On Sunday morning after a lonely breakfast, they missed the company of Joanna and Yvonne since they had departed some weeks earlier; they mounted the display scaffolds for morning stripes. Patiently waiting with their buttocks raised and presented, heads lowered onto the chin rests looking at the expectant expressions on their own faces in the vanity mirrors, they heard the agonised shrieks and screams of the other girls as morning stripes were applied with diligence. This morning was different, however. Usually all the girls were screaming in pain at the same time as a number of trainers applied the tawse with vigour to all the girls at once. Julie and Laura hadn't even been secured to their scaffolds yet when they heard Brigitte howling in pain at each sharp lash of the whip. Then they heard Charlene shrieking as the sound of the whip carried down the hall at her thorough chastisement. The girls in intermediate training were next, their pitiful screams echoing down the hall as they were given morning stripes one after the other. The sharp crack of the cane on nude female flesh accompanied by renewed screeches of agony indicated punishment strokes being administered to one of the girls. The sound of agony elicited from each of the students made their suffering seem more personal and painful than the usual caterwauling of six or eight women being whipped at the same time. It certainly took longer.

Julie and Laura were in a state when the lone trainer entered their room to fix them on the platforms for morning stripes. One at a time they were restrained and properly whipped with the tawse to begin another painful day of training. That dreadful leather tawse inflicted as much pain as it had on the first day over six weeks earlier. To be sure, the girls had become accustomed to the pain, they expected it. It didn't hurt any the less because of familiarity, however. This morning it seemed to hurt even more, since it took such a long time for one trainer to administer morning stripes to half a dozen girls. Where were the other trainers, wondered Julie and Laura as they tearfully laid out their heavy, restrictive, steel school uniforms.

It took a long time for one man to dress all the schoolgirls that morning as well. When finally all six girls were chained and shackled properly, gags in place, coffled together, he whipped the unwieldy six-girl coffle down the ramp. It was like a stroll in the park compared to the usual number of trainers constantly whipping them along in days past. One man couldn't be everywhere at once. The whip fell less frequently on each of the girls. It fell with no less burning pain on their bare flesh, however. Perhaps a little harder than usual, he seemed to be compensating with sharper slashes of his whip as the girls trotted down the ramp in their chained nudity jiggling, drooling and groaning behind the rubber balls stuffed in their mouths.

To Julie and Laura's surprise, they kept going after reaching the training room level. Down another level into the punishment facilities they jogged, out of breath and weary from the heavy burden of their chains and shackles. The tight restriction of their knee hobbles and the snubbing effect of the clinking ankle chains connecting their leg-irons made the long trip a slow painful one as the trainer moved up and down their struggling, coffle chained file, whipping them as hard as he could. They didn't want to think about the trip back up the ramp at the end of the day.

Their destination appeared in the form of a large Roman arched wooden door. Finally brought to a stop before its massive height and width, the girls' breasts heaved, their ringed nipples rising and falling in the effort to regain their breath. They gasped and drooled around the red ball gags distending their lips in pained but silent obedience to its relentless, stifling dimensions and severely intrusive insertion deep into their gaping mouths. The leather head straps holding the gags firmly in their mouths, buckled behind their necks tightly, compressed their hair and cheeks in its rigorous leather constriction. They couldn't spit out the gags or push them out with their tongues, they couldn't speak or scream, they simply drooled, spluttered, groaned and gasped helplessly in their restrictive chains and whip welted nudity as the door was opened for them.

Neither Laura nor Julie had been in a punishment facility before. They had never been in a torture chamber before, either. When they shuffled through the doorway, they entered both.

Located in the oldest part of the building, the punishment facilities reflected the antiquity of style and structure prevalent at the time of construction. Everything was stone. The floor, the walls, the vaulted ceiling, the pillars, all was stone construction. Obviously, the Georgian building that rose from this foundation was erected much later, hundreds of years later apparently. These rooms were like castle dungeons in every respect. The modern facilities, running water, heater vents and so on, did not detract from the medieval atmosphere of the space. Unlike ersatz Hollywood versions of torture chambers, this was authentic and genuine in all its terrible and grisly aspect. Iron rings festooned with manacles, whipping posts, heavy wooden chairs with holes like toilet seats cut in the bottom, benches covered with spikes rising in sharp menace, iron bars terminated in shackles, wooden platforms strewn with leather restraints, whipping trestles, their restraint straps lying open in ominous readiness, iron braziers for heating irons, all the ancient accoutrements of torture stood at the ready in the austere chamber.

A woman's screams could echo off these stone walls for hours without the slightest attention being paid to her torment or agony by anyone outside the room. More modern implements of agony made of leather, steel, and rubber hung in portentous preparedness from hooks along all the walls. Whips of every description, leather casques and long arm binders, waist constrictors, arm and leg restraints, head cages of steel, head stalls of leather and brass, gags and jaw stretchers, speculums; vaginal, anal, oral in a variety of sizes and shapes, some looking to be more suited for livestock than young women given their large size and egregious mechanicals, enema and clyster equipment in abundance, with nozzles of myriad sizes and shapes, one more threatening looking than the next, from short thin pipettes to horse sized phalluses looking fully capable of tearing a girl open with their enormous girth, all these nefarious items lay arranged around the room instantly available for use. It was small wonder many heretics confessed when simply shown the devices to be used under the question.