Chapter 1

 

Amelia Rivers was an upstart. One of the worst kind. She wanted to break into my group of friends and, once there, to steal my fiancé and she would do anything to achieve that aim.

I am not a snob. I am normally friendly to everyone of whatever class but I cannot abide social climbers and I have found in any case that people are generally most comfortable with others of their own background.

I was fortunate to be born into a very wealthy family and Toby was too. Money was therefore not an issue with either of us nor was it with our friends. Amelia was different. Her father was a storekeeper but she aspired to be with us. We didn't mind - at first. She was a very beautiful girl and really excelled at sports, particularly track sports. This was what gave her an entrée to our group for apart from our backgrounds, we were all sportsmen or women of one kind or another. In my case it was gymnastics and tennis and in Toby's gymnastics.

Toby and I had been a number for a long time. We had actually planned our wedding for early the next year when suddenly, out of the blue, Amelia made her pitch for 'my man'. Unfortunately for me, she won him away from me. He apologised profusely at our breaking up; said he couldn't help it, that he was smitten with her and that he hoped I would understand.

I understood all right. I didn't blame him as much as her. She really was beautiful and could turn on the charm when she wanted to. She wanted to now, for marrying Toby would make her a member of one of New York's richest families.

It affected me badly, though. Mother and Father and my friends tried everything they knew to snap me out of the horrible blues I had but nothing seemed to work - until Mary came on the scene.

Dr Mary Partridge was a highly eminent psychiatrist. She only dealt with extreme cases and very, very few of them. She told me as much when she came to my apartment and introduced herself. She had called me on the phone and told me a friend of a friend had mentioned my case and she might be able to help. I had said nothing would help and made to hang up but she asked me to at least see her and I reluctantly agreed.

"I can cure you, Judy," she said after sitting down and sipping at the tea my maid offered her.

"I doubt it," I said bitterly.

"You want revenge, don't you?"

Now I perked up. Everyone else had said I had just to forget Toby and especially Amelia and get on with my life and all would be well. Mary said nothing about forgetting. She was talking about doing something!

"What did you have in mind?" I said slowly.

She looked at me carefully for a few moments then, after checking that no one was in hearing, told me that she specialised in curing girls like me who had been jilted due to the machinations of another woman.

"And how do you effect these cures?" I asked.

She smiled. "By punishing the women concerned." Again she paused but then went on. "I arrange for the victim to leave the country, ostensibly to go on a holiday, preferably to some way out destination where communications are difficult. Then, a week or so later, the guilty girl disappears. You wouldn't be involved because you would already be out of the country ..."

I stared at her, my eyes bright. I was already getting into the spirit of what she was intimating. "Go on," I breathed, already excited by the implications.

"I have this camp ... It's in Korea. It's very secret although the local military governor is in the know and comes quite regularly to sample the wares as it were; so do a number of his officers. It gives me protection, you see ..."

"And what happens in this camp?" I asked, although I already knew, really.

"Ah. Well, in the camp we take young female criminals or upstarts such as your Amelia Rivers and we turn them into something quite different from what they were."

"Different? How different, I asked.

"Very different. I'm not going to go into details now. Suffice to say you would hardly recognise her at the end of my programme from the girl who leaves here in a week or so ... Of course she will never be seen again here. She will end up as the labourer-slave of a wealthy Korean who might perhaps use her in a mine or some such arduous employment, or possibly in the secret employ of a rich Arab who delights in degrading white women ... And then at night, they might use her for other purposes ..."

"It's perfect," I said, sparkling as I hadn't been for months. "When will all this happen?"

"Oh, very soon. First we must plan your 'holiday'. Is there somewhere very remote that you have always wanted to go - somewhere you have spoken of to friends, perhaps?"

"There is," I said. "I have often spoken about Nepal. I've wanted to go trekking up in the mountains there for years but haven't got around to it yet."

"It's perfect. Then go there. Spend a week in Kathmandu, see the sights and actually make arrangements to hire your equipment. Stow it somewhere safe and then leave the country by way of arrangements I will make that will show you as still there. You will then come to Korea to my camp and will stay for a month or so while we turn Miss Amelia Rivers from a beautiful young woman about town - into a freak ... I'll say no more about that for now for it is all part of your cure."

She looked at me speculatively. "How does it sound?"

"It sounds perfect to me. And afterwards?"

"Afterwards you come home. What you do about Mr Toby Askinall will be up to you - after you are cured. At this moment, you are in no position to judge things. Afterwards, when you have seen Amelia get her comeuppance, you will be."

