Chapter 1

 

Dr Felix Mendel was a genius of the first order. Very possibly, he had the most brilliant mind the world had ever seen, rivalling those of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton and the like. By the age of seventeen, he had already qualified as a physician and surgeon, and held degrees in physics and electronic engineering.

He was easily capable of studying multiple disciplines at the one time and absorbed any and all knowledge like a sponge. He didn't just absorb it however; he was also able to digest it and then regurgitate it in a new form, his mind constantly working on new ideas and concepts.

By the time he was twenty-one he was already a millionaire many time over, having invented gadgetry in any number of fields and then sold the ideas on, always retaining a share of the royalties of each item so he had an already world-class income as well as a huge nest-egg.

Unfortunately, unlike the geniuses already mentioned, he was also mad-or perhaps totally amoral and immoral. He lacked any conception of morality or indeed, of other people at all except as they fitted in with his wishes and concepts.

He was also an intensely sexual person.

He didn't love. Not people, anyway. He was incapable of loving another person. He enjoyed their bodies, male as well as female, but it was beyond his capability to feel emotionally towards them. His sexuality though, was as bizarre as his character. Oh he enjoyed having sex with girls and boys but as he grew older, he found that normal sex became tame. He was looking for something else.

He found it in the sex shops in the city; in the magazines and devices devoted to the kinky - and particularly bondage and discipline, and sadomasochism. He acquired a huge library of these magazines and video tapes and began to also acquire books on the subjects of torture and pain, all of which he absorbed as easily as he had the more acceptable disciplines he had studied at university.

By the time he was twenty-five, he was already a billionaire with an enormous income from the ongoing royalties from his inventions as well as that accruing from his investments. He decided to devote his life to the pursuit of sex - and of pain - in their ultimate forms.

Torture and pain would become art forms for him and while his business sense required him to continue to make money, it would now come from the invention and sale of devices designed to give the most exquisite pain to the human body...

 

All this I discovered after I was 'acquired' by him. Dylan and me, that is. We were both Physical Education students at Harvard (and were both doing quite well at it, too) but we were also athletics majors, both having won our places at the university from athletics scholarships. We had quickly gravitated together from our mutual love of running and had now, two years away from completing our degrees, decided to get married after we had graduated.

Dylan is my dreamboat. He is tall and beautifully muscled (as athletes usually are) and is as handsome as Denzel Washington (whom he resembles). I am also tall at five-ten and without wishing to seem immodest, also have a good body and looks. We are both black, Dylan a smooth milk chocolate colouring and me a little lighter.

Of course neither of us had ever heard of Felix Mendel. There may have been some articles about him as a boy genius but after he had graduated he virtually disappeared from public notice, selling his inventions to various companies, all of whom had no wish to advertise his part in their products. For his own part, he was quite content to sink into obscurity, for in the recesses of his mind he was already planning his adventure into the realms of pain and sex.

He acquired an island in an obscure part of the South Pacific Ocean, away from shipping lanes and also from routes taken by yachtsmen and he chose it very carefully, his criteria being inaccessibility, permanent water, equable climate and sufficient arable land so that it could be self-supporting.

The island he chose was surrounded by coral reefs except for the lagoon near the estuary of the one small river but he had a closable entrance constructed so that his own yacht could get in and then hide in the estuary, after which the barrier would close, giving the appearance of an endless coral reef around the island. From the sea, the island looked deserted and the coral reefs made landing a most hazardous undertaking anyway.

He flew in the construction crew who built the stark concrete pile that housed him, his staff-and us, his torture and sex slaves. They may have wondered at the strange layout of the place but since his clerk of works, who supervised their work, was not forthcoming in filling in any details as to what purpose the building was to be put to, they had to proceed without any real idea of its future.

None of them had any idea where the island was. They were flown out to it in the same huge helicopter that ferried the cement and other material from the ship that lay off the reefs and they completed their work in double quick time. This was possible for the building was totally utilitarian. He had no use for comforts or luxury - for himself or anyone else. The building was poured concrete and was left unfinished, inside and out. The windows were armoured glass, the doors steel. The electrical fittings ran up and down the inside walls, as did the plumbing. There were no floor coverings - no adornment of any kind. Felix didn't need them and saw no reason to provide them for his staff.

They worked for him because he paid them exceptionally well - and were as enamoured of cruelty, pain and sadism as he was.

How did he acquire us? Ah, that part of it was quite incredible (and I mean that literally!). As I said, he was a brilliant scientist and had made billions from his various inventions but he didn't market them all. Some he kept for his own use exclusively and one of those was his transporting system.

We've all seen the Star Trek series where Captain James Kirk orders Engineer Scotty to 'beam us up'? Well, he actually invented such a device. He also helped to develop and refine the GPS or Global Positioning System as well as those cameras that are now included inside cellular phones and are all the rage these days. What he did was combine all three in two devices: one, the receiver unit on his island; the other in a tiny device the outside part of which looked like the normal button on his agent's coat.

All the agent had to do was to point this 'button' at the intended victim and then, if Felix liked what he saw on his monitor back on the island, he could activate the device and the victim simply disappeared. The agent didn't even have to be close (or not too close, anyway) and so his presence at each of the disappearances would not be detected.

Of course it caused a furore. Athletes, film stars (the more athletic pornographic ones particularly) and other handsome and well built young people just disappearing right in front of huge audiences.

Felix didn't even try to hide his little trick. No-one outside of his own staff knew of the device and he sneered at the world as he thought of its scientists trying to fathom what had happened to us all.

He was careful though to have each such disappearance take place months apart and in different parts of the world so it took quite a long while for the authorities to discover that numbers of people were just vanishing, apparently off the face of the Earth.

In Dylan's and my case, I was giving him a kiss of congratulations after he had made another outstanding win. His body was hot and sweaty and his broad, so muscular chest still heaving as I clung to him, planting a firm kiss on his wonderful lips. And then it happened. One second we were there on the Harvard athletics track; the next we were in this bare concrete room on the island.

Not that we knew we were on the island of course. The Transporter Room was windowless and had only the steel door in the corner. The lights were fluorescent and around the walls were masses of electronics equipment. It was nothing like the Transporter Room on the USS Enterprise or Voyager but we stared around us in shock.

"Where are we?" I stuttered after we had broken our kiss and stared around us, Dylan holding my hand fiercely, as if to protect me.

"You are on my island, Blair Crosby and Dylan Scott. You are now my slaves..."

We stared at him. "Slaves?" said Dylan. "There are no slaves, any more?"

"Yes there are and you two are my latest acquisitions." He paused, leering at us as his black eyes roved up and down our bodies, still dressed only in the silk running shorts and singlet (for Dylan) while I had on the brief halter female athletes used these days. But then he spoke again: "You will now strip naked. I wish to look over your bodies."