Make men squirm! Make them crawl, suffer and beg. Drive them to the ultimate depths of degradation and then still deeper! This is my goal, my practice, my pleasure and my thrill!
"Sadist?" Is that the word for me? So be it then, and let me be the crudest of them all. For men have taken their toll of me and caused me to be this way. If they have created a monster in their doings, then let that monster be the cause of their destruction!
And I very well can. For monster though I may be, I appear to be anything but one. My eyes are large and lovely, enormous almond-shaped green gems that glitter with a soft fascination, entrap, enslave and destroy. My face is beautiful with strong lines artfully softened by make-up. My figure is disciplined, trained to strength and shapeliness, carried with queenly authority, an exciting invitation for men to become aroused and wanting, only to learn that no mistake could have been more deadly.
Irene Brownell is my real name. My pseudonym is the one by which I am known as one of the country's foremost lady hypnotists. Entertainment is what I call my business. People pay to see me, and then I make my selections of victims from them and perhaps they may never stop paying once they have discovered the hypnotic powers in these green eyes, this great, swelling pair of breasts, this slender waistline and these supple, dancing buttocks.
Don't be alarmed at this introduction, dear reader. Candor is imperative if we are to truly communicate, and I do feel that we should. You see, books are written for many reasons: to inform, to titillate, to arouse indignation, to explain, to entertain and there are others. To some extent this work is intended to accomplish all of these goals, but principally it seeks to warn.
Know that the things you say, do, reflect, withhold, may have a lifetime effect on those affected by you. Know that they may be destructive not just of those to whom they were directed deliberately or inadvertently but that they may eventually come back to destroy you!
Respect the rights and the identity of every human being with whom you come into contact, waitress or whore, the lost little draftee straying lonesomely through a town far from home or the oldster marking shuffling time until he dies. If this message strikes home to you, then the hideous ordeals to which I was subjected in this report and the violent revenge I took both on the perpetrators and many, many others of their sex perhaps even you!-will not have been wasted and totally negative.
Too there may well have been a warning at the end of this work which you might have overlooked, so, instead of waiting that long, I offer it to you now:
Don't mess around with a lady hypnotist!
Irene Brownell
CHAPTER ONE
GANG RAPE
"Please, Gerald, don't do that to me," I begged as I lay struggling on the floor of the basement meeting room. Norman held my hands crossed behind my head and knelt on my elbows, forcing me to thrust out my breasts as though by invitation. Marty and Joe held my legs painfully apart. And Gerald was kneeling there before me, his trousers off, a dazed look in his eyes as he studied me, studied my helplessness.
"Go on, Jare," Norman teased. "Hell, if you wasn't president of the Hell Riders, you'd not get chance to be fast."
"She might not be much good after the rest of us get done," Joe said, staring intently at my body, no longer protected by the skirt they'd shoved up around my waist nor the sweater they'd rolled up to under my armpits.
"She's sure a beauty," Gerald said. "But that old guy there with the camera has me nervous." He nodded toward the distinguished looking gray-haired man sitting on the edge of his chair, watching this scene, studying it through the viewfinder of a camera that had a strobe light on it.
"Our deal was all four of us do it to her and let him take our pictures," Marty said. "None of us can miss or he's buying none of us those motorcycles."
I turned my head and tried to get a better look at him, but just then Gerald moved forward. Clumsy hands dug into and squeezed my breasts, arousing pain but giving me no faintest sign of pleasure. Dirty hands with nails too long sought my chalice and dug and probed inexpertly, scratching and pinching me, making new tears push the old ones out of my eyes and down my cheeks.
Now he was moving in, looking down, threatening me with his scepter as though to blame me for his in-expertness in assaulting a seventeen year old virgin!
He slapped me and then pressed hard on me, pressed as though he was seeking to create entries that weren't there. How I screamed at the pain and tried to shift my weight to help ease it!
Then there was a sudden change. He had moved toward me only an inch or so, but now I felt a new sensation I had never even imagined. How it hurt! But with the hurt came something more, a sense of linkage, even though it be with this ape-like eighteen-year-old assaulting me.
"Attaboy, Jare," Marty said. "That's socking it to her!"
Now the boy's bad breath was in my face, his weight resting on his hands pressing my breasts. I felt the driving, driving, thrust of his hips now as though it were abrading my tender inner thighs. I closed my eyes, feeling all blood draining from my head and my chin jutted high as faster and faster this wild dance of lust continued and suddenly, with a gasp, Gerald collapsed atop me, driving the last ounce of breath from me.
He rolled off a couple of minutes later and he took Joe's place holding my right leg. I'd seen the flash of the camera go off perhaps three times, but it was too remote from the immediate suffering at hand.
The dirty gray towel Joe brought seemed somehow even more offensive than Gerald. It exemplified the filthy animal quality these boys possessed more than even this purchased action of theirs. But he wiped me roughly, hurting my tender flesh still more, and then dropped his tight jeans revealing no underwear beneath them.
"How long since you bathed, Joe?" Marty asked.
"Just last week," Joe said.
"Yeah, looks it," was the cynical reply.
All of my being seemed to be crawling upwards within me, flesh rejecting contact with these young fiends, rejecting contact even with myself!
But then Joe was there, taking me, taking me by force, with a strange circular movement of his body humped grotesquely as two hands cupped my left breast and thick, dry lips captured its nipple, then worried it with hard teeth not quite closed.
Norman loosened his grip on my hands and I was able, at least, to clench my fists even as I did my teeth and my eyes to withstand the pain of what this smaller boy, maybe only sixteen, was doing to me, hurting me in my helplessness.
Then Norman's weight was off my elbows and he stood respectfully back. "Use those hands to push Joe," he warned, "and I'll break both your arms."
I saw then why he had relinquished his post. The man wanted an unmistakably clear shot of my face so that nobody could doubt who was the subject in this picture!
The flash went off and so did Joe, pressing against me, lying absolutely still, showering my inner being with spurting thrusts of warmth, powerful and heavy at first, then fading with tiny, jerking movements as each diminishing return came.
And Joe was busily using the same grimy towel to wipe himself with one end and me with the other. I felt sick inside, a sickness I'd never imagined anyone could possess. Utter revulsion. I hated the five of them, the four young animals, the vicious older man who was photographing this nauseating scene and, because I was being irreparably soiled, I hated myself too.
When I opened my eyes, there was Marty standing naked above me, looking frighteningly large for a fat boy of average height. This was a boy my own age, a classmate, and he was doing this to me!
"I've been wanting to take you, you bitch, ever since you first came into class with that tight little red skirt you were wearing," he told me. "Remember, the one you wore with that red silk scarf? Man you got to me then."
"Marty," I pleaded. "Don't do it this way. Let me go. They did enough. Maybe later in someplace clean. Maybe I could even help you so it'd be more fun for us both." I was desperate. I knew I couldn't stand much more pain and he looked so very large.
"Sorry, Irene," he said, kneeling in place. "I made a deal and I gotta go through with it. Frankly, I'd rather have a motorcycle than a piece of your ass, especially now getting even worse than sloppy seconds."
I let my head fall back, my eyes closed, the tears flowing as I saw my pleas were wasted. I started to use my hands to ease his entry, to push him away. "Get those hands up above your shoulders," Norman said, kicking me in the bicep. I looked from face to face.
Not one sign of pity.
Then I heard myself screaming with fright, horror and agony as the grinning Marty drove into me. "I guess now you know what a real man feels like," he growled, his voice deeper than the others. I knew I was bleeding, tearing, accommodating more than I was capable of handling and I hoped that he might come to his senses in time to realize it too, but the flash of the camera and the animal lusts within him, the searing, roaring pain all seemed to unify into a crazy pinwheel of horror that spun wildly, crazily, careening through tilting, eccentric patterns that climaxed in a wild new sensation for me.
I was begging him to stop, but I didn't want him to! "Oh, Marty Marty," I was saying. "No, don't, stop, please." I was tossing and thrusting and my lips were moist and my eyes soft as I tried to match his every powerful stroke with an upward movement all my own.
He stopped. My own movement continued, my body clasping, wringing, absorbing him until I shuddered slowly to a gasping, sweating, smiling peace and realized that the boys had released their grips on me soon after Marty had taken his position.
I know I slept then. Maybe I fainted. I don't know. But I do know that sometime later Norman had assaulted me and slapped my face and I had bit his hand and his teeth drew blood from my right breast. There had been pictures again and more hurting and I was in the dirty bathroom that had no door trying to staunch blood with toilet paper and clean myself with wet wads of it and nobody seemed to care but me.
I came out later and the laughing stopped as the boys saw my set jaw and tear-streaked face. "Look, kid, that ain't so bad," Norman said, his mouth trying to twist into a smile. "Maybe someday you'll thank us for showing you how to have some real fun."
I didn't dare threaten them with going to the police. They could easily have killed me.
But the man stopped me as I was about to go out the door.
"Just one thing more, young lady," he said. "I'll take back my son's class pin." And he unpinned it from my sweater.
My eyes were dry now. Absolute hatred can accomplish that.
CHAPTER TWO
HYPNOSIS
It had been sweet, being pinned by the handsomest, most desirable boy in high school. Keith Nelson was just that. My girl friend Paulette had warned me that his parents wouldn't approve, them being so wealthy and his being an only child and all. But what girl with stars in her eyes could believe that?
If he'd wanted to marry Delia Sloan, as his parents wished, surely he'd have done so. In fact I insisted on his telling his parents about our future plans just to prove what I'd been saying to Paulette.
His mother was home when he brought me in and she seemed a big, impressive-looking woman made of ice to me. She waited until Keith finished telling of our plans and suggested that he excuse himself and go to his room. He balked and she took off the big, heavy silk scarf she was wearing knotted on one shoulder, put it around his neck and, looking deeply into his eyes, said: "Go to your room." Without looking at me or excusing himself, Keith turned and obeyed her. I found it frightening.
"You do have pretty eyes, Miss Brownell," she told me, her voice throaty and cool. "They have a certain hypnotic quality I don't wonder an inexperienced boy like Keith might find appealing. But you'll simply not do for a permanent alliance."
My face turned red. I felt hurt and anger fighting for command of me. Before I could say anything more, she said, "Keith is mine, you know, to do with what I wish. A wise mother never loses her son if she plants the right seeds while he's still very young and impressionable, as you noticed."
"But Keith is mine," I tried to say with conviction. "See, here's his class pin."
"Fortunately I had the foresight to plant those seeds," she repeated positively.
She offered me money to go. I turned it down. The gang rape followed and I could only assume from Mr. Nelson's role in it that she had planted seeds in him. too!
Two days later Mr. Nelson came to my aunt's house where I was living. "Your aunt is at work, I understand, Miss Brownell," he said.
I didn't reply.
"Here are the photographs. You'll notice how dear each picture of you is. How no restraints show. I've not shown these to Keith yet and there's really no reason to do so if "
"You want me to tell him we're through?" I asked.
"And leave town for good," he added. "Here's a hundred dollars. I'll drive you to the station."
I died a little inside when I saw those photos. That was me, Irene Brownell, under those four boys. A lovely painting, slashed, is no less ruined whether by vandals or the artist's own hand. I packed and Mr. Mortimer R. Nelson himself, distinguished citizen, drove me to the Greyhound bus station and even bought my ticket to New York for me.
At the station in New York a day and a half later I checked my bag in a quarter locker and then started walking. A bus came by. I got on and got off an hour later in a typical New York neighborhood shopping area. The smells were pungent, the people darting and loud in their pressures and responses, the sense of crowded living, of the city's vitality came through my numbness.
There were the colorful fruit stands, the candy stores dispensing a weird, tan, sweet concoction called "egg cream" and another that smelled less appealing called "Dr. Brown's Celery Tonic." A strange accent even among those not foreign born, a sense of violent energy being expended in unimportant directions somehow seeped through to me and I found my attention focusing on this strange environment.
Now I saw two skinny boys around fourteen or fifteen years old coming toward me and, from the way their heads seemed to bend toward each other, I suspected they were talking to each other about me, for they were studying me carefully.
I saw a flash of white upstairs above a corner drug store. "Girl Assistant Wanted" the sign a hand was putting into the window read. In gold and black lettering above it appeared: "Gilbert A. Lester, Hypnotist."
I was just beginning to wonder what people used a hypnotist for when I felt a hand grasping my breast and another grabbing low at the front of my dress. The shock didn't paralyze me. It drove me into action! These weren't just two swarthy, greasy-haired youngsters in New York, neither the one grabbing my person to make me forget my purse nor the one trying to seize my purse and run!
They were four boys in my home town named Gerald, Norman, Marty and Joe four boys I hated with a violence beyond control!
I saw the car coming. I deliberately timed myself to tug on my purse and, at the same time, press hard toward the older boy grabbing me, with a foot behind his, shoving him with an ugly thrust of my body against the moving fender of the car. He bounced off it and was thrown onto the sidewalk where he lay stunned.
But no sooner did he lose his balance than I put my other hand on my purse and jerked it toward myself, pulling the smaller of my assailants with it, pulling him off balance, and driving my knee hard into his crotch as he came toward me.
He dropped to the ground, his face contorted with the pain of my well-aimed cruelty.
Then I saw the older one get up on his knees, blood running from his forehead, and pull a knife out of his pocket. One sharp downward movement of his hand and its blade leaped out, ready for action.
The other got to his knees and struggled to his feet and I saw that he, too, was reaching into his pocket. Risking getting run over, I darted across the street to the door next to the corner drug store, rushed up the stairs with the boys behind me.
"Quick," I heard a man's voice saying. "In here." The office door opened and I ran inside, then into an inner office, hardly noticing the man who was my host.
Leaning against the door, holding it closed, I was gasping for breath, terrified. "Stop, right there! I command you!" I heard him say. What authority was in his voice! And yet I had a flash of a balding man only about my size when I passed him. That and a neat moustache.
I almost expected to hear the sound of a throat getting cut, but the boy's footsteps stopped as soon as he said the word, "command."
"Look at me, both of you," I heard my protector saying. "You cannot look away. Keep looking. Keep looking. Keep looking." His voice had the effect of a steadily running stream, soft, melodious, repetitive and numbing.
"Those knives in your hands are getting warmer," he said. "Now they're getting hot. They're turning red, even the handles, from the heat. Your hands are beginning to sizzle and cook from holding them. You can't stand it any longer. You have to drop those hot knives!" The sound of something falling on the worn linoleum floor was a relief to me.
"Watch out!" his voice said. "Those are snakes on the floor, snakes with silver poison darts sticking out of their short bodies. They'll kill you if you don't kick them until the poison darts are broken off."
What stomping I heard then and the cracking, satisfying sound of the knife blades breaking under their feet!
"Aren't you ashamed, big boys like you," he said. "You've wet your pants. Quick take them off and go home and change."
This I had to see. Sure enough, the boys took off their pants and held them at arm's length as they went down the stairs onto the street below.
That was my first introduction to hypnotism!
He came in smiling, warm brown eyes, a trim,-likeable man evidently without great physical strength, and yet I had just seen a demonstration of his power.
"I noticed you when I was putting a card in my window," he said. "Then I saw those two cuties try for your purse. Usually they go after older women's handbags, but you seemed to be daydreaming and they thought they'd surprise you with that groping tactic of theirs."
I was still staring at him with shining admiration in my eyes and it seemed to get through to him at last. His face flushed a bit. Then he smiled and I found myself strongly attracted to him, even though he must have been in his mid-forties.
"I'm Gil Lester," he said. "Excuse me for barging into conversation like that, but you surely know you're the sort of unusual beauty that makes a man break stride, don't you?"
Then I found myself smiling, too, really relaxed and happy and purposeful for the first time in what seemed the eternity since Keith Nelson pinned his class pin on my sweater. "Hi, Gil," I actually chirped. "I'm Irene Brownell. Now is it okay for me to thank you?"
Then, for the first time in my life, I reached out and kissed a strange man fully on the mouth. It was intended as a little peck of appreciation, but it held a little too long for that and I had my arms around his neck and was pulling him to me, pressing my body hard against his, grinding my hips, feeling his manhood stirred and then his tongue between my lips, between my teeth, stroking the roof of my mouth toward the front, linking with my tongue in a strange serpentine dance.
Despite his relatively small size he was strong. His hands caught my wrists and pulled my arms from around his neck. He forced me to sit in a chair. I felt tears of embarrassment in my eyes.
"I never did anything like that before in my life," I gasped. "What happened to me?"
"You just sit right there and tell me what brought you here, Irene Brownell," he said, obviously having had to struggle to get himself under control.
Gil was no ordinary person. His kindness, his professional air, his obvious response to me as a woman all combined to make me know I was safe in telling him the sordid story of Keith Nelson and his parents, of the four rapists and my being driven from the town of Morton so shamefully.
"Relax, dear," he said after I finished. "Let's just think for a moment." His head went back and his eyes closed and I watched him anxiously for fully five minutes. Then he opened his eyes again and gave me a little smile.
"Okay, Irene," he said. "You're hired. Go take that sign out of the window."
"Thank you, Gil," I said coming toward him.
"Easy, girl," he said. "Get that sign now. Later III take charge of how you thank me if you do."
Immediately he put me to work selling his skills as a hypnotist. I sent out a printed postcard to doctors in the borough's yellow pages offering to provide his hypnotic services in cases where they felt anaesthesia might be difficult or dangerous. I checked the pages of the newspapers and phoned the hotels looking for entertain. I even offered his services to all the private detective agencies listed in the phone book for purposes of assisting in recall and interrogation.
By the end of the day, I felt I'd earned my keep. We'd arranged five entertainment bookings at $150, lined up two interrogations and completed two columns of listings under Physicians and Surgeons.
Gil drove a cute sports car and brought me to the
Port Authority building where I'd checked my luggage, then he found me an inexpensive apartment in walking distance of his office.
That was it. No pass. Not even preliminary activities or conversation to a pass. I found myself respecting him for it and a little frustrated.
But, I knew, we'd be together for a long time.
This man had much to teach me. Hypnotism. Power. And I was going to be the brightest student in history!
CHAPTER THREE
THE LEARNING
At first Gil didn't let me go along when he did his work. He refused to permit me to attend the time he worked on an amnesia case and discovered that the man had stolen all his sister's money, then got drunk and raped her. When he recovered, he was so shocked that he completely forgot the incident and even his name. He adopted his sister's name, Shirley, instead and insisted that the credentials he was carrying were forged!
When he performed hypnosis on women having babies, people with respiratory difficulties requiring anesthetics or the patients of a dentist in the neighborhood, similarly, he refused to permit me to watch.
But then came the first club date and he not only let me attend, he permitted me to assist him. This was exciting. We went to a beauty parlor and I got my hair all done up, piled high and dramatically with interesting curls framing my face.
The beautician was so intrigued with my face that she did a complete make-up job on me, too. Dramatic green eye shadow to accentuate and match the color of my eyes. Gorgeous, thick, long and furry eyelashes that made me so beautiful I fell in love with myself! A lipstick that seemed constantly moist and iridescent and still the brightest of cherry reds. My brow plucked from beneath on the outer edges and with matching brow strips bringing up the ends almost to my hairline.
Gil took one look at me and said: "Irene, you have a great future ahead of you. I wonder how long I'll be a part of it."
