Chapter 8
Katrina had passed her initiation with flying colors. So much so, in fact, that the initiation had lasted much longer than Alya had really planned. But in due time, the two women had regained control of their exhausted bodies, and Alya, having slipped on her sheath and brushed her hair, had left the room, leaving Katrina in a confused and sated stupor.
Had she remained that way, in her room, for the rest of the day and the night, she might have been spared what her initiation gave her credentials for. Because Clint would have found her when he staggered, ashen-faced, back into the hotel. As it was, he could not find her, and the desk clerk on the late shift could give him no indication where she had gone.
Which was reasonable enough. For Katrina had gone, by specific request, to that part of San Dozes no other visitors ever saw or knew existed.
Alya and Boulo had come for her quite late that night, at just about the time Clint was sneaking into the villa that held such a horrible surprise for him. And Katrina had willingly packed her bags, knowing that she had been accepted, and gone with them. After a long and bumpy ride through the night in Boulo's limousine, Katrina felt the car maneuver onto a paved surface. Then it was more darkness, in silence. And then lights, and some immense sort of guarded gate, where there was a keeper's cottage, of the sort Katrina usually associated with European country estates.
She pretended she was still dozing when a man came out of the cottage, accompanied by a large, mean-looking Doberman, and after talking with the driver, unlocked the great, wrought-iron gate and let them through. In the headlights of the car, as they drove up what Katrina presumed to be a twisting driveway, she could see glimpses of a lush garden. She was getting more and more uneasy, and at the same time, intrigued. She hadn't really known what she was asking for when she had laid her plans to get to the bottom of whoever it was that plotted the kind of set-up she'd been trapped in as an errant guest on the island. But it was clear that she had not underestimated the powers she was dealing with. From the looks of things, the innocent world of the Sandozes' Hotel and its surroundings was only a small part of what she had presumed was a small island. Now she was not so sure.
The car glided up to an immense house, a sort of melange, from what Katrina could see in the floodlights that shone out of the garden, of a San Simeon monstrosity blended with the weirdest examples of a Spanish Gothic country castle.
Without a word, she and Alya and Boulo got out of the car. The driver carried her bags to the door. Although Katrina didn't see him ring or knock, the door opened. Standing in it was a dapper little clerkish-looking man in an ordinary business suit. Boulo walked up to him and whispered a few words that Katrina couldn't overhear. Then he handed the man a thick packet of papers and returned to the car.
Katrina was surprised to see him climb into the automobile. And even more startled when Alya came up to her and gave her a quick hug and a kiss.
"This is what you were looking for. Have fun. Do not think I am joking when I tell you that prayer is often the only link to reality." Katrina stared at the girl in bewilderment.
"You are surprised? I live in no reality, you know. But I pray. Remember that. You will need to. Good-by." Alya gave Katrina a last kiss, a distinctly sisterly kiss, and climbed back into the limousine.
Katrina watched with disbelief as the car rolled silently away, back down the twisting carriage-way, and disappeared into the gardens. She turned around and saw that the small man had picked up her suitcases and was waiting for her patiently.
Without a word, she followed him through the door, into an enormous hall. Too much! Katrina thought, looking about her at the crazy magnificence of the place. She had heard of rich nuts who even in this day and age repeated the examples of the robber barons who had come before them in the New World building enormous monuments to their egos and fortunes at incredible costs. She had been in enough minor-league examples of this sort of thing back in Hollywood.
But this was something else. Not since she had taken the Duke of Bedford's prattling tour through his magnificent Woburn Abbey had she seen such opulence, on such a grand scale. She didn't know whether to be amused or impressed, as she followed the padding little man through the vast foyer and up the great central staircase. Her heels clacked on the polished marble as she ascended the curving stairs, her head rotating 360 degrees with every step taking in the paintings, the stuffed heads, the heraldic displays and banners. It was Hearst to the tenth power, she thought, flabbergasted.
It was only when she was sitting on her four-poster bed in what was apparently to be her room, and after the little man had padded out, locking the door, Katrina noticed, that she paused to reflect on what all this meant.
