Chapter 3
Sally Durmont had hailed a cruising cab and had the driver take her to a downtown Los Angeles hotel. In her anxious and frightened haste to leave her vicious and depraved stepfather behind her forever, she had at first thought only of the thousand dollars which her aunt had given her. It was only when, after hurrying to her bedroom and packing a few things and taking the letter of trust to the bank executive, that she remembered that after all she and her sister were each entitled to half of the estate. Her parents hadn't left too much, but there was at least several thousand dollars there. So she would have something of a nest egg in her search for her sister and at the same time be able to find a proper job and earn her own livelihood. It would be freedom for her at last.
But she was still shaken from the ugly scene with Matthew Durmont, and her bottom still pained her from his harsh spanking. The throbbing of it as she sat in the back seat of the cab and shifted uneasily on the leather seat reminded her, also, of the shameful humiliation to which he had subjected her in baring her virginal body to his glittering, lust-burning eyes. She began to weep softly in a kind of nervous aftermath of that violent scene. Yet she had no remorse for what she had done, and she only wished she had killed him.
She checked into the hotel and went right to sleep. She was exhausted from the emotional draining of that scene, and so she slept until nearly noon of the next day, which was Saturday. There was just time to get to the bank and to draw out the thousand dollars from her bankbook, and then to consult with an officer of the bank to learn how much she could probably draw from that letter of trust. To her pleasant surprise, the executor himself was there and told her that there was something like twenty thousand dollars being held in trust for Laura and herself. Ten thousand apiece-why, it was a fortune!
She thanked the man and told him that she was going to San Francisco and would have a bank there contact him. She explained that Laura had been missing but that she believed her sister was in San Francisco, which explained her departure. The man, a plump gray-haired executive in his early fifties named Elsworth Laklin, frowned and replied, 'This may present some legal difficulties, Miss Durmont. How old is your sister?"
"Just twenty, Mr. Laklin."
"I see, It would be very helpful if, when you find her, you can have her up here before a notary public in San Francisco, unless she wants to come back here, to attest that she is the proper heiress to this other half of the money. I don't think we could give you the entire half now, Miss Durmont if you wished it. We could, of course, advance a reasonable amount. But do keep in touch with us."
She had thanked the man and promised to communicate with him as soon as she learned the whereabouts of her sister. And then she had gone out to the Los Angeles International Airport and by late afternoon was arriving at the San Francisco International Airport in San Bruno.
It was true that San Francisco was a much smaller city, but the problem of finding Laura Durmont when she had absolutely no clue except Brad Tobler's contemptuous declaration that Laura had gone to find a job in San Francisco, was an almost insurmountable task. And yet she knew she had to find Laura. There were mysteries to be cleared up, and one of the most pressing was exactly how Matthew Durmont had treated Laura to make her run away. Another one, almost equally pressing, was what had really made Brad Tobler so sadistically vindictive against both her and her sister. He had accused Laura of being a--Sally blushed to think of the vile word he had used. Well, a teaser, one who promised and didn't perform. Virgin though she was, she knew enough of biology to understand how a man might desire a woman whose beauty would incite his passion, only to deny him, and how furiously spiteful he might become as a result of that denial.
She decided on taking an expensive room in a hotel on Geary Boulevard, and asked the help of the cab driver at the airport. He was a friendly little man with glasses, a native of Boston who had come out here on a vacation some fifteen years ago and fallen in love with the City by the Golden Gate. He found her a modest little hotel near Seventh Avenue and on Geary Boulevard, and she checked in at once, took a bath, and then walked down the boulevard to find a pleasant little Italian restaurant where she had a nourishing and very tasty bowl of minestrone, ravioli with meatballs, and a small flask of Chianti, with spumoni and strong black coffee to finish.
