Chapter 8

He was back in the room where he had spent the afternoon with the trussed-up Lizbeth. The room was now streaming with harsh bright lights. Lizbeth was still squatting trussed in a corner as she had been when he last saw her-and as she had been when he first woke up after recovering from the beating that the statuesque Arbella had inflicted on him.

Arbella was in the room, too. Arbella had changed. She, like himself, was dressed all in leather, but un-like Robin and un-like her earlier appearance, she was dressed in leather from head to toe now.

She was wearing a one-piece suit of supple black leather that had many straps and lacings, rather like his own. One line of lacings ran down from the tip of each pointed breast in a vertical line that ended at the line where thigh and belly joined. The breasts themselves seemed encased in detachable cups judging by the line of fasteners that delineated the line where the bottom of the jutting breasts merged with the line of the tunic. The lacing terminated at the top of the vertical slit at a point that corresponded with the nipple of the breast underneath, and the knot of the lacing formed a sort of tassel that vibrated and shook with her body.

The suit ended at the top in a turn-down collar, rather close to the chin, and from the collar lacings ran down under the armpits and around to the back terminating at the waist. There was a line of lacing down the outside of each of the tight sleeves. The line of lacing that came down the front from each breast changed at the thigh-line into a fine zipper that reached to the hem at the ankle, and the line of lacing that went from under the collar at the front and diagonally under the armpits, continued at the back in a vertical line, again to the ankle. A triangular piece of well-reinforced leather covered the crotch and was fastened in place with massive straps and buckles.

The feet were thrust into glossy boots that fitted snugly. They were black but at the front, where the lacing was close and tight, there was a scalloping of red leather. They had five-inch pointed heels and finished just below the leather-covered knee. On her head, Arbella wore the same helmet in which he had seen her earlier, a close-fitting piece of glossy leather that added a frame of harsh authority to her stern face which was if anything heightened by the proud thrust of her dark pony tail from a hole at the back of the helmet.

"Get to work!" Arbella thundered at Robin as he entered. She emphasized her words with a flick from the long whip she was carrying, hung from her wrist, for instant availability, on a leather thong.

Robin looked in the direction she was pointing. Lizbeth was still squatting there, trussed like a chicken.

"Undo the chain from her ankle straps to her wrist straps," Arbella ordered. "Nothing else."

Robin found the fastenings without too much difficulty and undid them.

"Hang the chain from your belt. It will come in useful later."

Robin did as he was bid.

"Don't waste my time. Make her get up!" Arbella's voice was one of impatient demand.

"Get up," Robin urged the naked girl, holding out a hand ready to help her.

"What sort of a chicken-shit way is that to make that strumpet get up? What are your boots for? Your spurs? Your whip? Go ahead and use them!"

Robin did as he was told. Tentatively, but with a sense of first-time achievement, he let the whip flick across the trussed girl's back. She whimpered and rose shakingly off her heels. Her wrists were still fastened behind her but now that the chain no longer connected them to her ankles, she was able to slip them over her buttocks and hold them, shackled close together, just below her waist at the back. Her feet and knees were apparently numb from having been cramped immobile for so many hours and it was with great difficulty, encouraged by occasional light flicks from Robin's whip, that she rose to a kneeling position and then to a wobbly stand.

"Get her into the other room!" Arbella thundered. "We're waiting."

Lizbeth didn't walk on as Robin had expected. Instead she hung back, unnecessarily it seemed to him, ambling and much more slowly than her physical condition required. She must have known she'd be in for. a beating if she didn't move quickly. Why was she so deliberately slow?

Robin knew what to do. He gave her two light swinging slashes that covered her back and her buttocks.

Arbella cracked her whip in disgust.