 

I duly went to Nepal and did exactly as Mary had suggested, seeing the sights and at the same time buying my pack and food, etc for my walking trek. I stowed this away with a local trader, saying I might not have need of it, depending on my movements but that if I hadn't shown up to claim it within a month, it was all his. He was understandably pleased with the deal.

In the meantime, Amelia was kidnapped. Mary had told me she used people who were skilled in this task. She paid them well and they first researched their victim's habits and movements, planning the actual abduction so that she would seem to have simply vanished off the face of the Earth.

In fact, she was heavily drugged then bound up into a tiny, foetal-shaped bundle and placed into a small crate, labelled as 'personal effects'. This small wooden box was then placed inside another one that indeed contained items of clothing and other effects destined for Seoul by air freight.

The transfer was very efficient and Amelia would have no idea of any of it until she woke up in Mary's camp. Her arrival was timed for the day after I arrived, ten days after my departure from New York.

I left Nepal on a false passport and so Judy Fullbright was officially still there and off on her mountain trek. She would arrive back by the same false passport, stay another day or so in Kathmandu, and would then leave Nepal using her own official documents to return to the US.

I thought it a brilliant ploy but when I arrived in Korea and was driven out to Mary's camp, I really flipped. She had said she was going to punish Amelia but when I saw the other girls in residence there I had to restrain myself from laughing outright.

"And you are going to turn Amelia into one of these?" I cried as I stared around me at the ten girls already there.

Mary smiled. "I am - and you are going to help me. Come, let me show you around ..."

The camp had been carved out of a forest at the end of a valley remote from the tourist haunts. It wasn't hidden - South Korea's large population didn't allow for hiding such things and in fact many of the upper crust locals often came to gloat over the girls who were being turned into freaks inside the camp. Some of the local villagers were used as guards and as I said earlier, the local military governor and some of his officers as well as other dignitaries often came to use the girls from time to time.

The camp was self-funded. Mary charged her clients a small fortune to exact the revenge she offered but she didn't have need of money herself. She too was independently wealthy and had been jilted in much the same circumstances as I had. She had never married, however, and now delighted in helping others in like circumstances - or at least those of us who could afford it, to get better by her own brand of treatment.

Was I not ashamed that I could take part in such a bizarre revenge on my enemy? Not a bit of it. Amelia had known full well that Toby and I were engaged to be married and that we had been sweethearts since our early teens. She set out, quite consciously, to steal my man and I had no compunction whatsoever in dealing with her as Mary had suggested.

Of course she hadn't told me the details, saying it was better I saw them first hand but now that I did, I really chortled as I imagined Amelia going through this transformation. She showed me over the whole place.

It wasn't that big for she never had more than ten or twelve girls here at a time.

There was the main block containing her suite and bedrooms for us victims-in-residence as well as kitchen, ablutions and training rooms for the girls. In this block was also the main gymnasium where they were converted into their new selves. Underneath this block were the cells where they were housed. More about them later.

Outside were some of the other tools used to aid in their conversion and it was these (as well as the overall appearance of the girls) that had made me goggle as I watched some of the girls applying themselves on them.

The camp was spick and span. The drives and paths were all gravel that was kept freshly raked all the time. The lawns were like velvet and had not a single weed in them. The buildings were spotless and gleamed with fresh paint - inside and out. Indeed, everything in the camp was spick and span.

It was surrounded by a wire fence topped with inward-curving barbed wire strands and six feet inside this was a thick hedge of hawthorn. If you don't know what hawthorn is like, let me assure you it is equally as effective as razor wire in keeping anything in or out and it is also impervious to sight. No-one outside could see inside at all.

I was also introduced to the ladies in residence. There were four of them although there were ten girls. The reason for this is that the ladies usually only stayed for the first month or so of a girl's 'treatment' which might last anything from six months to a year. This was to protect them from any accusation that they might have played a part in the girl's abduction. They could come back as often as they like during the treatment, however, for there was a dozen rooms in the main block for their use.

Each of them had in some way been badly used by the girl she was here to see punished. Not all had been jilted by a fiancé as I had been; one, Elizabeth Sumner, from London, England, had been physically attacked by her girl, simply because she had been jealous of her good looks and wealth. The court had found the girl not guilty for lack of evidence. Mary had redressed the balance.

Another, Janice Worth from Los Angeles, had been defrauded of millions but again the courts had been powerless to act. Mary had. She had even recovered most of the money, salted away in a Swiss bank account but now secretly returned to Janice by her victim, under duress from Mary, of course.

