Chapter 1

 

My two sons and I sat on the throne-like chairs in the special chamber we had prepared for the scumbag in the cellars of my mansion in Toorak, Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, Australia, smiling down at him as he sat, perched on the cone in the torture chamber.

He was not smiling. In fact, his face displayed the agony his position had now engendered in his whole being, but particularly his arsehole - and I use that so obscene word advisedly for that is what he was, anyway.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. My name is James Kelsey and I am a forty-five-year-old investor who took the inheritance my father left me ten years ago and have since tripled it. My family has always been among the leaders of Melbourne's society since colonial days and our lovely old house, Bromley, in St George's Road, Toorak, is among the finest in that prestigious thoroughfare.

I do not mean to boast but my position is important to my story.

I had a lovely wife who, though delicate of late, was loved by all. Unfortunately, the events of the last year completely unhinged her and she used her sleeping pills to end her life - another nail in the coffin of the scumbag who was now moaning continuously on the cone before us.

My eldest son, also called James, but whom we called Jim, was just twenty-two and studying law at Melbourne University when Kane Bagot targeted him. As my eldest son, he was obviously fair game for unscrupulous slimeballs like Bagot.

Jim was a wonderful boy. Handsome, intellectually brilliant if extremely naïve and his sporting achievements matched his scholastic accomplishments. But he was naïve and despite my constant warnings to be on his guard because of his wealth, trusted everyone.

He was also gay but while we in the family knew, he kept it otherwise secret. Kane Bagot found out, though and promised secrecy but at the same time, although not openly gay himself, lured Jim into his bed - he is a very good-looking young man with a superb body - and Jim succumbed.

Little did he know the scumbag had set up cameras to snap the action on the bed and he then used the resulting photos to try to force him to push drugs for him. Jim shot himself with my gun rather than submit to such a course. But before he did, he filmed a confession of the whole sordid affair and also wrote letters to me and to his brothers in which he apologised profusely for bringing the family into such disrepute.

I took both the film and the written confessions to the chief commissioner of the Victoria Police who was a friend and told him I would not hesitate to go public myself if it would help him to nail Bagot. He asked me to leave it with him and he would get back to me.

My two remaining sons and I tried to shield Mary, my wife and their mother but it proved impossible as her friends came around and in trying to console her, let it all out. She put on a brave face at first but I could see she was losing the battle and it was only a few weeks after that she swallowed a whole bottle of her sleeping pills and simply went to sleep - permanently.

My second son, Richard, two years younger than Jim, is a fair facsimile of his older brother and is studying economics at the same university. He and Jim had been much more than brothers; they were best friends and were rarely apart. John, my youngest boy is just nineteen and is halfway through a physical education course, also at Melbourne University, for his strengths lie in athletics and gymnastics at both of which he is near Olympic standard. He too counted Jim as one of his closest friends as well as his older brother, so you see they were a really close-knit threesome and Jim's sudden demise hit us all very hard.

I don't have any daughters, so there were now just the three of us.

Once Bagot had been arrested and charged with numerous drug offences, not to mention blackmail and extortion, I talked at length to the pair of them and together we came up with a game plan to exact our own revenge on the young man who had so despicably robbed us of our son (and brother) and by extension, wife (and mother), and no, we weren't planning to kill him, much as he deserved it.

Killing him would have been too merciful. What we planned and then executed was a far more satisfactory - and a perfectly legal means of punishing him for what he did to us - and countless other families, for he had destroyed so many lives with his drug pushing.

I have to admit here that our daily discussions around the breakfast and dinner tables became rather limited: Kane Bagot and his future.

We didn't once conceive that he might not be convicted and sentenced to slavery for life for that was the standard sentence now for all major offences concerning drug distribution and of course he had the other ones of blackmail and extortion resulting in Jim's death by suicide to be considered as well.

And so I commissioned some major alterations to the cellars of our house.

There would of course be his cell: as bare, cold and uncomfortable as we could make it. The house being so old, was set on solid stone foundations and this included the floors and walls of the cellars. Creating a cell like those seen in the old western movies: walls of iron bars reaching out into the room, would be easy. And that was it, apart from a drain hole in the middle and a small realignment of the floor so that all parts of the cell would empty towards it.

