Chapter 11
The great gaunt Guard House was of old brown brick. Ye Olde Brythyshe Shytte color, she thought as she approached it that late Wednesday afternoon. It had a blank penal desolation that spoke volumes to her dying soul. She had parked the Lagonda near the market-place of trodden earth, to make a few last purchases in this colorful area in the middle of Shaftesbury. When she'd returned to it ... it was not there. It was--according to a grinning mulatto Gladiator Guard (surely it was the one called Lou?)-probably well parked in the yard of the nearest precinct house, for this was a tow-away zone. Joanna could recover it on application, and after having received a warm behind.
All the same she gulped, staring at the stupidly reiterated brickwork, the spiked gaffs and bits of glass shining in the late sun; the place didn't have to be so purely ugly, did it? And who would want to get in there? A grille clashed at her ring and she stepped inside the raw barrack, identified herself to another beefy Gladiator, and was sent directly to a squat building at one side.
She entered a grim, bare room with the same ugly, dead look to it. It was empty. To one side, on a shallow wooden dais, sat a Gladiator Guard, chewing gum and apparently reading an American comic, her gleaming boots on the table before her. She beckoned uninterestedly.
Joanna explained her mission, sick to her soul. The Gladiator noted her identification papers, writing laboriously in a book before her. Finally she looked up.
"Take this," she said, handing Joanna a printed slip, "and sit down over there. You won't have long to wait."
"You," she hesitated, "do have my car here, then?"
"In the pound. You get the keys afterwards, when you bring this back, signed by the officer."
It was like some gruesome dream coming true. "Then," Joanna continued sickly, "I have to pay some ... penalty, first?"
The Guard showed a flicker of interest. "You'll probably get eight, if that's what you mean. Idryss is the overseer on duty today and he ought to make you jump. He-likes to hit a good fat ass."
"But ... I'm only an immigrant."
The Guard frowned at her papers. "Grade 'B' immigrant, that's right. Subject to all our laws and regulations. Of course, if you want to refuse correction, you will be deported under the law...."
And never allowed to reenter, Joanna added mentally.
She sat on a hard bench by the wall. She had on a close-fitting navy acrylic knit and a briefly belted shirt dress. The printed slip had her name, address, date and time of offense; the dotted line under "Punishment," as that for the ordering officer, were left blank.
Her throat was dry. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. What happened if someone "appealed" in
The Territory, she wondered? It sent her to shuddering inner laughter. Then suddenly, somewhere, a steel door crashed open, a woman's stiletto steps came tapping down a corridor. Joanna's mouth dropped wide.
A petite blonde in a shantung mini came (staggered would have been a better term, in Joanna's estimation) into the room, making inarticulate moans. She held to a wall for support a second, and then Joanna heard, "Up there." The Guard nodded peremptorily, and Joanna was walking up the corridor on jelly legs.
The door was closed. She knocked and was bidden to enter. The sight she met surprised her. A low-ceilinged, bureaucratic office was divided in two by a screen. She found herself in the first part, a sort of ante-room in which a typist, not a Guard, rattled away at an old Remington. She looked up as Joanna entered, beckoned, took her slip, entered the details in a ledger, and put another official form in her platen.
"Take off all your clothes," she said expressionlessly.
"All of them?"
The girl turned. She was quite young. As if surprised, she said, "Yes, that's right."
The horrible thing was beginning. She remembered what Alec had promised her. Her skin, as she stripped, felt hot, thick. She tried to swallow. At last she was naked, reduced without her heels. The flagging of the office floor felt cold. The typist got up and approached with a tape measure; she took elaborate measures of Joanna's hips, entering each on her typed form-width, length from sulcus to coccyx, even each individual cheek was measured from the anal opening to the crotch in front. Finally she handed Joanna her form, as well as her original slip, and pointed. Joanna advanced to another worn table. Behind this one sat a man.
