Chains in Mind Page 4

  It was obvious that James was going to be in this thing, lying face up. He promised himself that he would stay very still. He looked closer: naturally, the carved interior had a depression for his buttocks, below the saddle position, but the shadows from the low lighting hadn’t let him see before that the dip was so deep that his buttocks wouldn’t make contact. And that was just as well, because at the bottom was a sheet of spikes, as sharp as drawing pins. He looked at Hubert, puzzled and apprehensive.

  “It works like this,” Hubert said. He pushed down heavily on a stirrup, his strong arm probably applying a good fraction of his mistress’s weight. The stirrup moved down about an inch, against the pressure of a strong spring; and a lever made the sheet of spikes rise five inches. He let go, and the spikes fell back. James swore, softly.

  “Well don’t hang about;” Hubert said. “You need to be secure before Ms. Watson comes up to bed.”

  Gingerly, James climbed onto the horse, pointing his toes and putting his legs down inside the hollow back legs as far as his knees. He sat down, taking care to avoid putting weight on his backside that might bring him down onto the spikes. Hubert shut the lid that made up the horse’s rump, locking James’s legs in position. Then he went to the ensuite bathroom and returned with a condom and a tube of lubricant.

  James took them and set about inserting the plug, something that, naturally, he had never done before, never thought about doing: he gasped and his chest quavered as if he were dipping his body into cold water, as, hesitantly, he forced the sausage-end inside him. It turned out, of course, that the cable was too long, since Hubert had used it last, but there was a way of adjusting the cable run to take up the slack. James lay back very slowly. The front section of the horse could be pulled back, shortening the whole horse, to fit him. He inserted his arms down inside the hollow front legs, which had been sculpted in a galloping pose rather than outstretched, so that James’s arms weren’t at too strained an angle behind his back.

  His head was lying in a cavity in the lower half of the horse’s neck. Hubert put a bit in his mouth: it was just a piece of wood, as long as a pencil but thicker, with leather reins riveted to each end. The reins went downwards into short brass tubes that emerged below the neck and bent backwards to redirect the pull of the rider from tugging backwards at her hands to tugging downwards at her mount’s mouth. For cosmetic reasons, fake reins continued, from where the real reins disappeared into the neck, forward to the wooden mouth of the horse.

  Lastly, Hubert clicked the hinged top half of the neck shut over James’s head, leaving him in darkness, a small amount of light getting in through the hole for his neck. Hubert pulled the reins tight, without being brutal about it. The bit pulled James’s head firmly down against the wooden base of the horse’s neck, and Hubert tied them round a pommel, too far forward for realism, that was fixed to the lid over James’s head.

  James heard him leave, the door shutting behind him with a soft click. Everything was now very quiet. He was quite helpless: the fastened lid above him, and the reins of course, prevented him raising his head. At the other end, the lid there prevented him raising his knees, and that meant that his arms and legs were trapped in their separate prisons. If he moved his hips at all, he disturbed the control cable, and the plug in his back passage made him gasp. Provided he stayed still, nothing was massively uncomfortable: there was quite a dip sculpted into the horse from rump to saddle, and that reduced the strain on his knees. The gap under his backside didn’t matter: support under his thighs and his hips was perfectly adequate; but he hated to think what it would be like if his mistress trod on a stirrup. He waited for her, in trepidation, for a long time.

  At last, he heard her arrive. She shut the door and came over to him, as he followed the sound of her footsteps and the rustling of her dress. She put a hand on his chest and ran it down his body.

  “You look like a zebra.” she told him, amused. The angry red stripes across his chest and abdomen, that Ms. Denton’s heels had given him, were very evident, and sore. “Don’t talk.”

  He heard her take off her dress, and put it in a wardrobe, and go to the bathroom. He followed rustling sounds from the direction of the bed, which he thought meant that she was putting on a nightdress. After a while, she came back to him. She put a hand on his belly, and moved it downwards. Immediately he sprang erect: this was the touch of his mistress, and he was passionate for her. She ran one finger along his member, her manicured nail tracing a line on the underside from base to tip, and he gasped. Then she put a foot into a stirrup, and swung herself astride him.