"I think we have to get one thing clear, young man. We're not playing games here or personal sentiment. What I want is discipline. I want to see you lash this pretty miss properly because that is what she needs and that is what I demand. I don't care a tinker's cuss what your personal sentiments are, you may love her or hate her or despise her, that should not influence the force or the severity of the lashings you give her under my order or at my instructions. You don't have to hate her to lash her well; you are just as free-so far as I am concerned-to lash her hard in the fullness of your love. Lash her with love, if you like, it's good for her and good for you. Now git!"

She flicked her whip, hard, and its lash stung Robin at the back of his legs, at the bare space between the top of his boots and the edge of his leather shorts.

"Perhaps you were wondering why I chose a boy-scout outfit for you with little-boy pants. Now you know. Nothing I do is without a design."

She lashed at his bare legs again to make him realize what his position was in the scheme of things.

"Get moving!" Robin ordered, falling into his appointed role. He lashed out at Lizbeth, letting his whip curl down her belly, from just below the breast to the cleft of her cunt. He saw her wince and saw, at the same time, the look of sensual joy with which she seemed to embrace the lash and the pain.

"Forward!" he ordered again, warming to his role. She stumbled forward, head down, feet shuffling across the floor to the extent that the straps that bound her ankles together permitted this.

He let her pass by him and then he followed up behind her, lashes on her bare back emphasizing his orders.

"That's better," Arbella said grudgingly. "You're beginning to understand what I expect of you. I'll go on ahead. The others are waiting. Straight down the hall; the door is open."

Shuffle-shuffle the nude shackled girl made her dejected way barefoot out of the room and along the long and ominous corridor. Slash, slash Robin punctuated each step with his whip. It was getting to be fun, he enjoyed playing his new role. He noticed with much satisfaction how easy and how rewarding it was to do his thing in complete detachment. His feelings for Lizbeth were one thing, his need to lash and the enjoyment he got from it were something else entirely. Nothing personal, just good, cheerful joy at wielding his whip and exercising his power.

There were lights blazing at the end of the corridor and a murmur of voices. Laughter, tinkling glasses, animated talk. The makings of a party.

Robin entered, Lizbeth hobbling in front of him, fully nude except for the bonds on her ankles and her wrists. There was a moment's hushed silence as she entered, heads were turned in her direction, then the talk started again as if the appearance of a naked girl, tied and hobbled, with welt marks down her back, and a whip-wielding leather-clad man urging her on, were matters of no consequence.

When his eyes had adjusted to the light, Robin looked around. The room was large, furnished in a harsh, ultra-modernistic style: glaring colors, sharp angles and corners, polychromatic clashing, neon constructions, polished steel structures, leathers, plastics and acrylic paints. Furnishings consisted of inflated plastics, free-shape leather recliners, black-leather-and-chrome saddles suspended from the ceiling, and the people in the room-a round half dozen-wore clothing to match.

But before Robin could take in the people or even determine what sex they were, his eyes were riveted by the equipment featured at one end of the room.

From the ceiling dangled hooks and chains of various lengths. The floor was equipped with hooks and rings, too. There were clasps and brackets attached to the wall.

The whole of this area was brightly lit with spotlights. One spotlight was focused on a long low table that looked something like a carpenter's bench, with vise-like devices, hooks, rings, clamps. It was a little longer than a man's length and had a helical device that looked as if it was meant for increasing the length of the bench. Near it was another table that looked like a gynecologist's examination table. It was covered in shiny white plastic and edged in chrome and various parts could obviously be raised or lowered or tilted according to need. One unusual item whose use he could not immediately establish was a sturdy wooden frame made of six-inch timbers. It was about eight feet square and stood vertically on a large swivel screwed to the floor; a similar swivel attached it to the ceiling and inside the frame, apart from braces at each corner to keep it square, were various hooks, bolts and rings.

"Over here! At the double!" It was Arbella. Drink in one hand, she was pointing with the whip held in her other hand, in the general direction of the area that Robin's quick mind had told him was meant to serve as a torture and punishment area.