What precisely did it mean? she wondered. Only that she had been brought, at her own request, really, to a strange and unreal world. In the Caribbean? In the twentieth century? What was behind all this and the people who inhabited this place? she thought. Who exactly would she be joining? And in what sort of activity?
And would it, she wondered, feeling really apprehensive, have any bearing on the blackmail evidence the hotel had on her? What had she gotten herself into? No telling. A dream-world, it seemed. Katrina tried the door and realized it really was locked. She went to the window and pushed the heavy, velvet drapes aside to look out. And her blood ran cold in her veins.
For under the drapes, filling the entire casement of the enormous window, was a thick sheet-metal plate. The window was sealed in, she thought, backing away in dismay. The opulent room, whether by intention or not, was a jail-cell for all practical purposes. It was a long time, after Katrina had gone to bed between the satin sheets and downy blankets, before she was able to drift off to sleep. The last image in her conscious mind was a picture of Clint, standing on a beach, holding a letter out for her to take, a look of love and devotion inscribed on his face. And then the image faded, and Katrina slid into a nightmare, in which she was running through a castle, pursued by a horde of natives in dancing costumes, calling desperately for Clint.
Katrina had no idea what time it was when she awoke. The room was lit, dimly, by imitation gas jets in iron candelabra on the wall. It felt like late morning, but she couldn't be sure. She sat up in bed and re-focused her eyes. She smelled something. Food. And there it was on the table by her bed. An elaborate meal sitting under a delicate cut-glass globe on a silver tray.
Katrina figured it would be wise not to start asking herself questions this early in the morning. She washed up in the closet which had been converted to a small, modern lavatory and, getting back into bed, fell to the meal before her. It was lunch, she figured.
After she had eaten her fill of the delicious meal, she decided to get dressed, in anticipation of whatever the morning or afternoon would bring. But after looking everywhere, she realized that her luggage, which she had seen the little man bring in the night before, was nowhere to be found. Well that was a bit rude, she thought.
She walked around the room, looking for something to read, but there was nothing. Even more annoying, she thought, as long as she was being expected to wait in her nightgown, until someone appeared. She went back into the lavatory and absently picked up the hair brush that had been provided, with an intention of brushing her mane of rich black hair. But then she realized, with something of a shock, that there was no mirror in the lavatory. And none in the room itself no glass of any kind. It was a touch that didn't reassure her any.
Nothing to do but settle down and wait, which she did, brushing her hair for a long time and staring at an oil painting which hung on the wall opposite her bed. It depicted a group of English-looking huntsmen on horseback, with their hounds. But in the distance, instead of foxes, there were buxom, naked figures running at large over the landscape. Katrina studied it for a long time, until she finally fell back to sleep.
When she awoke, the first thing she noticed was that the tray had been changed and that another meal was awaiting her inspection. She ate, a little more uneasily than she had a few hours earlier. The prospect of someone sneaking into the room, along with everything else about the room, didn't please her.
If only she knew what time it was, she thought, at least she could make some sense of why no one might have shown up. But the dim lights shone on. The room was unchanged or was it? No. Something was different, she realized. Where the painting of the weird hunting scene had hung before, there was now a different picture. Katrina calmed her jittery nerves and studied the replacement. It seemed to be a parody of an 18th-century depiction of a classical court scene, complete with crumbling temple and a bacchanalian crowd of overstuffed, brilliantly clothed men and women. The thing that made it odd was that instead of the usual roast boar on the platter in the foreground, there was a female figure, trussed and garnished and lying on a silver tray with an apple in her mouth. Katrina shuddered at the pointed implication.
This wasn't so funny anymore, she reflected, as she went around her opulent apartment, searching for anything to alleviate her boredom. But she had no luck with wrestling with the stout door or prying at the iron-sealed window or searching for bric-a-brac or clothes in the few pieces of furniture. Nothing. Just a cell, really, she realized with a sinking feeling. God, how she wished someone would appear, someone to talk to, someone to let her out to see the light of day, or night whatever it was.
