Chapter 14
Walter Craft was in agony. Although there were no lights in the room, his vision was filled with a bright red haze. The need for heroin had reduced him to a quivering, sweating mass of raw nerve ends. His body shook and rattled and water dripped off him as if he were melting. He had long since screamed himself hoarse and now his breath rattled in and out of his throat with a tombstone gargle.
He hung in the adjustable chair in the throne room. He had been strapped in twenty-four hours ago, when he had been surprised while trying for the drugs. They had been waiting for him. Roger and Flo and Phyllis and the twisted little lawyer. They-or rather Roger - had figured out that he would come back. They had trapped him, just as the others had trapped him so long ago. Trapped him and strapped him to the chair and done a terrible thing to him.
They had put a candle on the seat of the throne. A tall one that burned for hours. They had put a clock with a luminous face on the throne back, so that he could see it after the candle went out. And then they had placed his needle, and a package of the pale powder that he needed so desperately, on the throne in front of the candle.
There was the sound of a key in the door, boomingly loud in the deathlike silence which filled his world. Craft threw up his head, eyes desperately wide, lips drawn back over his teeth. The door opened and light flooded the room. The black figures came in silently and arranged themselves in front of Craft, blocking his view of the throne and its contents.
"How do you feel, Walter?" the grotesquerie asked.
"Did you sleep well?" That from Flo.
"Did you dream, Walter?" Phyllis asked.
"Did you dream about Suzanne, Walt? And about the other girls you've killed?" That from Roger.
"Please," Craft croaked. "Please. Give me my fix. I'll do anything. Give me my fix."
"You'll do anything anyway, Walt," Roger said pleasantly. "You have no choice."
"Please. Pleeese!" Walter Craft began to sob.
The two girls removed the heroin and the candle from the throne, then took the clock away. Tom Baumler scrabbled his way onto it. The other three arrayed themselves in the pattern of condemnation, two to the left of the throne, one to the right. The group began a swaying chant, the words being a mixture of archaic English and modern expletives. The base sound was Gregorian, almost churchlike, solemn.
After a time the chant ended and Tom Baumler raised a scepter whose head was a thick-veined penis. "Let the condemnation begin!" He waved the obscene stick in a slow sweep. "Who condemns this miserable creature?"
Flo stepped forward, her chocolate breasts swaying to her movement. "I do, master."
"Say on!"
Flo pointed a long finger at the cringing man in the chair. "This man is an abomination. He has defiled the sacred room. He has come to steal from us."
Baumler cried again. "Who else?"
Phyllis stepped up and pointed. "I do. This man has brought the fear of exposure to us. He has debased this place and those in it."
"Who else?"
Roger stepped forward and pointed a slow finger. "I do, master. This man has harmed. He has brought pain for other purposes than gratification. He has hurt one and perhaps others. And possibly killed all of them."
"Well and so be it," Baumler intoned. "What shall be the manner of his chastisement?"
Roger spoke again. "That he be humiliated. That he be used. That he suffer the torments of his own abasement of his flesh. That he be denied the poison which has eaten him away. That we take our pleasure before him, that he may watch but not participate. That we allow the cesspool of his own mind to render him into a state of gibbering insanity."
He turned to the strapped figure and finished matter of factly, "And that I then commit the bastard to a hospital, where he belongs, for the rest of his goddamn life."
Baumler thumped the scepter on the dais twice. "Then let the revels commence!"
"No!"
The word was so final, so authoritative, that it stopped them in their tracks. With one accord, they turned to the door. "Suzanne!" It burst from all of them at once.
She stood framed in the doorway. She wore white vinyl kneeboots with rolled tops. Over that was a white vinyl miniskirt, pleated. A single panel rose between her bare breasts and ended in a choker collar around her neck. A mask, also of white vinyl, covered her eyes, with catlike slits for vision. She held a long, white bullwhip coiled in her hands.
Roger stepped toward her. "Suzanne, I-"
"Silence!"
"Suzanne! What's come -"
The whistle of the bullwhip cut him short. The tip lashed his chest, producing a sharp crack of leather against leather. Roger staggered back and stumbled into the throne.
Suzanne stepped into the room. "You will speak or move with permission only. Any disobedience will be punished immediately-and painfully." She looked them over slowly, one at a time, to make sure they understood. "Henceforth, I will rule here. There will be no room for disobedience." She turned to the crippled lawyer. "Off that throne, you."
"Now see here, Suzanne. This has gone f -"
The whip cracked again, and yet again. Suzanne beat Baumler until the little man half fell, half crawled off the throne. She stepped over him as he lay gasping on the floor and mounted the throne. She crossed her legs, revealing that she wore nothing beneath the skirt, shook out her long hair, and lifted her chin. "You may sit - there, in front of the throne." The four numbly obeyed, Roger and Tom Baumler gingerly rubbing their welts.
"Now you may speak."
Roger spoke. "I'm, uh, glad to see you're all right, Suzanne, and -"
"The correct title is 'my queen.'"
Roger nodded. "My queen, then. How did you... what happened with Walter?"
"He got clumsy. Just as you have. I escaped him."
Phyllis raised her hand, as if in school.
"Yes?"
"Where, I mean, uh, how did you get back here?"
