Chapter 3
The echo of the scream reverberated through the chamber until Paula felt certain that she would go deaf from the sound.
It was Carl, it was definitely Carl. But what was he doing here? Why had these perverted monstrosities allowed him to live when they could have so easily killed him.
The answer came to Paula all to quickly: they hadn't killed Carl because they wanted him alive. They wanted him alive for the same reason that they wanted Paula herself alive: so that they could both be subjected to sexual torture.
Paula whirled to face her captors, to confront them with her discovery. "Why are you doing this to us?" she demanded. "Why don't you let us go? Or, if you want to kill us, why not kill us and get it over with?" Veena stepped forward into the room, and the points of her proud breasts gleamed brightly in the torchlight.
"We do not intend to kill you ... yet," she purred ever so softly. "We want to see you suffer, we want to hear you scream out your agony as your writhing limbs tremble with pain. My helpers and I find the sounds of a human being in anguish to be quite soothing...."
"You ... you BITCH!" Paula hurled herself forward, her fingernails clawing at Veena's throat. But a slight movement of one of Veena's hands, a deft manipulation of the handle of the spear, and Paula was flung bodily across the room to land in a heap beside an iron maiden.
Veena strode swiftly forward now, and her men were not far behind her. Hernandez flicked out one powerful hand and pushed the wall until it slid shut again, sealing them all in
SI as though they were entombed.
Paula found herself standing and then backing away from her tormentors, backing away from their lecherous glances. She turned and quickly ran, but even as she did so she knew that there was no place to run, no place to hide.
Something struck her in the ankle and she stumbled and fell. Stumbled and fell against the spread-eagled body of her semiconscious lover Carl. Straining at the cord that bound her wrists, Paula tried to caress the boy, tried to sooth his fevered flesh with the warm wetness of her tongue.
"My darling, I love you," Paula breathed. "Whatever else may happen to us I love you. Remember that. Oh, darling, remember that!"
Carl groaned. The boy shifted and opened his eyes, and then Paula screamed louder than she had ever screamed in her life.
For Carl's eyes did not contain the bright sheen of an intelligent, reasoning human, but the dull gleam of an unthinking animal.
He made a noise in his throat that was definitely not human, and Paula screamed again.
"Take him away!" she heard herself shouting. "Do anything you like to me, but don't let me look at him! Not like that! DON"T MAKE ME LOOK AT HIM!"
Veena's face was creased with a thin smile, an evil smile, the smile of a sadist. She came forward slowly and gripped Paula's chin, then turned the girl so that she was forced to look at the thing that had once been Cael, had once been the boy she had loved and had made love to.
"Feast your eyes on him, my dear," gloated Veena. "Is he not handsome? Is he not magnificent? You made love to him once before, back there in the woods. You felt his body within your own. Would you not like to make love to him again, and to feel him make love to you?"
Paula shut her eyes and screamed, but even them she could hear Veena's mocking laughter, Veena's triumphant howl of glee.
"This is why we brought you both here, wretch," Veena exclaimed. "My men and I wish to see you make love to this thing that has gone mad, this beast that was once a human being. We believe that we shall find it a source of great ... pleasure," Veena's eyes closed in ecstasy as she imagined what the spectacle would look like.
"I won't do it," Paula exclaimed. "I won't do it and you can't make me. I'd rather die, I'd rather die by slow torture then feel my loins get torn apart by that thing. It ... it's not even human!"
Veena no longer appeared to be pleased. "It would be wise for you if you were to obey," she murmured thoughtfully.
"Go to Hell!" Paula spat, no longer making even an attempt to hold back the fury and unfathomable rage that lay within her soul. "Go to Hell and don't come near me again! You've killed the person I love, you've killed Carl!"
Veena was giving the impression of being politely bored by all this. "But we did not kill him...."
"You killed his brain! And if you had any sense of human decency you'd at least kill his body too!"
Veena dismissed this thought airily with a wave of her hand. "We did not kill him," she repeated. The black-clad dominatrix let her eyes rove about for a moment, then settled her gaze on Frog. "My bunyip, if you would be so good as to show her...."
The twisted wretch nodded obediently, then began to hobble across the stone-cold floor. One knobby hand was out and extended towards Carl's hot throat. "It requires merely a reconnection of the nerve ganglia," Paula heard Veena informing her. "And then everything is as it was before now."
Paula looked on in horror as Frog stretched out his battered forepaw to gently stroke the side of Carl's throbbing throat. Paula thought she detected a flickering in the boy's eyes. Suddenly Frog squeezed the tendons sharply and Carl gave a gasp and looked up.