Gil was honest. Therefore he didn't have much money. The little bit he paid me was a strain for him, I knew. So I went out on my own and found a few of the charitable thrift shops I'd passed on the streets, Goodwill Industries, Salvation Army, American Rescue Mission, Volunteers of America, Society of St. Vincent de Paul, searching until I found just the thing I wanted: a red satin evening gown very much like that Rita Hayworth wore in an old picture I'd seen on television: Gilda.
I found a pair of red satin gloves at S. Klein's and a pair of white satin shoes I dyed red in my apartment. Then I bought an enormous pair of chandelier style, shoulder-dusting rhinestone earrings in one of those places that cater to sailors and the unsophisticated foreign-born.
To this I added a perfume that was completely without subtlety, but I knew it would permeate the atmosphere of the club if the place was small, and lend the lingering touch of provocation I knew I wanted to project.
We rehearsed without Gil knowing of the outfit I planned. My job was simply to go into the audience and tug on the arm of whatever person I was passing at the instant Gil clapped his hands together and started rubbing them, my clue. For the second person he would clear his throat and the third he would snap his fingers. After that I was to get offstage and hand him the props he called for in the planned order.
These were two sturdy chairs so constructed that a subject could be stretched out between them, his head on one, his heels on the other, and they'd not tilt forward. Also there were costume details I considered rather silly, such as the high hat and white gloves and polished black cane that had nothing to do with the act, but apparently were left-over memories of some magician he saw when he was a youngster, a performer he evidently sought to emulate.
I say this from the perspective of a professional now. Back then, I'm not that certain I was so perceptive.
He was a good, competent entertainer. They were properly amazed when he did his act with the chairs and the slender man I'd brought on stage for him was a good choice, for he didn't seem to have the strength to accomplish this position on his own.
The audience seemed a bawdy one. They clapped and whistled when I came onstage in my strangely sexy costume. Gil seemed to me to be less sure of himself from the moment he saw me in that outfit. The audience seemed to get ruder all through his performance and I heard one fat man in front bellowing, drunkenly, "To hell with you, brother! Bring out that broad again. We'd rather just look at her walking."
From offstage I saw a dangerous-looking glint come into Gil's normally warm brown eyes and he signaled for me to pass through the audience. As I passed the fat man, I heard his hands clap and he began rubbing them. I brought him onstage and then he sent me out for more subjects. This time I passed a tremendously fat woman as he cleared his throat. And on my third trip he snapped his fingers as I passed an effeminate-looking older man, completely bald and with an enormous silk handkerchief cascading out of his breast pocket.
"Thank you, all three of you, for being such wonderful sports as to come up here and help me entertain these fine people," Gil said, smiling.
"The hell with that, brother," the big man said, winking broadly into the audience. "I just wanted to be dose to this little pretty-thing here." He grabbed my arm.
Gil said, "Now look what you've done! You have poison ivy all over your hands."
The man began frantically wiping his palms over his belly, then his thighs!
"Gil said: 'Now you're rid of it. But isn't it hot in here?"
Those three actually began perspiring. He whispered into the ear of the faggot: "You're comfortable now, but isn't he the most gorgeous hunk of trade you've ever seen?"
"Oh yes," the faggot replied. "He's a beautiful piece of beefcake."
"But you'd like him better in drag," Gil told him.
The man clapped his hands and smiled, "Oh yes, that's the only way I'd like him. That'd be groovy!"
"It's entirely too hot to be wearing those heavy clothes," Gil told his other two subjects. Then he told the woman that I was her maid and was undressing her for a nice, cool bath and I proceeded to take her clothes off her. He told the man that he was a multimillionaire and that his valet was preparing him for a costume party. The faggot then proceeded to undress him
I wanted to see how far Gil would carry this. But I hadn't counted on the degree of hatred he had for the fat man who spoiled his act and had acted so lecherously regarding me. We stripped the man completely and the big woman down to just her brassiere!
The audience roared as I put the man's huge shorts and tent-like T-shirt on the woman, then put his executive-height socks on her. We couldn't close the fly of the trousers and his shirt was tight on her, but, apart from that, since the belt did reach and could hold the trousers up, we were able to get his clothes on her and send her back to her seat in the audience. Her husband, I discovered later, had started to come up onstage and object while I was busy undressing her, but Gil had put him into a deep sleep in his seat. Now he did-likewise with the wife.
But now Gil concentrated his full hatred on the fat man. To keep his big, flabby masculinity from distracting the audience, he had the faggot put the woman's big pink panties on him first. Then they used their combined strength to lace him into a corset and Gil exhibited a surprising comic flair here, tugging on the laces so hard he actually walked up the back of the man, who leaned forward on Gil's instructions, looking like a very comic gymnastic act.
With fatty's flesh oozing up in front and down in back from the pressure of the corset, the faggot even straddled each of his legs, sitting in his lap, or rather where his lap ought to be, as he put the woman's big, dark nylons on him.
She'd been wearing a navy taffeta slip which fit him well and then came her black silk dress printed with red roses. Her earrings and a string of huge pearls were his jewelry. Try as he might, the faggot couldn't get her shoes on him and the audience was screaming with laughter at his efforts to accomplish this.
Finally a woman tossed a roll of double-faced, inch and a half wide black satin ribbon onto the stage. "Here, tie them on him with this," she called out. So the faggot jammed the big man's heels into the heel portion of the woman's shoes and then tied the ribbon across his instep and under the shoe, around his ankle, crossing the length under the heel and he tied big bows across his instep. That way he at least had high heels under him, held securely enough for him to stand in a strange, bent-knead, wobbly way.
I couldn't resist digging into the woman's purse and taking out her lipstick, which I applied to the big slob's lips in a thick, sharply, defined cupid's bow.
"This man is your boss, your complete master," Gil told the fat man. "You must do absolutely everything he tells you to do without one word of resistance or protest. Then, when he says 'Fagele' to you, you will awaken completely and forget completely where you were tonight and what happened to you here."
I noticed a slender man in the chair next to the one the fat man had occupied. He was beckoning to me. I sat in the fat man's chair while Gil was saying something to the sissy onstage.
"He's my partner and I hate him," the skinny man told me. While he was talking, he was writing something on a piece of paper that began "Full and Complete Release."
"Get his signature on this and you can sell it to me for five thousand dollars." He handed me a fountain pen, his business card, and the paper and I ducked out into the wings, just as the effeminate man walked offstage with the fat creature's arm tucked under his.
"Make him sign this," I told the Mary.
"Sign that, slave," he ordered.
The fat man took the paper and pen and wrote his name on it in a bold hand. "Date it," I said. He did.
The audience was still roaring with laughter and applauding wildly as I saw those two leave by the side entrance and returned onto the stage. The pen, card and partnership release were securely tucked away inside my suitcase.
"Where were you?" Gil asked from the side of his mouth as he smiled and bowed to the audience.
"The John," I replied.
We had others believing they were various sorts of animals, people acting like little children and an elderly couple dancing in a livery way when it would have looked hard for them to even walk.
Then the show was over and everyone left except the sleeping couple. "What do we do with them?" I asked Gil.
"I'd better make them forget where they were, too," he said. "First, let's change into our regular clothes, though. There's bound to be a time when this doesn't work."
He went backstage and I quickly checked the sleeping man's wallet, then the woman's purse. There was a fair-sized diamond in the purse, but I was afraid to take anything but the money. Between them they had ninety-three dollars, of which I took ninety.
We changed into regular clothes, put our costumes in the trunk of Gil's car, then he walked the sleeping couple two blocks away, into a darkened doorway, told them they had forgotten everything leading up to the show and all that happened during it and then he went for the car. While he was gone, I took a hundred and twenty-five dollars from the wallet in the hip pocket of the pants the woman was wearing, then tossed the wallet with the rest of its contents into a mailbox on the corner.
When Gil returned, I told him what I'd done with the wallet, neglecting to mention taking the money out first. "Good thinking," he replied. Then he checked the other pockets, took out all the papers in the suit the woman was wearing, and threw them in after the wallet. We were in the car when he woke them up and blocks away before they discovered their plight, I'm sore.
Then we stopped, parked and laughed uncontrollably for fully five minutes.
"Gil, you were just wonderful!" I told him, tears still running from the laughter. Then I practically climbed on top of him, with him trapped behind the wheel, and kissed him and pressed my breasts against him and rubbed my knee into his crotch and bit on his earlobes.
"Irene! Irene!" he exclaimed ecstatically. "You were just great and so beautiful in that red satin gown. How did you know I was queer for that stuff?"
"Don't tell me you didn't hypnotize me and plant the need for wearing it in me," I teased.
"I didn't," he said, "but you've given me an idea. I will."
Once again I kissed him hard, wantingly. For I did want him, but I wanted something far more than I did Gilbert A. Lester. I wanted his "hypnotic powers. "If you teach me hypnosis," I promised him, "I'll wear that costume and take you to bed with me tonight. Of course you can hypnotize me and make me go to bed with you, I suspect, but that'd be more like masturbating than like volunteered, truly-wanted love."
"How is it possible for a girl as young as you to know so much?" he asked.
I knew then that I had my affirmative answer.
Gil taught me many things, but the one thing he taught me that night was the power of a fetish.
He was a satin fetishist. The material itself turned him on. Any woman wearing it was more appealing than any woman not wearing it, regardless of what her appearance or other traits, her age, color, mentality or character might be. That's how strong the appeal of a well-entrenched fetish can be.
Before the audience, Gil had to keep himself under control.
Not in my little room, though. I teasingly undressed him and made him stand with his back to the bathroom door. Then I stripped and put on nothing but the red satin evening gown, gloves and shoes. Because of its vintage, the gown had a red satin, full-skirted evening slip with it, too. This I carried in my red satin gloved hands.
I came up behind Gil and passed the full slip across his chest so that it covered his nipples. Then, watching over his shoulder in the mirror so that he could see my face, look into my eyes when we chose, I began lightly, gently stroking his nipples through the soft, smooth, slippery fabric.
What seemed complete arousal even before I approached him proved to be only an early stage. His yearning reached outward and upward toward the ceiling! I saw a lovely drop of moisture forming on its tip, rise and trickle downward.
"Stand absolutely still, darling," I told him as my fingers toyed with his hard, firm nipples and my satin-clad knee worked back and forth between his thighs from the rear. "Tell me you adore me, you worship me and will teach me everything you know."
How did I suddenly know so much? Where did this authority, this special knowledge, this astonishing insight come from? And me still a young girl whose only actual experience with heterogeneous sex had been that ugly gang bang?
Perhaps it was an instinct brought to total, certain knowledge by the hatred I carry for men-all men.
Perhaps Gil had hypnotized me at some time without my being aware of it and had implanted in me all his secret yearnings, his special needs.
I don't know where it came from, but I do know that my tactic was the one most totally geared to break down any resistance Gil might have been harboring.
This man who had disarmed savage, brutal youngsters with their knives at the ready. This man who had the power to completely control members of an audience of great size, who could twist and distort powerful personalities into cartoon people. He was mine! Mine to control, to use however I wanted!
"Irene, dearest," his voice said, trembling, "right now you could do anything in the world that you wished with me. I'm yours, utterly and completely and I want you more than I've ever wanted anything on this earth."
How those words thrilled me! How towering, heroically proportioned, Amazonian I felt with the knowledge and the controls I had. My stroking became faster, lighter, surer as I brought the maddening touch of satin's smoothness to more and more of his erotic zones.
"You are my goddess! My one and only, my absolute deity," he said, his voice rising higher. "The adoration I feel for you is beyond that any mortal should feel for another creature of human flesh." I let my nipples brush against the small of his back, slowly twisting back and forth. His shoulders hunched and his body shuddered deliciously at the feel of full, womanly breasts in satin touching his naked being.
I lowered the position of the full satin slip against his body so that now it was an apron across his stomach and I could stroke the curves of his hips. The satin came to a gleaming point in the mirror as it crossed his tumescent manhood and now I saw the fabric darkening at the crest of the highlights, pointing like an asterisk to the spreading spot of moisture. I caught his thrusting lance in the hem of the slip and brought the sides up again to his nipples so that the fabric was stroking him lightly as my fingers again hardened and excited his nipples.
"Command me," his quavering voice proclaimed, "and I'll teach you everything I know about hypnotism, Irene. Oh God, how I want you!"
Now I whipped the satin slip away from his body and put its full hem over his head. It was permeated with the perfume I'd been wearing. I played with his ears, stroked his throat, gently massaged across his closed eyes with the gleaming, beautiful red material and, keeping him thus imprisoned, I walked him over toward the bed.
It had its blankets and spread turned down and ready.
I put one foot on the bed and leaned toward Gil. pressing him backward until he collapsed on it.
Now I positioned him just where I wanted him with a pillow beneath his hips. How great it felt to have this powerfully equipped man in this woman's position, helpless and waiting and wanting me!
"Now not another word from you," I commanded. "We'll work entirely with signals."
I knelt across him, across his hips, sitting back on his stomach and spreading the full skirt of my evening gown so that it covered him from his head to his ankles My hands patrolled his whole body through the sleek. slippery, soft, smooth, seductive, shining fabric and he trembled with the thrill of it.
I studied him then as a cartographer studies terrain and I found his erogenous zones by research of the most fascinating sort. I made him lie on his back for a while and on his face and with his arms stretched out or above his head.
I knelt across his head and his darting tongue rose and delighted me, bringing me to quick and glorious fulfillment in a surprisingly short time as his fingers probed and spread me and prepared me for the assault of his knowing, skillfully positioned tongue, finding that one most sensitive little spot and thrilling it with the warm, soft, moist, rough, darting touch of him.
I felt him creating a rich and powerful vacuum with his mouth, drawing the juices of my youthful femininity deep into his being, thrilled and delighted with the fragrance, the touch, the responsiveness of my satin-clad being.
Now I relaxed on my back, put the evening slip over his head and shoulders, for the bodice was too small for him to put it on and I wanted the fullness over his breasts for me to stroke. I reached up and stroked him while his two busy hands parted and played with me, delighting me with the knowing, gentle, tender touch he demonstrated so expertly. I quaked from the glorious thrill of it, felt the surging fulfillment, and kept lightly touching his ball-bearing-hard nipples and reaching to check from time to time to reassure myself that not one whit of his readiness for me had waned.
And the shattering, never-ending, nerve-thrilling experience of fulfillment kept repeating itself again and again under his masterful stroking of that tiny, sensitive area of my being, robbed of its natural protection by the way his strong fingers spread my coin purse open and kept my currency exposed.
Now his head was there again beneath my skirt, drinking, delighting in the copious flow he had so artfully stimulated, a special stigmata he worshipped and I thrilled at the power of being worshipped.
But I wanted most, now, to command him further and so, still silently, I put his head back on the pillow and repositioned the second pillow under the arc of his up-thrust hips. Now I rose above him, with him still wearing the cape of my slip, spread my skirts far out like wings of a striking bird of prey. Then, slowly, precisely I descended and he held his spear so expertly that it hit the target perfectly and penetrated delightfully.
As a fist closes around a pistol butt so did I grasp, clasp and wring this wonderful tool of Gil's as soon as he became my captive. For that he was. Reaching down through the twin silken encasements of my skirt and the slip across his chest, I found those nipples once again and played with them.
We held absolutely still while the inner muscles I suddenly found working gripped him, while the lock held the key and squeezed and created a powerful vacuum!
Looking down at those worshipping brown eyes of his, at that angelic delight, that all-suffusing joy in his face, I knew then what it was like to be a queen. Gil was mine now to do with as I chose.
Now there came a tiny tremor, the beginnings, I knew from an intuition woman possesses from generations of being the seductress. I rose and descended on him, slowly, certain of my every move, the violinist drawing the long bow that creates the lasting note of exquisite tone and texture. Slowly, certain that I was in total authority, I did as I pleased with this man lying helpless beneath me, enslaved by the satin I wore and used so skillfully on him, by the beauty of my eyes, the excitement of my person, the susceptibility to my perfume, the glorious prison of my woman's body.
Faster and faster I rose and lowered myself and how he could lie still no longer. How desperately he drove his thrusting hips upward off the bed! Deep, deep, deep, probing reached my innermost seat of desire and now we were Gemini, the twins, locked in physical unity, in the utterly total merger of our beings!
It was happening inside me, that glorious, absolutely needed response that I had first discovered just a few months before when Marty took his turn in abusing me. Only now I was the abuser, finding my own gratification in my own way! I took Gil Lester then, took him as a man takes a woman, took him foi my own complete satisfaction.
And as I reached the quick-paced, screaming climax of this, rockets were fired off inside me by his cannon. His mouth was open, gasping for air, and I could feel his heart pounding violently as my hands cupped and delighted his satin-seeking nipples. His eyes were closed and the smile in the corners of his mouth let me know that this was a moment for which he would gladly die, an instant he absolutely had to treasure forever.
So I stopped all movement then and pressed with one hand on his hips to stop his up-thrusting, too. And I drew myself tightly around him, locking him in place, massaging him with the inner controls I had learned just then, making his whole being shudder from the volcanic eruptions that seemed as though they would never cease.
Bit by bit, slowly he subsided.
Every muscle in his body relaxed.
His face took on a happy serenity I found delightful to observe.
And, smiling, Gil fell asleep.
I had paid my tuition in full for the complete course.
From now on, whatever we did together would be on my terms.
He could enslave others with those hypnotic powers he was to share completely with me.
But I had enslaved him.
Gil was more than my employer, my teacher, my friend and associate and my protector.
He was also the first man to be completely my victim.
CHAPTER FOUR
MONEY
Want power? Get money! That's the formula. I was lucky to learn it early.
Here Gil had received a hundred and fifty dollars for the club date and there had been expenses, getting his tails pressed, new properties, cards and all. T had merely taken the cash I found lying around loose and done much better.
I started to bring the signed release of partnership to the man who'd left me his card, but, just as I was about to enter the office building I saw the fat man of our experiment in hypnotism. It was a week later and he still seemed to have a glazed look in his eyes. He didn't recognize me at all, but then the situation was different. A floppy-brimmed hat and a tightly buckled trench coat look far different from a smart coiffure and a red satin evening gown. And Gil had planted that memory erasure in him, too.
All the same, I phoned the fat man's partner, made an appointment to meet at a bench in Central Park and told him that if he didn't bring the cash in small, old bills, nothing larger than a twenty, and not in any numerical sequence, to forget it; I'd sell the release, in his handwriting, with his pen and card to his partner for even more money than the ten thousand I was asking.
"But our agreement was five," he squawked.
"No," I told him, "that was your asking price. Shall I see what your fat partner would bid for this evidence against you?"
I put the original paper in a railroad station locker and brought one of the several photocopies I made with me. The key was taped to the underside of my high-heeled shoes with black tape that was inconspicuous against the black of the shoe.
He had a large man with him when he came toward me in the park. I got up and walked briskly away. A policeman was walking along swinging his club. "Isn't it a lovely day, officer?" I asked.
He gave me a broad smile and assured me that he shared my opinion of it.
When I glanced back, my visitor was all alone and was carrying a large brown bag.
"There's a man back there who said I remind him of his daughter," I told the policeman. "He seems nice and I certainly would like to brighten his day if I could help, but, just to be on the safe side, would you keep an eye on us?"
"It'd be my pleasure, ma'am," he told me.
