Introduction

 

Humans react to real-and-present danger in different ways-shock, paralysis, rage, anxiety, flight...and a million years of evolution has perfected these to the point where the chance of surviving are reasonably good. There's one reaction, however-denial-that does just the opposite.

Rather than spur a life-saving response, denial makes people numb, unable to accept reality. No matter how clear or urgent the evidence is, it's ignored. Even worse, when an individual finally does accept reality, the follow-on reaction to denial is usually panic, which is often more damaging. In other words, denial and panic deprive humans of their ability to think. Most men who lead others in stressful situations-police, firemen, soldiers-understand this and work hard to root it out of those who serve.

Some experts challenge this. They believe that the denial-panic reaction is exactly what's needed when the circumstances are so horrific, so impossible that they overwhelm our ability to cope. They argue that there's a point when fear is so debilitating that denying reality (denial) and frantically trying to change it (panic) are not just reasonable, they are necessary. That such reactions preserve our sanity and allow us to marshal the extra-human response to address the impossible, even sometimes to succeed. Edgar Allen Poe earned fame for his ability to write about this reaction in the face of impossible situations.

 

Day 1

 

Brooke knew her nightmare was no dream, that it was real, but still she denied it.

All familiar conditions of a nightmares were there-she couldn't see or speak, she was naked, and unable to move. It was easy for her to make the argument that she was still asleep. The pain, though, was far too intense for a dream, far too sharp for any nightmare. She knew it, but she continued to deny that this was reality, that the horror was on her. Slowly, however, as her mind cleared, her arguments for denial became too thin to accept and she panicked, jerking her thin, lovely body, writhing like an animal in a trap in a frenetic effort to break free of her bonds.

Her reaction was understandable, but it was not thoughtful. She couldn't think clearly in the midst of such overwhelming panic. All she wanted to do was to flee, to escape her captivity, but there was no escape. She was hopelessly caught, helpless, totally powerless to affect any change in her circumstances.

Suddenly, as quickly as it had started, the panic ended. It was as if a mental circuit breaker had tripped in her mind to prevent lasting damage. Her heart was racing, but her mind was calm and clear; she was thinking logically again, accepting her impossible situation and working rationally on her escape.

Whatever had happened to her, whatever was happening to her, it was real, and she needed to deal with it. Slowly, she began to assess her condition more carefully. There was something evil in her mouth, something that prevented her from screaming-a reaction she greatly missed at the moment. Screaming would have been an appropriate response, an outlet, she thought, wholly unproductive but perfectly appropriate.

She ran her tongue along the surface of the object that filled her mouth. It was a small ball made of...rubber. How small...she asked herself, forcing herself to examine the details? Smaller than tennis but larger than golf ball. It was a...a gag, held deep inside by a strap that pulled at the corners of her mouth then ran back along the sides of her face to a spot behind her neck...under her hair.

Under her hair...?

She thought about this for a moment. Why was the gag's strap under her hair...? There could only be one reason. Whoever had gagged her wanted her hair free rather than gathered in an ugly bunch under a strap. He wanted her to look good in her bondage.

He wanted...?

She just assumed her captor was a man. This might not be true, there were many girls who looked at her in school with leering eyes, but most likely it was a man. "Capture and bind" was not a woman's thing typically, even the dykes who might do such a thing were subtle about their masculine impulses.

She filed both thoughts away in her mind, slowly beginning the process of collecting intelligence. They were small bits and piece of seemingly unimportant information that might prove useful down the road...assuming there was a "down the road" for her. She guessed there was, whoever had done this to her had a purpose, she could sense it. He...he didn't go through all this trouble just to watch her naked struggles. This hopeful assessment suggested a hundred new questions that threatened to bring back her panic, so she suppressed them with a deep calming breath through her nose.

Don't panic again, she told herself. Fear is...fear is the mind killer. That's what Jessica said in Dune and she was right. Fear did kill minds! Anyway, she needed more evidence before she started asking herself random and scarry questions. Friends often criticized her for this, for her coldly logical and rigidly analytical mind. She needed these traits now, more than she had ever needed them in her life, she needed them now. Her orderly mind was the only way she could defend herself at this moment, it was the only way she could fight back.

Evidence...that was what she needed, hard evidence not speculation!