"Paula!" he shouted. "Where are we? What's going on here? We've...."
"Enough," ordered Veena.
Frog squeezed the boy's neck again, then continued stroking it.
The light disappeared from Carl's eyes, and he grunted like a beast.
"You see?" Veena said triumphantly. "His mind is not dead, merely ... resting. We do not care to return his reasoning faculties to him until after we have had our sport with you."
Paula gulped nervously, and she could feel chills running up and down her unclothed spine. "And what do you mean by THAT?" she wanted to know.
Veena smiled again, and that smile was the unholiest smile on earth, with the exception of Bertie's. "It is a source of amusement for my men and I," Veena said, "to watch a helpless naked girl being sexually ravaged by a monster that has the body of a man and the brain of a beast. I desire to see what will happen when we unchain your friend here and turn him loose on you."
Paula was backing away in terror. She had expected to be tortured, possibly even to be raped, but she had not conceived of anything like this. "You're ... you're SADISTS!" was all that she could think of to say to the black-clad woman.
Veena nodded calmly. "But of course we are. My men submit to my wishes, and in return I provide them with these amusing little entertainments. For you are not the First girl that I have brought here like this." She bared her teeth in a ferocious grin as she spoke. "Nor shall you be the last."
Paula was aware of somebody sneaking up behind her, and she caught a glimpse of Hernandez reaching far into his clothing and withdrawing a switchblade. A touch of the stud, and the blade flicked out and glinted keenly in the wavering torchlight. Paula tried to turn, so that she could at least look this man in the face, but Hernandez was too swift for her. His free hand shot out and seized Paula by one elbow, then brought her arms close to his body. In a moment he was sawing industriously at the cord that bound her wrists together.
Paula saw what the man was doing, and submitted gladly. She wanted to have her j hands free, so that she would have that much chance of escaping. Also, she certainly had no plan to struggle when a blade of that size was a fraction of an inch from her wrists.
Hernandez knew his work, and he did it quickly. One swift jerk, and the severed cord fell from the girl's throbbing wrists. She rubbed her chafed joints busily, striving to restart the circulation.
Veena was watching, and she seemed amused. "That will be of very little help Jo you," she remarked. "For, whether you wish it or not, we are going to subject you to the torture that I have just described. You are going to be raped by your own lover, although we have deprived him of his mind and turned him into an unreasoning, slavering beast.
Paula was beginning to think that perhaps apparent submission on her part would make it easier for her to escape. "All right," she panted desperately, trying to make her voice sound willing. "So I get raped. And then what? After you've had your fun do you let me go?"
Veena tossed her head back and laughed, and when she laughed her entire shapely torso shook up and down enticingly. "Let you go? You've got to be joking! Perhaps you think that being raped by this mindless beast will be torment, but you are wrong. Because that is only the beginning. After you have endured that we have other punishments in store for you. Other little sex-games far more painful, and far more humiliating...."
Paula felt her hands knot into fists, and then she was lunging towards Veena, her eyes ablaze with hate for this woman. But Veena, as though reading the girl's thoughts, reached out lazily with her spear and sent the girl sprawling in a heap in the far coiner.
Grasping her tall spear with one hand and her. whip with the other, Veena raised both instruments of torture until they were pointing towards the ceiling. "Hernandez, Cyclops, Estrogen," she called out. "Prepare our female captive for the Arena."
Paula tried to stand up, to fight back, but she was too weak. She saw the three men coming towards her, and then Cyclops and Hernandez were dragging her out of the room, Estrogen tagging along behind with Paula's clothes nestled in the crook of one arm. Paula cast one last desperate look in the direction of the beast that had once been her boy friend Carl, and then a steel door was clanging shut between them, echoing hollowly in the midnight stillness.
Paula found herself in a small, steel-lined room, the only exit from which was blocked by Hernandez. Estrogen tossed her clothes at her disdainfully, and the heel of one shoe struck Paula in the corner of her eye. "Put on the clothes," Cyclops rasped unemotionally, and his voice had a strange, alien quality that was even more unearthly than his one-eyed appearance. "And don't take all night about it, either. We're getting impatient."
Paula shuddered, then began to dress herself hastily. At least she had been given her clothes back, though she wondered how soon it would be before she was naked again. Perhaps now, fully clothed and with her hands untied, there might be some chance of escape.
Paula dressed herself as quickly as she could, which was not very quickly. Every inch of her body hurt, particularly the protuberances of her breasts and hips, and it was difficult to put the clothes on without screaming aloud in agony.