Lizbeth seemed to hesitate when she saw the fittings readied for her punishment and made as if she wanted to turn away from the direction in which her stern mistress had pointed. Robin knew what to do.

"No you don't f he snarled and he headed her off with a slash of his lash.

Lizbeth resumed her hobbling. She was bent forward, her wrists painfully behind her bare bruised back. She looked the picture of absolute dejection and ultimate hopelessness. How different she was, Robin mused, but only for a moment, from the innocent, fresh, cheerleader-type who had picked him up that sunny afternoon at the outdoor cafe in Greenwich Village.

"Here!" Again the deep voice of the leather-clad mistress rang out and her whip pointed. Lizbeth seemed to know where to go. headed there, hesitated, got a new prodding from Robin's lash and slowly shuffled forward.

"Undo the straps!"

Robin realized she was referring to the leather thongs that bound her victim's ankles. He bent to the task but found the binding was tighter and more complicated than he had reckoned with; perhaps the girl's shuffling from the room in which she had been kept had helped to tighten the knots.

He bent over her feet and ankles. Her bare legs and thighs stood over him and the smell of fear and pain mingled with the sweat from her thighs and crotch and assailed his nostrils. It roused his passions and he found his cock straining under the tight shorts. It was ludicrous going through with this charade under these conditions when here there was a girl-beautiful, naked, sexy, willing, urgent to be fucked. A girl who aroused him, a girl he could desire once again to either use or abuse for his sexual ends. And instead, at the orders of the strange monster-woman, he was going to help in some outlandishly orgiastic rite of punishment and degradation for the delectation of the hostess's weird band of perverted guests.

He struggled with the straps and-perhaps she moved, perhaps he inclined his head-found his forehead in fiery contact with her smooth leg. He worked on the leather, lingered, found reason to let his hand slide and stray slightly, felt the high arch of her foot, rubbed his hand along the instep, allowed the ball of her foot, plump and soft, to rest awhile in the palm of his hand. Tie was fascinated by this foot, that was tied to its mate by the knotted leather.

His ringers traced the outlines of the heel, worked their soft way up her achilles tendon, encircled her slim ankle, took in the bone, wandered down and back along the instep. A leather strap cut into his skin at the back of his knees. "You're here to work, not to indulge yourself in your infantile fetishistic obsession with this slut's feet. Get going!"

Robin felt the sting of the lash but even more deeply he was stung to the quick by the mistress's tongue-lashing. It wasn't just that he was falling down on his job, but that he was somehow failing her in the task for which she had selected him. He was...yes, at least a weakling, giving in to cheap eroticism when he had a task to serve this demanding mistress. He was...he wanted...no, he couldn't find the words...only images...bound to this woman, this demanding woman, bound to this woman who would be his mistress, this woman who had promised him nothing, who had given him nothing but kicks, beatings and lashes, who promised him nothing, and stood only for pain and torture...and yet, with this woman he could gain a sense of being, of existing, of acquiring strength and mastery.

Yes, mastery through doing the will of this imperious mistress. Mastery by mastering his own desires and his own needs and carrying out her wishes for her ends.

It was true. Robin was not there to enjoy his private pleasures with the naked Lizbeth but to enjoy the much wider pleasure of being nothing but the instrument of Arbella's own desires.

Arbella desired now that he untie Lizbeth with as much dispatch as possible. Ergo, that was his desire, too. He redoubled to the task and found himself swelling to the sense of achievement when at last he had accomplished what his mistress had set him to do-small task though it was.

"Foot restraints!" Again the order issued from the demanding mistress of it all. She had sat down on a tall stool to watch the proceedings. Her body was half turned toward him and her long, booted and leather-enclosed legs were visible to him in profile, one slightly higher than the other, its toe tucked in behind the ankle of the other. Robin found himself filled with a surge of desire for her-not to possess her, not to abuse her, not to form with her an erotic union but simply to be allowed to remain in her presence and to win her approval.

