Chapter 7
At just about the same time his brother was being clawed and tortured half to death, twenty-five-year-old Jeremy Garrick was pulling his battered secondhand Volks into the town of Stockton. It was too late, he decided, to try to make contact with his brother and so he planned to spend a night in a motel before figuring things out the following morning.
The entire situation had unnerved and depressed him. What he had been able to gather from Seth's hurried and frantic phone call could not be easily forgotten, or dealt with offhandedly. He had heard of women such as Lydia Rinaldo, women who combined elements of sexuality and sadism to put down men and reduce them to mere shells of their former selves.
But he had never come in contact with one, not that he knew of at least. And, on top of that, the woman had the ace card up her sleeve, her seeming lack of concern should she have to call the police and report Seth's presence in her home.
Not only couldn't Jeremy understand why his brother had attempted a holdup, of all things, but he couldn't figure out why it had been seemingly impossible to reason with the woman, or even escape. But these unanswered questions he hoped would all be dealt with in time.
Now, as he checked into a motel, he tried to see if he could figure out a likely enough plan, one that would enable him to rescue his brother and get him back to L.A. before she summoned the local police. In a city of that size there was a good chance Seth might be able to remain anonymous, perhaps go to Mexico or Canada for awhile while things cooled down.
He knew his brother too well to even think that Seth would give himself up and go directly to the police. Not after what he'd already gone through, especially. And so it was that the following morning, fortified by a big breakfast and a fairly untroubled night's sleep, he was filled with resolve and determination.
He checked out of the motel, stowed his things in his trunk and following his brother's directions, headed out towards Lydia Rinaldo's house, several miles past the outskirts of the town. But it was most unfortunate that in some ways the Garrick brothers each thought alike.
He parked his car off the road, less than a hundred yards from the high brick wall and the iron gates that opened onto her property. From there he went on by foot and when he found the gates locked, didn't hesitate to ring the bell he noticed at the side of one of the gates. He didn't look at all like his older brother, but if they lacked close physical similarities, they thought pretty much along the same lines.
For the first thing he said when Lydia came out of her house and strode haughtily to the gate, was the he'd like to use her phone since his car was stalled. He had no way of knowing that Seth had used almost the identical ploy.
Lydia, still unnerved by the previous evening's events, Seth's show of force to be specific, immediately began to feel suspicious. No one's car had ever stalled by her house before. But now, within the space of three weeks, two young men had both come to her for assistance.
"Of course you can use the phone, young man," she replied, smiling to herself and sizing him up as she unlocked the gates and beckoned him onto the grounds. He didn't notice how she made a point of locking them and pocketing the key, for his eyes were everywhere at once, trying to see if he could discover any signs of his brother's presence.
And it was then that Count came hurtling out of the house, growling and barking as he ran down the drive. Seth had neglected to mention the Great Dane and needless to say, Jeremy's first reaction was one of considerable fear and alarm.
But instead of saying, "Down, boy, down," words which would have immediately halted the Great Dane, Lydia merely snickered and stood by, watching Count as he lunged forward and threw Jeremy to the ground. "Hey! Stop him, get him off of me!" Jeremy cried out, trying to wrestle the dog off of him.
"Who are you?" Lydia spat out, looking down into Jeremy's frightened eyes. She was taking a chance, for if his car had really stalled she just might be charged with undo harassment. But a sixth sense told her that her initial premonitions and perceptions would prove to be correct, as they usually did in the past.
"My ... my car stalled, Miss Rin ..." he started to say, catching himself but not before her eyes narrowed with obvious delight.
"Miss what, little man? Miss Rinaldo, is that what you were going to say? How do you know my name? It's not listed by the bell, you stupid little fool!" she hissed, taking delight in his helplessness as Count stood right on top of him, pinning him down to the ground, his fangs bared and deep low-pitched growls emanating from the back of his throat.
He had no ready answer, no comeback with which to counter her accusations. And Lydia took his silence and frightened look as being sure signs of his guilt, though what that might be was still a matter of conjecture.
Even as Count ripped at his clothing, she didn't hesitate to raise her booted foot and press the high and dangerous spiked heel flush against his throat. He quivered with terror, completely overpowered as Count stood right on top of him, immobilizing him and pinning him down to the ground. "Now talk, little man," she said, threatening to smash his windpipe with her heel.
He looked up at her, suddenly and totally believing and understanding all that his brother had gone through. And what surprised him even more was that there was still no sign of Seth. He hadn't come running out of the house nor shown his face since Jeremy had rung the bell.
Lydia, regal and arrogant in her red vinyl costume, a skintight long-sleeved mini dress embellished with a wide studded black belt, pushed the heel of her boot down against his throat with all of her might.