She purchased the Chronicle, the evening paper, and read the want ads. There were not too many jobs, mostly for secretaries, dental receptionists, girls to work as filing clerks in insurance and realty companies and the like. Nor were the wages too high. San Francisco was an expensive city, she knew. And Monday she went to the Bank of America to deposit the draft for eight hundred dollars (which had been part of her aunt's gift, the other two hundred dollars being kept for immediate expenses), and left on file the letter of trust from the Los Angeles bank executor with one of the officers of this San Francisco savings institution founded by an Eastern investor who believed in the little people and especially the farmers of California and had lived to see his dream of a friendly little bank grow into one of the financial giants of America.
The thought came to her that she might advertise in the "personal" columns of the newspapers, something like, "Laura, Sally is in town and needs you. Call the Gurlaine Hotel at once." And yet Laura might never see this, and it might be run for months before anything would happen and the suspense would be intolerable.
But how could she find her sister in all the districts of this city which was forty-nine square miles in size, dominated by the Presidio, by Twin Peaks, and in the business district by the elegant Coit Tower and Fisherman's Wharf?
She spent the afternoon registering at employment agencies, but they discouraged her for the most part. It was true that Sally had had two years of junior college, but she had never actually worked in a business office. True, she could type, she could even read and write French passably well, but these were minor talents which could be surpassed by hundreds of girls with even less formal education than herself, girls who had gone to business school or had to go to work right after high school in jobs in order to help their families or to survive on their own. No, it wasn't too heartening for Sally Durmont that April Monday in this town which was nearly five hundred miles away from its sister to the south and yet which snobbishly prided itself as being infinitely more important in culture and sophistication. . . .
The naked red-haired girl who had been bound to the cross arm whipping post in the cellar of the house on Macklin and Van Ness in Oakland had been severely whipped by the silver-blonde young woman who had won her at the lottery that night.
Her executioner's name was Ernestine Helms, and she lived with her lecherous uncle, Harold Buttridge, in a house in the Marina district of San Francisco.
From the attic window of that magnificently spacious old house, one of those few to survive the great earthquake of 1906, one could see the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear day. It was very foggy this Monday afternoon, and there was little vision in the attic. Besides, the shutters had been drawn, and Ernestine made certain that not a single ray of daylight could come through any of the dusky glass windows.
Her gray-green eyes narrowed, burning with an unholy and perverse light, as she stared down at the naked red-haired girl bound en crapaudine on the dirty floor of this attic. The girl was blindfolded, there was a ball gag in her mouth with a narrow and very solid strap pressing against her jaws and buckling tightly at the back of her neck to force the rubber ball into her mouth so that she could not expel it. Her wonderfully pale white skin, nuanced with the rosy flecks typical of her red-haired type, was cruelly marred. The marks were fading, it was true, and they appeared to have been made about a week ago. At least this was true of the stigmata which appeared on her upstandingly rounded bottom-cheeks and her long, gracefully sculptured thighs. There were splotches which had turned bluish, and there were also scores of tiny black-and-blue pore-like marks all over her behind and upper as well as inner thighs. These latter marks had been made by the bristles of a hairbrush. On closer examination, one could see the faint marks of what had been blisters, raised by a paddle with holes in the applicator.
The girl on the floor was weeping softly. Ernestine stood, hands on hips, sneering down cruelly at her victim. The silver-blonde heiress wore white linen playshorts and a sleeveless blue pullover polo shirt, her feet thrust into sandals with open toes. Her thin small mouth was twisted in a vicious and sadistic smile of anticipation. Her snub nose betrayed her lascivious temperament in the thin, widely flaring wings. And her own complexion was a blend of pink and tan, pink over buttocks and loins and titties, tan over all the rest of her, for she was an inveterate swimmer and also expert sailor. Often she had handled the tiller of her own sailboat out in the Marina Dock, going out to Sausalito to see some of her dear friends.
Dear Uncle Harold was taking his afternoon nap. Perhaps tonight he would join her in putting this little bitch through her paces again. They'd paid two thousand dollars to "rent" her for two weeks, and Ernestine thought it was money extremely well spent. The bitch wouldn't give her name at all, and she kept calling herself Vilma. But it was obvious she was lying, because there had been an old movie magazine with a story about Vilma Banky, one of the silent screen's most famous heroines in the days of John Gilbert and Wallace Reid. But even the worst whippings that Ernestine had given this bitch had failed to elicit the truth about her background. Not that it really mattered. After all, when one went to "Les Masques," one could rely on the discretion of its founder, Dr. Helmuth Weirath.
