Christine dashed frantically through doors that led though more red-lit courtyards, although in her mind they now more closely resembling dungeon pits. Her red heels clicked and clattered on the hard stonework and her sore stinging breasts jiggled and bounced.

She was confused and terrified. She had never experienced such an intense dream before. Every little detail had seemed convincing, from the gross whip marks that crisscrossed her body right down to the scrapes on her knees and toes and the rope burns about the roots of her breasts. She was even dribbling juices - and revoltingly Wade's sperm - from her aching, throbbing vagina.

No! Dream juices and nightmare sperm!

But apart from the impossible setting it all felt so real. And yet briefly, momentarily, as she had lost herself in the throes of her powerful orgasm, it had seemed to flicker and break down as dreams usually did and the ropes and chains had simply slipped off her as if they had turned to rubber and she had been able to pull out of them. Then all her revulsion had returned and she had run away from that monstrous version of Wade, who had inexplicably also seemed surprised by this sudden turn of events.

Did that make any sense? What kind of game was her mind playing on her? She did not feel the least bit ashamed of stealing that money from Wade. He owed her and Benedict's legacy ten times that much. This couldn't be something her guilty conscience had conjured up. Or was it was a simple fear of being caught? What she had done, however morally justified, had technically been illegal. Was that it? Did the image of Wade as a public executioner represent authority? But even then, after that intense shocking encounter, why hadn't she woken up?

But then that was the thing about nightmares, wasn't it; you could never wake up when you wanted to...

She burst into another courtyard only to stumble to a halt paralysed with fear. There was a rustle in its shadowy corners of metal on stone and then long sinuous shapes reared up and it seemed that a dozen huge snakes were slithering across its floor towards her. So raw were her nerves that she actually screamed aloud before she realized they were heavy iron chains with a life of their own.

Then she screamed because they were iron chains with a life of their own...

They wrapped themselves about her arms and legs and waist and neck and dragged her kicking and squirming across the stone floor, rattling as they slid back through a ring of sockets set in a wall. They pulled her against it between them, spreading her arms up and outward until her shoulders and the back of her head were pressed against the rough stonework. Several coils of chain slithered around her neck, tightening until they were like a collar, rasping across her skin and forcing her head up. Then the chains about her ankles lifted her legs off the ground and pulled them up and out as well until her knees were almost touching her breasts and her red-shod feet stuck up in the air.

More snake-like chains slithered out of sockets on either side of her chest and wrapped around her across the backs of her thighs just behind her knees and drew themselves tight, squeezing her body closed like a pocketknife and bending her legs painfully at the hips until they were completely doubled over. Her buttocks were lifted invitingly taut and the dimple of her anus stood out from its almost vanished cleavage with her pussy cleft bulging above it.

A final thinner chain slithered out of the wall by her head and curled across her mouth and then pulled tight, forcing her lips apart and grating between her teeth as it gagged her. Now she hung absolutely helpless and exposed against the wall bound in a web of unyielding chains.

There was an iron plate in the floor before her splayed thighs. Now before her eyes a pair of short iron rods were growing up out of it each with a large ring on their ends. The rod stopped rising when the middles of the rings were lined up with her groin and about fifty centimetres apart. A rack supporting a dozen long slender iron rods rose up out of the ground next to the ring rod plate. The rods were over a metre long and had spread and flattened ends and notably phallic heads. Suddenly her groin felt like a target.

How could she be imagining this? She could not possibly want to punish herself in this way? There was something very wrong...

A pit door opened and Wade strode through. He had a large wooden mallet resting casually over his shoulder.

'That was very naughty of you to get away from me like that, Christine,' he admonished her. 'But it won't do you any good. You see in here I'm in charge. You can run but you can't hide from me or your conscience. This time we'll have less talk and more pain. When you're broken then you can tell me what I want to know...'

He pulled a rod from the rack and slid it through the iron rings so that its tip, resembling a fifteen-centimetre-long string of marble-sized iron beads, butted up against her groin. Christine's stomach knotted up in horror. No... he couldn't... But he could. Carefully Wade positioned it against the clenching pucker of her anus and then stood by the other end of the rod, lining up the swing of his mallet.

Christine's eyes bulged in sheer horror and she tried to scream and shake her head but the chains did not allow it.

Bang! The mallet smacked into the end of the rod driving its tip against the feeble resistance of her anal sphincter, the beads tearing through it as they punched deep up into her rectum.

'Enjoyed that did you?' Wade asked. 'Well I've got more where that came from...'

He picked up another bead-tipped rod and positioned it next to the first and then struck its end with his mallet. It drove up into her anus with a clicking of metal beads against its twin, stretching her orifice sideways. Christine shrieked and bit on her chain gag. Wade picked up another rod and positioned it next to the first two and hammered it home with more metallic rasps. Now her anus was stretched three ways. Another rod... Bang... Now it was four... Christine bent her head against the chain loops cutting into her neck and sobbed as she saw her sphincter being stretched wider and wider. She squeezed to try to push them out of her but the necks between the beads locked them in place. Wade positioned the head of the fifth rod between the shafts of the other four and hammered it home, having to strike several times to drive it past the resistance of the other rods squeezed by the elasticity of her anus.

By now Christine was shrieking and sobbing and terrified that he was going to burst her open. How many more could she take? But if this was a nightmare then there was no logical limit. She saw him lining another up and could not look away...

Bang! The sixth rod was hammered home... Bang... there was a seventh...

The flesh ring of her anus was now like a band of pink elastic while her lower stomach was bulging from within from the pressure of the bead shaft heads. She would burst... she would burst...