He gurgled and just managed in the nick of time to roll to the side, or else she could easily have crushed his larynx. Her hip-high red vinyl boots swished tightly against her body and she laughed at his helplessness, grabbed hold of the collar of his sports jacket and began to pull him along the gravel drive to the house.
And when Jeremy came to his senses and tried to pull free of her grip, the Great Dane was on him in a flash, tearing at his clothing, digging his bloodthirsty fangs into his arms and legs so that he knew when he was licked.
"Okay, I'll go. Just get him off of me!" he yelled, unable to fight Count off. The dog weighed nearly as much as he did, possessed of both incredible strength as well as incredibly quick reflexes.
She signalled to Count, a mere nod of her head and the dog released Jeremy and stepped back, growling and guarding him as he got shakily to his feet and tried to pull himself together. "Just follow me, mister," she sneered, pushing him forward as she opened the front door and a reluctant Jeremy Garrick followed her into the house.
The door was quickly bolted and locked shut behind him. But for the moment the last thing he felt was that he too would become Lydia Rinaldo's prisoner. "Okay, prick, now start talking," she said. "Who the fuck are you and what business do you have around here, because it ain't a fucking stalled car, that's for sure."
"I... I'm a private detective for the Stockton bank, the one that they tried to hold up. You know the rest," he told her, trying to use his acting skills to sound as convincing as possible.
But her only response was laughter and additional scorn.
"Detective?" she snickered. "Boy, you've got to be kidding. Any detective worth his salt would have handled himself out there," and she motioned to the front of the house where Count had attacked him a few minutes before, "without any sweat. You're a detective, my ass, little man!"
And with these words ringing in his ears, she stepped towards the door once again. Instinctively he followed her, wondering if it just wouldn't be easy to grab her and use her as a shield against the dog.
But before he could put his ill thought out and hastily executed plan in action, she pressed what at first glance appeared to be a light switch. Suddenly everything seemed to come in on him and the full implications of his situation now made themselves totally clear and apparent.
For the instant she flicked the switch, it activated a device she had first seen in a detective movie nearly ten years before. He hadn't, needless to say, bothered to ever look up at the ceiling. But now he was immediately sorry he hadn't let his imagination run away with him, hadn't expected her house to be as filled with wily tricks as her personality was.
Because once she'd put the switch into its on position, a sudden rushing sound filled his ears and before he could make a single move he was screaming out, his arms flailing up to protect his face as a tight and constricting barbed wire cage descended from the ceiling.
It covered him in an instant, head to toe, barely allowing him to move a muscle. And when he did try to push it off of him, he immediately was cut by the sharp and jagged barbs which covered just about every inch of the cage. It hung by a now uncoiled chain from the ceiling, a perfect trap for a fool.
He was that fool and he knew it, having been completely gulled, intimidated and ultimately imprisoned by Lydia Rinaldo. All that his brother had tried to tell him was put in its proper perspective and he didn't for one minute doubt the validity of Seth's statements.
He realized what a living hell his brother must have been enduring for the last three weeks, but now he was in no position to offer any assistance, just as trapped and helpless as Seth. "A snug fit, if I do say so myself," she giggled.
He was barely able to lower his arms and each slight movement made the barbs tear at his clothing as well as any part of his body that was exposed and unprotected. His trousers were reduced to virtually rags and his jacket hung in bloodied tatters from about his torso.
Lydia stepped closer as if she was examining an animal, a specimen in a cage. She reached through one of the narrow openings and grabbed hold of his nose. But her gesture was far from playful. Rather, she didn't think twice about wrenching it brutally, nearly twisting the bridge of his nose completely out of shape.
He tried to pull back, only to suffer the pain of more barbs digging into his scalp and the back of his neck. "You're crazy. You'll never get away with this. People know where I am," he told her, though if the truth be known he had told no one, not a person at his office nor any of his close friends, the reason for his trip to Stockton or even that he was going there, to begin with.
Just as with Seth, he had virtually disappeared, having never thought to take the necessary precautions, having never imagined he'd meet with anything but the easiest of successes. All along it had just seemed a simple matter of reasoning with the woman or helping his brother escape through more ingenious and dramatic means, ladders against his window in the middle of the night, all the stuff of adventure comics and Saturday matinees that he had relished when he was a kid.
But this was not a game for children.
Lydia played for keeps and though she didn't know who he really was, neither his name nor the reason he had tried to gain entry into the house, she now turned on her heel and strode imperiously into the living room to fetch an even more painful inducer, one that would make the barbed wire net she had snagged him in look like innocence and gentility personified.
Count stood guard, though he really wasn't needed, for it was quite impossible for Jeremy to escape the barbed wire net and its close and painful dimensions. And so he kept his eyes on Lydia, able to see her rummaging in a drawer of a rosewood credenza at the far end of the living room.