Cautiously, she pushed back against her fear and opened her eyes. The blackness continued as her eyelashes moved lightly against a silken cloth. A blindfold...! He...he had put a blindfold over her eyes, and it was a good one. Even with her eyes wide open, there was no light, none, not the tiniest hint of it. A blindfold of this quality needed to be held tight, she decided, and she concentrated on what she felt around her eyes. Slowly, she felt the strap. Like the gag strap, it brushed against the side of her face and was held tightly in place behind her head. It certainly was fucking effective ...! This told her something else-whoever had done this was knowledgeable about bondage and fully prepared-a good blindfold was something that most casual kidnappers would not have bothered to have ready and to use.

Kidnappers...? Had she really been kidnapped...abducted or was this just a prank? It seemed crazy, but college-age boys did crazy things all the time. Maybe...

Remembering the trauma of her earlier panic, she tried slowly and gently to move, just to bend her head forward, but she could not, there was a strap around her thin neck. She pushed her head back and felt a cold metal rod pressing on the back of her neck. She hadn't noticed it before. She tried again but got no farther than before. The strap was tight, tight enough so that if she lowered her head, it reduced her air flow making it hard to breathe. He wanted her upright, positioned in the way he had devised. The strap could have been tighter, but he didn't want her to die. No, he wanted her to...obey! The message was clear-as long as she kept her head up, as long as she obeyed him, he would allow her to breathe.

Obedience...!

Obedience was important to him. She filed the thought away but again avoided thinking about its implication. Why would her captor prioritize obedience?

Suddenly, she was angry and jerked violently on her arms...to no effect. Something was holding them painfully in place behind her back. A rope...she could feel its tightness now around her wrists and just above her elbows. She tested her ability to move them again and felt another metal rod under her pulled-back arms near her armpits. He...her captor had pulled her arms back over a metal rod and tied them together. Carefully, she tried to lift them over the rod but something prevented it. After a few more tires, she understood why. They were tied...to another rod farther down near her bare ass. He had tied her upright to parallel metal rods, she could feel more of them now pressing into her bare back, into her legs. Suddenly, she realized that she was...on display.

She thought about this for a moment then reached out to explore with her fingers. Skin...she felt skin, human skin...feet...toes...her feet, her toes. With a sickening jolt, she finally understood the bondage, her wrists and ankles were tied together to the same rod behind her back. There was no way she could move under these conditions, let alone escape. No way could she avoid his full inspection of her naked and bound body.

I made sense in a perverse way. He wanted to see her, to watch her suffer, to revel in her fear. He was sick...SICK! It took her a while to calm down and start thinking again.

Why tie her elbows together, she wondered? The elbow tie pulled her shoulders back and straightened her spine. But it was overkill. Tying them did nothing to make her more secure, more captive, or more immobile. Why do it? Perhaps there was some aesthetic purpose, forcing her shoulders back did point her well-shaped tits, and it did make her nipples pop, she could feel them pulling on her oversized areolas. But somehow, she knew that making her look sexier wasn't the reason for the tie, at least it wasn't the full reason.

He had tied her elbows together because he wanted to squeeze every drop of pain he could out of the position; he wanted her to suffer. Her pain was the goal of tying her elbows together; he enjoyed it...he was a sadist. She filed this scary conclusion with the others, again, without lingering on it. Still, it was hard not to consider that she was naked, helplessly and painfully bound, and in the hands of a sadist who probably...who probably wasn't finished with her. Sadism was a progressive thing. It was something that...

STOP...!

She knew that this kind of thinking would take her back to the panic. She forced herself to focus on the metal rods holding her in position. They were hard, unyielding, and cold on her bare skin. Suddenly, she realized that her knees were open, tied far apart, forcing her legs open. How had he done that? Verticals...! There must be vertical rods that held this device together. He had opened her knees and tied them to the vertical rods. Was it some kind of frame or ladder, a metal ladder? She tried to think about a real-world object that was built like a ladder but with round rods and wider, much wider than a ladder...but she could not. She could not think of anything that fit the bill of what she had conceived in her mind. Custom built...? Was this torture ladder custom built for this specific purpose, for this very perverse and sadistic purpose?

Had he built it...her captor?

She shuddered with the inescapable conclusion that this was no random act of an unprepared and irrational student. Her assailant was too well prepared and his execution was too well orchestrated and executed. The conclusion was inescapable...she was in the hands of someone, most likely a man, who wanted to enjoy her appearance as she suffered on a device of his making. Who would do such a thing...? Who would...

A whiff of cold air on her open and wet pussy interrupted her thoughts. The inside of her cunt was completely exposed and her labia spread open. Instinctively, she tried to close her legs but it was impossible. She pulled even harder, suddenly desperate to hide her genitalia from her captor. Ironically, it was this action, the closing of legs spurred by vanity, that caused her to slip back into a panic, which in turn made her body jerk wildly on the bars.