  Instantly, as her weight came on the stirrup, the spikes rose, and James jerked his hips into the air in response. He couldn’t move far enough to avoid all contact, but he thought the points probably weren’t breaking the skin. She sat on him without care, and her buttocks crushed and bent his erection. He moaned. At the same time, her weight meant that he couldn’t sustain his raised hips, and he began to fall back onto the spikes. But they were falling, too, as her weight moved from the stirrups to his belly. His movement was contracting and expanding the plug in his back passage: the combination of new sensations, all happening together, was overwhelming, and he made an inchoate cry.

  She stood in the stirrups, forcing him to thrust his hips upwards again, took his shaft in her hand, and inserted it into her. She sat back down, and took control of the reins. He could feel the soft touch of the hem of her nightdress, on his thighs at the back and near his navel at the front.

  “Be a good mount for me,” she told him. She began to rise and fall rhythmically in the saddle, keeping the reins tight, the wooden bit pulling deep into his mouth. He had no choice but to follow her movement, forcing his pelvis up as she rose, and descending under her weight as she came down. His buttocks were getting pricked by the spikes on every rise. The plug was squirming inside him and, if he could have seen it, the tail of the horse was bobbing jauntily up and down with the same movement.

  Their combined movement was rocking the horse backwards and forwards in the traditional manner. As his mistress became more heated, she brought her hands, still holding the reins tightly, down to rest on him, her nails scraping his chest. His reflexes took over, pumping his pelvis as she required, totally under her control. He grunted with every thrust, and she cooed with pleasure.

  He felt her take both reins into her left hand, and her right hand left his chest; he wasn’t left wondering why for long, however: in a few seconds he felt a sudden burning pain in a line across his left thigh - she had a riding crop! Like a jockey racing towards a finish line, she began whipping him regularly, rhythmically, on every other thrust. He was moaning continuously now: a long drawn out cry on every breath. The crop was landing where her arm conveniently fell - in a relatively small region of his left thigh - and it was agonising. She squealed with pleasure, and climaxed, her movement slowing right down. He was, of course, not ready - could not be ready without her specific permission - but his instinct to keep thrusting was easily overridden by the pain of the spikes beneath him: his body would move exactly as she required: no more and no less. After a while, she was simply sitting, the rocking movement of the horse slowly dying away. She stroked his chest.

  “Good boy,” she told him.

  His hidden face was streaked with tears, and his breath was coming in ragged sobs, but, through his pain and frustration, he rejoiced that Mistress was pleased with him. She dismounted, making him arch upwards for one last time as her weight came onto the stirrup, and left him still secured on her toy. As she turned away she gave the horse’s tail a careless tug, which communicated itself to the plug inside him and made him wail. His phallus stood erect, unsatisfied, helpless. Ms. Watson, relaxed and comfortable, went to bed and turned out the light.

  ***

  So here he was, as the clock struck midnight, staring upwards in the dark, going over the events of the day: the first day
of his new life. Eventually exhaustion overcame him, and he slept.

  Chapter Five

  Hubert, the bodyguard, woke up as usual at five thirty. As usual, he was roused by a small jolt of electricity between two rings, each of which was fixed in a body piercing: one on his lower belly, just above the base of his penis, and one between his legs, between his scrotum and his anus. As usual, the shock made him give a little grunt, and a jerk. As usual, the jerk made him hit his head: the space he slept in was a box twenty-eight inches wide, twenty inches high, and seven feet long. He did not allow it to ruin his temper; he had long ago surrendered to this life, and that meant more than the automatic devotion that he gave his mistress: it meant that he had stopped grousing at the dozens of inconveniences that he bore daily. One can know that one can’t change the weather, and still fuss about it. In the same way, Hubert could have accepted his mistress’s will and still whinged about the effects; but he had learnt to be more tranquil.