After hours of muddled thought and reminding herself that she couldn't afford to get upset, she dozed off again. When she awoke, there was no meal, and after lying in bed for a while, she fell back to sleep again. And then woke again, from a nightmare, in which Clint was being tortured in a medieval dungeon, dying with some secret on his lips that Katrina knew but did not know.
There was food again not discernible as any particular meal just food, delicious as it was. Katrina ate only some of it. She was determined to stay awake tonight, to find out who brought the food. But after hours and hours of sitting on her bed, walking around, singing to herself and brushing her hair, no one had come. And finally, the only thing she had left to do was take a shower.
When she emerged from the lavatory, toweling herself and wishing as only a woman can that she had a mirror, something else had happened. Not only had someone come and taken away the tray, but her nightgown, which she had left on the bed, had disappeared.
And not only that, but the bedding itself had been stripped from the down mattress. Katrina didn't know whether to go into a rage at the tricks someone was playing on her or sit down and cry with frustration. And then she realized as she sat on the plump, soft mattress, holding the damp towel to her body, that somehow, someone was spying on her. How else could they have known when to come and go? She looked absently around, and her eye fell on the picture, which, like the meals, had been changed.
This time she was compelled to go stand in front of it and study it closely. It was a portrait of a nicely furnished room an Edwardian room. Quite normal, except for one thing. In the elaborately decorated bird cage to one side of the picture there was no bird. But instead, the naked figure of a woman, crouching on a roost, staring out between the gilded bars of the cage. Katrina resisted the impulse to scream out.
As time dragged on, she fought that impulse more and more desperately. For she soon lost even the remotest sense of time. She slept; she woke. She ate; she washed. She sat and lay on the stripped-down bed, studying her nakedness and thinking about the eyes she knew were watching her from somewhere. She stopped being upset by the pictures, which changed with regularity but always stuck to the same theme themes she was familiar with from great paintings, but always with a naked woman or women substituting for something else in an incongruous way.
Above all, she knew, she had to keep control of herself. For perhaps, this confinement and humiliation were some sort of test. Or perhaps it was deliberately designed to unhinge her. She didn't really have any basic fear for her life. She was fed, and warm enough. And she simply sat, during her waking hours, thinking about her life: the compromises she'd made; the mistakes especially the greatest one her failure to trust Clint enough to be honest with him when he had been with her. If she'd gone to him, she thought now, surely he would have helped her. Instead of being so stupidly willful, and scrubbing him, and bringing this ludicrous situation on herself.
Then, when Katrina woke to find one of her meals sitting there, she saw something else. A clipping from a newspaper in Spanish, with a picture of herself. Attached to it was an English translation. Katrina read it in horrified fascination. It was an obituary her obituary describing how she'd been lost in a light plane while flying from one island to another with someone whose name had probably been manufactured, like the rest of the story. She compared the translation and the story and had no reason to doubt it. Someone, she realized, had gone to the trouble to let the world know she no longer existed. Clint, she thought what if Clint had seen this?
It was then that she broke down and cried, for many long hours, sinking into the deepest of depressions. And finally into tortured sleep, curled up naked on her mattress. When she awoke, she picked at her food and soon, in spite of that fact that she didn't feel at all tired, fell back into slumber once again.
She had a nightmare this time, again. Someone was choking her; she was being throttled by a snake; a noose was tightening around her neck. She was in a New England-style stocks, her wrists and ankles pinioned.
Katrina awoke, covered with sweat. She felt as if she were gagging, but when she raised a hand to her neck, she shrieked with terror. For on her wrist there was a metal band on both wrists, and on both her ankles. With a sense of dread, she touched her neck. Yes, there too. Somehow she had been drugged, and someone had attached these bracelets. The horror was getting worse how would it continue, she wondered, and when, or how, would it end? She studied the five bracelets that had been attached to her body, noting the rings that were part of each.