He examined the square frame and discovered a pair of steel shackles spaced about three feet apart in the base of the frame. They were attached to spring-laden cables and could be tugged up and out of the frame with a moderate pull. Lizbeth knew what to do; she hobbled on her pained feet to the frame and mounted it. Robin snapped the shackles around her ankles and left her standing on the frame, her legs spread apart in the steel, her hands still fastened behind her back with leather thongs.

"Undo her wrists, then shackle them to the top."

The voice of the mistress was issuing the next command.

Robin started to get up. Lizbeth, who had been standing upright as well as she could on her pained and cramp-bound ankles, tottered forwards. Her thighs fell against his shoulders as he was rising to a standing position, and as he continued to rise, his head, encased in its leather helmet, plowed a path along her body. His head slid along the gap between her legs, his face scraped up her pubic hair and along her wet cunt-slit, along the ridge of her belly, up the hollow in her rib cage and between her ribs. He put out his hands to steady her as he rose and by the time he had come to a virtual standing position he had her, in effect, in a close embrace after having traversed her nude body with his face from crotch to hair. But something had happened to him in the transformation during the past half-hour: her body, her skin, her form, her erotic appeal-none of them meant anything to him. She was just a body, a mass, an object that had fallen against him and had impeded him and inconvenienced him in the proper performance of his duty. He picked her up, therefore, not as a woman and not as a potential sex object but simply as an unavoidable task or duty, held her roughly in a standing position...

"Dancing?" The question was both a mockery and an implied threat. It was furthest from his mind to see this naked Lizbeth as a woman even, but he realized that not only must he reject other person-directed eroticism at Arbella's insistence but he must take pains to avoid all semblance of such involvement or desires.

He pulled at Lizbeth's shoulder with an obvious display of roughness, then grabbed her by the wrists, pulling her backward so that she fell down on the ground with a resounding bang. She was facing the group in the room, sitting on the floor with her bare um, her feet held in the clamps three feet apart, and raised perhaps eighteen inches off the floor because of the structure of the frame and its supporting mechanism. Her thighs were thus widely parted as was her cunt and the pink young lips were wetly parted too in full view of the audience, putting on display the pulsating mounds of darker flesh inside her cunt.

He knelt down behind her and tugged at her thongs. One hand was freed and he prepared to untie the other one . .

"Don't waste time. Hitch her up. You can do the other hand standing."

He found the correct clamp from the upper beam, pulled it down against its spring-laden resistance, shoved Elizbeth to standing position, and fastened her hand into the clamp. It left her arm extended above her body at an angle and she was unable to sag back.

The other hand took him a couple of minutes to untie, then he put it like its mate through the appropriate clamp and left her, spread-eagled in space, held firmly by wrists and ankles into the wooden frame. He felt satisfied with his work and stepped back, a warm glow of accomplishment through his body and a smile of satisfaction on his face.

There was more work for him.

"Turn the frame. Let everyone have a good look at her."

The guests, sensing that something worthwhile was now going to be enacted, left their idle chatter and gathered around the torture frame. Robin found the pin that held the frame locked to the pivot, undid it, and slowly moved the frame on its pivot so that the spectators were offered a view of the spread-eagled young body from all aspects.

"Hey, whatya planning for her, baby?" one of the men asked Arbella. He was a tall muscular Negro with a fuzzy Afro hairdo. In one ear he had a large gold hoop and over one shoulder he had draped a robe in exotic shades of orange and purple. The other shoulder was bared and snowed off a magnificent physique. The robe reached half-way down the thigh on each side but it was draped in such a way that it left his tight black ass exposed at the back and at the front it left the last three or four inches of his massive dong fully visible.

Tm planning nothing," Arbella announced. "This isn't designed as a public spectacle, this is simply a punishment that must be meted out on Elizabeth so that she may be taught the elements of discipline. There'll be time enough later to devise some fun and games-with Lizbeth or without."

