Feature Writer: Leftygreenfield
Feature Title: SWITCH
Published: 29.08.2018
Story Codes: Erotic Horror
Synopsis: A Gothic tale of horror and depravity is begun
Switch
Blame the rain. Had the weather been clear on that autumn Saturday, I likely would have ridden my bicycle for exercise most of the day. I would have pedaled past the yellow and green farmlands of my aboriginal country, enjoying the familiar exertion and strain that served to exorcise the demons that otherwise tortured me most of my waking hours. Returning to my home depleted and purged, I would have showered and slept. Indeed, atonement through physical toil has been virtually the only way I am able to achieve the escape of slumber since the death of my beloved Esme. Most nights I spend wandering the empty rooms of our home and stumbling through the crumbling habitation of my memory. But you did not come to listen to my personal anguish. You came to learn that for which I blame the rain.
Deciding that the weather matched my mood, I opted for a coffee and a walk that day. The café was a short carriage ride from my desolate dwelling. I chose a table with a view of the sodden gloom outside, ordered my cappuccino, and settled into a volume of Poe. After a time I grew restless, and, warmed by my drink, went for a stroll. The sky wept; I brandished my umbrella and turned my collar against it. Whatever calamities so troubled the heavens were as nothing compared to the bleakness that consumed me. I had no capacity to sympathize with the predicament of another—even if that other be the Almighty himself.
The window of a second-hand store caught my eye. I spied a writing table of a very peculiar sort. It appeared to be a Louis XV-style three drawer bureau, and a fine specimen at that. Although the finishes appeared worn and desiccated, not unlike myself, the rectangular, curved top framed a handsome tooled black leather writing surface. The molded borders above the drawers were flanked by amazing corner pediments of Joan of Arc. The drawers themselves contained diagonal marquetry and ormolu decoration, and the elegant cabriole legs resolved in acanthus feet. I had to have it.
After a short negotiation with the shopkeeper, the desk was mine. (I am not profligate in my spending, or extravagant in my tastes. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find disposable income when there is no one upon whom to bestow tokens of affection, or to treat to pleasant evenings of entertainment, or to dress in costly taffeta.) It fit in the rear of my carriage, and was soon in the hall outside my bedroom.
I was not sorry to see the old writing desk go. It was an ugly, utilitarian piece of furniture, notable chiefly for its inexpensive materials and for being sturdy enough to withstand the furious copulations of Esme and me when it resided in my office at Schramsburg & Barnard. In those early, halcyon days of our engagement, my fiancé had found excuses to visit me at my place of employ. I, in turn, had found methods by which her moans could be muffled while I stripped her of her skirt and found her sex between her garter belt and stockings. With my hand firmly over her mouth, my partners and associates could not hear her pleading for her moment of ecstasy, or her groans when I gave her release and delivered her from the exquisite torture of our frenzied lovemaking. Afterward, Esme departed my office smiling, if a bit unsteady.
When Esme fell ill, the desk came home with us so that I could discharge my duties to the firm and still care for her. Now it was a mocking reminder of a happiness that was cruelly and forever taken from me. I wanted it gone.
But the rain. Had the day been clear, I would not have been out walking; had I not been out walking, I would not have found the writing desk; had I not found a new writing desk, I would have had no need to move the old one; had I not moved the old desk, I would never have noticed the small switch centered in its plate on the wall behind the desk.
It was a most curious discovery. Admittedly, the recent introduction of electricity into older houses had resulted in some unusual wiring and strange placements of switches. Even so, the siting of a switch low enough on the wall to be concealed by a desk, and neither near a doorway nor the item—say, a lamp or a fan—to which it gave power was odd. But location was not the oddest thing about it. The switch was not inconspicuous; on the contrary, it was of a classic and ornate design. The plate appeared to be brass, with lavish scrollwork and a subtle, leather-grain field pattern surrounding two push buttons. Such a fixture naturally drew attention to itself. Yet I had not noticed the switch when I had moved the old desk into the bedroom. In fact, I positioned the desk where I had precisely because it did not cover any appurtenances such as outlets or switches. It wasn’t that I simply hadn’t noticed the switch; I would swear by all that was sacred that it hadn’t been there.