She had no special cache to keep her equipment, but put things away throughout the house. Thus it was that there was always an instrument of sadism and torture available within easy reach. Now was no exception and upon opening the lowest drawer in the credenza, her eyes immediately lit up at the sight of a particularly frightening and diabolical instrument of depravity.
She pulled it out, slammed the drawer shut with the back of her shoe and returned to the foyer where her newest arrival and newest prisoner was hopelessly and agonizingly entangled in her net of barbed wire.
He took one look at what she now held in her hand, presenting it to his wide and staring eyes as one would present a gift and not a punishment, and felt his knees turning to jelly, buckling under him and suddenly unable to support the bulk of his weight.
But when he slipped and he tried to stop his fall, all that resulted was a score of fresh cuts and bruises as the lethal and sharp jagged barbs slashed into his body. "I see you can well appreciate such an interesting little device as this sweet lovely," she said, almost fondling the handle of the punishment paddle she waved before his wide and frightened eyes.
It was much more than a mere paddle, for though it bore a certain similarity, shape-wise that is, to fraternity hazing paddles, that was where the likeness ended. Rather than being constructed of wood, the lozenge-shaped paddle was of hard thick cowhide, specially treated so that it retained its stiffness without an appreciable loss of resiliency and give.
She waved it back and forth and it swooshed through the air, bending this way and that as she demonstrated its versatility and pliable construction. A length of rawhide formed a wristlet which she had already secured around her hand and the handle was much like that of a tennis racket.
It was covered with one layer after another of leather until it was nearly as solid and durable as actual wood. But these minor details, of great interest and also greatly appreciated by Lydia, were not the things that Jeremy Garrick was really noticing.
For the moment she'd displayed her hellish trophy, he'd recoiled not at he sight of the paddle, but at the rows of gleaming spikes which had been driven through the thick leather surface. The points extended a good half-inch, row after row of sharp metal studs, looking for all the world like the tacked wood used to hold down wall-to-wall carpeting
"Now is the time to let bygones be bygones, my little man," she told him, even as he kept his eyes glued to the spiked leather paddle. "So let's forget what's happened earlier and just think about the present, and my friendly persuader." She motioned to the paddle, bent her knees slightly and almost as if she was swinging a tennis racket or a golf club, Lydia thought nothing of slamming the spiked side of her torturing device right against his nearest thigh.
Although not every spike hit the mark, since the barbed wire was coiled around him, enough pointed ends did manage to make painful contact with his leg. He groaned and tried to pull back, only to ensnare himself, worse than before.
The net of wire seemed to be shrinking, catching onto him and ripping into his skin like a thousand burning fish hooks. He refused to scream, to give her the satisfaction of displaying his agony and terror.
But Lydia had all the time in the world and Jeremy was certainly in no position to go anywhere but where she wanted him to go. "Now then," she went on, clearing her throat and smiling sarcastically, "where were we? Oh yes, the question of identity comes to mind, my dear. Who are you, for starters?"
"Leopold von Sacher-Masoch," he spat out defiantly, glaring at her and trying to maintain his outward appearance of strength and manly conviction.
"How amusing," she snickered. "How very clever of you, to know of such things, the origin of the term masochism, in fact. That's one point for you, little man," and saying this she continued to smile, cool and decidedly collected as she took aim a second time and brought the paddle down with all of her might along the outside of his other thigh.
He could not stop himself from screaming as the sharp nails dug into his muscular leg, puncturing his skin in a dozen different places. And the violent and instinctive backward motion he had made the instant she'd raised the paddle in the air once again caused the barbs to entangle around his body, tearing at his clothing and leaving great gaping naked areas of skin, flesh that was now exposed and thus even more vulnerable to the jagged barbs than before.
"Shall we repeat the question, boy?" she said, continuing her harassment and interrogation where she had left off a moment before. "Or are you clever enough to remember?"
"My name is Jeremy Garrick," he told her, sullen and angry with himself, annoyed as well as agonized, both by his debasing predicament as well as by the fact that he knew he was now in no position to argue with her or give her any more back talk.
Lydia's eyes widened with genuine surprise. She had never thought to suspect that Jeremy had come because of Seth, even when he had mentioned the attempted holdup of the Stockton bank. But now she could barely disguise her glee. "A relative of our dear Seth, no doubt?" she asked with a chuckle of delight.
"His younger brother," replied Jeremy, realizing it was pointless to hide anything from her any longer. His skin was torn and covered with a multitude of cuts and punctured wounds and he was beginning to feel claustrophobic, on top of everything else.
The wire cage held him immobilized and his body ached with muscular fatigue. I'll figure out something, just as soon as she gets me out of this, he thought to himself, wondering what was going through her mind, what her silence meant as she stood haughtily and arrogantly before him.