I sat down next to him. "Nice to see you again, Mr. Torrence," I said, recalling the name on the card, "Karl J. Torrence."
"Thank you," he said dryly. "You know I could take that paper away from you by force."
"I'm pretty strong."
"I have a friend over there on that next bench who specializes in little assignments like this. Now I'm prepared to pay you the original five thousand we agreed on and let you go without any complications or else I can give that man a signal and you'd be surprised how fast he works."
"Funny," I said, "I suspected you'd do something like that. So I arranged for a friend of mine to be here, too."
He looked around. "You're bluffing."
I waved to the policeman. He smiled and waved back.
The large man on the opposite bench got up and began walking away.
"If you have ten thousand in that bag, Mr. Torrence, we will go ahead with our transaction. If you only brought five, you've lost the bidding already. I take my little treasure to your partner."
"I do have the ten in here, I swear it," he said anxiously.
"Want to see a photocopy of your handwriting and your partner's signature?" I handed it to him.
"The original, that's what I'm paying all this for,' he said, his face working.
The policeman started to stroll toward us. He put the copy in his pocket.
"Let's take a cab to Penn station. It's in a public locker there. I have the key concealed in case your rough friend decides to earn his pay."
"You have my word," he said.
"And I know just what it's worth," I replied. We took a cab to the station. In the cab I checked the contents of the bag. I looked back. Nobody was following us.
"At least you could give me the key," he whined "I will, when we get to the locker."
His fists were clenching and his jaw was working, but he didn't say anything the driver could hear or that might make me abandon the project. I was amused at the inner bag having five thousand in it and the outer one containing the balance.
At the locker, I produced the key from the bottom of my shoe and he opened it with trembling fingers, grabbing the paper and then, with fingers held like claws and an evil look on his face turned, obviously to wrest the bag from me. I knew, because I was watching him from in front of the policeman working the station.
"Oh officer," I told him, looking up to give him the full impact of these eyes of mine, "I'm so frightened. I have a great deal of cash here in this bag that I must take to the bank. Daddy never trusted banks and he just passed on so I want to put it into a safe deposit box. Could you please escort me?"
"Really I'm not supposed to," he started to say, and I kept my eyes trained on him imploringly, "but I really think I should."
I kept out just a hundred dollars. The rest went into the box in the bank and only I knew of it.
See what I mean? Power.
Gil was still my principal target, though. I sent away to Scintilla, Inc., in Chicago for a set of black satin sheets and a set of red ones. Scintilla runs ads in newspapers occasionally and some of the magazines. They advertise many satin things. I found a piece of their literature at Gil's.
I stopped in Macy's and did some shopping, buying a few very large satin scarves, a printed and a white satin blouse, a pink satin slip and a white satin nightgown. I even bought some wide satin ribbon to make bows for my hair. Never would Gil see me when I wasn't wearing something of satin. I still had hypnosis to learn.
It worked. He taught me everything he knew about the art of bringing people under my power. We'd practice in restaurants, in crowded stores, on salesgirls. How tempted I was to get them to steal for me or to do things that would get them into trouble! But Gil is a sensitive, fine person. I didn't dare jeopardize his willingness to teach me, despite the physical control I had over him through the use of my body and his fetish. I was a good r girl all the time, as far as he knew, except in bed with him.
And bed we did! After every session, tired as we might be, we did join forces. It's astonishing how two creative people can demonstrate imagination the way we did!
Part of the fun was play-acting. He'd be the drunken roadgang worker coming to his little shack and I'd be there stark naked except for a little satin apron I'd be wearing.
"Aha, I told you, you'd behave better if I kept you like that," he'd bellow. His body was covered with perspiration, and he really was well-muscled.
"Please, Hiram," I'd say (each of the characters had a different name), won't you let me have a simple little cotton dress so I can go to the store? I'll treat you good. Honest I will."
And then I'd come rushing at him panting and tearing off his work trousers and heavy shoes and shoving him onto the bed. I'd wrap my little apron around his towering readiness and leave only its lovely head sticking out. Then I'd open my mouth wide and, while my hands stoked the shaft and my mouth created a vacuum for the head, my tongue would play its little symphony, trilling up and down that one most sensitive little area at the base of the head until he was a gasping, tossing, twisting hunger that insisted on satisfaction. Then I'd tie the ribbons of my apron around his basket, catch his arms in a scissors lock behind his back and say, "You can't do a damned thing, Hiram, until you promise to buy me that dress."
The crazy thing about these games we played is that always turned out to be so real! He actually couldn't get loose because I'd mastered a powerful scissors grip. He did have a need for gratification that was brought, most expertly I admit, to just before where he could do anything about it.
He'd be begging me to release him, to gratify him in any way I chose, in minutes. And some of the ways I chose were very interesting. Once I wore a low-cut satin blouse that held my unbrassiered breasts close together and I forced him to put his need between my breasts down the front of my blouse and use fingers and tongue to toy with me as he found his fulfillment while I stroked his calves lightly and maddened him.
Once I put on several pairs of nylons and trapped him in their silken smoothness, making him work between the fullness of my calves with his face buried deeply under the skirt I wore.
I learned that, with the proper build-up, almost any sort of narrow aperture, anything fleshy that could be lined with silk, anything that could apply pressure to a man would be hungrily sought if the conditions, the pre-establishment of the right sort of premise, were right.
Gil played the parts of a hundred men and I gratified him in a hundred ways with costumes that became increasingly numerous and imaginative. Oddly enough, the more we worked together, the better established he became. I got him several guest appearances on local television programs, a regular night club booking that lasted almost six weeks, important new business and he began earning good money. He always credited me for it, and he raised my pay from the $60 a week at which I started to $150 after his income grew to where he could afford it. And I learned hypnosis most thoroughly.
There's no need to go into what I learned nor how I learned it, for the books on this subject are plentiful, but soon I was able to accomplish some astonishing things with this new talent I had.
Sometimes it was strictly experimental. I was in a restaurant having breakfast one morning and I heard a man say to another, "I'd give a hundred bucks for a shack-up with that waitress."
I approached them and said, "Are you talking fantasy or real money?"
He looked up, surprised, grinned, and reached for his wallet. "No, I mean it for real. Here's a hundred. Can you arrange it?"
"Of course," I said, taking the money.
I went to the waitress. "I'm feeling a little ill," I told her. "Would you come into the ladies' lounge with me for a moment?"
"Why sure, dearie," she replied.
I looked into her eyes, talked for just a little while. She came out with me behind her, walked up to the man I indicated, and said, "Darling, I love you. Come, I'm tired. Let's go to our room and rest." She started to take off her apron.
"You her agent or something?" the man's friend asked after they left.
"No," I said, smiling. "I hypnotized her."
He laughed at my witticism. I made a bank deposit.
Sometimes it was whimsical. I saw the goon that Torrence had hired in an attempt to strong-arm me, traced the license number of the car he was driving and phoned him, pretending to be a client. We met at a counter in Gimbel's and talked for a while. Then he was under my control.
"What do you really do for a living?" I asked him.
"I'm an industrial spy. I steal blueprints and market sources and formulas and things like that from firms for their competition."
"And what's your real name?"
"Marshall Grogan."
"Hand me your wallet, keys, and any weapons or other paraphernalia like that you have on you, Marshall," I commanded. He kept looking into my eyes as he went into various pockets and handed me things, which I dropped into my shoulder bag. There was a gun, a pair of handcuffs, a pair of brass knuckles and a sapper. He did have his private detective license.
I marched him to a police equipment supply shop and told him exactly what he was to purchase, then to meet me on the corner promptly in an hour.
There was an almost desperate anxiety in his face as he arrived just when the big clock on the corner said he should. He handed me the three pairs of handcuffs and the thumb cuffs, the hospital restraint belt and its matching wrist cuffs that let a wearer remain unharmed while rendered completely helpless. I had given him enough money from his own wallet and his identification for the purpose of making these purchases. Then he gave me back his wallet and identification.
"Very good, Marshall. Now I must reward you. Come with me."
My new place was much nicer than the first one I had. This had a separate bedroom and a big living-room-dining-kitchen plus a modern bathroom.
"Strip, Marshall. Completely," I commanded.
For a big man, he was well built. I had expected to see more flab and less muscle, but this was a powerful creature I had under control.
"Stand here in front of the mirror," I ordered, "and put those thumb cuffs onto your big toes."
How fascinating it was to watch these preposterous orders of mine being obeyed!
"Now put on the hospital device, Marshall." Dutifully he fitted the padded leather cuffs about his wrists and then threaded the wide, padded leather belt through the metal openings that made it impossible to remove the cuffs. He backed up toward me, hopping as best he could with his toes manacled and I commanded him to suck in his stomach as far as he could, then buckled the belt securing him in a completely helpless manner very tightly in back, knowing he had no possible way of reaching it.
Then I brought him out of it.
"Hey," he barked. "How'd I get like this? What do you think you're doing, lady?"
"Just having a little fun," I said. "Do you remember me?"
"Sure, you're the one with the cop friend that made Mr. Torrence all that trouble."
"And just look. Now I'm making trouble for you. Aren't I simply terrible?" I teased. He started to walk toward me, discovered the toe bondage too late and he fell heavily onto the carpet.
"You'll have to be quieter than that, Marshall," I said severely. "After all, we must be considerate and not make noises."
That's when he started to call me names.
I'd noticed the spring-jawed metal clamp they used to attach the antenna to my television receiver when they installed the set. The serviceman had called it an alligator clamp. T took it from the set and pinched and twisted Marshall's nose with my right hand until he obeyed my command to stick out his tongue as far as he could. Then I used my left hand to attach the alligator clamp to his tongue.
"That stays there, Marshall," I told him, "until you apologize by completely satisfying me."
I undressed in front of him, slowly, teasingly. I made every garment that I removed a great moment in history. I'd never seen a burlesque show, of course, but I had the idea of how they'd work.
As my brassiere came off, I lovingly lifted my breasts and pointed them up toward him, fingering my own nipples. His eyes popped and he looked so ridiculous with his arms strapped to his sides, his toes manacled together and his tongue held on the end of the television line by the sharp-teethed clamp that I decided to tease him even more.
I pressed my nipples into his eye sockets and ordered him to squint and tease me with his fluttering lashes! Naturally he couldn't under those circumstances, but the effort was most amusing.
Then I finished undressing and started stroking his body wherever I thought it would stir him the most. He was gigantic! This, I knew, was going to be fun. He was wanting me and completely unable to do anything about it. He was so rampant!
I released his tongue from the clamp with the understanding that he apologize to me for his previous rudeness. For a none too articulate man, he came up with a long, beautiful apology then!
"I think you need still more punishment, Marshall," I told him. "Ask me to whip you. Beg me to do it."
"The hell with that," he said.
I picked up his handcuffs and pried his jaws apart, forcing them into his mouth!
"You really must learn to be more obedient, slave," I told him. Then my eyes fell on those brass knuckles. His eyes widened and fear came into his eyes as he saw me slipping them over my fingers. They fitted me loosely. I couldn't put my fingers together the way I should have liked, to make a solid fist. But my fingers managed to close around the central core.
"I've never worn these before, Marshall," I told him, "so if I don't use them on you correctly, you'll have to improve my technique later."
I started on his biceps. They made a satisfying row of black and blue marks each time they landed and I learned just how hard I could hit without hurting the backs of my own fingers. Soon his arms were black and blue from the outside of his shoulder to his elbows and I started on his thighs in the same manner.
Now I noticed a new thing happening. This was actually arousing him! I had some more experimenting to do, I realized.
His belt was my next weapon, fully across his rump. He was squirming on the floor, unable to push the handcuffs out of his mouth with his sore tongue. There were grunts and groans and he was snorting, but still the evidence that he was excited by what this pretty young nude was doing to him couldn't possibly be hidden!
And, I confess, I found this stimulating too.
Now I removed the handcuffs from his mouth, a harder thing to do than I'd anticipated. There was a little blood in the corner from where the teeth of the cuffs had caught on his mouth as I forced them out.
"Say 'thank you, my lovely slave-owner' now, Marshall," I told the helpless hunk of beefcake on the floor.
He mumbled it, but I made him say it louder, then smile while he said it. What that did for me to hear this big, brutal lustful captive confess his subordination! I felt it deep inside as though I were actually being served by a man!
Which was the next assignment I gave him. In the restraints I had on him, there was no possibility of his being able to assume a proper position. So I put him on his back and stood over him, striking him across the chest and belly with the belt and watching him rise in hungry need from my cruel ministrations.
Now I tucked my legs under his sore shoulders and forced him to stick out his sore tongue at me, sitting almost on his face, threatening to lower myself onto him and smother him if he failed to pleasure me for an instant. I parted myself with my hands to ease his assignment, and found it a joy to see his need in the mirror to one side while he was compelled to satisfy only my own wants.
I shuddered to fulfillment three times as the perspiration poured down Marshall's forehead and tears came into his eyes, tears of pain, of frustration, of wanting.
Then I changed my position and this time I was squatting over his thighs, keeping from falling backward by holding onto the hospital belt around his waist.
"Marshall," I warned him, "remember this is for my own, not your pleasure. If you do not delay your release until I permit it, everything you've suffered so far will seem like a picnic in comparison to what I'll do to you next!"
Slowly I lowered myself over that massive pylon, delighting in its carved-of-granite hardness, thrilling as much to the control I had over this victim as to the sensuous feeling of him deep within me, my prisoner in every sense of the word!
I took my time, working ever so slowly, taking forever to raise and lower myself, glorying in my power over this helpless, trussed, needful, suffering man. He epitomized every man I hated. He could suffer for the lot of them for now!
And then I quickened my pace, felt him trying desperately to help, to match my own movement with his. I knew that it was only seconds as our wildly thrashing bodies joined in a match-the-sensations bout of delight. Now I threw my head back in a delightful cry of utter fulfillment even as I felt Marshall's release.
I guessed then what it would be like to have Old Faithful as a personal bidet!
What an enormous capacity this big hulk had!
Now I was fully down over him, capturing him completely, letting our pooled emotions continue to crescendo of their own momentum.
And then I saw Gil's reflection in the mirror.
What hurt was in his eyes! What glowering hatred seemed to come across his face next! I felt a desperate situation required fantastically resourceful emergency measures.
"Quick, Gil," I ordered. "Undress completely and put your head as deeply as you can into my red satin evening gown."
He was a bird perched on a branch, ready for flight He was a panther crouching low in tall grass, ready to spring. He was a statue, a man in a catatonic state, frozen there in disappointment, disbelief, indecision.
"Satin, Gil," I said in a steady voice. "I want to see you in satin now while I'm still trembling and thrilling from this captive's surrender to me."
Gil came forward and looked at the way Marshall was trussed. "Then he didn't have anything to do with it. It was all your idea? Your decision?" he asked his voice flat.
I pointed toward the closet. Gil opened the door and saw the red satin evening gown and its matching slip hanging just inside, I heard a sob in his voice as he stripped recklessly, popping two shirt buttons in his blind haste. I saw him pull the slip and the gown over his shoulders and chest so that his head worked out of the top.
"Come, stand over him with me, Gil," I ordered, releasing the bewildered Marshall and standing, my feet on either side of him. Gil came and faced me, also straddling the prone figure of my victim. I reached forward and began stroking Gil's nipples.
His face relaxed. I saw resignation there. Then complete, abject surrender.
I reached forward and down and grabbed him, felt his hard need and directed it downward.
"Let's do this together, Gil. I want you to relieve your kidneys and I'll do-likewise."
Soon two amber streams were descending on the helpless body of Marshall. He didn't even try to roll away from it or kick with his two feet. He was as utterly defeated as was Gil.
I was in absolute charge.
Before I released him, I hypnotized Marshall once again. I planted in him instructions, whenever he heard my voice say, "Slave," to take out his handcuffs and cuff his wrists together behind his back, no matter what his location or circumstances.
With Gil watching shocked and helpless, I made Marshall get dressed still wet from us both, and I gave him back all of his possessions except those things I'd had him purchase for me. I ordered him to go back to Gimbels and snap out of it when he was at the corner there and forget everything that happened to him this day.
Gil, looking ridiculous in the red satin draped about his body, stared at me thoughtfully for a while after Marshall left. "You're a monster," he said. "I'd never have shown you all I know of hypnotism had I even suspected."
I stroked his nipples through the satin. Then I put on my printed satin blouse, nothing more. I stroked him some more. "Evil as you are, Irene Brownell," he said, almost sobbing, "I am compelled to love you."
"Of course you are, Gil," I told him. "Now go lie on your back with a pillow behind your hips. I'm ready for more fun."
His eyes were fixed on my blouse. His hands stroked my breasts through it even as my hands stroked his nipples.
We understood each other completely.
CHAPTER FIVE
AGENT
Carry a hatred as intense as mine and you find you never lack purpose. I knew where I was heading and exactly what I had to do to get there. Once I saw the reaction of my first audience to my beauty, I recognized that I had every prospect for becoming a successful entertainer.
Of course I needed an act, but now I knew hypnotism and had something on which to base it.
Call me cruel, heartless, relentless if you will, you could never call me lazy. I made it a point to catch every hypnotism show that played New York! I even went out of town to catch such great performers as Miss Pat Collins. I learned how they put an audience to work entertaining itself, how they chose the members who had responsiveness which gave them easy control and sufficient appeal to let the others in the audience
SB identify with the victims. I learned how they left their subjects feeling relaxed and refreshed and unmindful of whatever ridiculous paces they put those poor people through.
It was up to me to develop my own stage image. I knew the gratification of gorgeous evening gowns and smart hair styles. Mine was not the job of the seductress alone or I would have used a different tactic, the very short skirts, for example, or more active movement of my voluptuous body.
Mine, though, was the image of the person in absolute control of the situation. The flawless hair style, perfect complexion, impeccable silken evening gown, superb quality accessories these were my properties.
How did I finance all this? With hypnotism.
I'd go into a swanky club bar and watch the out-of-town men checking in at the adjoining hotel's registration desk. They'd come in, order a drink, strike up a conversation with me and soon be stuffing all their money into my purse on the bar.
The bartender got twenty dollars each time it happened just to forget he noticed. Once a victim confronted me, called a policeman and insisted that I had somehow caused him to give me all his money.
"Officer, this is ridiculous," I told him. "I'm just eighteen! I wouldn't think of going into a bar, let alone doing anything as awful as this."
"Aha, I have you there, young lady," the mark chuckled. "I have a witness!" The policeman, the patsy and I went into the bar together and the soft touch pointed to the bartender. "There he is officer. He saw the entire thing!"
With a concerned, solicitous look on his face, the bartender approached us. "Young lady," he said, "unless you can produce identification that shows you're past twenty-one, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave. We allow nobody under twenty-one in this particular bar."
"Shall we continue this discussion in the lobby," I asked the policeman. "I've never been in a bar before and I should hate to have to report that you brought me to one for the first time."
These eyes of mine have that sort of effect on men.
"Mister," he told the sucker, "are you satisfied yet?"
He was so red-faced and furious he could hardly speak. I waited in the lobby. Soon the policeman came out and apologized. "These conventioneers! They drag someone up to their room, invite their guests to feed them Mickey Finns and then try to get their money back when they've been rolled. Apparently whatever woman took his wad off him was one real beauty. He actually mistook you for her."
Anyway, that was one of the ways I got my money.