The jerking sent a dozen spikes of agonizing pain shooting into her brain. Everything hurt with shocking clarity now especially her...her tits. The steady pain she felt from them was a gnawing, toothache-like hurt that just went on and on. It created a backdrop for the sharp stabbing taking place in her abused joints and muscles.

She forced herself to focus on her nipples. It felt as if someone was pinching them. She moved her torso slightly, gingerly, testing the pain, and it grew worse. Why...? Why does the pain get worse when I move, she wondered? Why does it seem to pull and pinch when...?

Clamps...!

He...the monster had put clamps and weights on her nipples and whenever she moved, gravity did its worst, pulling them down even harder. The idea of it was too much and her mind crackled again with anger, a fierce rage that brought on another round of shaking and full-body pain.

She had never felt such total agony. The pain was pervasive, punishing, unbearable, and yet she had no choice but to bear it. Her rage intensified when she remembered that she was suffering so someone else could feel a perverse pleasure. She felt sick, a feeling she immediately controlled; it would be dangerous to vomit with a gag in her mouth. She calmed herself but retained the thought that what he had done was more than unfair, it was outrageous, contemptable...inhuman! She didn't have the words to adequately express her feelings.

Surprisingly, it was the pain caused by her agitation that calmed her again. It was like someone was throwing cold water in her face, making her face the full reality of her situation. Someone had abducted her, stripped off her clothes, and tied her to a metal rack in a purposely painful bondage. She felt the rage building again with her thoughts and viciously suppressed it. Rage was not going to help her at this point, more importantly, it precipitated movement which in turn caused pain. That was not something she could allow herself to do to herself.

She forced her lungs to breathe deeply, then to exhale fully, then to repeat the process until she had full control. She needed to think...to figure out what this was about and how to end it. Stopping the pain was her priority now, nothing else mattered at this moment.

She searched desperately for something to divert her mind, while she found ways to cope. What happened to her yesterday, she asked herself with a fierce resolve? What was it she remembered from the day?

She had spent most of the day in the library working on her anthropology term paper. She wanted the paper to be good, as good as she could make it. She wanted another good grade, of course, but she also wanted to make a good impression on her teacher, Professor Wagner. She remembered absently taping her pencil on the library table, thinking rude thoughts about him, and...and being reprimanded by Jessica, the beautiful but bitchy librarian and proctor who sat in the study hall's highchair.

Jessica...? Why was she remembering Jessica? Was she remembering the fictional Jessica from Dune or was she thinking about the school's librarian? She remembered staring back at her then taking a break outside in a huff. She had been talking a bit loudly to her friends who wanted to invite her to William's Spring Break party.

"QUIET...! People are trying to work here," Jessica had screamed in her most irritating voice.

She could still hear the frosty library bitch calling her out for the disruption then again for scraping her chair too loudly.

She had finished the term paper around 10:00 p.m., submitted it electronically, and driven herself to the party. She had a few drinks then...then she had...had what? She had a few drinks and she was talking to her friends, and she was...nothing. There was nothing after that conversation, no memory at all.

The party...remember the details! The details will allow you to remember more of what happened at the party, she thought.

It was the last day of classes and the final deadline for submitting term papers. The party was thrown by William Blake, an unabashed social climber. It was to celebrate the end of classes and the onset of Spring Break. She had had several drinks, whiskey sours, expertly made by the hired barkeeper. The drinks were strong, but nothing that she couldn't handle. She and her dance team friends had been discussing the idea of her driving to Florida and joining them. They had rented several beachfront motel rooms. She remembered being tempted by the proposal; the drive from Georgia to Florida wasn't that far, and both of her parents were away on business trips. Why not...? She remembered thinking...indeed, why not?

In fact, she had received several invitations to Spring Break vacation residences, but this was the most appealing. The other kids on the dance team were all attractive and athletic, all positive about the future, and full of life, like her. Hanging out with them was always fun, always interesting and exciting.

That was it. She had been drinking and talking, circulating, spending some time with everyone, then settling down with her circle of close friends-there were even a few teachers with them-than laying her head back for a moment and...and...nothing. She couldn't remember anything more after the couch. She didn't think she had made a final decision about Florida; she didn't remember leaving the party, or driving home, or being with anyone...nothing. Had she really been so wasted that she couldn't remember a thing? This had never happened to her before; she was usually so...careful. Why had she...