He was middle-aged, mustached and wore a dark blue uniform, without cap or hat. He too shared the universal boredom apparent in these offices. Behind him there was a barred window, but it only gave, Joanna was thankful to see, on another gray brick wall. He perused the slips in silence a long time, stroking his black mustache while nearby the typewriter clicked merrily away. At last he picked up an old-fashioned pen. "Ten strokes," he said.
Joanna's heart gave a desperate lurch. "Ten!"
Cynthia had told her that even six ...
The officer on duty looked up. "Dimensions are taken into account. You will receive ten strokes with the cane for Illegal Parking."
"But, but," she spoke in sheer despair, "it's ... the first time ... my first offense ... please."
"You won't die," said the officer bleakly.
Joanna wished she could as the secretary came forward at this point and led her into a square stone room, whose door, as they entered, was at least a foot thick. There were no windows at all.
"Wait in here," said the girl. "If you want to urinate use that pail." She went out.
The room itself was almost insupportable, thought Joanna, feeling a panic quaking in her every limb. Punishment was intentional throughout it. She herself was confronting the same kind of splayed saw-horse trestle she had seen in the Punishment Shed on the estate, with the exception that the head of this was lower, it was supplied with more straps, and there was a padded portion where the victim bent over it. It looked worn and slightly soiled. Perhaps it was still warm from the last victim ... then the rack of canes caught her eyes.
They were ghastly, gaunt and gleaming, and of a prodigious length. They were supposed to be sized, to make them stiffer, harder on the skin. Just then a shadow slipped into the room. In an athletic, animal motion he turned her to the wall. Joanna gave a sob as he touched her. She did not have to be told this was the man who would administer her punishment.
He was stripped to the waist and below that he was wearing black stockingette tights. He made no sound at all when he moved, a short bald man with waxen skin and hairy forearms, the strength of whose hands became apparent as he squeezed and kneaded her bottoms, like a butcher inspecting meat. Joanna groaned and gasped.
Was he Spanish, Mexican, she wondered? There was an utter repellent grossness about him, yet such a latent savage ferocity about his cold, foreign touch that her soul gave a fervent prayer for strength. What mercy could she expect from this thick-thighed monster?
He never spoke. He pointed to the trestle and she bent over it, shuddering. In a trice she was trussed like a turkey. The girls in the Punishment Shed were strapped, but not in a manner like this, which reduced her body not merely to submissive passivity, but to absolute nonentity. She was secured at ankles, knees, thighs, waist, under the armpits, elbows and wrists. Her legs were parted in an inverted V, her crotch on the leather pad, still wet, her torso straining downward and arms thrust out sideways along the forward legs of the horse, which were parted even further than the rear. Then a saddle strap was drawn tightly up between her legs and buckled to the belt in back. She let out a stifled "Ow!" as she realized this seemed to have notching within. All the straps were brutally tight and it was not that she could not move, she couldn't even vibrate. She felt utterly parted and devoted to the torture to come. Only her head could turn, on the axis of her neck at the end of the trestle, but at first she saw only the feet of the officer as he came in, slamming the great door behind him.
"Congratulations, Idryss," he said, stationing himself to Joanna's right and looking across at the overseer, who was now flexing a monstrous rod, "I don't know when I can recall such an early effect on you, though I admit it's a superlative buttock."
Glancing to her left, Joanna saw the nervous, eager trembling of the cane-tip on the floor. The dark, liquid, formless eyes of the overseer gleamed in their deep holes and then, suddenly, she saw along his thigh the muscular arm of his erect organ. It was immense, a visual blow itself. She groaned inwardly. It had risen to its fullest extent under the stockingette, threatening and trembling in eager readiness.
"Well, we'll be merciful," said the officer as he reached into a bucket. Between Joanna's jaws he placed what seemed like a length of wet rope, the sort of thing she had seen on a ship. She remembered: it helped to bite on something. She bit and the officer clenched her head down on it hard so that the rope clamped into her teeth. It was sudden, there was an acrid taste, and then Joanna remembered what the girl had said about the bucket. She tried to spit in disgust, but the lump of rope, extending either side her mouth, seemed lodged there of itself, an effective and efficient gag.