There was no bed. No furniture at all. No toilet or tap. Nothing. Nothing, at all!

As a slave, he would not be permitted clothing anyway, for all slaves, by law, were stripped naked on sentence, delivered in an extremely public manner to the local State Slave Centre in South Melbourne and there to be depilated nude of all facial and body hair below their eyes and then sold at auction on the next Saturday morning.

The cell was built as part of a quite large storage room that we had cleared out. At one end, the builders had created a dais with the three chairs I mentioned at the beginning of this account and this had been decorated to resemble the dais in the throne room of Buckingham Palace. Not that I had pretensions to royalty, just that it gave us a position of superiority over our victim-to-be.

Down on the floor of the room, we installed various instruments of torture, the cone aforementioned being the one we were using this day. They were made to be movable so that whichever was going to be used that day, could be centred right in front of the dais.

This we achieved by installing a huge circular turntable (rather like that formerly used to rotate a steam engine at the terminus of its journey) that was let into the stone floor and was powered electrically.

Other instruments located at various points around the circumference of the turntable included a modern rack, a shrew's chair and an ultra-modern electro-genital punishment machine. More on them later.

The trial was of course a foregone conclusion and no, I made no contact whatsoever with the Attorney-general, the Minister for Justice or the DPP, although I knew them all. I wanted to ensure there was no hint that I had tried to influence the outcome of the trial although all three of us attended it each day.

The jury didn't even leave the box. I watched as the foreman looked along the two rows and receiving a nod from each of them in turn, indicated to His Honour that they had made their decision: "Guilty on all charges, Your Honour."

Neither did the CJ waste any time in delivering his judgement: "Kane Bagot, you have been found guilty of numerous charges of drug trafficking, extortion and blackmail, one of the latter of which resulted in the death by suicide of an up and coming young law student. I have no compunction whatsoever of sentencing you to the only penalty open to me in such cases. You are hereby stripped of your citizenship of Australia and declared a slave for the remainder of your natural life.

"Strip him!"

There was dead silence in the courtroom as the bailiff now moved up to the young man who was now cowering in fear as the burly officer approached and gruffly told him not to resist or it would be the worse for him.

Bagot had worn his best suit to the court but it was now ripped apart as the bailiff forcibly tore its coat from his upper body. The tie and shirt came next to reveal a torso that while not quite as good as those of my three sons who were all well-muscled with no fat, he had a reasonably good physique.

Next came the belt, while he stood there, now shaking like the craven coward he was, allowing the big man to strip his pants down to his ankles and was then ordered to remove his own shoes and socks and the trousers, leaving him in only his underpants. They were flimsy affairs, silk if I'm not mistaken and tore apart easily under the bailiff's big hands, leaving him now totally naked and now the audience jeered as he tried to cover his privates with his hands and knees.

And now the judge spoke again. "Stand up straight, slave. I have more to say to you." Bagot slowly straightened up his cringing body and stared fearfully at His Honour who looked down on him scornfully. "Your actions against Jim Kelsey caused him to take his own life and while it might be termed suicide, I am inclined to the belief that it was your actions that prompted him to do so. I am therefore ordering that your body be awarded to his father, who is here in this court, as a slave for life once you have been processed at the State Slave Centre."

He banged his gavel rose, bowed to the court and left without even a glance at me. He too, wanted to ensure there was no hint of bias in his actions.

They took Bagot away down the steps to the cells under the courthouse and we stayed in town and had a wonderful lunch at the Vue de Monde which some people at least vote as Melbourne's best.

But then it was home to add the last touches to Kane's future abode.

I should say here that through this whole affair and apart from burying their brother and mother, Richard and John had not neglected their studies although they now dedicated their weekends to helping me design and oversee the development of his cell and the chamber outside it.

My work involved reading the various financial publications I subscribed to, discussing particular stocks and securities with my broker and then making decisions as to what to sell and what to buy. This I did from my study but it left me plenty of time for a full social life including entertaining our friends at home.

With such a huge house, my parents and other forefathers had of course employed many servants. There was a butler, housekeeper, cook, Dad's valet and many housemaids as well as a chauffeur/mechanic and a full-time gardener outside.