Another was to go into stores in distant parts of New York, places where nobody could recognize me, hypnotize the proprietor into giving me everything he possessed that I could use, and then having him handcuff himself to a standpipe or radiator or heavy piece of furniture. His would be the only fingerprints on the handcuffs. Insurance people were always suspicious of my victims because of the way I robbed them. In fact, when I used up the three pairs of handcuffs Marshall had bought me, I robbed pawn shops to get more supplies.
Sometimes, to add amusement to my little game, I'd drop my victim's pants. One thing I learned this way a secret I shared with the police was that a surprising number of men wear women's garter belts or girdles and nylons and panties under their men's clothes.
My safe deposit box soon had twenty thousand in it and I lacked nothing in the way of luxuries in my life.
But I still needed my act, the necessary polish, and an agent to get me the top bookings.
The coach I wanted was Ray Muldoon. He had everything I lacked: flawless speech, a creative flair in the preparation of patter, an ability to choreograph even a soloist's performance onstage and to inject artfully taped music to create just the effects we needed. Even lighting and color treatment were skills of which he was a consummate master.
The only trouble is that Ray Muldoon is as queer as a seven dollar bill. And I am all woman.
The scorn was in his face when I first approached him. I told him what T wanted, offered to pay generously for it, and was met by a sneer. "Listen, Brownell," he said with lofty arrogance, "I simply do not repeat, not-like women! So go find yourself some straight creep or some friendly stomping bull dyke and work with them. I'm simply too damned busy for you. Get it, Brownell? I have no time for you."
I looked at him and kept looking. Nothing. This one would be tough to handle.
"Muldoon," I asked, "how would you like to have your choice of any men in this whole world for trade?"
"Nobody's that good, Brownell," he said, looking at me thoughtfully, with new interest.
"Care to take a walk with me and point out any test case in the entire city of New York you'd like to try. On the street, in their offices, in front of their wives, at a party you name it and I'll gamble on just the one shot. But if I deliver him for you that's my complete fee. No money."
He had a really beautiful smile. I found myself wishing he were straight just for himself. But we shook hands on it.
That was my first penthouse party. We were introduced all around and I found myself the center of much masculine attention, several of the men being ones I earmarked for later study. But this time I was John Alden to Ray Muldoon's Miles Standish.
Then Ray gripped my elbow hard and I saw what he meant. "Miss Brownell," my hostess with the fat legs and the short, white-sequined dress said, "I'd like to present Marvin J. Kraus."
He stood a good six feet four. A massive gold ring on one finger. Shoulders door-wide. A huge-teethed smile. Iron gray hair. Eyes handsome and knowing Certainly the best-looking, most virile-looking man I'd ever met in my whole life. I found myself wanting to melt in his presence.
The way he looked into my eyes was the most extravagant compliment any man could pay a woman! When our hostess took him away to meet the other guests, Ray reminded me, "That's your fee to me, Brownell. Do we have a deal?"
"Just don't you welsh on it," I said. We shook hands. Mine was the firmer grip.
Ever been hunting? Remember how you had to lead the flock, squeeze the trigger at just the right time, know where the game dropped?
Ever been fishing? Recall how you had to pick just the right fly, how to land it where that lunker could strike and still keep your line from tangling m die weeds?
Then you have the general idea.
Bait? That was me. Me in a green silk jersey gown artfully draped to make every curve I possessed look like the one men sought destruction on. Me with my hair long and silken and touchable-looking, with an enormous green bow in it. saying how girlish I was. Me perfumed and painted and walking and smiling and looking with these eyes of mine, artfully made up to attract, intrigue and enslave men. Bait.
Line? Saying just the right things to search, to interest, to stir odd wants and awful needs.
Skill? Well, first it was necessary to get rid of the weeds that could interfere with good angling, in this case, our hostess wanted to take Marvy off and show him her bedroom drapes. I said, "Excuse me, dear, but I think you have something in your eye. No, don't blink. Look into my eyes. Keep looking. Looking. Looking. Your rump is getting heavy. So heavy your legs can't carry it any longer. You have to bend your knees and squat. Hold your knees with your hands. That's better. Why no wonder your rump was so heavy, you're a duck. Go on, say 'Quack, quack.' That's a good little duck. Go on, keep saying it and walk around the room that way in a duck walk until everyone here has seen what a pretty little duck you are."
She went off, her fat legs looking shorter than ever, her dress high and showing her stocking tops and her white lace panties with the dark evidence in the middle. "Quack, quack," she kept saying.
"You can be as cruel as you are beautiful," a vibrant mellow voice behind me remarked.
I turned. Marvy had seen the entire performance I thought had been more discreet than that.
"Yes," I replied. "I delight in cruelty. You wouldn't by chance be a masochist, would you?" His grin delighted me. I was almost sorry I'd shaken hands with Ray Muldoon.
"Irene Brownell, you're certainly the most fascinating woman I've ever met," he said. "Is hypnotism a hobby of yours or your business?"
"It's my livelihood. I hypnotize handsome men like you, indulge in my nymphomania, and then release them so that they never knew what they'd been through or with whom, just that they had one hell of a time. That is, unless-
"Unless I get sadistic and subject them to some imaginative tortures. That's fun I"
"I'll bet it is," he said dryly. "Do you, perchance, have me slated for anything on your agenda?"
"I've been contemplating in fact planning just that ever since we were first introduced," I confessed. (It was beginning to show in his eyes, that hungry wanting I knew so well in the men I seduced. Only this one looked like he was more-likely to seize me and take me on his own terms than submit to my taking him on mine. Caution was the watchword.)
"But I'm afraid I'll have to reject you," I continued. "I wanted something very special, something extra that you're too limited, too narrow, to be able to offer me "
"Okay, we've had our little talk," he said, his face hardening. "Now suppose you let our hostess quit acting so ducky before she hurts herself holding that position and arrange to meet me at Les Tuilleries in an hour. Then we'll look into whatever kooky thing you have in mind."
"Ray Muldoon is my escort tonight," I told him
"Then bring Ray along. Maybe I can even find someone right for him so we can double."
"No, Marvy," I insisted. "I want you both all to myself."
"And they say tenements are crowded," he intoned.
Les Tuilleries is quiet, fragrant, beautiful and elegant. I didn't know that before the night I met Marvy Kraus. Ray was beginning to show me a sort of respect that I never expected from him as we saw him advance toward us. At least he kept this date.
But I had to get them to a more private place and two rounds of drinks seemed to take forever.
In a way you hate to see perfection marred. You don't like the idea of idols having feet of clay. I had much that same feeling as I saw Marvy's elegance showing a flaw. Cold sober, he was diamond hard. Two drinks and he was slurring in his speech, his eyes failed to focus well and he developed a silly grin and a way of making clumsily boyish passes at me.
Cold sober, he would have been a strong-willed, difficult subject to hypnotize. This was the first time I learned to use liquor as an ally. I ordered two more rounds of drinks for us and somehow, with Marvy showing the effects and Ray looking the obvious lavender lad he was, I was in charge. T liked that.
In an hour we had Marvy in Ray's apartment. He wanted to sleep. I wouldn't let him, not until I'd finished what I'd started here.
"You love me, Marvy," I told my subject. "You want me so much you'll stop at absolutely nothing to please me. You'll gladly set aside your every inhibition, your every more to even be remotely close to gratifying yourself with me."
"I love you, Irene Brownell," he said slowly, thick-tongued. "I'll do anything, anything to have you."
"But I don't like just straight men, Marvy," I told him. "You'd have to prove to me that you are AC/DC before I could even begin to be interested in you. You will do that."
There was a comic look of befuddlement in his eyes that went beyond drink. "You mean you want me to like boys and then you'll like me? What's the angle?"
"Oh, several things," I said, starting to undress him. "I have no intentions of marrying you or anyone else. If I know you're a faggot, I can enjoy you and not regard you as a potential husband. Then, too, I'll have something on you that you're at least a little ashamed of; making you less-likely to talk about our little indiscretions. And I find that the sissy boys tend to be gentler than the others, while I'm anything but gentle. I like the dominant, masculine role. I actually enjoy spanking men." By now I had him down to his shorts, socks and shoes and his torso, stripped, was even more appealing than fully clad. "You do want me to spank you, don't you, Marvy?"
"Oh, sure, if that's your thing," he said. "But how come you're stripping me and not you?"
"I enjoy the feel of my silken garments against the naked bodies of men." I turned to Ray. "Come on, Ray. Strip."
I was standing behind Marvy now, kneading those powerful back muscles, working him up, getting him ready. He was quick to react and the results were a veritable Louisville slugger!
Taking each by a hand, I led them over to Ray's enormous circular bed and realized suddenly that a goodly portion of the ostensible males of the entertainment world must have furthered their careers on this big, soft, impressive arena of love.
Taking off my shoes, I jumped girlishly onto the bed and knelt in the middle. "Come on, you two, you must let me be the impressario. Marvy, you first. I want you here, to my right, lying on your side. I want to feel that manly chest of yours next to me and have my hand on that big, hard rump of yours so that I may spank it as much and as hard as I wish."
Amused and a bit woozy, he took the position I dictated and I enjoyed tickling him and looking at the adoration in his slightly out of focus eyes. Then I positioned Marvy with his feet not far from Ray's head, then moved him down so that it was his knees there. I moved them in closer, tightly against me. I put their hands on each other's bodies, guided them in a stroking movement, added my own touch wherever it would help and the man-smell circling me seemed somehow intoxicating.
I made them both open their mouths wide and suck each other's toes individually at first and then all the toes of one foot at once, with the tongue bathing them. This was getting more exciting than I had imagined it would. I was inside a ring of living, aroused male flesh. Now I brought them even closer to me and moved each down on the bed so that the tongues could have still more practice on single digit areas rather than the five-digit toes.
I kept stroking and kissing Marvy, sensing Ray's annoyance, but giving him maximum cooperation in this manner.
"Now I want to ride on your back, Marvy. Ray, you lie face down and Marvy, you get on top of him. I'll get on top of you. I positioned Marvy perfectly and then began hitting his rump vigorously. His reaction to this pretty girl in the green silk jersey dress and the sleek brown nylons spanking his pratt noisily, with cupped palms, was absolutely perfect. Groans and grunts came out of Ray as the me-stimulated Marvy made him his emotional outlet and T, in turn, was on Marvy's back, finding an astonishing number of implements to do un to him as I was making him do unto Ray.
My lipstick case was first. Then later I used the little penlite in my purse. And this was followed by a Tampax in its plastic wrapper. In the mirror, I could see Ray, his face a concerned and yet happy expression, pointed toward a dresser drawer as he watched what I was doing in the mirror. There I found an amazingly life-like dildo.
Marvy groaned with pain and, in his efforts to escape my assault assaulted Ray even more violently. The rhythm we established of pass-along proved to be a great one, for soon I was standing beside the bed manipulating the gadget in Marvy's aperture while he drove himself frantically to fulfillment in Ray.
And then he lay still, great gasps of air coming into him, each seemingly replacing an equally large gust of manhood flowing into Ray Muldoon, Ray of the angelic face, the closed eyes, the contented pain-seeker having found just the cruel, virile mate he had sought.
"Okay, Ray?" I asked. "Deal?"
"Deal," he sighed contentedly.
Then Marvy reached hack and extracted the device still in himself, withdrew it, and shoved it hard into Ray. "Work that, Irene," he told me. "Keep at it until I let you stop."
How strange to actually have a man tell me things that I must do, actually giving me direct orders!
"You wanted me to do that, and I did," he told me. "I don't know what your deal was with Ray, but evidently you delivered your part, so it must have included me. Now, dear, whether you like it or not, I'm taking you and don't try any of your hypnotism on me."
He was standing behind me while I worked the dildo in and out of Ray. When Ray reached back to ease the pressure, Marvy quite forcibly put his elbow back down under his chest.
Now Marvy tied his white handkerchief across my eyes and shoved a pair of Ray's black silk socks (I later discovered) from his drawer into my mouth so that I could use neither voice nor eyes nor my hands holding a shining object to hypnotize him.
like an auto mechanic sliding under a car in order to work on its undercarriage, he slid under me, then, putting his head and hands beneath my skirt, lying on his back, knowing exactly what to do to make me writhe and twitch, thrill and tremble in the glory of his touch!
While I tried to maintain command of this situation, I knew I had lost the initiative. Ray had been pleasured and I was seeing to it that this continued the way he liked it. Marvy had fulfilled Ray as I'd instructed, now he was satisfying himself by super-satisfying me! He wrung me out, drained me of emotional response and physical capacity to feel anything but those strong, thick fingers of his and that knowing geographic tongue with its velvety patterns of pleasure stroking and manipulating me to fruition what must have been a hundred times!
When, exhausted, I fell onto the bed on my back, Marvy told Ray to kneel with his knees in my armpits, his chest over my face while he knelt immediately behind Ray, his tongue soothing the place made sore by the dildo.
Soon he asked me if I'd ever swallowed a candle and then he guided Ray into helping me practice that while he pulled off the pretty silken panties I'd so carefully chosen for just this occasion.
I was certain that those two candles would soon touch!
What incredible glories a powerful man can effect within a woman! What joyous magnificence! What precious pain!
Forgetting all about my clothes, I was deliciously enmeshed with two powerful males in a menage a trots more imaginative than anything I could have dared envision in my most torso-tossing of dreams! Two such men, both handsome, both fascinating in their versatility. And me their captor and their captive, their victim and their victor, their objective and their motivator.
Many, many times have I mated with men. Never had I done so more memorably.
Someone had undressed me while I lay sleeping. I was wearing a pair of Ray's black silk pajamas when I awoke with my head on Marvy's chest, one of his strong hands cupping my breast. And, opening my eyes wider, I saw Ray's head facing mine, on Marvy's other shoulder, and a hand similarly resting on his breast.
He winked at me and smiled. I winked back. Together we reached down and began toying with Marvy, astonished that he could be stimulated so quickly after the rigorous night we'd spent together.
Now we began playing a funny game. He put two fingers around the base as boys do in determining which team is to bat first. I put my two fingers against his. Then he put two against mine. We continued this more times than seemed reasonable until we got to the end and I couldn't get both of my fingers on the bat.
Grinning, Ray scooted down deep under the covers, kneeling, across Marvy, looking down into his handsome face, my breasts ripe fruit over his head, watching the smile playing on the corners of his strong mouth, watching him awaken, watching his eyes open to be locked into mine.
He awoke slowly. Some people are like that. They don't have all their personality force functioning at once. It opens during their wake-up period like a folded morning glory in the morning's gradually emergent sun.
By the time he awoke, he was completely under my hypnotic spell and Ray was his mistress in his mind, a beautiful girl who adored him and for whom he lusted.
It was a painful price to pay, losing that man to Ray, but I'd made my deal. Ray told me just what he wanted from Marvy. I delivered it to him in meticulous detail. That night he paraded his conquest through several of the gay bars, to the envy of many of the denizens thereof.
By the end of that week, I'd lost all interest in Marvy and he in most girls, although I was somehow an exception. Thoughts planted under hypnosis can remain part of the subject forever.
How Ray made me work! Diction. Speech. My phrasing became cultivated, my projection powerful so that I could fill a vast auditorium without seeming to raise my voice. I learned to walk with a special sinuous grace that gave me a deadly appeal and to rise from a seated position slowly, smoothly, like a swan on the water.
I learned lines he wrote for me, clever throw-away lines, all perfectly in keeping with the act we were devising. Taste, authority, the ability to capitalize on the audience's desire to be taken in every sense of the word these were among his contributions to my act.
He sensed that I used my hypnotic powers for criminal means to finance costumes and luxuries beyond anything my earnings could cover and that meant absolutely nothing to an immoralist like Ray. I'd given him the one thing he wanted and now he was delivering his end of the deal.
Later it developed into something far greater than that. He took pride in assembling an interesting act. Mine was destined to be the greatest with which he had ever become associated!
I wanted to get an agent right away. He told me not to. We broke in the act in coffee houses frequented by hippies and in small night clubs populated by noisy drunks, in cafe theatres where it was necessary to perform to the music of soup-eating and in famous night clubs where the big band pulled in the visiting firemen.
But it acquired flair and polish, and I picked up technique and assurance and then we started getting write-ups in the publications known to show business as "the trades."
"Now we're ready to go looking for an agent," Ray told me. "Unfortunately, the best one for your purposes is a tough old boy, as hard and unscrupulous as they come. He's Zev O'Connor. He has a little office in the Transcendor Building. But this one's almost impossible to get to even talk to you and he never comes to catch a show."
"Ray," I told him, "we'd never have gotten this far if I was squeamish about doing anything necessary to accomplish my goals. What's the best way to pitch my act to him?"
"Why make him see it, of course," Ray said. "But that's impossible!"
"Want to bet me Marvy that I can deliver him to my date next week at Club Lascivious?"
"No, I don't. But that's the way to do it"
And I had my next assignment.
It was not as easy as I thought. The place was inaccessible. Elevator operators wouldn't let the door open without his permission and he had a control on the inside, so you couldn't bribe the operator if you tried.
The building directory listed Zev O'Connor on the 13th floor, but I didn't even see the number 13 on the elevator console. Nor were these manually operated by passengers. The controls were complex, needing an operator to man them.
I found where some of the acts he booked were performing and struck up the acquaintance of some of the talent he represented. No, they didn't actually know him. Someone had seen their act, reported it favorably to him, and they had received a phone call asking if they wished him to represent them for a guaranteed fee, usually at least twice what they were earning. Always they accepted. Then came his criticisms. Costume changes were made. Acts were contracted, lengthened, modified. But they never saw him. Anything they were to sign came in the mails and they received their checks from him.
I talked to some of the club owners for whom he booked acts. No, they didn't know him. All they knew was that he was a square shooter; he never sold them an act to please himself or the performer alone. Invariably the act was good enough to help business in a most tangible way.
This was getting more and more maddening. With no 13th floor door accessible to me, I had to use resourcefulness such I'd never used before. I got off the elevator on the 14th floor of the Transcendor Building and strolled the short, wide corridor. Obviously there was more space on the 13 th floor than just Zev O'Connor's office. Buildings have uniform vertical space in them. The 13 th floor had to be a good two hundred feet by a hundred, far too much space for the little office Ray had described. That was the size of the 14th floor. I looked at the various tenants there, a jewelry designer and manufacturer, a dressmaker and milliner, the local sales office for some West Coast and Chicago magazines and an industrial tool sales firm. Perhaps one of these could prove helpful.
I looked out the window to see the practicality of gaining access to the offices below through, say, a rope ladder or perhaps a helicopter, but the windows were set in deeply, too much so for a helicopter, and they were flush with the walls, affording no purchase for the rope ladder and louvered to minimize the possibility of entry. There wouldn't even be a window washer under these circumstances who could tell me what went on in Zev O'Connor's that would make him so secretive.
I chose the industrial tool outfit.
The man inside was a hard-faced fellow who looked like he could handle himself in any sort of trouble, like someone who had learned the tool business from an apprenticeship, from making them, and had kept his information updated through constant personal and school study.
"Lady," he greeted me, "I'm very sorry, but this outfit deals only with tool customers, manufacturers and fabricators of metal products. I buy nothing and, obviously, you buy nothing. So please, whatever you came here for, get it or do it somewhere else."