He glanced up at her and for the first time since he'd laid eyes on Lydia, began to appreciate the kind of hold she could have over men. At least his brother had been kept captive and enslaved by a woman who gave every appearance of just about deserving a man's respect. Her curvaceous ... no, voluptuous, he decided, body was accented by the tight and revealing nature of her dominating costume.
Her clothes were as much a part of her as the paddle seemed to be a natural extension of her hand. She was right for the role she played, but even his theatrical perceptions, halfway between being those of an amateur and a professional, told him that she was not acting, that every word that came out of her mouth was genuine and not just reeled off as if she had memorized a script of her life beforehand, mouthing words that someone else -- de Sade perhaps -- had written for her.
No, her life was no act, her clothes no sham. She was not playing at being a dominatrice, not sporting her custom-made leather garments to titillate a middle-aged husband with a flagging libido and a limp pecker.
This was real, actual, the very meat and meaning of her day to day existence. And with these realizations came a new sense of respect, mingled with fear. Here was a woman you could not take lightly or con into believing what you wanted her to believe.
The games that others played, pretending to be leather studs and leather-shod high-heeled mistresses of pain, were all real and purposeful to Lydia. She was not pretending and her venomous temper and savage ways were the product of thirty-five years of development, of refinement of her bondage arts, of self-discipline as well as the discipline of others.
"What do you want from me now?" he asked her then. "I'm Seth's brother. It's time you gave him up and let him come home with me."
"Oh, is that so?" and she raised her narrow penciled eyebrows and stared down at him with haughty indignity. "A known criminal, wanted by the police? It would be much easier to just call the cops, right this very minute."
"In which case you'd have to do quite a lot of explaining, Miss Rinaldo, like why you didn't report him for three weeks, why you have all this ... this stuff around, why I'm all cut up. The cops don't take very lightly to perverts, especially women like yourself, women who enjoy emasculating and putting down men."
"You dare to call me a pervert, you ... you little spineless jellyfish! You're nothing, kiddo, nothing but another piece of shit. And what's good for one brother is going to be good for the other, I can assure you." She glared at him, her eyes blazing with rage. That he had insulted her, threatened to expose the very fabric of her life by revealing her dominating practices to the local police, was something she found intolerable in every way imaginable.
So now she didn't have to think twice about continuing her torturing regimen. Now that Jeremy Garrick was helplessly imprisoned, unable to escape his cage of barbed wire and lacerating torture, she simply went about her business without saying another word to him.
Oh yes, Lydia thought to herself, two is always much more fun than one, especially when they're brothers. And I never did have two brothers to entertain, not at the same time, that is. Just think of all the things I can force them to do, fucking each other, sucking each other off. Homosexual buggery and incest, perfect, absolutely my cup of tea!
She couldn't have been more delighted with the prospects thus afforded her. Upstairs, Seth was bound and gagged in the guest room, certainly in no position to come to the aid of his brother. And downstairs in the front hall, Jeremy was just as hopelessly and painfully ensnared, captive and virtual slave of the insidious and commanding Lydia Rinaldo.
Even though Lydia realized it would be much more difficult to deal with two men at the same time, taking care that they didn't pull any tricks on her, she was confident that with her own sense of ingenuity and Count's talent for knowing to do the right thing at the right time, she'd ultimately be able to deal with both of them without too much trouble.
Because now that Seth was secured upstairs, it took very little for her to do the same thing to his brother. She couldn't keep Jeremy wrapped in barbed wire for the rest of the day. And so she came back to her flawlessly constructed and pain-inducing cage armed with long coils of stout rope, the rough hemp variety she had always favored, both for its tendency to abrade human flesh as well as for its light yet highly durable physical properties.
He could not stop her from tying up, for even when he made a move to knock her hand aside, his arm caught on the jagged barbs which, by this time, were covered with linty scraps of his clothing as well as his torn lacerated skin.
She hummed aloud as she worked, virtually ignoring him, her fingers agile and quick as her hand darted back and forth and she fashioned tight and binding lengths of rope, first around his ankles and then around his wrists, managing despite his feeble struggle to pin his hands together behind his back.
Once she had accomplished this, immobilizing his arms and legs, she flicked the switch on again and the cage rose up, the overhanging chain creaking and clanking as the links were coiled one upon the other. Needless to say, it was not as simple or effortless as unveiling a statue, for the barbs tore into his body as the cage was pulled off of him.
He began to scream then, no longer able to endure the pain of being flayed alive, of having his skin ripped off of his body by the sharp and tearing barbs. But his cries only turned her on and by now she was impatient to really get started, anxious to demonstrate to Jeremy Garrick that what was good for his brother was just as good for him.
Needless to say, her idea of "good" left much to be desired.