After this, she managed to stay awake for what she figured must have been fifteen or twenty hours. Or twenty-five or thirty. It was impossible to tell. She was afraid to sink into unconsciousness again, afraid of what might come next. The discomfort of the steel bands biting into her soft skin helped her stay awake.
When she awoke, it was with piercing screams again. Something had touched her! She catapulted off the bed and looked for the intruder. With terror, yet relief, she saw only a black dog, sitting panting by her bed. She froze as it got up and sauntered over to her. It was a terrible-looking thing enormous and sleek, with great shining teeth, just like the one she had seen the night she arrived. Unable to move, she stared at it as he for it was noticeably a he came panting over and sniffed at her. Her skin crawled at first as the wet nose poked her. She was sure he would start to devour her at any instant.
But after a few moments she realized that in spite of its formidable appearance, he was a friendly dog. Satisfied with his investigation, he licked her hand and sat down in front of her, wiggling his tail and studying her.
Katrina felt a gush of relief. Here was a living thing! In the same room with her. She was overjoyed. She reached out and scratched him behind the ears, and he responded by wiggling his stub of a tail even more. The boredom and tension which had been relentlessly building up left her as she made friends with her new companion. For what seemed like hours, she played with him, making him do tricks, running around the room with him, chasing him and making him chase her under and over the bed.
Finally, she was tired and got up onto the high bed again. He jumped up and lay down beside her, snuggling his long, tightly-muscled body against her soft form. She scratched his stomach and, without thinking, hugged him to her, shivering with a strange excitement at the way his short, bristly hair tickled her delicate skin.
When she awoke, he was still there. And so was a new tray full of food. There was more than usual this time, and Katrina knew why. She fed him from her food, marveling at his intelligence at the way he waited for her hand instead of flinging himself headlong into the tray. When they had finished eating, only one thing puzzled her. But the problem was solved, to her amazement, when the dog headed into the lavatory and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, relieved himself in her shower stall.
All of that waking day, she played with him, and talked to him too. It was extraordinary, she thought, how human a dog could be. How intelligent how even nicer than a human. For he didn't talk back but just stuck by her side with constant affection. The fact that she had him with her had virtually dissolved her worries about when and how she would be released from her captivity.
"Up, up," she commanded him, as they romped around the room together. He obeyed her and jumped up, his great panting tongue swabbing one of her breasts in the process. Katrina felt a stab of guilty excitement, looking down at her wet breast. Then she looked slowly at the handsome animal, suddenly seeing its magnificent canine body in a new light. No, no! she thought to herself, trying to drive out of her mind the freakish thought which had just occurred to her. I won't, she insisted to herself, and got back up on the bed, trying to ignore the brutish animal temporarily.
But he jumped right up on the bed, panting almost as if he had read her mind and were laughing at her. Katrina felt his hot breath on her side and tried to fight the idea away again. She pushed at him, trying to make him leave. But he disregarded her hand, lowering himself to his belly and crawling right up next to her. She put her hand on him again to shove him away. But this time she couldn't. Under her palm and against her side she felt his prickly hair, rubbing against her as he panted away.
How could you even dare! she checked herself, but try as she could, the idea wouldn't shake free from her. And the dog would not leave her side. With guilty apprehension, feeling herself sink into an abyss of damnation, she whistled softly to the animal, patting her tummy at the same time. He pawed her and crawled closer to her, poking at her responsively with his cold, wet nose. Katrina gasped and closed her eyes as he nudged her breast playfully. She kept her eyes closed, feeling herself stir with a forbidden kind of animal eroticism. She patted herself again, higher up on her body this time, and felt the dog edge closer to her, snuffling his nose against her. Then he licked her again, his tongue rasping directly over the tip of one of her ivory breasts.
Katrina shut her eyes more tightly. Was the dog becoming human, or was she turning into an animal? Her body was answering for her. She opened her eyes and looked at herself, regarding the nipple he had laved with his canine kiss. She watched it burgeon and swell, pulsing to its full coral hardness.