That's one of my very favorite kinds of people. They have hard faces. They look directly at you when they talk. When they make statements like that, they back it up by a hard, prolonged facing of you, sure that you'll wilt and back away in a minute, or stammer some sort of apology, or maybe break into tears. At first they or at least he--could refuse to look away; later he was unable to, and I could see the fear entering his glance and then the submission as I trained my eyes on him with the intensity of some of the products I soon learned he was selling.
"You will now give me a quick demonstration of your newer and more sophisticated industrial tools," I commanded. It was as though a store dummy were going through the motions with a recording mounted inside him.
He showed me devices for melting tiny, high-tolerance holes in the toughest of today's alloys, how industry is using laser beams to cut metal, how saws of every shape can cut out an incredible variety of materials.
I selected a spot I figured was safe. Under my hypnotic direction, he moved a wide counter, then drilled a small hole through the terazzo, wood, concrete and steel of the floor, employing a vacuuming attachment to keep any of the dust from falling down below.
This was fascinating. For on the 13 th floor of The Transcendor Building the ceiling was all brilliantly lit with ultra-violet lighting. Because of its brightness, none of the dozen naked people I could see through the aperture my victim had made could see me.
Zev O'Connor was running a nudist colony right in the heart of downtown New York.
How strange it was to see those bodies, all tanned and healthy-looking, completely nude and not involved in any sort of orgy! Middle-aged men and women with anything but beach-ornamenting-type figures were there and also some who would have done credit to any of the nudist magazines.
As far as I could tell, all ages were represented here from around eighteen up. But my vision was limited. I knew that when we put the counter back in place, this one opening in the floor wouldn't show, and yet I couldn't hope to have an opening large enough to gel down through with those blazing lights right at this spot.
We tried several other concealable locations and had the same results. We were over their lighting area in this office.
Diagonally across from the industrial tool office was the dressmaker's and milliner's. I explained to the beautiful little gray-haired woman with the twinkling eyes exactly why I was there and what I had done so far. To demonstrate the hypnotic spell I had over the rugged tool salesman, I made him ask her if he could try on a few of her hats.
"Can you make him do anything?" she asked me, smiling and curious.
"Anything that's not totally beyond the limits of his physical capacity and moral beliefs," I replied.
"And what do you want from me?"
"To make a hole in your office so that I can get down into the nudist colony there and cause some trouble."
"And, for that, could you, uh,-well it's been seven years since my husband died and a woman needs some sort of "
"Say no more," I told her. "Will this one do?"
"Do? He'd be great! He looks like the sort who would be all man and would let there be no nonsense about moving right in there and taking a woman."
We had the floor opened with a two-foot square in minutes thanks to the sophisticated tools of modern industry and, to my delight, it was over one of the 13th floor washrooms.
The dressmaker took several yards of strong muslin, knotted it at eight-inch intervals so it would be easy to climb down, and anchored one end securely to the pipe rack base of a stand in her workroom.
Then I commanded my victim to strip, assured him that this was Anita Ekberg, the star he confessed he would most prefer to rape of all the women in the world, watched him grab the little dressmaker and undress her with fast-moving fingers, and force her onto her couch. He tore off his own clothes, holding her down with one knee, and he was ready!
I'd seen movies of jousts in which knights held their lances pointing directly at the target and rode unswervingly, driving the lance with deadly aim.
Well, this time I saw it again. And the little dressmaker squealed with delight as this rugged stud showed that chivalry wasn't dead.
Then I let myself down the makeshift rope onto the 13th floor.
I didn't know whether this was the men's or women's lavatory when I got down there, since I was inside a booth and couldn't check for the types of urinals, but in just a minute I could tell by the nature of the graffito on the walls.
This was strictly for men:
I stood on the stool, crouched, and saw the door swinging open and a broad-shouldered, well-muscled man was hunched there, relieving himself.
"Don't shake it too many times," I said in my most feminine voice.
He looked up startled and saw my head above the booth. "Hey, girls aren't allowed in here," he said. "What if Mr. O'Connor found out about this?"
"Well, if you insist on smuggling your girl friends in here like you did me, you'll just have to pay the consequences," I told him.
His was the perfect face for what I needed. A puzzled expression, heavy, low brow, bulldog jaw, a body that had all the development and a mind that was undernourished. Muscled he was! Superbly. But what fun it was to see that pea-brain wrestling with the problem I had just given him.
"You my girl friend?" he asked. "Hey, I don't even know your name. How can you be my girl friend?"
"You're just forgetful, aren't you, George?" I explored.
"My name isn't George," he said triumphantly. "See, you're the forgetful one! My name's Hector. What's yours?"
"Petunia," I said. I came out of the booth and his eyes popped and his mouth dropped open. "Hey, you got clothes on! You know what Mr. O'Connor does whenever he finds anyone here with clothes on, don't you?"
"No."
"He strips and spanks them. I got to report you. Maybe he'll even let me spank you." The ugly grin on his face made me want to punish him and is there anything more equivalent to being dressed in a nudist colony than being undressed outside one?
This one was easy. Under hypnosis (I'd ordered him into the booth so we'd not be detected by anyone else corning in) he told me all about the place, about Zev O'Connor's nudist colony, the way they curtailed people's sexual appetites by putting certain deadening chemicals into the meals served, the pictures Zev took of the people there and how he published some magazines showing them with their faces retouched.
He told of people trapped there for months while business associates took over contracts, stocks declined in value, times for exercising options expired, and how Zev charged fees for keeping them in this place, literally prisoners.
How did this limited mentality understand what O'Connor was doing? He didn't really. That's why Zev was able to discuss them so freely in front of him. But, under hypnosis, Hector had something close to total recall. He could tell me the words. I supplied the meaning.
Occasionally someone would come in. I was lucky the first time; the muslin rope went unnoticed. Then I stood on Hector's shoulders and poked it into the opening above. The darkened area wasn't-likely to show the hole in the ceiling that plainly. We escaped detection by my subjecting Hector to instant sleep as soon as someone started to come in the door.
Yet, despite what he said about the saltpeter in the foods, it was evident that Hector wasn't affected. Each time I touched him, or he smelled my perfume, or my hair brushed him, he was ready! His explanation: the cook left it out of the food prepared for Zev, a man named Ishmael and Hector. The latter two were having affairs with the cook. Usually at the same time. "Ishmael and I are friends," Hector explained in his simple way. "We toss a coin. Heads the cook faces me. Tails she backs toward me. We have fun either way. Mr. O'Connor doesn't know we can. He thinks he's the only one who can. The women aren't affected by this the way the men are. He has the women pretty much to himself. If he found out about Ishmael and me, he'd probably fire us, or maybe kill us, or at least feed us that stuff that spoils your interest in women and keep us here as prisoners, naked all the time, the way he has those others."
He was just about to tell me about the show business, booking agent aspect of Zev O'Connor's enterprises when someone came in calling his name. I had to bring him out of his sleep to let him do it, but he grunted and said, "Be right out, Ishmael."
We'd been there a long time. I looked up and saw my dressmaker friend. "Hey," she called down, "that's a cute one too. You using him?"
"No, not just at this moment, dear," I said.
Hector was still under hypnosis. "Who's the woman you would most want to go to bed with of all the women in this whole world, Hector?" I asked him.
"Liz," he replied.
"That's wonderful," I exulted. "She's right upstairs. But you must do everything she tells you to do if she goes to bed with you, otherwise she'll never let you see her again."
He scrambled to the top of the booths and through the opening with the speed of a monkey and it was impressive the way he scraped his shoulders putting them through the two foot square cut in the floor diagonally!
I undressed quickly and the dressmaker lowered the muslin rope, hauled up my clothes, then set a sheet of white paper that matched the ceiling fairly well over the opening.
Now Ishmael was in there again. "Coming Hector?" he asked. "Mr. O'Connor's getting mad at you. He says he'll give you an oil of wintergreen enema if you're not there in two minutes."
"Coming," I called out. I emerged and there was a physical giant that looked like a refugee from a Mae West traveling show. What super-developed muscles he had! His body was all tanned and oiled and his hair was longish and curly. He had regular features and interesting light brown eyes with a dark brown ring around the iris. "I just had the craziest dream, Ishmael," I told him. "I dreamed that some woman came into the booth and said: 'Let's exchange bodies.' I told her that was both ridiculous and impossible. She was beautiful. And she just laughed. Then I woke up and you were calling me."
I deliberately avoided looking into the mirror and stared into his eyes while his jaw dropped open. He shook his head. I studied that great build of his and wondered if, aroused, he'd be in proportion; if so, this was worth researching.
"Do you mean to say," he croaked, his face pale, "that you're Hector?"
"Of course, you creep. Now come on, I got to see O'Connor before he busts me."
"But you can't! "
"What do you mean I can't? You're the one who said I had to."
"But you're not yourself..."
"Let's go have another party with the cook and I'll show you," I insisted while his eyes banked off my breasts and down, then up again and his glance went into the corner pocket. "Only this time I'll just take heads and you can have tails."
"Maybe we had better go see O'Connor," Ishmael decided.
Walking with as much of a masculine roll as I could affect in view of my particular build, I went with Ishmael out the door. There were many men there looking at me with mild curiosity and I noticed some of the women seemed to look at me enviously, but none projected an image of being concerned about the fact that I was a stranger who suddenly appeared in their midst
"Mr. O'Connor's going to be surprised when he sees you, Hector," Ishmael said timidly.
"Why?" I asked.
"What you said about that girl. Did she have big, green eyes?"
"She sure did. The biggest, greenest, most beautiful eyes I ever saw in my life."
"And breasts," Ishmael persisted. "Were her breasts very shapely, firm, high and large?"
"You said it," I enthused. "I was mighty glad the cook left that anti-Spanish Fly stuff out of our food. If she'd not just been a dream, I'd have wanted her even more than we do the cook."
"Hector," Ishmael said gently. "I have something to tell you."
I made my eyes as large and innocent and my face as blank as I could. "What is it, Ishmael?"
"You had no dream, Hector," he insisted. "It was real."
"Real?" I scoffed. "Why if it were real, I'd have women's breasts here "I suddenly acted as though I had discovered my breasts. He looked at me, triumphant, while I registered surprise. Then I said, "But I wouldn't have this down here "I looked down and affected shock, surprise and dismay. "Why it's gone! She took it! And look at all she left me in its place!"
"Why this is terrible," I said. "What will I do? You know, Ishmael, I'll bet that Mr. O'Connor doesn't believe my story."
"I can't understand why not," Ishmael intoned. "I do."
I clapped him on the shoulder and said in the deepest voice I could muster, "Thanks Ishmael. You're a great friend."
Now we'd crossed the room and we had come to a heavy oak door that ran from floor to ceiling with enormous wrought iron hardware adorning it. It seemed something from a medieval castle.
On the outside was a sign: "Zev O'Connor, Camp Director."
Ishmael knocked. "That you, Hector?" a voice called.
Fortunately, shocked as he was at my transformation, Ishmael said, "Yes, Mr. O'Connor."
"Then come in," O'Connor's rasping voice commanded. "What took you so long? Why did I have to send Ishmael after you?"
"He was sleeping," Ishmael said. "Lots of times I've fallen asleep on the stool waiting for one. Only he had a dream and now he's not him any more."
The gray-haired, balding little man with the tanned body and the aura of complete authority looked up then from the desk where he'd been writing. His gray eyes seemed blank at first, then he snapped his head back and forth quickly, as though to reset their focus.
"Who are you, young lady?" he asked. This man was as sharp as they came. I'd guess him to be in his mid-fifties, but a real physical culture buff. His chest was deep, his stomach flat and his jaw-line firm.
"Hector," Ishmael insisted. "Honest! This girl came in there and did something to exchange bodies with him. I know, because he or she or maybe it knows some things only Hector and I know."
Ishmael left. We stared steadily at each other for a full minute. I broke the silence. "Like?"
"Not bad," he replied. "Dangerous, though. Yet interesting."
"Then let's," I said.
He wasn't very tall. That wasn't important. This was a man! I took his hand and we walked together over to the couch. There was no question about who took what position. I was on my back like a turned-over turtle with one quick flip of his wrist and he was on top of me.
His nose nuzzled me, nuzzled my breasts and he kissed my throat and soon our mouths seemed to want to integrate inseparably. I felt his powerful, hungry need and his hand snaking down to check mine. It was there. No question about it. That body of Hector's alone in a booth with me for so long; that build of Ishmael's so close and wanting and desirable. They'd primed me. But this one had everything! Mind and build, capacity and technique all combined!
The hell with preliminaries, I figured.
I reached down for him and he for me and we didn't let our hands get into each other's way! How smoothly, how quickly he sheathed his sword! How superbly it fit its scabbard! We two weren't strangers who had just met. We were a pair of devil-lovers, meant to be joined by forces that neither of us suspected existed; a unit that had simply never been unified before.
Now I found myself arching higher, strong and ready and bending his rod like a fisherman's with an enormous trophy on the end. He caught the movement and the thrust became a great arc, a rainbow over which he rode, finding the arch in my cathedral, letting his royal sceptre trace its sensitive surface, bringing a special majesty and grandeur to it all. I froze in mid-motion, a dazzle of delight, a fountain of jewels frozen at its cresting.
Glorious emotions coursed through my being while he, expert and artist, maintained the superlative pressure exactly in place, maintained it there with unwavering strength while spasms of splendor shook my entire person, gave me fulfillment unsurpassed!
Now gradually I lowered my torso to where I could lie fully on the couch and he reared back on his heels, inching toward me, bringing his hard-salami-like weapon to where its head was barely caught within my being, just the tip the inmate.
I contracted my muscles, felt the pressure exactly where it belonged as we lay still and I stroked him, unmoving, started that special look in his gray eyes that let, me know ecstasy in the taking and the giving, in the granting and the seeking.
Now his handsome eyes widened in an awareness that he could no longer restrain the meeting of his destiny. A fierce forward thrust gave me a momentary fear that I'd be torn asunder, but he was still my captive when the great earthquakes shook through his entire nervous system and I felt as though a fireman had brought his big, hard nozzle to bear on my being, had housed it perfectly and then had turned on the full, powerful stream.
We locked and trembled, thrilled and joined in a special merger that could know no peer! All of our beings, both of us, shook from the glorious wonder of it all. My heart was pounding and I felt his matching it in its speed and power.
And then we were quiet, together, on our sides, facing each other, arms around each other, hands cupping heads and forcing mouths together in a strange pledge of belonging such as two utterly immoral people rarely if ever can know.
For fully five minutes our mouths screwed in against each other, tongues touching, lips hard and sore in their hungry seeking of appeasement. And our beings throbbed and juices of passion flowed and delight was ours. Utterly. Completely.
Maybe it was just fifteen minutes later; maybe an hour. But then we were smiling at each other. "Dear," he said, "I must confess: I really don't believe you're Hector."
"Darn," I replied. "I tried to fool you. How'd you guess?"
Now the warning system that lies deeply within all who live dangerously began to sound within me. I noticed his well-muscled body, tensing, preparing for a sudden surprise move and I forced myself to seem relaxed and unaware.
"Does the phrase apply, Zev? 'When I'm hard I'm soft. When I'm soft, I'm hard'? "
It took him off-balance. I caught his wrist that held the handcuffs he'd snaked out from behind the back of the couch and slapped it back hard against the wall. The handcuffs clattered to the floor.
His leg came back to drive his knee into the site of so much recent pleasure. That made him vulnerable. It was just a short drive of my own knee, but I hit the mark and his face contorted with pain. Now I was off the couch and there we were, two naked adversaries, only he was hurting. I was not.
He came off the couch roaring like a bull and tried to charge me despite the pain in his every step. I moved slightly aside, let his head get past me and his arms reach around my lower body to bring me down in a charging tackle.
Then I caught him fully on the chin with a hard-driven elbow. His head went forward, struck the corner of the desk, and he was unconscious.
In an instant I had his hands cuffed behind his back and he was helpless on the floor.
He hadn't locked the desk. It was interesting going through it.
What a complex series of rackets this fellow was running!
The nudist thing, to keep people out of the way, at fees ranging from one to ten thousand. To make others feel they belonged, that their health was assured, that their loneliness was ended. To provide material for two magazines which had surprisingly large circulation; health publications, ostensibly, but it didn't hurt circulation one bit nor keep the price down any at all that the only retouching on the pictures was on the faces of the subjects!
But there were more activities: blackmail for a hundred different things, seduction for his own hobby, a wildly diversified complex of goings-on. He owned the Transcendor Building; that's what gave him such complete control of this floor.
Yet the one absolutely clean end of his operation was the front he maintained: there wasn't a single thing shady about his entertainment bookings. Prices were fair. Quality was excellent. If the act was good, it made it; if it were poor, nothing in the world could get him to book it. Nobody failed to get their pay. When a night club owner didn't meet his payroll, he was soon persuaded by the loss of first his mistress to the nudist colony, then his own freedom there and finally a visit to what was noted on the records as "Hades" until he came through with the missing money.
I found all this perfectly fascinating, He was just lying on the floor when I came around the desk to check on him after going all through the desk. He was no longer unconscious. Just lying there.
"Zev O'Connor," I told him, "you're the most fascinating man I've ever met in all my life. I just hate the thought of having to expose all these things you've been up to; I'd rather feel I was a part of it all."
No newly trapped wild animal could show more fury, more cold, deadly hatred, than was in his eyes at that moment. He said absolutely nothing. I knew this man too well already to think he'd betray whatever warning system, whatever hidden weapons he had concealed in the office, by looking in their direction before he used his manacled fingers or his feet or his head to get at them. I watched him with the same objective, unmoving glance that he used on me. I saw him taking little twitching movements toward the desk.
That's when I stood him up on his feet, carefully holding him by the side so that his groping fingers couldn't catch and hold or hurt me.
"Would you settle for my simply disappearing from here, my going back into the person of Hector, taking nothing with me, no evidence, not even memories of what I now know about you?" I asked.
Something happened to his face then. It actually looked puzzled. "Why would you do that?" he asked in turn. "How do you know I'll not track you down whoever, wherever, whatever you may be and simply kill you to insure your silence?"
"I don't," I told him. "But I believe that you have at least an interesting vein of honesty and decency in you because I am a performer."
"I know every worth-while performer in this business," he said. "Bum acts I do nothing for. Good ones don't need all this risk and danger and trouble you've taken to get my support. I have my staff people catching all the good talent spots."
I sensed that he was talking much more to himself about the logic of what we'd gone through together than he was to me.
"And is it possible that they missed one?" I inquired.
"But not probable," he said. The tone let me know I was going to win this. It was a glorious feeling of triumph.
"Then here's all you need to do for me to disappear unless we agree we should get together, Zev," I told him. "I open next Monday at Club Lascivious at 8:30. Be there and stay through the entire performance. Be my agent if I'm good enough for it. Forget it and forget me and I'll never bother you again nor you me if I'm not"
Now I saw something else in his face: respect. "The keys to these handcuffs are in my upper right hand drawer," he said. If I'd been suspicious or had taken them out for him to work himself loose as best he could or if I'd checked the place for weapons he could have brought out, I know that the probability of my accomplishing my mission or even getting out of there alive would have been lessoned. But all I did was take out the keys and unlock the handcuffs, then hand keys and cuffs to him.
He took them in his left hand. We shook hands with our right hands.