"Ten of the best, Idryss," instructed the officer, standing back. "Lower quarter. Imagine you're hitting," he added on a chuckle, "one of those horsehair cushions you practice on. This pair is really ripe for a whipping."
There was a thrill in the air behind her, then a profound fleshy thump, echoed by her instinctive grunt. She gave a cramp-like jerk at the stroke, then gradually its intensity began to burrow through her. She felt herself striving to crawl along the central strut of the trestle, as her sinews knotted without effect.
"Uingh!"
The enormity of not being able to move terrified her. It was awful. She tried to muster her forces, felt the sudden thud of the second, slamming her with fire and twisting her like something on a spit. That was it-a thing! She realised, she knew. Why, she could not even cry. Her head bobbed back and forth like some frenzied chicken's, she saw everything with the acute clarity of such moments, the studs on the forward legs of the trestle, the officer's scuffed boots, her senses reached some new plane of vitality, as she sought to fight this searing pain.
Three fell, and four. The fifth made the whole trestle seem to bound. By straining she could see him waiting. She shared a strange kinship with her tormentor. Those parted buttocks, arcing up as if to be hit even harder, belonged to someone else, a woman apart, bound in the highest ecstasy of hell itself.
"Yeeeeeeeh!" Six.
Unspeakable agony. She snorted. Snot spat on the stone beneath. Her convulsive responses were driving the saddle strap into her. Her sphincter opened and shut.
"Good," said the officer at the seventh.
The man was hitting her almost horizontally now, great powerful thuds that drove her forward with grunts. She couldn't seem to breathe. Her mind was going dull, blunted. Her buttocks felt swollen and, in one place, wet.
Then she heard chuckling. The officer was saying, "Perhaps that will teach you where to park in Essbury, Ma'am." He had left the room. The door had slammed. It was over.
Was it over?
Her being felt totally, wholly crushed. Blank. It was not over.
And then she was trying in desperate earnest to spit out the gag. The saddle strap had been undone. But the others held her firm. Idryss was standing behind her parted butt and beyond him the club of his cock was rampant and threatening. Then it was nubbing her softly curved ass.
Noooooo! she screamed.
But the scream only emerged as a gargle.
The head was a purple duck-egg.
Idryss spat. She felt his wet rough thumb widen her anus and tried to buck and rear and clench her ass-hole. If only she could scream ... surely someone would come. Surely they were not allowed to do this, even in The Territory.
Two thumbs were either side the entrance now almost popping it open. The great smooth knot of his cock dimpled it deeply a second, she felt the straps at her shoulders bite in as she lurched forward, and then it was within her. It slid an inch, stopped, gave a jump to its master's appreciative grunt, slid in further still.
No more, no more! Her mind screamed a protest.
There could not possibly be any more....
Idryss slid his pole up her rectum peacefully, patiently, laughing softly each time he rammed it home. She felt choked, engorged, steaming and stuffed. Her toes beat a tattoo, her fingernails dug in her palms, the whole length of her body seemed impaled on prick. Then suddenly it began to swell and pump within her.
At that moment she screamed. She could simply bear no more. Her effort widened her jaws to distention and the rope gag spat out with a plop on the floor. At that moment she started vomiting. The retches came from the depths of her belly, the man's pitiless palms pinched up her hanging breasts to increase her convulsions, and as he pumped his gism deep into her entrails Joanna was monumentally sick on the Guard Room floor. She had had oysters for lunch.
Finally, she was aware of cold water being tossed on her from another bucket. But no, it was simply for him to sweep up her vomit and wash it down some drain. Only then did he condescend to untie her. When he had gone Joanna rested on all fours so long that the secretary looked in and, in a discontented voice, inquired, "Anything wrong?"