Ernestine closed her eyes a moment and considered the name she had just summoned up. Dear Helmuth! What a wonderfully imaginative man he was, and how clever he was to have founded something like "Les Masques"! And how grateful she was to dear Uncle Harold for having taken her there last week and letting her participate in that wonderful lottery!
By Saturday night, this bitch would have to be returned to him, of course. She would do it herself, she would insist, and of course dear Uncle Harold couldn't say no to her. Not if he wanted to get into her panties anymore, and of course the old devil did. For a man of fifty-nine, it was just amazing how capable Uncle Harold was. And what he couldn't do with his tongue and fingers to a girl's pussy! Ernestine sighed and hugged herself in reminiscence.
No, but this time she'd do something she'd wanted to do ever since she'd been introduced to Dr. Helmuth Weirath. She'd bring this bitch back, all right, and then she'd ask if she could have a few minutes with him. She'd wear one of her sheerest gowns, and under it she wouldn't have anything at all except a garter belt and of course her sheerest stockings. And she'd wear her spiciest perfume and use her most alluring makeup. She wanted him to fuck her. She wanted him to tie her up and just spank her playfully until she squealed and felt warm and until her pussy got so hot it couldn't stand it anymore, and then be fucked by that gray-haired genius who had made all these lovely games possible. Who had brought this red-haired little slut to be used as a slave.
Last night, she had tied the redhead to her bed, on her back and with a pillow under her bottom. With wrists and ankles spread-eagled, the redhead had been just about helpless. And then she'd worn just her boots and gloves, and taken a feather and started frigging the bitch's titties and pussy and along the insides of her long white thighs. MMMMM, how the slut had squealed and yelled and wriggled and begged for mercy, not that it had done her any good. And she'd crouched over her victim's face and started using the feather on the girl's pussy with one hand while with the other she had taken her little military hairbrush and begun to pat that gaping cunthole with the bristles, just the way she had done at the end of that ritual last week at the meeting place of "Les Masques." And finally she had forced the bitch to gam her; and when she refused, all she had had to do was to keep on spanking with the bristles, and pretty soon that tender soft little cunt couldn't take it any more and she had felt the bitch's tongue and lips pay homage to her own pussy.
"You know, bitch," she drawled as she kicked the naked, bound and blindfolded victim in the side, but not too hard so as not to hurt her bare toes, "if you'd just tell me your name, I could make it a little easier on you. You know what I'd really love to do? Strap you down over a sharp sawhorse so it would cut into that soft little pussy of yours. Tie weights to your wrists and ankles, and maybe even clamp on some nipple-pinchers. Then I'd like to give you a nice hot enema, dear, and fig you with a medicated suppository. Then I'd give you a nice little spanking, with a switch and maybe the hairbrush. I'll bet that you'd just break down and tell me everything you ever thought about or dreamed about, wouldn't you? I know you've been a pretty good girl, because you were cherry when Uncle Harold fucked you the night he brought you home from where we got you, darling. We'd like to know a little more about you. If we do, why, there's just the outside chance we might decided to keep you, say, as a maid or a servant. Of course you'd be our slave, we'd pay for you and buy you outright. Come on, be a good girl."
But only a thin moan could be heard through the gag, and faintly the redhead shook her head in sign of negation.
Her lips very tight, her eyes sparkling with anger, Ernestine Helms walked over to a dusty table, picked up a wooden yardstick, swished it through the air to test its flexibility, and returned to the unfortunate naked captive. In the crapaudine position, the victim's knees are drawn up against her titties, while her hands clasp her own knee hollows and her wrists are corded to her knees. To complete it, a rope goes round her neck and then under her knees and passes round her wrists and again around her elbows. It is a pose not only of shameful presentation but also the most painful constriction imaginable. And the girl on the floor had already tasted twelve hours of this, with only a little water and two or three crusts of bread fed to her by Ernestine herself.