"If that act is worth a damn," Zev O'Connor said, "you and I should have more little parties like that last one. It was a beaut!"
"I loved it," I said, most honestly, "and more of the same would be my pleasure."
He didn't follow me out the door, didn't ask my name or how I got in, didn't ask the nature of my act, Somehow it was a point of honor with him to trust me as I had trusted him. I respected him, crook though I knew him to be, for that.
When I left the office, Ishmael was standing some distance away with a very tall, buxom woman with brilliant blonde hair. "See?" I heard him say. "That's what happened to Hector."
I went over to them and patted the cook on the rump. "Next time we have a party, I get heads," I said, winking.
Her big, mascaraed eyes widened. She peered deeply into mine and said, "But you don't look at all like you, Hector. Whatever happened to you?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "This girl with the big green eyes came into the John while I was there and next thing I knew Ishmael was telling me that we'd switched bodies. Now, much as my mind tells me I want to have a party with you, I think I could do better with Ishmael here." We had walked into the kitchen as we were talking and I groped for Ishmael's manhood.
"Hey, get away from me, you!" he protested indignantly. "I ain't no queer."
"Would you like me if I weren't Hector and were just a girl who looks like me?" I asked.
"Man or whatever you are would I ever!" he exclaimed enthusiastically.
I caught the deadly glint in the cook's eye then and said, "Looks like you get the regular cool-it food rations, Ishmael."
"Oh, not that," he said seriously. "I was only kidding Cookie. You're my only girl, really."
Now another idea struck me. "If I were able to get an aphrodisiac in here for you instead of that stuff you use in the food, how long do you think it'd take for this whole gang to work up into the world's wildest orgy?" I asked the cook.
"We could make it in three days if I quit putting anything in for that long and you got me the right stuff on the third," she said with the authority of an expert.
"Let me know that you've quit spiking their food with that no-sex stuff next time I see you and we'll have some fun," I told her.
She looked around the room at those masses of men's torsos and licked her lips. "Can you make it back here in three days?" she asked.
"I don't know for sure," I replied, "but offhand I'd say I'll not be back before next Tuesday at the earliest."
It didn't shock either of them when I walked into the men's lavatory. I had to take the core out of a toilet paper roll to have something to throw up through the paper covering of my entryway.
The dressmaker pulled the paper away and looked down, her hair disheveled, a delighted grin on her face. The muslin rope came down. I clambered up it. There was Hector, utterly exhausted, a smile of serenity on his face as he slept. "Liz, it was just wonderful," he sighed in his sleep.
I sprayed some of my perfume on him, touched up his lips with my lipstick, stroked his lashes with a mascara wand and, as a final touch, put my earrings on him. Then I ordered him to climb down the rope, pulled it up, and brought him out of his hypnosis.
We set the plug that had been cut away back into the ceiling and it fit remarkably well.
While I dressed, my new friend told me that the machinery salesman had taken his equipment back into the office and set everything up in its original place. He'd even emptied the vacuum chambers and cleaned the teeth. No evidence of how we'd made our entry downstairs would be readily located.
"I never had so much fun in all my life," she told me.
Thinking bark on that magnificent mating with Zev O'Connor, I agreed, "It seems we had the perfect evening all around."
Then I told her only about my encounter with Hector and Ishmael downstairs. Both of us were in tears from our laughter.
"Now the cook will feel she's a Lesbian whenever Hector approaches her," she exclaimed.
I walked down the stairs to the 10th floor before ringing for the elevator.
As I left the building, I saw a man there with a rugged-looking brown tweed jacket on. He was a balding, well-muscled man with gray hair. His eyes matched the color of his hair. There was a smile lurking behind them.
He held the door open for me. "Monday, Zev," I said solemnly.
"Monday," he replied.
CHAPTER SIX
TRYOUT
Movies and personal experience have acquainted most of the public with the excitement of a theatrical production. The play, be it a Broadway blockbuster or a little theatre timid venture, has its tensions and excitement stemming from the interplay of conflicts between writer and producer and director, the concern of a star about forgetting her part, the problems of advance ticket sale and the social message of the thing attempting to get born that night.
They're known. But not the performer shaping up the solo act. That's far lonelier. While there may be others backing up the performer's play, lighting engineers, musicians, directors, the burden is entirely his. In all my life, I never felt more alone than I did as I went in through the back entrance of Club Lascivious
No venerable, grizzled doorman was here. Instead there was a sharp-looking young man with sideburns that looked like raised earmuffs, a cigarette permanently glued to his lower lip and trousers so tight they looked painted on. I never spoke to him, nor he to me, ever. He stepped aside when he saw me coming, moved in if anyone was coming along behind me. Somehow they simply didn't get in unless I gave him a nod approving them.
Ray, ever the professional, was there. He had my music ready and had checked the sound system all through the club to make certain that the right eerie, mysterious, alluring quality was imparted to the place. Expert lighting engineer that he was, he'd wired controls not just for the stage lights but also for the entire club so that, if we wanted, we could bathe anyone in the place with a sickly, bright green spotlight that made them look as though they'd just arisen from the dead, or a startlingly vivid red-orange color that would make it seem we knew exactly where they went after they died! He had a chalk white effect from bright spots through a scrim that was a miracle of lighting genius, and, for me, he had a luminous sort of lighting that gave the effect of delicate candlelight during preliminary and the gentler portions of my act, but gave me a strange yellow-green intensity that approached ferocity when a subject was under hypnosis and I was conducting some of my more imaginative experiments with him.
There was an enormous bouquet of flowers there from Marvy Kraus and a sweet bud vase with tea roses in it from Ray, but the one that puzzled me most was the giant horseshoe of flowers that was being brought in as I exclaimed in nervous delight over the first two. The card read: "From your first and most devoted slave gal." Try as I might I couldn't figure who sent it since men were my victims. Then I noticed the tiny, almost illegible comma after the word "slave." And the final word then was the initials of someone reduced from capital to small letter initials, gilbert a. lester. Knowing that he still loved me after my betrayal, humiliation and assuming command of him gave me a grim sort of satisfaction. So the fools not only took their lumps from me; they came back for more. Well, a certain satin fetishist of my acquaintance could well continue to prove useful. Why not?
I called. His answering service said he'd be out for the evening. Probably in the audience to catch my act.
Now a huge bowl of fruit was brought into the dressing room. The card on it was attached by a wire that seemed to run deeply into a grapefruit in the center of the bowl. Don't ask me what instinct warned me. I couldn't possibly define it. But when Mel was about to yank on the wire to pull the card loose, I stopped him. "Mel, that's some sort of booby trap. Don't pull that wire."
We took it into the alley, tied a string loosely around the card and then, around the corner from the basket of fruit we yanked on the string, pulling the grapefruit out and spilling the fruit into the alley.
The doorman solemnly lipped his cigarette and watched from inside the glass door. We felt a little ridiculous seeing the spilled fruit, the lack of any explosion. Then I noticed that some twigs near the grapefruit were smoking. A paper bag seemed to be pitted and the pitting spread. A few leaves seemed to be changing from solids to liquids.
From a distance, Ray lobbed a rock at the grapefruit and a fountain of spray came from it in many directions and, wherever the liquid struck, so did destruction!
"Acid!" Ray exclaimed. "Somebody down here hates you!"
I assured him I'd be all right for a while, asked him to get a description of whoever it was that brought the fruit, which had come back from one of the ushers from out front. Also I asked him to buy me several grapefruits.
He returned in just a few minutes with the bag of yellow citrus and the information: "Big guy, tough faced. Walked easy for his size. Looked like a policeman or something."
It had to Marshall Grogan. But I couldn't picture him using anything as vicarious as acid to do damage to me; if he wanted to get even with me for the way I'd handcuffed him and used his own brass knuckles on him, he'd be more direct. No, once again he was acting either as an agent for the fat man I'd gotten to sign the release of partnership or for the thin Karl Torrence whose fee I'd forced to double. The answer would be whichever was in the audience.
The pressures, the tensions and the attempted marring of my features and costumes didn't build up within me and cause me to be frightened; rather I was hard, cool and cruel, a comfortable state for me.
"Ray, just one thing," I said when we returned to my dressing room, "where are my costumes?"
"In the next room," he said. "Mrs. Kelley took them."
"Mrs. Kelley?" I asked, feeling as stupid as I must have looked.
"Didn't Zev O'Connor tell you he was sending you his top dresser for tonight's performance?" Ray asked.
"All right. Muldoon," I said. "You've been around show business a lot longer than I have. What's a dresser? And who's this Kelley? And shouldn't I know all the people involved with whatever I'm doing?"
"Better save your temperament for the audience," Ray told me, every inch the director. "Now listen: First, a dresser is an experienced and competent person who works backstage only for the individual performer, usually the star, keeping costumes in order, helping with changes, having new costume details ready when needed, able to make a quick repair or to improvise or substitute whenever it is necessary. An experienced dresser can contribute greatly to the success of an artist. Mrs. Kelley has worked for Zev's top stars for years, usually personalities the whole world knows, not any newcomers like you.
"Second, dressers are usually not permanently attached to the artist, although a few have their regular ones; usually they're employed by the theatre or work just their city during tryouts."
Just then a fat, smiling woman with a fat brown bun hairdo came walking toward us, holding my costumes over her outstretched arms as though she were a ring-bearer at my wedding.
"Hello, Victoria," she said. "I was hoping that you'd have the figure to do justice to these costumes. Both you and they are perfect!"
"Looks like you're in the wrong pew, Kelley," I said, playing it deliberately hard to conceal my disappointment that she'd been assigned to someone named Victoria instead of Irene Brownell.
"I'd just like to see anyone else do the things for these costumes that you can do, Victoria," she said stubbornly. "Show me someone who can and I'll move to their pew."
"Oh, the costumes are mine all right," I said. "But my name is Irene Brownell, not Vic "
"Used to be Irene Brownell," Mrs. Kelley corrected me. "Zev O'Connor says that if he takes your act he'll have you billed as Victoria. Puts the audience in the right frame of mind and gives you the right image."
"To be compared to that dowdy old queen?" I said, my voice getting shriller.
"To be identified with the feminine word for victor, victory, the person who vanquishes her opponents," Ray cut in. "That's both brilliant and appropriate. O'Connor must know you better than you suspected."
Yes, I liked it. And from then on that was my professional name.
Victoria. The Victor. I held my head a little higher with that new identity. Now to earn it with a splendid performance!
Come, take your seat in the audience. This show will soon go on and I don't want you to miss one bit of it, wherever the action is taking place.
Someone has decided I deserve a great debut, for reservations aren't available for more than a week. Column items are in the papers about the Mysterious Victoria, sensational hypnotist from nobody knows where. It had to have Zev O'Connors's touch for he was the only one who knew that was going to be my name before tonight, as far as I could tell. And yet, if this performance flopped, he'd scuttle my career in an instant. This was the one perfectly clean bit of his background and character and he treasured that cleanliness fiercely!
Now an Alexander Scourby sort of voice, rich and eloquent, filled with the portent of the moment, proclaimed over the quality casette tapes feeding into the public address system:
"Ladies and gentlemen, Club Lascivious is honored tonight to be the site of the world premiere of a person destined to become one of the truly great artists of the mysterious, the gifted and immensely talented VICTORIA!"
Ray must have caught that last one by phone, for it had a distant, rain barrel quality to it that gave the word "Victoria" a sense of destiny itself!
You could feel the tingle going through the audience sitting there in total darkness as the voice finished and now a swell of soft cello music provided the background for a light that changed from the quality of a sun that had just set to one both growing in intensity and sharpening in focus, as though all the light in the world was being brought to bear on me.
I was vague, shadowy and ill-defined at first. Then, as the light grew in brightness and intensity, it focused on my face. My eyes were closed. I heard a gasp all through the house as they sensed my beauty.
Then I opened my eyes suddenly, looked out upon the audience as the music swelled to a sudden, terrifying jolt and I gave them the full impact of these enormous green eyes. They actually jumped from the double impact of the sound and my eyes hitting them.
Now complete silence fell over the darkened room for almost a full minute. Then flute music for maybe two bars, dropping to a background level as I spoke:
"Friends, tonight I plan to introduce you to the very special, ancient art of hypnotism. Tonight you will see men surrender completely to a stronger, superior personality. You women will be invited to counsel me in the experiments we conduct with your escorts. We're going to have an interesting time in which only the women are safe for just the men are my victims."
The light went out suddenly, as planned, and I caught movement at one of the front tables to my right just then, disturbing movement with a metallic glint to it.
Silently I glided to my right and around the table in the darkness, listening to the sound of someone moving toward where I had just been. That instant I barked to Ray, "Full spot."
There stood Marshall, blinded by the light, groping stupidly around for me in the just-gone darkness, holding handcuffs in his hand. Obviously he planned to ruin my act by cuffing my wrists behind my back and then remaining behind me so I couldn't look' at him. Then his employer could complete whatever damage was attempted with the acid spray that had failed.
I recalled the post-hypnotic thought I'd planted in Marshall when he was under my power. Publicly exposed and identified by this, he'd stop at nothing to hurt me now. He reached in his pocket, but he released his gun and let it drop to the floor as soon as it had cleared his jacket, for I had barked the word "Slave" at him and he quickly put his hands behind his back and locked his handcuffs around his wrists there!
Now from across the room I saw a pair of small, balding men, one with black hair, one with gray, and the black-haired one was standing looking at Marshall. Gil was there to help when I needed him at this moment. Now I looked around the table for the fat man or Karl Torrence and almost before my eyes could reach him I saw Torrence starting to leave and head across the room.
Zev O'Connor rose to his feet, as though to let Torrence pass. But just then his right fist shot up and caught Torrence beautifully on the chin, sending him into the lap of an enormous man in a tuxedo, a man with gleaming dark skin, longish hair and light tan eyes with dark brown rings around the iris.
In the shocked silence, I heard O'Connor's authoritative voice saying, "Take him to Hades, Ishmael."
Then the huge brute picked up the thin weasel of a man and walked off toward the door like King Kong carrying Fay Wray!
The audience applauded my amazing realism as Gil quietly commanded Marshall to follow those other two to Hades. For a well-rehearsed act, we had some unexpected action there! O'Connor had worked fast when he checked me out after our surprise visit and, obviously, his investigation had led him to Gil.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I intoned again in the darkness, "what you have just seen was not I repeat, not a part of my planned program for you. I was actually assaulted by an enemy tonight. Now I must determine who it was."
I called for full house lights then and asked Gfl to halt Marshall and Karl Torrence. Then I reached into the bag that Kelley had brought me and tossed a grapefruit to Gil, who caught it easily with a puzzled expression on his face; then a second one to Zev, who let it drop unconcernedly on the table in front of him. I spotted Marvin J. Kraus at another table and threw one to him. He playfully batted it back to me with his open hand.
Then I threw one to Karl Torrence. He, still in Ish-mael's arms, uttered a piercing scream. "And that was the live one, Karl Torrence," I said, my voice thrilling the entire room. "Now you have been sprayed with acid. Undress completely this instant while it is still in your clothes, before it works through to your skin and eats all through you, maybe blinds you."
Despite the awkwardness of being held in Ishmael's powerful arms, Torrence managed to writhe out of his clothes until he was stark naked! "Sleep, Karl Torrence," I commanded. He fell asleep.
A silent nod to Ishmael and he carried away the sleeping victim who had planned my disfigurement. We had an appointment in Hades, I resolved, soon after tonight's performance.
Where could I take the act from a beginning like that? Certainly the gradual build-up I had in mind wouldn't work, not now. The pace was already too fast. I pointed the microphone to a large woman sitting with her equally large husband at one table. "What's his worst fault?" I asked quickly.
She'd been aware of the answer for twenty years. ".Arnold collects things. He fills our home, his office, our lives with things he collects. Books he doesn't read, stamps he doesn't look at once they're pasted in the books, coins, rocks, funny hats anything. It's awful!"
The man's face was even redder than usual as he tried to paw at her arm and remind her that this was being carried by the microphone all through the place.
Her drink hadn't even been touched, so I knew she was deliberately embarrassing him, giving vent to decades of resentment.
"Look at me," I commanded. He did. A minute later he was standing and, at my command, emptying all of his pockets and giving their contents to his wife. "Now Arnold," I told him, "you will go to every table in the night club and get an ice cube for your collection from each person there. Put the cubes in your pockets, for they're contraband, you know, and you must be very sneaky about it. Put them in your shirt pocket, your trousers pockets, sides and hips; your every jacket pocket and keep collecting until all your pockets and both your hands are completely full. Then you must come sit down."
The audience was delighted with the silly spectacle he presented and his wife had a grim smile on her face as we sent him on his mission. "Thank you, Victoria," she said to me. I've waited many, many years for this. He's been a terrible bully."
I asked the night club photographer, a cute girl in triangles where they joined and over her nipples, to take a half dozen representative pictures of this for Arnold's wife.
Somehow that gave the other women their courage. Soon they were volunteering information about their escort-victims and it was necessary for me to arrest some of the men in mid-flight with my commands.
We found four in the room who insisted that their husbands had beaten them against their wills and, in a trice, the four men were onstage. They were ordered to stand in a square. I had the women tie their shoelaces together and, when we found two of the men were wearing loafers, those had their trouser bottoms drawn tightly toward their inner ankles and pinned together with big kilt pins. These men weren't walking anywhere.
Now I had each woman take off her husband's belt and hand it to the man behind him and to his left. Then each was told to open her husband's trousers. With an almost beautiful rhythm, these men's trousers slid to the floor as, to the music of the Anvil Chorus I had each, in perfect rhythm, beating the one before him and to the right, always directly across the rump with the folded belt.
The bizarre quality of it, the obvious delight the women took in what was happening, the sense of some men in the audience actually envying those on stage for receiving pain from women's doings, it charged the atmosphere of Club Lascivious in a way that brought an almost sexual odor to the atmosphere!
When they decided that their men had had enough, I brought the performance to a halt, ordered the women to put the men's clothing back in order and to release their feet, told the men to take their seats again and, before bringing them out of it, planted the post hypnotic thought that whenever they were about to strike any woman, they would feel the pain they were about to experience right at the instant they were released from my hypnotic spell.
How they jumped when their awareness returned and they realized how sore were those rumps on which they were seated. And yet they had no choice but to remain there until the end of the show! For I had commanded them to do so.
Hypnotists have wonderful powers over audiences!
I was feeling a thrill in all this and was about to make a few more impromptu changes in the planned program when Ray reminded me that this was a professional performance, not just a demonstration of power.
We returned to our planned program. The biggest man in the room, a hulking, heavy, commanding sort, was soon a little boy and I was his teacher and he was confessing to me that he was the one who had said the dirty words on the school ground. So I washed out his mouth with soap and he cried. He looked so silly with his cravat tied in a bow and his trouser legs rolled up to his knees, foam coming from his mouth and tears from his eyes that I almost lost my expression of objective disinterest, a cold, cruel manner that seemed exciting to both men and women in the audience. I left him like that and now it was pitch dark and I was talking, telling a story of Amazonian conquests of men, of enslavement of them against the musical background Ray provided from those splendid tapes (in fact my talk was taped, too) while Kelley speedily helped me change from the dramatically long, clinging back crepe gown I had been wearing to a spectacular white one richly encrusted with rhinestones.