But the advent of criminal slavery some forty years ago had meant that paid servants gradually disappeared as slaves took their places. I still had a paid butler, who was the son of my father's incumbent in that role and as he and I had grown up together in the house, he was as much my friend as my servant - perhaps much more the friend. But he still performed as butler and therefore oversaw the work carried out by the many slaves I now owned, including their discipline.

That was something quite different to what we were intending to inflict on Kane. In his case, we wanted revenge as much as punishment but our slaves were rather more considered as family, the same as the former servants were, even though the institution of slavery required that they be worked hard and seldom, if ever, granted favours. I think Charlie (Charles Hudson) struck just the right note here, rewarding good work with a thank you and in special cases, a piece of chocolate, but wasn't backward in using the cane to their naked buttocks if they erred. That was seldom for he was fair and constant and they knew exactly where they stood.

I must stress here that nakedness was an inviolable rule so far as slaves were concerned. And that nakedness was total. No slave was permitted even a rag over his or her private parts and as they were also routinely depilated nude of all facial and body hair below their eyes, their genital organs were blatantly exposed.

And even the worst of weathers was no excuse to allow them any relief from this rule. The one and only exception was that Thermacoat ®, an aerosol preparation could be sprayed over their feet if working outside and conditions indicated that frostbite might otherwise ensue. Otherwise, in biting, icy rain or sleet, burning summer sun or anything in between, they toiled through it and only their hard labour (and of course their conditioning to such conditions) gave them any respite.

Criminal slavery was designed to be the worst punishment ever dreamed up on this world and the thing was that it worked a treat. Religious terrorists disappeared into the blue; street and other forms of violent crime were decimated, although white-collar crime was only partially affected and so a greater proportion of such criminals now appeared on the block of each SSC every Saturday morning.

Perhaps I should briefly indicate how it resurfaced in such a draconian form, two hundred years after its demise in the nineteenth century.

All over the world, religious terrorism had become a scourge of unbelievable proportions and whole nations were reeling under its onslaught. Almost as bad, the incidence of street crime, homicides and horrible assaults, major fraud involving millions of dollars and bankrupting thousands upon thousands of elderly defenceless folk - and worst of all, the massive growth of the drug trade, had now choked the justice and penal systems, to which was added the stultifying effects of the legal amendments by the do-gooders that had made it a joke anyway.

And then, forty years ago, the European Union proposed that only the reintroduction of criminal slavery would be enough to cure all these multitudinous ills and the world, in the form of the UN, took to it with relief.

A slave cannot be made other than by sentence of the courts. One can't even sell oneself to relieve a major debt, for example. So, if you see a naked slave out in public, you know damned well that he or she is a criminal and deserves no sympathy.

As I said, we follow that rule and while the odd word of praise or a small piece of chocolate may be awarded, we still maintain a proper reserve between us free men and them.

Charlie occupied the butler's flat at the rear of the house and it was quite comfortable. The slaves on the other hand, slept on wooden beds in the male and female dormitories down in the cellars. They didn't need wardrobes for they had no clothes and a comb and toothbrush was the only other items they needed.

I should also mention that each slave was routinely chipped at the SSC. This involves a tiny slit being made in the scrotum, the wax paper peeled off the tiny silicon chip, which was then inserted into the slit, onto the wall of the right testicle and a Band Aid placed over the tiny wound. With a female slave, the same thing was applied to the inner clitoral wall and with the same effect.

This was to give their owner a detailed signal as to their location; but also to function as a device to alert them with a mild zap that they were wanted somewhere; or to punish them with a very painful zap if they erred seriously. It could also act as a monitor of his vital signs, if desired.

The punishment aspect could be used to prevent them leaving their beds once ensconced there for the night. Once all the slaves were properly bedded down, Charlie merely spoke into the little, brooch-like device on his shirt collar with the words: "Global - Lockdown" and if they as much as set a foot on the floor, they were zapped.

The foregoing will serve to explain that criminal slavery was not a pleasant state to be in. By design, it was certainly a hundred times more unpleasant than the largely useless jails all over the world had been, as slaves ceased to be human beings at the moment of enslavement and while the Criminal Slavery Act provided that they could not be intentionally slain or mutilated (say by amputation or the like), they were to be worked hard for at least twelve hours a day and could be used in any capacity whatsoever.

This included sex, of course.