  The only open side to the sleeping box was the end down at his feet, and there were no lights, at least, none under his control. There was no mattress or pillow either; instead, the bottom was lined with a piece of carpet.

  There was a small metal device locked to the two rings in his flesh: shaped like a bent oval ring, it encircled his genitals, lying flat against his skin. Working by feel, he unplugged the charging lead from it; the wake-up jolt that it had just given him signalled that he could now disconnect without penalty. During the night, disconnection would have triggered a much more severe, and continuous, electric shock, that would continue until one of three things happened: either he reconnected himself, or Ms. Watson had mercy on him, or the battery ran down, which could take a day or more.

  When Ms. Watson dismissed him at bedtime, she normally pressed a button on her remote control to set the device: that gave him ten minutes to get connected, and stay connected until morning, or suffer very painful consequences. It was an elegant way both of compelling him to recharge the device, and of keeping him tethered through the night. Why she bothered, when he was devoted to her service in any case, he didn’t understand.

  He squirmed his way out of his box. The room into which he emerged was on two levels: a strip of floor to stand on, three feet wide and spanning the ten-foot width of the room at one end, and a wooden platform, covered with a piece of old carpet, that filled the rest of the room, seven feet from front to back. The platform was raised two feet above the floor, and the open ends of three sleeping boxes showed as dark tunnels in the front edge. As Hubert got clear of the right-hand box and stood up, Thomas was just emerging from the left-hand box, near the arched doorway. The room was windowless, but there was no door in the doorway, so early morning light was filtering in from the stairway beyond. The reason for the sleeping boxes was not at all obvious, but Hubert, who had built the mechanism, had to admit it was a neat idea of his lady’s.

  “Morning,” Hubert said. Thomas just gave him a nod, his face pale: he was never at his best, first thing. Come to that, Hubert, again as usual, was suffering severe craving. He thirsted for, he needed, his goddess to pee in his mouth: his face wrinkled in disgust as he thought of it, even while he yearned for it, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t going to happen. He sighed, and tried to set his longing aside.

  The two slaves followed routine, picking up their clothes from where they were folded on the platform. Thomas put on the standard white shirt and short black trousers, while Hubert put on a crotch support strap, a T-shirt and shorts, and a pair of trainers: his job often required him to follow his mistress around all day, but she also required him to be fit, both in case she needed him as a bodyguard, and to keep him looking to her taste. That was why she had assigned him a gruelling daily workout for him to complete before she got up.

  Thomas was also in excellent physical condition for a man of forty-six, with no hint of belly fat. Hubert knew that he had not been like that when he arrived, but Mistress had given him a tough exercise regimen, and the normal slave diet was not over-generous: the beer belly had disappeared in six months, replaced by carved muscle that Thomas had paid for in sweat and suffering. Ms. Watson did use him for sex sometimes, for variety, and to be considered worthy of that honour, Thomas thought the price worth paying a dozen times over.

  Thomas exercised later in the day, because he had other jobs to do now, so Hubert went alone outside into the crisp morning air. First task was a six-mile run round the grounds, with interval training; time to complete: forty-two minutes. By the time he had finished, he was gasping for breath, fit as he was. Next was weight-training in an outhouse attached to the main building - probably once a wash-house or some such thing. Hubert sweated and strained, using a weights machine that his mistress had provided.

  He finished off with a bout of reflex training, punching a speed ball, taking out his frustrations on the leather. Damn new guy. He knew it wasn’t James’s fault - after all, he’d been there when he’d been taken, and he had hardly volunteered - but for some time now, Ms. Watson had had only two slaves living at home, and Thomas wasn’t much competition: the light of his life had used Hubert frequently, enjoyed him, sighed in pleasure as he served her, and the discomfort that the experience usually involved for him, seemed a small price to pay for the privilege.