HesitanUy, her mind flashing back to her schoolgirl days, she touched herself there. It was unbearable, she thought. She was being overcome with self-intensified desire. She squeezed the nipple with her fingers, gasping at how much pleasure it gave her. She brought her whole hand into play first on one breast, then on both, massaging and caressing herself, teasing herself to an abandoned state of autoeroticism.
Gods! she thought, the animal has a mind of its own. For the Doberman had intruded himself where both her hands were now. As if it were a game and she was hiding something from him, he poked under her hands, nuzzling against her already aroused and burning flesh in the process. But Katrina didn't stop him. She was too overcome with the novel sensations the animal inspired in her.
Instead, she began to massage her entire body, trying to imitate with her own hands the gestures which men and even Alya had recently employed to bring pleasure to her ripe body. From nowhere, as her fingers slid further and further down her body and the dog nuzzled her with increasing playfulness, the image of a church swam into her mind. It clouded into a picture of her parents, then of Clint, and all her friends. She wrestled with herself, but it was no use. The images faded and all she was aware of was the burning feeling in her flesh and the mounting ache deep in her groin.
Torn between anguished guilt and the compulsion of rising lust, Katrina writhed on the bed. But this only increased the dog's playfulness. He rose up on his haunches and hovered over her, pawing at her even as she tried to brush him away, scraping the hard pads of his paws over her, scratching her skin in a delicious kind of torment. Katrina yielded to herself completely then.
She lay back on the mattress, spreading her legs, letting the animal nuzzle and paw her more. One of her hands crept between her thighs and began a most intimate exercise on her secret parts. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her mouth opened wide as her breath came more heavily and harshly. Her body was telling her what it needed and what it demanded. And the more it demanded of her, the more she tried to appease it, stoking its inner fires of lust to a greater and more forbidden heat.
She knew what was happening to her could feel the dog and knew that his actions were becoming less playful and more purposefully minded, as she rolled about under his insistent bids for attention. But she couldn't stop now. What she was doing to herself was too crucial, too desperate, too damnable for her to stop! A dark and lustfully sinister purpose had taken hold of her and was driving her on, in turn rousing the animal in both of them to a greater pitch of excitement.
Now her body cried out for a tool of pleasure. A cataclysmic want had surged up in her and was wracking her entire being. And now the animal was on her, in the insistent, insidious way that an animal will have at a human being, no matter who's watching or what else is taking place.
But Katrina wanted the brute to come at her, with all its weight and devilish intent. With a groan of anguish and pagan abandon, she writhed around until she was on her stomach. And groaning more, under the weight of her godless actions, she raised her pulsing, lust-torn body on her knees and elbows.
The animal needed no further prompting. Its profile had been transformed by excitement, displaying its own evidence of arousal. Katrina sobbed to herself in schizophrenic despair as she felt the dog scramble up on her, its forepaws raking her waist and its scalding breath boiling on her back.
She screamed in pain and nearly collapsed under its weight as the animal lunged at her and missed. Frantically, she squirmed under the terrible urgency of the beast, trying to accommodate herself now that she had no power to check the punishment she had invited. Again she screamed as the panting dog stepped about on the treacherous mattress, thrusting himself at her vulnerable parts with increasing rapidity.
But in an instant, Katrina's screaming turned to a low moan a shuddering sound she had never before heard herself utter. Her fingers clenched into fists and her toes curled. For now the animal was in her and Katrina was experiencing something unlike anything she had ever dreamed of. It was so good that she grabbed the bedposts with her hands and raised herself higher in the air, letting the brute drive more deeply into her with his catatonic, pell-mell rhythm. Nothing had ever felt like this before. And as quickly as the monstrous animal reached the peak of his frenzy in the woman, her body responded to the unnatural intensity and matched the quick but overpowering cycle of lustful execution and completion. For a brief eternity her whole being became a giant tuning fork, quivering and then reacting in spasms to the pace and power of the Doberman's finish in her. And she sank forward on the bed, the last sensation her mind registered being the feel of the brute's slobber trickling down to the small of her back.