Whatever could it be for? Every electric lamp in the house was operated by a switch other than the one that now occupied my attention. And how could I have not noticed it before? In my curiosity to discover the secret of this mystery, I bent down and pushed the bottom button. The world disappeared into blackness.
xxxxx
The darkness was complete. My eyes could not adjust to it enough to discern even the vaguest outline of any object in my bedroom. The black had a gravity to it, as if it pressed upon me and made it difficult to stand up straight. I was lost—as lost as a child abandoned in the forest to the predation of wild beasts; as lost as a prophet forsaken by his God to the cruel justice of a wicked empire; as lost as a man from whom Death has stolen all hope of meaning and joy. In my disorientation and sudden fear it was as if I had been disemboweled. The infinite blackness of my interior self had spilled outward and now engulfed me. I was drowning in it. “Esme!” I shouted into the void to my own astonishment. Of course there was no reply.
“Sir?” A voice in the darkness. “Are you quite alright?”
“Who is there?” I cried out, trying to control my breathing.
“Just a moment, sir,” the voice responded. A match was struck and put to a paraffin lamp, and a man’s face emerged from the shadows. His visage was unknown to me. The years had worn lines and sunk hollows into his countenance, but his age was indeterminate. His hair had retreated, but not fled entirely. It was only somewhat grey, as were his eyes. His skin had loosened and he had acquired slight jowls, but his chin was square and firm. His clothing was decidedly unfashionable, having passed out of style many years ago.
“There,” he said, “That’s better. Now, sir, this way if you please.” He turned to walk away.
“But where are we going?”
“You pressed the switch, did you not, sir?”
I admitted that I had.
“Very well, then. This way, please.”
I followed, more from fear of being left alone again in lightlessness than from any wish to accompany this strange individual to any particular place. We walked. Impossibly, my bedroom seemed to have vanished. Where solid walls had been, there was now a vast emptiness. The weak light of the lamp illuminated little and obscured the depth of the surrounding dark. I was too astonished to protest, or even to ask what had become of my abode. In truth, I was in no small measure afraid.
We walked on. Presently, a flickering light appeared from off to one side, its source hidden from view. It became apparent upon our approach that the light emanated from a chamber on our left. I was not prepared for what awaited us there. Above us a wooden pole the size of a caber hung horizontally, suspended from the ceiling by lengths of chain. Metal eyebolts were attached to the underside of the pole, through which shorter lengths of chain had been threaded. On the ends of those chains were . . . women. Five women were bound with their hands manacled above their heads. They had been strung up so that they were forced to stand on tiptoe. By appearance, the women ranged in age from about twenty well into middle age. All were stark naked. They had been groomed to remove all body hair save the hair on their heads and brows. Their eyes pleaded with me for . . . I could not say what for. They could not speak; their mouths were choked with metal and rubber horse bits. Clamps connected by fine trace chains squeezed their nipples. Angry red welts covered their thighs and abdomens, betraying harsh punishment for offenses real or imagined. Their ankles were fettered by heavy metal cuffs joined by a stout chain that looked just long enough to permit a hobbled gait. Their feet, like the stone floor, were filthy.
It was an appalling sight. What could these poor wretches have done to deserve such torture? But there was worse to come. The wall torches that lit the chamber generated an insufferable heat. The prisoners were damp with sweat. Their hair was matted to their faces, necks and shoulders. Their glistening bodies aroused me; for that, I was surprised and ashamed. And speechless.
A woman clad in shiny leather approached us. Her dress was tight and short. She wore leather boots that extended to her thighs, and fingerless leather gloves up to her elbows. Her hair was pulled back into a tight pony tail gathered into a silver coil at the back of her head, increasing the severity of her appearance. She was clearly in charge of these pitiable captives.