Oh, by the way, the proscription on mutilation did not apply to castration (testicular only or total) of a male life-slave and the excision of all female reproductive organs and closure of the vagina for female life-slaves. Of course, cases of rape and other sexual assault made this operation mandatory and was carried out at the SSC prior to the slave's sale.

That didn't apply to Bagot, however. He hadn't technically raped Jim, however we three had talked it over at length and finally came to the conclusion that we could hurt him far more with his cock and balls than without them.

And so I now come back to my starting point.

There we were, the three of us on the dais and to underline to Bagot so that he couldn't come to any other conclusions, I was dressed in the uniform a mediaeval lord of the manor (or perhaps the Sheriff of Nottingham) might have worn, trousers overlaid with a tabard (a sort of overcoat).

On my right, Richard had a similar but not as rich a uniform, while John was dressed as a mediaeval torturer and to make it even more dramatic still, he had dreamed up a skirt of leather straps (like Roman army soldiers wore) that sat very low on his lean and so muscular waist and showed off his thighs and upper body's muscles to a T.

This was the scumbag's first day with us and we had decided on this punishment as an excellent introduction for him.

We had collected him from the SSC in the morning on the Saturday after the auctions got under way and took him home in the boot of my Daimler. Once home, we took him straight down to his cell.

"This is where you will be spending your nights, scum," I said, showing him the totally empty, cold and unhospitable cell.

"But there's not even a bed," he protested, staring in at the plain stone floor and iron bars.

"No, and neither will there ever be. Get used to it, scumbag..." We pushed him in and closed the door and he listened to the audible click as the lock took hold.

We turned off the lights as we left to go up to have our lunch and change into the dress I have just described and as we ate, we all chuckled as we imagined him down below us, trying to get comfortable in the stygian blackness and imagining the worst from his first glances at the equipment we had installed on the huge turntable.

But then in the afternoon, we went back down there again, turned on the lights, and moved up to his cell where he was squatting down on his heels with his back to the stone wall, staring up at us in real fear as he took in our garb. He had obviously sussed out that he was now in a reproduction of an ancient torture chamber and that he was destined for some very bad times in the days and weeks ahead.

We brought him out, the two boys going into the cell and grabbing an upper arm each, hoisted him up and moved him over to the turntable where the cone now had pride of place right in front of the dais.

He clearly had no idea what it was or how it was to be used so I explained it to him in graphic detail: "This is an item of torture, scumbag, much used in ancient times. You will observe it is a perfect cone, if a quite narrow one although the tip has been rounded to prevent any piercing of its victim's innards...

"It is made of stainless steel and as you can see, is mounted up on a standard of the same metal. In a few seconds we are going to oil its upper reaches and then perch you up on it..."

He looked puzzled. "How perch me up on it...?" But then the penny dropped and he looked shocked - and then his face crumpled and he let out a scream of very real fear: "No! You can't mean it?"

I grinned back at him but my face wasn't registering humour but satisfaction. "Oh, but we do, scum. You are going to learn over the next hours, days, weeks, months and years - for as long as you live in fact, that pain - and when we aren't busy torturing you, ultra-hard work is going to be the only life you will ever know from now on."

He began to sweat then, yes, even down in that cold cellar and as the three of us contemplated his fear, nay terror, at what was coming, I, and I suspect my sons looked over his so beautifully muscled body with appreciation.

No, we weren't admiring him. We could never do that, no matter how handsome and nicely put together he was. But he certainly possessed a fine body and while none of the three of us was inclined towards homosexuality, that doesn't stop us from recognising a well-built man.

And now, while I sprayed the tip of the cone with a lubricant, Richard and John moved him over to the Cone. We had been very resourceful when designing each of these macabre instruments for him and the Cone was no exception. I now spoke into my brooch (the same as Charlie had) and said the words: "Cone: Lower." And the cone part of it now dropped down slowly until its base reached the floor and the tip of the cone itself was now seventy-five centimetres above floor level.

They manoeuvred him right over the tip and then forced him down onto it. I was there behind him and parted his so muscly buttocks to guide his anus right onto it then said, "Cone: Raise." It did, and as it slowly moved up on its standard, the oiled tip penetrated his anus and the conical shape began to stretch it wide.