As the lights came up again, slowly, the audience was still in the spell of my intriguing tale of feminine domination and tingled at the striking costume change.
I made four fat men put on tutus over rolled up trousers, tied bright ribbons around their heads and taught them a graceful ballet number while the audience was in tears laughing at their solemn antics. I sent them back to their places in these same costumes and ordered them to be unaware of them until they arrived home that night.
I chose six others and made them into trained dogs in my animal act, putting dog collars on them and leashes and making them sit up, bark, play dead, roll over, eat hamburger from dog dishes on stage for a television commercial on dog foods, and finally I gave the leashes to their women, informing the victims that they did not have the use of their arms in any way until the collars were removed and that they must lick the hands of the women who held their leashes.
It was an exciting thing to witness.
Two of the most rugged, virile looking men in the audience were brought on stage. How interesting it was to take these full-scale, complete human beings, reduce them to pulp, mold them into anything in the world I chose for them to be! I made these two strong men walk with mincing gaits, affect high voices, make their eyes large and purse their lips when they spoke, stand with one knee bent and a hand on a hip and toss heads in feminine ways. I gave them lisps, made them kiss each other, made them borrow lipsticks from their ladies and apply the stuff. I could have kept them in that state as long as I wished, planted post-hypnotic suggestions to humiliate them in the wildest of ways after the show even days or weeks afterward.
I put all the men in the room to sleep save Zev, Gil and Ray and talked to the women candidly, as an ally of theirs. In the room were two men who had gone with the women they'd brought for more than five years, were single and had never proposed. When I learned from the women that they wanted those proposals, I saw to it that the sleeping men were given their training.
Now all were awakened and I asked, "Would any of you in the audience care to use this microphone to make a public announcement?" One rose and proclaimed his undying love for his lady and asked if she would marry him. She accepted and the audience applauded. "Public announcement" had been the trigger term for that man.
"Would anyone else wish to take over this microphone to reveal his secrets?" I asked, "secrets" being the release word. And the other, with surprising aplomb, rose, took the mike, and said, "Eleanor, I'm doing this in public in the hopes that you will be too embarrassed to reject me and so the whole audience here can know how much I love you."
They were fully aware of what they were doing. They just couldn't help themselves!
Now I took the handful of men in the audience who had not participated and conducted a fashion show with them, describing the costumes they were wearing and having them mince and posture in the mannered modes of models and, as a grand finale, had all the men in the audience except my selected friends standing in a series of rows behind me and pledging that whenever their wife or sweetheart made any demand of them, these demands would be met immediately upon pain of their being stripped, bound and spanked by their ladies.
As a grand climax, each returned to his place, bent down and got on his hands and knees and licked the feet of the woman who had just been put in complete charge of him.
The whole audience was brought out of hypnosis then and I made a few innocuous remarks about hypnotism and its role in modern day society in another costume, this one of gold satin superbly designed to accentuate my every desirable feminine feature and Ray brought the music to a crescendo.
What a heady experience violent applause can be! What a fantastic thing it was to take so many men from their normal worlds down the dark, twisted chambers of my mind to the beginnings of their degradation and destruction! I had found my field, my identity, my mission and that seemed most important of all results of this quest that had begun long, long ago in the little city of Morton when four crude boys had assaulted me so hideously.
They left. Men on leashes, men in ballet skirts, men who had knelt before their womenfolk and kissed their feet for the first of many forthcoming times, men who'd been sissified, mortified, reduced to something far less than they had been when they first caught my show.
All of them, the women who had won so much and the men who had lost, applauded me, thrilled to what I had accomplished. It did wonders for my career.
I had retired to my dressing room, still in my golden satin gown, and the little cluster of men came in behind me.
"Splendid," Ray said. "I'm proud of you, and I didn't have the usual feeling of resentment that someone tapped my mind and got the glory for it. Your contribution was far greater than mine."
Marvy came in to ask, quite seriously and confidentially, if it'd be okay for him to give Ray the same devoted obeisance that those other men were giving their women. Naturally I assured him that, in his particular instance, that was exactly what I had in mind.
Gil was silent, worshipful. And Zev said: "You got an agent."
The manager of Club Lascivious came bustling in just then beaming and smiling. "Victoria," he said, "you were terrific! They loved you! I'm willing to tear up your contract and pay you three hundred for tonight's performance and put you on the payroll for a thousand a week. What do you think of that?"
I looked at him with wide-eyed innocence. "I'm not allowed to think anything like that now, sir," I told him. "My agent here handles all such matters."
He looked at the direction of my glance and saw Zev. His face whitened. "You have Zev O'Connor as an agent?" he gasped. "Well, why didn't you tell me?"
"I wanted to see what I was worth to you without your knowing that," I said.
He turned green.
"Do you wish to negotiate with him now or shall I subject him to hypnosis?" I asked Zev.
The man almost ran away. He put his arms up, crossing them before his face, as though I were emitting dangerous rays.
"I'm sure we'll have no difficulty in coming to a mutually satisfactory agreement, Victoria," Zev told me.
The manager breathed a four thousand dollar a week sigh of relief I
CHAPTER SEVEN
HADES
Notice how the underground newspapers have spread lately? How underground films have become such a major rage? How the coffee houses of yesterday where what was then called beatniks have become psychedelic centers today frequented by hippies and groups and other rebels? It's all part of a special subculture that has taken America by storm in an underground way. leaving the establishment, the veteran status quo set, unaffected by it all because of the ability to look away.
Yet slowly, almost imperceptibly, the underground subculture is gradually eroding the establishment from a juncture point so that the break-off element is dropping into the underground stream and drifting along with it, soon to be joined by more from the other side.
The trend is so strong it's like a crusade!
I'm sure there have been many night club acts which have become part of an underground movement all its own. All the sick comedians are in this group. And the big dirty song singers from Florida and New York and New Orleans, and the party record set, the female impersonators who have risque content and some of the old burlesque comedians in their new roles as tummlers in the borscht circuit.
My act joined theirs. And, as the audience came expecting increasingly shocking sights, I found myself thrilling to the task of granting their expectations and then some!
To the brilliant counsel and technical authority of Ray Muldoon, I was able now to add the programming skill of Zev O'Connor and, surprisingly, the personal counsel of Mrs. Kelley.
She was the one who got me onto the high leather boots with the exceedingly high heels and the leather skirts that were so tight I could show the audience the drawn grain of the leather, the full-sleeved satin blouses that had playing spotlights accentuating the superb thrust of my breasts and making every man's hands in the audience itch to be stroking the luscious, goodie-filled fabric.
She taught me new tricks about exotic make-up, how to plan the foundation garments I wore so that they accentuated my full hips and jutting rump and slimmed down my waist, what perfumes induced certain moods in the audience, and, later, how to conceal an incredible arsenal of weapons on my person, bondage devices enough to immobilize an entire night club audience's male complement.
I became the thing to see whenever you hit New York. With my rich variety of hair styles and my dramatic, costly wigs, I was a chameleon personality, intriguing by the constant change I depicted and exciting to watch. The frequent on stage changes in the darkness got me write-ups in all the leading fashion monthly pace-setters and in Women's Wear Daily. I was the "in" personality of New York! And my prices rose with each new contract thanks to Zev's incredible insight as to what was the ceiling and did I deserve it. What started out as a compulsory thing on his part, his catching my act, became a major delight for him as he watched it improve.
It was not at all unusual for my acts to include scenes in which the victims of my hypnotism were stripped to the waist, bound to pillars and lashed by their womenfolk, often down to nothing but half-slips or panties, until blood was flowing and lust rose high.
I've closed these acts of mine with actual orgies about to start and the people all herded off to some other locale so that the police couldn't trace it to the night club.
Once two policemen came to catch my act and it was my distinct pleasure to send them home stripped from the waist down with their clubs protruding from them like pump handles and they swore it happened to them in Calcutta!
Audiences became my co-conspirators in a program of destruction that seemed destined to wreck mankind throughout New York and leave womankind in complete supreme command!
But I didn't forget my earlier commitments. Once Zev dared me to personally subjugate a famed mentalist who had once been a client of his and had gone to another firm when Zev criticized a slovenly performance, he brought to that firm confidential information about Zev's fees, contacts, scouts and representatives.
I sat in the audience wearing dark glasses and conservatively dressed in a white mink suit with a black satin blouse and an enormous floppy bow at the neck. The man came out, filled with self-importance, dramatic in his rich voice and impressive gestures. His act was an old one. It lacked fire and he wasn't concentrating nearly as hard as he might have done when his powers were at their peak. This much I knew.
Now he was approaching the climax of his act. He had the president of the organization sponsoring this benefit performance and his wife sitting on the stage asleep.
"Bet you can't control this one," Zev told me.
"Willing to bet three days with me in complete command of your nudist camp?" I asked. "No restrictions on what I do?"
He watched the smooth professionalism of the old ham before me and said, "You're on."
I'm not sure what the mentalist planned to have this sleeping pair of subjects before him do, but I do know what happened next.
I took off my glasses and, with Zev holding a flashlight so that my face was inescapably visible, stared intently at Mr. D., the mentalist. It was obvious that he was distracted by this and he decided that he was going to punish me for my interference with his act.
Being underground, it is only natural that he didn't recognize me as a co-hypnotist. Our eyes locked. Mine didn't waver. He was resorting to speech, to hypnotic gestures, to bright objects on the periphery of my vision spiraling inward and outward, bringing up all the tricks and supports he could find, while my eyes remained locked into his, bringing him to me, probing more and more deeply until I was in the core of his brain!
"Come here," I mouthed so that he could read my lips, but the audience could not. He squatted down beside me, put his ear to my mouth, received his instructions from me.
To make certain that Zev knew that what happened next was not Mr. D's idea, but mine, I gave him a rundown of what was going to occur within the next few minutes. He was both shocked and amused by my audacity and irreverence for good taste.
To control people directly is one thing. To control others through an intermediary is the difference between a straight shot in pool and one involving a three-cushion two-ball bank!
Yet it was working! "Mr. Throckmorissey," Mr. D's voice intoned, "you will rise, please and remove your trousers."
Even while he commanded it and while the pudgy, stuffy-looking president solemnly took off his trousers, folded them carefully and put them atop the piano, Mr. D. was doing-likewise. To my delight he was wearing red nylon shorts which sent the audience into gales of laughter.
"Now, Mr. Throckmorissey," the voice continued, "you are on a convention, that convention that was all stag and only your top customers attended. Remember?" He nodded that he did.
"And do you recall the girls you had there? Particularly that cute one who was so crazy about you?" Smilingly the company president recalled that particular girl with considerable enthusiasm.
"Well, she's here now," Mr. D. said, with delight in his voice, "and you're all alone in that big, comfortable bedroom with her. She wants to kneel before you and pleasure you once again, the same way she did on that convention."
Throckmorissey was sitting in the chair again, his knees well apart, his evidence of appreciation of what was about to happen to him mighty impressive for a fellow his age.
Now Mrs. Throckmorissey was the object of the instructions I'd given Mr. D. He assured her that this was a case of great discretion and they were all alone. That a very handsome, famous movie star was her date that day while her husband was off on that island convention. She seemed thrilled by the prospects of this adventure.
Mr. D. persuaded her to take off her dress to keep
It from getting soiled and then he had her kneeling before her husband, his rampant weapon caught between her lips, her hands holding his basket tenderly, delight on both their faces.
And Mr. D. himself joined in the act by withdrawing his own evidence of manhood and then taking off Mrs. Throckmorissey's panties, wrapping them around his club and, with obscene words and matching strokes he was instructing the woman just what she should do to the man and at just what pace!
When the scene was at its climax, the audience was through with its shocked silence and was yelling for them to stop and was beginning to advance toward the stage in bitter indignation, Zev and I headed toward the exit and, just before we left, I snapped Mr. D., out of his hypnotic trance and he did-likewise with the Throckmorisseys.
The look of total, absolute shock, of complete shame, of awe at the impossibility of this situation in which all three now found themselves was something so totally satisfying that I actually felt as though I were experiencing a full orgasm! This was incredible! To have that much power, that degree of ability to cause destruction! My whole being was shaking from the realization of careers and reputations wrecked, of people spending the rest of their lives in shame marveling at this impossible thing that had happened to them.
Power! How I adored it!
"It took longer than I'd expected," I told the cook in the nudist camp, "but here I am again and I wish you'd put this stuff into their food for two days now. It'll be up to Zev O'Connor and me to see to it that they behave themselves until we are actually ready to start. In three days I want the tables piled high with meats and fruit and wines all around the place."
"Yes, Miss Victoria," she said. "But I get to get in on the fun, won't I?"
"You, Cookie, will be the actual centerpiece," I promised her.
We isolated the men from the women as a precaution, with a heavy wire mesh grill down the middle of the area. And it was a good thing we did, for the very first day of aphrodisiacal rations had a bunch of the men poking their fingers and things through the mesh and women on the other side trying to reach them.
Whenever we found one of the men interested in other men, we cross thumb-cuffed his thumbs to his big toes so that he couldn't get at his necessary equipment if he wanted. When we found that they presented too tempting a target this way, we paired them off and chained the pairs back to back. These had to be hand-fed by the more reliably heterogeneous members of our little gathering.
I assigned Hector and Ishmael the task of fixing up cushions and cots of pillows, old mattresses covered with silk and foam rubber pads-likewise covered with materials that brought tactual satisfaction so that when we were ready, we'd have the necessary working areas. Incense and perfumes were gathered by my friend the little dressmaker from the 14th floor, who was to be my specially invited guest.
Now came my final little fillip to end allure to the people engaging in the forthcoming event. How can a man look exciting to a woman when she sees his little belly jutting out or a woman to a man when the folds of her flesh, the stretch marks and the varicose veins are all besides hairy areas that cause her to seem different one place from another? Breasts in superabundance are almost as ineffectual as none at all!
So I arranged costumes for all my participants. What excitement! To see the hunger with which women reshaped themselves with well-cut brassieres and strong girdles, the relief with which they encased their legs and gave them shapeliness with dark, sleek nylons! It brought tears to one's eyes! Then when they could again indulge in the tactual delights of soft nylon lingerie, nylon satin and tricots, and colorful, silken dresses and scarves, glamorous evening gowns and entrancing, girlish blouses of the most feminine styling and skirts that danced and swirled when they walked, I was almost their savior. High-heeled shoes, jewelry, perfumes and the makings for the most elaborate hair styles were all available to the girls and they vied with each other to gain maximum physical appeal. I actually had to show some of them how to apply the new make-ups that had iridescent, shiny quality and the others that were applied with powder brushes.
Meanwhile Zev was, on my instructions, working on the men, updating their ideas of men's clothing so that they didn't wear loose-fitting trousers or narrow ties, improperly cut clothes or pointed-toed shoes. He went over local stores' catalogs and took measurements and we soon were ordering the outfits that the men regarded as most appropriate for them. To some the new styles of turtle necks and lockets seemed effeminate, particularly with the long hair, sideburned and combed forward, but bit by bit we prepared our boys for their moment of resurgence.
And through the dividing grill the women were already picking out the men they'd want to experiment with most now that the food was aphrodisical instead of appetite-eliminating and the moment of juncture was drawing nigh.
"Okay, kids," I said when we were at last ready to have our glorious moment and get rid of the dividing grill. All the manacled people had been released. The table was set, the beds ready, the air filled with incense smells. You could almost feel our guests on both sides, strange in their clothes and far more interested and interesting, pawing the earth, snorting and getting ready to charge the opposition. I was in red satin, for I had seen its power in the past, only this outfit had been especially made for me with its bared midriff and its low-cut back, my hips swathed in drapery, a slit showing the jet black hose on one side of the skirt, my breasts an invitation no man could deliberately resist and still be worthy of the name.
"Okay, kids," I told them, "here's how we're starting this orgy." I had Ishmael and Hector unroll an enormous scroll showing scenes from the Kama Sutra, nude bodies of men and women in every conceivable sexual position in an endless ring around the room!
I told of the ancient Hindu customs these depicted and how some people thought of this as the definitive sex works of all time.
Then I produced a miniature of the enormous scene before the whole group and pressed a button so that each person shown on the scene had a number showing on him. "We will now work out a human jigsaw puzzle in which each of you is one of the pieces," I told them. "Each of these elements in this miniature of the scene can be broken off." I then proceeded to separate them and toss each into a big pair of black silk bloomers the bottoms of which were sewn together.
"You will reach into these bloomers, the women into the left leg, the men into the right, and determine which position will be yours in the jigsaw puzzle. You must agree to participate in it on this first round with whoever happens to be your mate by the corresponding drawing."
As they drew their scenes and their parts in picture, I could see faces lighting up, smiles coming, an eagerness to get to the actual action (tableau would have been too passive a term). And it was a thrilling concept!
Now the grill was raised and the people stormed to their places beneath the pictures and made the scenes above come to vigorous, contemporary life! With mouths and sexual organs, rears and fronts, kneeling, standing, bending over, lying down, face to face, back to face and face to back, in a hundred positions these thrilled, excited, sex-starved, sex-maddened people joined forces and the scent of satisfaction, the aura of attainment, the thrust and lunge, the sigh and throbbing thrill, the delirious headiness of this start of their greatest sex adventure sent a special quality of unbelievable lustiness surging and throbbing all through the room, rocketing through the atmosphere until nobody cared, nobody could resist, everyone was participating with a glorious competence and an enthusiastic vigor and capability that seemed like a tropical drumbeat.
I stood before the microphone, shouting encouragement, commanding changes of partners, urging quicker action, fuller movement, variations in positions and I felt my own fires burning down below more than ever before in my life, and I'd not been on the aphrodisiacal diet as had these others.
Now, one by one, they drifted off to the cots and sleep, to the tables and the wine bottles and the older and the more readily exhausted of the orgiasts separated themselves from the others and fell asleep
But Cookie was still going strong as two men kissed her breasts and another kissed her in front in the red tie silk dress she was wearing and a fourth man assaulted her from behind. She actually was the centerpiece of the greatest mass of activity there.
I found a ladder and proceeded to go up it a few rungs, the better to survey the scene, when I saw Zev disengage himself from two young girls who were kissing his breasts as they stroked his body and come walking toward me on the ladder in a sort of trance.
My little dressmaker was resting and smiling and Hector clambered off of her, saw me on the ladder like a battle flag and started working in my direction over the writhing bodies on the floor. Now Ishmael sat up, spilling both the girl who'd been kneeling across his face as his tongue took her temperature and the one who'd been trying to impale herself on his onto the ground where they could find and kiss each other in another great sort of satisfaction. He came walking toward the ladder and every step seemed to bring him to greater readiness.
From across the room a supple, handsome young man with Paul Newman type eyes started toward me and I felt more and more of these men, the better ones who'd lasted through the first stages of the orgy, coming my way in every sense of the word!
Was it an unintentional or a deliberate message I'd sent out to them that they were all receiving now, these lust-filled, ready, powerful, brutal men?
They were near me now, standing beneath the ladder, climbing up it. Each seemed to know his exact place and what he should do when he reached it. My hands were each holding giant clubs in a moment and my mouth held the largest lollipop I'd ever tasted.
I recognized Zev's touch as he climbed the underside of the ladder and faced me, his face buried between my breasts, his person under my skirt. Ishmael was in back of me now and I knew that soon he and Zev would be fighting a duel inside me, each from a different entrance.