Most of them however, had been the subject of abuses of affairs of the heart. They had come from near and far. Mary was nothing if not scrupulously careful how she acted. These girls were not going to be going home - ever; but she had to be sure they were secure in their new 'homes' and that their new 'hosts' were safe bets as guardians.

Our accommodations were comfortable, if not exactly sumptuous. Those that housed the girls, if you can call them girls that is, were anything but. They were stone. Stone floors, walls and roof and they were quite bare. Not even a metal cot bed for them to sleep on. They were also small and when the steel door was closed on them, absolutely black and quite soundless. No wonder they preferred to be outside, even under the conditions they worked under out there!

 

Amelia arrived the next day. The large crate had been opened in Seoul by Mary's agent and the smaller one containing Amelia's body, still perfectly unconscious, was hoisted up onto the back of a utility truck and brought up to the camp. There it was opened and the tightly trussed body tipped out.

Dr Barbara Trudeau, Mary's resident physician and surgeon and her partner in this highly illegal enterprise, knelt down over the bound girl whom I hated so much, checking out her vital signs. "She'll come round in another hour or so," she said.

Amelia was dressed in the clothes she had been wearing at the time of her abduction: a pair of jeans and tartan shirt. We had a cup of tea and sat around her, making idle conversation in between staring down at her while we waited for her to come out of the coma.

The doctor was right. It was only fifty minutes and then she began to show the first signs of recovery from the effects of the needle that had been injected into her as she got into her car in the deserted car park. Her car had then been driven down to another park that served the port of New York. She could have gone anywhere from there - as was the intended conclusion.

Her last conscious thoughts were getting into the car in New York City; but she was coming around to it, a very sick girl from the drug, in a camp in the mountains of Korea. Of course she didn't know that. Not yet. As she began to gather her wits and looked around her, all she saw was me - and some other people, none of whom were Korean but whom she didn't know anyway.

"You!" she spat as she realised she was trussed up like a pig for slaughter.

"Yes me, Amelia. Welcome to Korea ..."

"Korea? No. I'm in New York ..."

"I'm afraid not," I said. Mary had told me that I could conduct the first part of this preliminary conversation. It would be good for me, she added. I went on: "No, Amelia, you are no longer in New York or even in America. We are now in a camp high up in the remote backblocks of South Korea."

"What am I doing here?" she asked, her voice a trifle uncertain now as she tested her bonds and found them so tight she couldn't move a muscle.

"Why, you are going to be taught a lesson, you slut. Mary here, whom you will address as Mistress - as you will all of us here, has devised a programme that is going to punish you for what you did to me - and when she is finished, you are going to be sold - as a slave, to work as you cannot believe possible. You will not be a pampered harem sex-slave either. Oh no. Instead, you are going to be turned into a unit that can work - use her muscles to dig out rock from a mine perhaps ..."

She stared up at me as I spat these words out to her. She couldn't believe what she was hearing, that much was obvious from the expression on her face. She sputtered and blustered.

"You're not serious. Look, Judy. Release me now and I'll say no more about it. I won't even tell Toby ..."

I had been hiding a riding crop behind my back for Mary had told me the girl wouldn't believe my words and that she might well insult me or anger me in some way - at which I was quite at liberty to beat her. I brought it out now and raised it over my head while she stared up at me in new fear, the bluster all gone.

I lashed it down, right across her bottom cheeks. Of course it didn't hurt all that much through the denim material of her jeans; it was more the fact that I had hit her than the pain.

"You will address me as Mistress, slut - and you're darn tootin' you won't be telling Toby for you will never see him again - ever."

Now she cowered, at last realising she was in deep trouble. Deep shit if I can put it so crudely. "What are you going to do to me ... Mistress?" she faltered.

"First you are going to be punished for your sins against me ... and then we are going to turn you into an Amazon ..."

Again she stared up at me not at all comprehending my words. Mary now nodded to Barbara who proceeded to undo the bonds that held my enemy curled up in a foetal ball at my feet. She was not cramped because her muscles had been relaxed during her drug-induced coma.

"Get up, slut," said Mary, her grey eyes glinting down at the now very frightened twenty-two year old. I grinned as I remembered her look of triumph over me when Toby had announced he was going to marry her instead of me. That horror was but a distant memory as I stared down at her now.

Amelia got to her feet slowly. She was still nauseous from the drug but more to the point, she was scared witless of us and what we had said we were going to do to her and while no doubt she would have preferred to lie still, she got up to stand before us.

I was relishing my next words to her. They were going to shame her more than anything I had yet said and it was going to be like an aphrodisiac to me.

"Strip naked, slut," I said, very slowly and very clearly. "You are now a slave and slaves here do not wear clothes ..."