Estrogen was watching the girl with interest. "You have nice tits, bitch," he commented eagerly. "I'd like to fuck a girl with tits like that. I'd like to stick my meat in her and then...."
"Shut up, Estrogen," said Hernandez calmly, rolling a joint with one hand while the other toyed idly with the handle of his switchblade, ready to use it should the need arise.
Paula had noticed something odd, and something that she might be able to use to her own advantage. Once they were out of Veena's presence, her helpers did not act quite so bizarrely. Hernandez had stopped swaggering and was now acting almost like a human being, although not a very pleasant one. Cyclops, who had formerly been an emotionless robot, was now at least registering impatience. And Estrogen, who had been so meek and humble while Veena had been around, had now quickly reverted to his brash, cocky former self.
Paula had no doubt that she might be able to use this bit of knowledge to her advantage. She was still confident that if she could only get rid of Veena the rest of these people would be like a chicken with its head off, rushing madly about for want of a leader. But there seemed to be no way to get rid of Veena, not even temporarily.
Was there a chance of creating dissension among the ranks, of turning some of these men against Veena and towards herself? Paula doubted it. All of them seemed to be subservient to her, even the impossible-to-understand Bertie. The one exception to this seemed to be Estrogen. Paula had noticed that he appeared to resent being ordered about by Veena, and that he also resented being the scapegoat for all the other members of the group.
While Paula's body dressed itself her mind was working desperately. If she could manage to win Estrogen over to her own side, and if the two of them found a way to free Carl and regain for him his intelligence, what chance would the three of them have of escaping from the other six? Paula thought the question over realistically before she answered it: no chance at all.
She finished dressing, and saw that the three men were looking at her intently. "Good enough," muttered Cyclops impatiently. Why was he in such a hurry, Paula wondered. "Now you will come with us."
Hernandez had his knife out, and even though the blade was not out the message was clear. Paula allowed herself to be led to the far wall of the tiny cell. Cyclops stepped in front of her and depressed a small button in a corner of the wall. Instantly a section of the steel barrier slid inward on itself and Paula found herself looking into the room beyond.
It was the Arena A huge, almost cylindrical pit with gently sloping but insurmountable walls. Along the top edge of the wall was a ring of bleachers, and already Veena and her assistants were filing down a corridor to sit in these. Paula noticed that Bertie was strangely absent for some reason, and more than ever she wondered what could be wrong with this man that made him so grotesquely different from the others. Of all of Paula's captors, Bertie was the only one who did not appear to be insane or mentally afflicted. He was simply inhuman, an alien creature whose mind was totally different from any man's.
Paula saw that there was no way at all she could scale the wall of the Arena to reach the row of seats. The wall sloped upwards and outwards slightly, but not enough to improve the climbing appreciably, especially since it had been polished until it was metal-smooth and mirror-bright.
With the wall dismissed as unscalable, Paula could not see any other way out of the Arena except for the door through which she had just come and another door exactly like it on the opposite side of the ring. And these ways out were so conspicuous that Paula doubted she would be able to use them....
Cyclops and Estrogen pushed her roughly into the middle of the Arena, and then they and Hernandez were departing through the first steel door, which promptly slid shut behind them. Less than a minute later they could be seen emerging at the top of the bleachers corridor and picking their way downwards towards three of the empty seats. They wanted to be able to get a good look at this....
Veena was watching all of these proceedings with the calm, stately eye of an empress. Now, seeing that everything had been made ready, she turned and gave a signal to Frog, who sat beside her. "Now, my bunyip...."
Frog produced his pipes, and a moment later he was blowing one loud, clear note that shattered the stillness of the atmosphere.
As if in answer to this sound there came a second one: a clinking clattering as of chains being wound round a winch of some sort. Paula turned fearfully, and saw that the door at the far end of the Arena was opening. There did not seem to be anybody opening the door....
A low moaning was heard, and then Carl appeared out of the inky blackness of the void. He was walking on all fours like a beast, and the look in his eyes was not of something human. Paula looked with revulsion, and saw that a steel collar had been locked around his neck, a collar to which was attached a chain.
Bertie was on the other end of that chain, leading Carl along like some sort of dog on a leash. And it was this final touch that seemed to deprive Carl of any humanity he might have once had. His naked muscular body was sleek and glistening, the sort of hide that would be found on an animal of the night rather than on a human being. Even his cock, Paula noticed, even his organ of manhood seemed to have changed, so that now it looked like something worthy of a horse or a dog, rather than of a male human being.