"I want to shove my cock down her throat," the black giant responded. He grabbed hold of his uncircumcised prick and waved it at her, with his lips thrust forward, to give her an idea of what he had in mind. Robin looked up at Elizabeth's face at that moment and watched her eyes dilate-in fear, in surprise and anticipation.

"I want to eat her," said a plumpish, well-rounded woman of an indeterminate age. She wore a tiny waist-clinching corset made of leather and reinforced with chains and straps, a leather half-bra that pushed her rather weather-beaten breasts into full high prominence, frilly panties with a lacy black border and a garter belt with black elastic down her thighs holding up a pair of black-mesh opera hose. Her feet were encased in high-heeled pumps of black patent. She wore what looked like a double-strand pearl necklace, long pendants hung from each ear, her hair, dyed a cruel red, was piled high on her head in a rather cruel and out-dated style and on her face she wore-with the help of paints, creams, rouge and unguents-an expression of utter hate and cruelty.

"Yes," she repeated after a brief pause, "I think I'd like to eat her...." she left another dramatic pause. ". . . Eat what's left of her after we've all had our joys and pleasures of her."

There was a tittering of laughter among the audience. Robin continued slowly turning the frame for the edification of the guests.

"I think we should marinate her slightly," a thin and rather swishy-looking young man expressed. He was wearing a black silk shirt with turtle-neck collar and skin-fitting white kidskin tights. "Girls are never good when they're too fresh, not for anything, not even for punishment."

"I've had her trussed up all afternoon," Arbella told him.

"Yes, but she doesn't look quite ready yet. I suggest you leave her hanging a little while longer before you start whipping her."

"I want to see her whipped now," demanded a very young and very lovely-looking girl who couldn't have been older than eighteen. She had a huge mop of straw-colored hair that fell to almost cover her breasts, a three-inch wide studded belt that hung somewhat loose so that it drooped almost to her clitoris, and gold-colored Grecian sandals that were strapped all the way up her thigh, ending in bows on the outside of each hip. Beside that she wore nothing else and her magnificent figure with its melon-shaped breasts was unmarred by so much as a stretch line or an uneven tan.

"Yes, you're right, she should be whipped now," Arbella said, smiling sweetly at all assembled there. "It would be cruel to have her wait for her punishment. And besides, I want to see how our new apprentice assistant can wield the whip, so I think we should give him a chance straight away. On the other hand...." and now she put on a special smile. ". . .on the other hand it would be much more pleasant if we had her wait in anticipation for her punishment. So what's going to happen at this point is that our young man here will give us a demonstration of his abilities and will help break Lizbeth's-a-hah-suspension if you don't mind the pun-and then we will let her marinate a bit, as you termed it, Milton. We can devise something else for the marinating period, and then we can get down to the real punishment."

"Robin!" she thundered.

Robin pulled himself up and stood in awe and in readiness.

"His name is Robin," Arbella explained, a sardonic smile across her cruel features. "Robin-Hood Robin, perhaps, or Batman-and-Robin Robin, or perhaps Cock-Robin Robin, or perhaps Robin-Redbreast Robin. Which do you like?" and she poked Robin in the belly with the end of her whip handle, to the combined laughter of all those there.

When the laughter had died down, Arbella started her orders. "O.K. now, Cock-Robin Robin, turn her around for three-quarter view. That's right. Turn your head my way, Lizbeth, I want to see your face when he whips you. Good, perfect. Insert the pin Batman to keep her from spinning like a top. Here, I'll select a whip for you, that utilitarian model you have in your little fist won't do for the real thing."

She strode over to one wall where whips and lashes in all sizes, all styles and all different materials were on display in orderly racks. She selected one with a tubular steel handle like a golf-club and twin lashes made of two-inch wide strips of leather, four feet long.

"Here's a fine one," she said, handing it to Robin. "It's just right for warming her up and it won't cut her up too badly to force us to take time off, later, when we're ready for her."