“We need a girl,” said the man with the lamp. The woman cocked one eyebrow and smirked lewdly, as if she shared with us a degenerate secret. Then she walked to one of her younger charges and released her from the caber. The mistress led this debased creature to us. “This is Merry. Use her as you will.”
“We need her services only as a guide,” said the man with the lamp.
“Only that?” asked the woman.
“Only that.”
“Very well. Merry, show these men what they wish to see. Do as you are commanded. God help you if you disappoint them, or me.”
“Yes, Mum,” said Merry, her eyes never lifting from the stone floor. I did not know how Merry’s Mistress intended for us to “use” Merry, but when she learned she was only to be our guide, I saw both relief and disappointment cross Merry’s face. Everything about this place was too strange and aberrant to comprehend.
Mistress was not finished. “You will remain cuffed and shackled, Merry. These, however, will need to come off.” With that, Mistress cupped Merry’s left breast. In one motion, she removed the clamp from Merry’s breast, drew the nipple into her mouth, and suckled for several long moments. Merry gasped, then moaned. Then the process was repeated on Merry’s right breast. Again, Merry gasped when the clamp was released and her breast sucked hard. And then she was given to us.
Or, rather, to me. To my surprise, my escort had slipped away while I was fixated on Merry and her mistress, leaving only his lamp on a small table that I had not noticed before. Merry’s gaze now disquieted me. Her dark eyes held shadows that evaded understanding, and yet they were strangely familiar. Her unruly black hair might have curled were it not damp and clinging to her skin. Her features were small and fine; her figure neither slender nor voluptuous, but well-proportioned. Her nudity captured me completely; I could no more tear myself away from the sight of her breasts and belly, her rump and her bare pubic mound, than I could have willed myself to fly.
Merry picked up the lamp and walked away from me without a word, her gait deformed by her shackles. I followed. Her bare buttocks stirred feelings in me that I thought had absconded forever with the loss of my beloved. Yet it was her eyes that occupied my mind. Impenetrable, unreachable, unfathomable, luminous, breathtaking—Merry’s eyes possessed all these qualities, and more. In the endless depth of those orbs were joy and melancholy, beauty and terror, guilelessness and corruption, aloofness and intimacy. None of this could I have explained to another soul, for it made no sense to me, but the truth of it I felt in my bones.
In the grip of my fevered imaginings I must have been distracted, for now two men walked alongside Merry where none had been before. They were considerably taller than she, and equally naked. I supposed them to be athletes of some sort from their lean, muscled physiques, and from the confidence with which they bore their nakedness. They had none of the softness indicative of affluence and indolence; rather, judging by their carved shoulder muscles, deep back groove, and small, rounded buttocks, they could have been sculptor’s models—for Michelangelo, perhaps, or Bernini.
Each of the men held one of Merry’s arms at the elbow. It would have appeared almost sweet but for the tension and rigidity of their grip. They stopped before a door. One of the naked men opened it with his free hand. Light and noise flooded the passageway in which we stood. The men hurried Merry into the room, with me in close pursuit. As I stepped into the room, however, a third man came forward and blocked my path. He was as naked as the others, and equally well muscled. The brawn of his shoulders, chest and arms seemed to strain at the skin stretched over them. Where most men are soft in the middle, his abdomen was as lean and cobbled as a London street. He could have been hewn from granite, so hard and chiseled was he. He smirked as he barred my passage with an outstretched hand.
“No further.”
He planted his feet, and I saw that his thighs were like tree trunks; I would not have been able to move him aside in any event. The head of his enormous erection bobbed once, twice, as though acknowledging me lewdly with a nod.
“I am with Merry,” I said. “Let me pass.”
“No further.”
A small drop of fluid appeared on the head of his erection. The man was an obscenity—and yet, startlingly, I felt my own manhood stir, and drops of fluid escape within my trousers. I raised my hand in a reflexive gesture of surprise and terror, but my adversary snatched my wrist before I could bring it to my face. “You are surprised?” said he. To my horror, he brought my hand to his member and caressed himself. He leered. “There are many surprises in this place.”