And Bertie was still moving along without separating his feet, without using the muscles of his body. He moved like one solid unit, and this was the thing about him that frightened Paula most of all. For the umpteenth time she wondered how he did it. Mass hypnosis? Many small movements very quickly? Levitation? None of them seemed to quite be the answer, although at this point the panic-stricken girl would have been willing to believe any one of them.
Slowly Bertie brought the thing that had once been Carl to the centre of the Arena, to where all eyes would be upon him. Paula stepped back until she felt the cold hardness of the Arena wall against the base of her spine. She couldn't get far enough away from Bertie. Or from Carl, as long as he was in that condition....
Bertie turned his whole body at once until he was facing Veena and the others, and then he seemed to bend slightly at the ankles so that his entire gangly frame inclined forward a half an inch or so in a grotesque imitation of a bow, "They who are about to wish for death salute you," Bertie declaimed, and his voice fit his appearance perfectly: dead and hollow, with the smell of an open grave. It seemed to Paula that the voice did not come from Bertie's throat, but instead sprang to life inside her own head. And when Bertie spoke, THE MUSCLES OF HIS FACE DID NOT MOVE....
Veena made a sign to Bertie with her flail, and he straightened up and dropped the chain attached to Carl's collar. The man-beast that Paula had once willingly made love to now turned to face her. He looked as though he wanted to spring, as though he wanted to attack her, but for some reason he still remained motionless.
Paula turned back to the others and saw that Bertie was now in the bleachers alongside of Tish. How he had gotten up there so quickly was a mystery to Paula, until she remembered how fast she had seen him run. But even running might not be the answer in this case....
There was a low growl from Carl, a caterwaul of animalistic lust, and for the first time Paula realized how truly vulnerable she was. She was a good-looking young woman trapped in a small area with a naked creature whose brain had been stripped of its intelligence, stripped of its reasoning, so that the only thing that remained in the mind was Lust. And up above all this were six men and one woman in varying degrees of humanity, all thirsting for a chance to see this man-creature ravish this helpless female.
Paula knew that she was in trouble.
Veena turned slowly to satisfy herself that all was in order, and then she made a signal to
Frog with the flail in one hand. "Let the battle begin now," she commanded.
Frog understood. Again he picked up his instrument, the thing that was a cross between a flageolet and a bagpipe. He raised it to his lips and then blew two short notes that blended into each other in a way that was at once both sweet and harsh....
There was a low rattle in Carl's throat as the sound died away, and then Paula saw that he was slowly inching towards her.
There was a gleam in the man-beast's eyes, a gleam that indicated only one longing, one desire ... the desire for Lust. For Carl's brain had deteriorated to such a point that Lust, the most basic emotion of all, was the only thing that he could still understand.
The man-thing came closer, drew nearer an inch at a time, and Paula was too frightened to move. She was like a bird being hypnotized by a snake, and there was nothing she could do but wait to be devoured, wait until she was ravished.
The man-thing came nearer, and then suddenly it gathered its for feet beneath it and pounced, cutting through the air like a knife as it lunged towards Paula's captive virgin flesh.
She screamed and ran, but even as she ran she could feel the man-thing's hot breath warming her buttocks. Paula's feet pounded harder and harder against the floor of the Arena, but even as she ran she knew that there was no place to hide. Sooner or later she would be caught.
Suddenly the girl tripped and fell, and sprawled full length on the floor of the Arena. She looked up and saw that the thing that had once been Carl was directly over her, and now it was slashing at her body with both hands, tearing the clothes from her bleeding flesh and flinging them in every direction at once. In a few moments Paula was naked.
She screamed and drew her knees and elbows up over her torso, trying to protect her erogenous areas from the creature's erotic onslaught. One of the girl's knees came up and grazed the edge of the man-thing's temple, causing him to grunt in pain and stagger momentarily backwards.
"Oof! Ugh!" For one brief moment Paula saw a look of sanity, of pure reasoning returning to that face. For one moment Carl was Carl again. But then the veil closed over his mind once more and he was again an unreasoning beast, a bloodthirsty creature that slavered for this girl's throbbing flesh.
With a howl of lust he was atop her, lashing out with his hands to pin her wrists back to the ground, to bend her body over backwards beneath his own. And then his legs were forcing their way between her legs, straining them outward a fraction of an inch at a time to reveal the vaginal treasure that lay below, the thing that this creature lusted for and wanted.
A thrust of his hips, and his petrified manhood was forcing its way into the girl's interior, tearing her apart, impaling her tender flesh upon its hardness. Paula writhed in erotic agony and screamed again and again, shouted for help although she knew that no help would be coming....