  Part of his mind still conscientiously acknowledged that, really, he only felt that way because of the artificial changes she had made inside his head, but still, it was the way he felt, genuinely, without reservation, and he wanted her to have whatever she wanted, including him. And including the new guy. He gave the ball one last swipe and headed for the showers, his body dripping with sweat.

  “Hubert, go and get James.” Ms. Watson said, buttering her own croissant. The two ladies were breakfasting in what was officially the rear hall, from where the French doors opened directly onto the terrace at the rear of the house; but that side of the room consisted wholly of windows separated by beautifully carved stone mullions, and even though it faced North it was light and bright at this time of year, so the ladies had decided to have conservatory furniture placed here.

  “Yes, mistress,” Hubert hurried out of her presence, and upstairs to the bedroom, where James was still secured to the rocking horse. When Ms. Watson used a male in a toy like that, she liked to consider him part of the furniture; so he was in position before she retired in the evening, and not released until she left her room in the morning. And, of course, when she did come downstairs, serving her breakfast took priority.

  Hubert untied the reins from the pommel, and flicked open the catches. James blinked as the lid over his face swung back, and the light hit him. He groaned. Hubert had to help him sit up, his groans turning to wails as he tried to move his arms that had been secured in a strained position all night.

  “How are you feeling?” Hubert was not a vindictive man.

  James tried to answer, but all that came out of his mouth was another incoherent moan. He looked startled, and tried again with no more success.

  “Oh, right. I guess Mistress told you last night not to talk?”

  James nodded.

  “Well there you are, then. It doesn’t matter if you forget: the circuitry doesn’t.”

  Hubert hustled him through extricating himself and removing the plug from his back passage, even quickly dealing with the soiled condom for him: leaving a bad smell in a lady’s bedroom was not acceptable. He could barely stand at first and Hubert had to support him as James stumbled as fast as he could towards the door, and downstairs to present himself to his owner.

  By the time they arrived in Ms. Watson’s presence, the boy could stand unaided, although still looking dishevelled and unsteady, and, of course, he was still naked. Ms. Denton gave them a casual glance as she sipped her coffee. Her own slave, Harry, stood attentive and silent behind her and to her right, ready to serve her anything she might want, just as he had been standing before Hube
rt had left.

  “James.” Mistress acknowledged her newest slave. He made an inchoate, but deferential, noise.

  “Oh, yes. You may talk.” She sat back in her chair, and adjusted her dressing gown, a beautiful example of oriental silk, china blue, and embroidered with little sprays of white flowers. It framed a ‘V’ of bare, flawless, skin, from her collar bones down to the beginnings of her cleavage, where the horizontal lacy top edge of her nightdress was just visible. Her hair hung down loose round her throat, completing the ravishing effect. Ms. Denton was wearing a very similar dressing gown, in pale pink with blue flowers: they had bought them together, on a shopping expedition, Hubert remembered.

  “Now,” Mistress continued, “I told you yesterday that I had an acquaintance at Sallis and Company. Actually, I own the man who owns the company - I don’t like to attract attention by having too much in my own name. I saw you on surveillance camera, six weeks ago, and thought you might be worth having.

  “Anyway, John Sallis is coming over this morning to explain what I want from you. Hubert, have you got that terminal set up downstairs?”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “Okay. James, go and get yourself cleaned up; then Thomas will give you something to eat.”

  “Yes, mistress.” James bowed his head, and withdrew, moving a little more easily. Hubert moved back to his position in attendance, behind Ms. Watson’s right elbow.

  “Harry,” said Ms. Denton after a few moments silence, “go and fetch the paper.”

  Harry had previously, as part of his morning routine, collected the newspaper from the front gate and put it on the hall table; but ‘fetch’ meant something much more specific. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the door as fast as he could. James had shut it behind him. Harry reached up with one hand to work the handle, while keeping the other on the floor. When ‘fetching’, he was supposed to crawl like a dog, but a compromise was necessary for doors and such, and he knew that Ms. Denton found this acceptable.