In a panic, I found the strength to wrest myself from his grasp and recoil from this beast. More liquid dampened my trousers as my organ strained against the fabric. How the monster had caused me to lose control of my body I could not say—but neither could I deny it. The power of speech had fled from me; my rebukes faltered and collapsed without escaping my mouth. My captor made no further move against me, but continued to block my path.
xxxxx
The room was a carnival of horrors. Men and women in all stages of undress cavorted with one another. A nude woman shackled with her face to one wall wailed and sobbed as another woman flayed her backside with a whip until the victim was striped and weeping blood. A man stood confined in stocks, his trousers around his ankles, while another battered his hindquarters with a thick wooden paddle. A woman bound from neck to ankles in rope was hoisted into the air and suspended like a butterfly in its chrysalis.
Merry and her naked escorts were visible over the shoulder of the man in front of me. They turned toward me. Merry was clearly afraid. Her hands shook; her legs trembled. She looked from one man to the other. They said nothing, but unbound her hands and feet held her in place as others moved a large wooden contraption into place behind her. It was round and spoked like a Catherine wheel. They brought it up behind her at an angle to the stone floor. As tiny as she was next to the two men, Merry was powerless to resist as they held her down on the wheel while other men used ropes to tie her wrists and ankles to the place where the spokes met the outer rim of the wheel. Naked, spread-eagled, and secured, Merry was at the mercy of whoever wished to use her.
The spectacle that followed was so heinous that I cringe at the memory, let alone the task of description. One of the men who had escorted Merry to this infernal chamber stepped forward and thrust his erect member into her mouth. Grasping the back of her head with one hand, he pushed himself in and out of her until she made rhythmic, gurgling sounds. When she gagged and her cheeks ballooned, he withdrew briefly and allowed her to gasp loudly for air. Then he filled her mouth again and resumed thrusting. As she was being tortured in this fashion, her other escort moved a low divan to the underside of the wheel. He lay down upon it and, his body almost touching Merry’s backside, began to knead and massage her buttocks. After a time the fingers of one hand disappeared from view, and from the undulations of Merry’s hips it appeared he was entering her with his hand. But Merry’s smooth, hairless sex was in plain view; his hand was not there. Finally, he moved his hand away from her bottom and grasped his erection. His other hand he wrapped around her waist, and he pushed upward—slowly, but relentlessly. Merry screamed around the shaft of her initial tormentor as the second man entered her anus.
The two men pistoned in and out of Merry as if they three comprised the gears of some devilish machine. A third man stepped in front of her and entered her from the front. Two other men came forward; each placed his phallus in one of her bound hands and compelled her to stroke it as they pushed forward and back. With that, Merry disappeared from view, lost in a roiling swarm of naked men. Not even her muffled cries could be heard over the shouts and grunts of the villains who abused her.
I could do nothing but watch, speechless, as the poor girl was thus defiled. It seemed an eternity, although it must have been less than thirty minutes. When, at last, every man had finished with her, Merry was allowed to rest. Her eyes closed, her head lolled, and her chest heaved with heavy breathing. She was unbound from the wheel after a time, and helped to her feet. Indeed, she could not have stood on her own. Unsteadily, she approached me. The man who had barred my way stepped aside. I rushed to this girl who had been a stranger to me mere minutes before, but whose plight now touched my heart.
Merry was in a shambles. Her skin and hair were slick with sweat and semen. The devils who had used her hands had ejaculated onto her arms, which were now streaked white. The one who had used her mouth had spurted his essence onto her hair and face, and it dripped onto her breasts. There was more on her belly from the one who had used her quim. “I will rescue you from this place,” I whispered. “I do not know who you are or how you came to be here, but I will save you from this hell, I swear it.”
“It is forbidden,” said Merry, eyes downcast.