Suzanne stared silently, as if waiting.
Phyllis dropped her eyes. "My queen."
Suzanne nodded. "Good. Where I have been between then and now is not your concern. It is sufficient for you to know that I am here and that I am in charge."
Tom Baumler whined, "Why have you turned on us, Suz-my queen? Haven't we helped you, tried to save you from Walt?"
Suzanne sneered. "Helped me? Drugged me and used me against my will, then tried to convince me I was having hallucinations. Lied to me under the guise of being my friend. Planned to make me a slave. You dare to say such things to me!"
They cringed before the fury of her tone.
Flo spoke. "My queen. What do you intend to do?"
Suzanne smiled, a mixed smile full of happiness and malice. "Do? Well, I'm going to keep your little game going. But I'm going to change a few of the rules. You see, I've found out a lot of things about myself during this last week. I've found that I'm a pretty healthy woman. I like sex. But the way I got introduced to it was nasty. Nasty and cruel. It left me with a lot of hang-ups that would scar me for a long time if I didn't work them out.
"I've met some nice people. People who have their heads on straight about a lot of things - including sex. And I'm going to go and be with them. But first, I'm going to work out all those nasty little things you people have done to me. And you're going to help me."
Roger spoke, shaking his head. "It's not going to work - queen or not."
Suzanne pointed the whip at him. "Use that tone with me again and I'll cut your face off." She relaxed and smiled the grim smile again. "It will work, Roger. I have you people by the cock, and you know it. I have only to go to the police and your whole world comes down. How would it look in the papers, a rich lawyer and the city's top psychiatrist caught tying each other up with their cocks hanging out?
"Besides," she added, "You've been using that pitiful wreck over there for a long time, when as a doctor you could have put him in a hospital. That would look peachy in the news, too."
She flicked the whip so that its point just touched Roger's exposed genitals, and smiled as he flinched.
"All the sordid details are in a nice letter that gets delivered to the police if I don't check in a certain place once a day-and in code, too. A mechanical code that I can't figure out in advance, so that even if you drugged me you couldn't get it."
She laughed nastily. "You're really not too bright, Roger. You were bright enough to figure out that Walter would crawl back here for his stuff, but not bright enough to think that I would figure it, too. That I'd reason that you had him under your thumb with drugs and would therefore have a supply here - which he would make straight for.
"I've been outside in the shadows for two hours. I gave you time enough to get together, knowing that you'd use this as an excuse to put it to Walter. And now we're all together again. Only this time, I'm on top."
Tom Baumler spoke. "What about him, my queen?"
"Walter? Well, I have a little debt to settle with that creature, pitiful as he is. And you're all going to help me settle it. After I'm done with him, he's your problem. You created that Frankenstein, you dispose of him. When I'm done with him - and you - I'm going to leave here and forget this place ever existed."
Flo spoke. "How we going to help you, my queen?"
Suzanne smiled deeply. "I thought you'd never ask."
She rose and cracked the whip viciously. "You," she said, pointing to Phyllis, "and you," to Flo, "Come here." The girls came, crawling and scooting up to the throne. Suzanne sat down again on the very front of the chair. "Suck my tits. Now!" The girls crawled up the side of the chair and applied their mouths to Suzanne's already hardened nipples. She smiled and her eyes half closed as they sucked noisily at her.
"Now, Baumler, get over here." The hunchback crawled over to her, his eyes fearfully on her whip. Without speaking, Suzanne cocked her legs up over the arms of the throne. Baumler nodded, licked his lips, and, trembling visibly, sank his mouth to her slit. "You'd better be good, little man," Suzanne warned.
Roger rose to his knees. "What about me?" he asked quietly.
Suzanne, still registering sensual delight, answered, "Walt owes me a couple of things. I'm going to collect by fucking him until he can't move. I'm going to fuck him until his prick is so sore he screams when I touch it - suck harder, damn you, Flo.
"Your job, Roger dear, is to get old Walter up for me. Just go over there and start sucking, Doctor. I'll come along when he's ready."
Roger sprang to his feet, his face red. "Now see here, Suzanne! You're out of your - "
Flinging bodies in all directions, Suzanne leapt off the throne and lashed Roger across the face with the whip. He fell back against the captive junkie, who screamed. Suzanne whipped Doctor Roger Watlington to the floor and beat his leather-clad buttocks until he curled into a ball with his arms over his head. Then she stood spread-legged, breathing hard. "You were saying?"
"N-nothing, my queen. Nothing." Roger crawled painfully off the floor. He cast an imploring look at Suzanne, saw no pity, and turned to Walter Craft's twitching form. Slowly, his face a mass of welts and disgust, he lowered his mouth around the fish-belly white member and began to suck. Walter moaned and mumbled.
Suzanne turned to the three others, still cowering around the throne, and snapped her fingers. "Well?"
They came humbly across the floor. Suzanne stood while the girls again applied their mouths to her breasts, and while Tom Baumler crawled between her legs and began to suck.
She placed her hands on the cripple's head and let the whip dangle down his back. Then she surveyed her realm and her cowed, submissive subjects.
A whimper came from Craft. "Please," he mumbled, "gimmie a fix."
Suzanne smiled again and spoke very softly. "No."