“Forbidden?” I cried. “What power can keep a girl in such circumstances? By whom is it forbidden that I should save you?”
Merry looked up at me from under heavy eyelids, as if half-dreaming. She smiled. “By me.”
In that ghastly moment I knew. The eyes that had seemed so strange, yet so familiar, were unmasked by a smile equally familiar—one that I had seen so often before, but whose meaning had always eluded me until now.
Merry.
Esmeralda.
Esme.
“What is happening?” I cried. “Who are you? What madness is this?”
“Sir,” said a voice behind me. I whirled around to see the man who had led me to this nightmare by the light of his oil lamp. “Where am I?” I shouted. “Where is Esme?”
“Who?” asked the man.
I turned back around. Es—Merry—was gone. All of them were gone: the men who had violated Merry, the demon who had held me back and tricked my body into profane excitement, even the room where Merry had been abused. All had vanished. I was alone with my guide again in a darkened passage.
“This way, sir.”
“Where are you taking me now? Have you not satisfied your damnable desires? Is my suffering not complete?”
“Please, sir. This way.”
What could I do? I followed. Again the lamp barely illuminated the stones upon which I trod; beyond them was only darkness.
He led me into a room and stopped. As I looked away from the lamp, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I began make out walls and furniture. My room, in my house. “Now sir,” he said, “if you will, the switch is over there.” I found the wall and felt my way along its length until I found it. The switch that had flipped everything upside down and begun a nightmare without end. The toggle that transposed light and dark, grief and ecstasy, virtue and depravity.
A push of a button, and the room flooded with light. The specter with the lamp was gone; my bedroom was as it had been before. Whatever phantasm had possessed me might as well have been a delusion; there was no sign it had ever been corporeal.
I slumped on the bed and did not bestir myself for several long minutes. When, at last, I gathered my wits and arose, I noticed the closet door ajar. I thought to close it, but opened it instead and gazed upon the trunk containing Esme’s things. In the time since she had been taken from me I had not opened it, so oppressed was I with grief at the loss of my beloved. Now, for some unfathomable reason, I opened it. There were the expected articles of clothing and personal effects. Resting on top of those were items strange to me before today; horrible devices unsuited and unsuitable for my darling angel. Metal cuffs. Bits. Canes of various materials and diameters. Several lengths of chain. Clamps. I was aghast. With trembling hands I took up the envelope that lay atop these abominations, removed the paper inside, and read:
Dearest:
If you are reading this, then I am gone. Had you been the man I needed you to be, I would have removed this letter before we opened the trunk together, and you would have been spared the reading of it. Had you known the woman I am, there would never have been anything between us, and this letter would never have needed to be written. But you are who you are: a man who imagines himself the master of his fate, the ruler of his domain at work and in his home. A man who preserves the illusion of mastery by blinding himself to all needs and natures other than his own. And I am who I am: a woman who wishes to live. I am a woman who wishes to know fully the pleasures and pain of existence so that I may learn the purpose of life as well as I know the certainty and finality of death. I wish—I need—to experience the height of ecstasy and the depth of despair, so that I may appreciate the distance between the two. I am truly sorry that I am not the helpmate you need. Another woman might not need to feel humiliation to understand dignity, but I do. Another might not need to grovel in abject servitude to understand dignity and worth, but I do. And another woman might not find erotic delight in the hot sting of the lash—but I do.
If you are reading this, then I am already far away. The potion administered by my confidant to induce a death-like sleep has run its course, and I have awakened to a new life far from here. Do not look for me; for the sake of your reputation and mine, it is best that all who know us think me dead. Dearest, please believe that the impossibility of spending a lifetime together does not make me insensitive to the pain I cause you in taking this most desperate course of action. You deserve to find a woman who makes you happy, and not to spend your years with one whose wicked desires can never be reconciled to your more conventional ways. I wish you happiness and long life.
Yours,
Esme
Outside, the rain continued to fall.