Never was woman pressed so simultaneously, so deliciously amid masses of men! The world was a spinning, thrilling thing as the pressure of these tanned, virile bodies, these hungry thirsting, wanting men came against me, squeezed me in delectable delight, brought me to a pinwheel of fruition as each upon reaching satisfaction and attaining mine found another place on my body that needed attention.
Tongues probed my ears and vacuuming lips found my throat. My breasts had escaped their red satin confines and hungry mouths hardened their tips and thrilled them with the touch of masculine beard pressing against breast-skin.
Ears pressed against my thighs and my be-nyloned legs were stroked by knowing, teasing fingers thrilling to the touch of me as much as I did to their touch. I felt tongues now where rods had been before and vice versa. Fingers found me and I became one enormous, delighted erotic zone.
Now one by one, like leaves in the fall, my men deserted me. I was alone now on my ladder. Cookie had her legs clamped tightly around the head of some fellow and she was holding the ends of his tie to nail his head in place. "Keep that up until I tell you, you may stop," she commanded and the slight movement of his head indicated that he was doing just that.
And then there were no more men on the ladder, just Zev helping me down. I was walking stiffly, my entire body sore and satisfied. The two of us found an empty cot covered with black satin. I saw my little dressmaker friend on the next site, a bed of soft pillows, with the Paul Newman eyed young man's head resting on her shoulder. Her hand was inside his trouser waistband and his was reaching down the very low-cut front of her dress. They were sleeping, smiling.
"I hope you'll not consider me too much trouble for these ideas I get, Zev," I started to say. But then I saw that he was asleep. I blindfolded him with the brassiere part of my red satin outfit so that he'd not be awakened by the light. Then I slept, dreaming that each of the handsome men who'd been in on my ladder scene asked, "What are you doing after the orgy?"
There's a great satisfaction in having mated well with a compatible, understanding person. There's an even greater one that comes after all of your being has responded with vigor and joy in the ministrations of masses of people in an orgy.
That's how I felt when, a while later, I awoke. All about me were drained bottles and spilled goblets, the stems, seeds, peelings and cores of eaten fruit and the sense of total abandon that could be equaled nowhere else.
As, gradually, my fellow participants in the orgy awoke, I realized that I had best return Zev's empire to some semblance of its original order or else I'd not get to go on to the one portion of it I was looking forward to more than to even this glorious place.
So, one by one, I awoke the people and required them to strip off their remaining garments. These Hector pushed through the ceiling into my friend the dressmaker's establishment for her to repair, clean and dispose of as best she could.
To Ishmael fell the task of removing the bedding as it was vacated and Cookie cleaned up the banquet table and the floor where food had been spilled. Bit by bit I eradicated the remains of the orgy until when Zev (the last to awaken for he was one of the last to fall asleep and one of the most indulgent in the orgy) awoke, the only clothes present were those he was wearing and the only bed, that on which he slept.
"Was I dreaming?" he asked.
"I don't know," I teased him. "Tell me about it."
His gray eyes looked at me in solemn appraisal and then his hand came up with the red satin bodice of the costume I'd worn and used to blindfold him. "It was real, all right. Real and wonderful. About the greatest sort of experience a person can have."
"About?" I asked.
"Maybe not for most people, but for the-likes of you and me there are thrills beyond even the kind we knew last night."
"Then you understand how much I want to visit and take part in that other part of your empire," I concluded.
"They're expecting you this afternoon late and I planned to take you there then," Zev said. "You have several days to enjoy yourself as my head torturer before your next booking. It may even give you a few additional ideas to incorporate into your act."
That afternoon I went to Hades.
Somehow I had expected to go to some remote part of the country, far off the beaten track, to a big, fortress-like building surrounded by dense shrubbery and there find all sorts of sophisticated instruments of torture. How wrong I was!
To get there all we had to do was enter a small closet in Zev's office. It was equipped with clothes racks and storage areas, looking very permanent and convincing. But when he pushed an inconspicuous button on the base of the light switch the floor started moving downward. It was a cleverly concealed elevator!
There were no intervening stops. We went down from the 13th floor to the sub-sub-basement. That, as far as I could tell, was the only access to this strange place. Hades was its name, but we saw no flames, no fire and brimstone here. At first it looked eminently civilized with attractive furnishings, air conditioning, a pleasant fragrance in the air, even growing plants all around.
People were here, quite a few, in fact. The men were smooth-shaven, well-dressed; the women well made up, their hair-dos in good order.
Why, then, was it called Hades?
Because every one of these people was undergoing some sort of restraint. I saw one man approaching us, an imploring look in his eyes. "Zev," he said, "I swear that's the last time I ever try a deal like that on you. Let me out of here and I'll forget all about it; I'll pay you everything I owe. Please, Zev. Give me a break."
He sounded so earnest I wondered what was happening to him, what he had done, and how Zev could withstand such an ardent plea. Zev looked at him as though he were a specimen in a cage. "This is an interesting case, Victoria," he said. "One of my clients had a deal with him for a percent of the gross on a movie he was making. He forgot to include all the European and television rights when settlement time came and he had a hundred prints working in secondary markets that didn't show on his books. One artist had one great break in this risque movie that happened to be a hit. She worked nude, got busted for it, didn't have enough to make bail, became a hooker and now is in terrible trouble, all because this rat held out more than $50,000 she had coming to her."
"I can see where he was wrong and deserved punishment," I said coolly, "but he doesn't look so miserable to me. Why is he so eager to get out?"
"You may examine him if you wish," Zev told me.
I examined him carefully. What appeared to be his hands with the fingers held together actually proved to be flesh-colored gloves with the fingers inseparable. I worked his coat off and saw that every time he bent his arms at the elbow, he drew a wire taped across the outer part of his arm tight enough to press cruelly around his bicep and give it a small, annoying electric shock. I dropped his trousers and saw steel rods in the backs of his legs, soldered securely in place with woven wire straps around his legs. He was compelled to walk stiff-legged. But, worse, an exceedingly tight rubber girdle was on him, rubbing him raw in the crotch, giving him not nearly the freedom he needed for comfort, and he was chafed and messy from his inability to get the girdle off and function as he should.
"We clean him up every three days by stripping him and turning a stinging cold hose of water on him. He cries and shakes for at least two hours after that," Zev said.
I examined the tightness of the rubber girdle's fit and squeezed sharply to check on it. The man screamed in pain. I saw a bowl of artificial fruit on a table, selected a plum, forced it into his mouth hard, then checked him again and only a gasp and guttural groan came from him. "That's better," I said, squeezing him again. I readjusted his clothing and left him with the wax fruit wedged behind his teeth.
A beautiful woman came by, fragrant and alluring as anything to be seen in the more provocative ads. "Is she being punished?" I asked Zev.
"Oh no," he replied. "She's part of their punishment. We have a dozen men who have abnormally powerful appetites. We keep them charged and ready for anything, but have them in suits that encase plastic dressmaker dummy type forms which hold their arms permanently crooked at the elbows or at their sides. They have to be fed by others and the girls make it a point to tease these fellows and keep them wanting. They're here for a variety of reasons ranging from failure to live up to contracts with me to having wives I enjoy associating with. As a matter-of-fact, there is that one's husband now."
To the girl he said, "Work Bertram over some more. Gladys." She immediately began playing with his ears and kissing him on the throat. His response was such that I felt my own apetites rising once again. She knew exactly what to do to excite him.
"Gladys," the man wailed, "please, do something to relieve me, dear?"
"Why Bertram," she asked, venom in her eyes, "I'd not think of cutting in on your secretary's territory."
"I swear, Gladys, that I'll fire her as soon as I get out of here. I'll always be faithful to you."
Her face was an interesting mask. Almost dreamily she lifted up her skirts and gave him a view of the promised land. When he tried to lunge toward her, she kicked a footstool at his legs and he fell heavily to the floor on his shoulder, unable to use his hands to break his fall.
While he lay there stunned, before struggling to his feet, she came up to Bev and me and asked, "May I have the pleasure of pleasing one or both of you in front of my husband?"
We both thought that would be interesting and her tongue entertained me while her hand stroked Zev and the husband found himself miserably unable to tear his eyes away from this scene.
"What have you done with Marshall Grogan and Karl Torrence?" I asked Zev.
"Oh, I've been saving them for you," Zev assured me.
Marshall was standing in the middle of the room in the middle of what appeared to be a jungle gym that had gotten loose. Metal pipes pressed tightly against him from all sides, including under his arms. He couldn't move. He was absolutely helpless.
"We can run very hot or very cold water through those pipes whenever we wish," Zev explained proudly, "and we can set them vibrating at any pace we wish, from one that can madden him by never permitting him rest to one that can bruise him severely."
"Put ice water through and let's see him at a low level of vibration, please," I said, looking directly into Marshall's eyes. What a pleasure it was to see that degree of fear there! And when I saw the diabolical effect of the device in which he was imprisoned, felt the cold of the pipes and the cruel trembling of them, it gave me great pleasure.
Torrence was strapped inside a hollow frame of strong metal so that the weight of his body pulled his bonds against him. It was mounted so that it could be turned at any angle, head down or up, with his body facing ceiling or floor, on either side.
I put Marshall under my hypnotic spell and sent him out to bring me a certain man whose establishment I'd noted at Coney Island and all of that man's necessary equipment.
Then I proceeded to work on Karl Torrence. I'd always wanted to be an artist. This was fun! Zev brought me the India inks and the assortment of pens I'd requested. So I drew spit curls on the sides of his face, curly bangs half way down his forehead, bee-stung lips on his mouth, an ornamental pansy high on one cheek. When he started to protest, I picked up a furniture clamp and showed it to him. "One word that doesn't sound like gratitude or praise, Karl Torrence," I warned him, "and this goes on you tight!" He practically chirped after that!
I painted black lines upward on the outer edges of his eyes so that they took on a pretty appearance and then drew big beaded lashes above and below his eyes like those on certain dolls.
Inspired by this beginning, I painstakingly drew a black lace brassiere on his scrawny body with "Victoria" on the strap in back and then I drew a pair of red lace panties onto his nude body, including a ridiculous looking ruffle around the leg bands. I put a wide blue garter on his left leg just above the knee with an enormous, pink-centered rosette in the middle. Around his right ankle I drew a slave chain. Then I put a black velvet-looking band around his neck.
He was unable to move to even attempt to get rid of the India ink making such a cartoon of art out of his body. It took me hours to complete my task, but Zev returned and was delighted with it. With him were Marshall handcuffed to the world's angriest tattoo artist. In Marshall's free hand was the big case of equipment that had been in his studio at Coney Island.
"You will follow these lines and colors on this man exactly," I instructed the fuming man. "Do it voluntarily or under hypnosis. I leave it up to you."
"What's with this 'hypnosis' junk?" He snarled. "I think that's all a lot of crap."
"Marshall," I said, "release those handcuffs." He obeyed. "Strip and then bring me that cat o' nine tails from the wall." Soon the naked man presented it to me. "Beg this tattoo artist, Professor Magoo (I read on the side of the case), to whip you until you're bleeding." He did. Magoo did. "Now say 'Thank you.' "
The tattooing proceeded without hypnosis.
"See how I turned the other cheek, Karl Torrence," I said six hours later when the work was complete. "You tried to disfigure me. I turned you into a thing of beauty." There were tears in his eyes as he saw the grotesque sight he presented in the full length mirror. "You may stand and admire yourself like that, front and back, for two hours," I told him. "Then you are free to leave. Here are your clothes. And your next attempt to do me any harm will bring an even harsher fate."
"But how can I conduct business like this?" he wailed. "How can I face anyone? Even walk down the streets with my face like this?"
"Mister, you really do have a problem, haven't you?" I sympathized.
Marshall had rendered me some service in bringing me Professor Magoo, and we had had some fun together, so I made his punishment a lighter one. All that happened with him until they put him away was that, whenever he saw a policeman, he found he couldn't resist the urge to expose himself I
CHAPTER EIGHT
MORTON
Success is impossible to define. Here I had wealth, a very special reputation, the satisfaction of giving vent to all my hostilities without serious threat to my person. I had many of the things others regard as success, and yet I was constantly beset with a feeling of incompletion, of needs not gratified, missions not accomplished. That which set me on my course had faded back in time until it was ill-defined.
Kelley was the triggering factor. She'd been my confidante during the many long hours we spent together in the dressing room while she polished my appearance, subtly suggested ways in which my act could be improved, brought me new styles. In time, that fat little dumpling had become the one person in the world I actually liked.
I'd told her I'd come from Morton, of course. She had begun reading the daily newspaper from there just to let me know of the ridiculous little things that make news in small towns and to cheer me about my good fortune in having escaped there.
But one day she had another type of news. "Next Sunday they're writing the last chapter to that story that began when Keith Nelson gave you his class pin."
Something new was in her voice, a mixture of compassion and the sound of a boy telling his dog "Sic 'em." I waited, feeling my heart pounding a little faster, almost anticipating what she was about to reveal.
"That's when Keith Nelson and Delia Sloan get married," Kelley said.
"Your eyes are becoming narrow slits of hatred. Your chest is thrusting outward and rising and falling heavily. Your nostrils are flaring. Your jaw is becoming set," Kelley said in convincing imitation of my hypnotic technique. Of course she was right.
"The way he just buckled up, knuckled under, folded when his mother put that scarf around his neck," I said, reliving the disappointing picture. "I'd expected him to be more of a man than that, even at that age."
"Some mothers dress their little boys up in little girls' clothing because they think they look cute that way," Kelley said. "I once worked for a woman who did that. She explained to me that the reason she wanted me to sew silk dresses for a boy of twelve was that she always wanted him in her power. I remember making him stand still while I tried on a red silk dress, pinning up its hem, and his mother kept stroking and fussing with it through the matching slip and panties. That kid will never grow up completely straight because his mother need only stir that same reverse Oedipus thing in him to take him away from any girl."
Smart woman that she was, she was looking at me all the time she was speaking, reading me with absolute accuracy.
I called Paulette, had her arrange a reservation in the best hotel ballroom in Morton and get the printer to send out invitations to a pre-wedding party there to all the guests-likely to be on both the Sloan and the Nelson invitation lists. Let each side's family think the other had been planning the surprise.
I wired her money to stock the party lavishly with flowers and champagne and told her exactly what to do to arrange the setting for my entrance and my act. She had always hated Delia. How good this opportunity for revenge seemed to her!
Zev complained when I told him that I had to cancel the one engagement we had set during this time, but, when I told him what I planned, he seemed more understanding. Then Kelley and I gathered the necessary properties we needed for this visit, picked up the fastest, best-looking camper we could find and stocked it with equipment gathered from hardware stores, special manufacturing establishments and Hades, and off we drove to Morton.
Familiar places, the river bottom where we used to pick violets, the swing in the park that was a little high on one side, the school ground shrubbery behind which we first stole childish kisses, the drug store where I bought my first sanitary napkins and the variety store that sold me my first brassiere. These can do something to a person's emotions he felt too strong to experience before it was happening.
Kelley looked at the tears welling in my eyes and said, "Careful. You're not Irene Brownell any more, you know. Now you're Victoria."
I sat up a little straighter, gripped the wheel a little tighter, and my brow smoothed out. "Thanks, Kelley," I said. "I needed that."
We stopped for gas. I recognized the station attendant at once, though he couldn't know me behind my dark glasses. "Fill 'er up?" Joe asked.
"Please," I said.
He washed the windshield, checked the oil, water, batteries and then, noticing that I was a pretty girl, felt chatty. "You own this station?" I asked.
"Yep, she's all mine."
"How'd you get your own business, young as you are?" I asked.
"Well, fellow gave me a motorcycle which I traded for an old junker I fixed up and sold for $200. I bought two more cheap cars for that and put them into condition so they made me money. By the time I had a dozen cars, I was renting out the used ones and pretty soon I made enough money to buy out the old fellow who owned the station and rented me the back lot for my car lot."
"So it all began with that free motorcycle, did it Joe?" I asked, taking off my glasses.
Even then he didn't recognize me at first. "How did you know my name?" he asked. Then it dawned on him and he seemed to shrink from me. My eyes held him. In a moment he was mine.
He brought me the tow chains I used to link his wrists to his ankles around an oil drum. With his trousers down, he presented a great target, but I didn't have time to give him the beating I'd have preferred. Instead I gave him a high colonic enema of old crankcase drainings and then drove it in even deeper with the high-powered grease gun used for lube jobs. He wasn't under hypnosis while it was happening to him, though. He felt every painful iota of the punishment.
That's how I left him. And I warned him that if he said a word about my being in town I'd douse him with gasoline and use him as a torch to burn down his station!
We cruised through town, a hundred nostalgic sights catching my eye. We passed the big supermarket and there I saw a familiar-looking face, Gerald coming out with a big bag of groceries. I parked and followed him to his car. He set the bag on the hood of the car and was reaching for his keys when I came up behind him and took them out of his hand.
"Hey, what the hell you doing, lady?" he asked.
"Well, I usually find that a man's keys are the entry-way to most of his possessions," I said. I took off my dark glasses and stared deeply into his eyes.
"Irene Brownell!" he exclaimed. He forced a smile on his face. "Hey, when did you get back into town?"
"Let's not be polite, Gerald," I said. "Put your groceries in the car now. I want to see what all these keys fit."
A man under hypnosis is such a helpless thing. His apartment was uninteresting and his post office box yielded nothing. I recognized others as unrewarding, but the one that was most interesting was that to the chain store he was managing. I made him load all the merchandise from it that he could into his car and take it to his apartment. We had quite a few thousand dollars worth moved in several trips. Kelley waited at the store with the camper.
Then I made him strip completely and wait in the store. Three very fat, ugly women were walking by, ready subjects for hypnosis. I sent them into the store and soon had a wild party going on among the lot of them. When they were all naked and at their peak, I phoned the newspaper to send a photographer, waited five minutes and set off the burglar alarm.
Norman and Marty were in a bar when I spotted them. It's surprising how different a girl can look with a sprayed gray wig and a tight, miniskirted dress. I even was able to change the color of my eyes to dark brown thanks to the contact lenses I had.
Sure they wanted a party. In fact they even were willing to pay me the $50 I demanded in advance. But they didn't want to come to any place of mine or to have a drink with me. They were too familiar with the old badger game and weren't about to get acquainted with the taste of a Mickey Finn.
Sometimes the most knowledgeable of men are the worst suckers. We went to Marty's pad. I delivered beautifully to them, for, in the interval between our first encounter and this one, I'd become quite an expert at that sort of thing. After several rounds of such activity, though, I had two mighty exhausted men on my hands while I was deliciously satisfied.
That's when it becomes punishment. To have to deliver after you've completed your ability to do so. I kept teasing and arousing them and draining them to the point that they were both out on their feet.
That's when I went into the bathroom and came out with green eyes and my natural color of hair. The shocked, frightened look in their eyes was pleasure in itself. I actually hated to subject them to hypnosis. But I had to have complete control of what was happening now and it was necessary to erase their memory of my being in town.
Street lighting isn't very bright in small towns. Not many are out at nights because there's really not much to do. Therefore it wasn't too difficult to march two naked men into Marty's car and drive them to the public square with the familiar wrought iron fence surrounding the block. I had Norman walking along inside the yard and Marty outside it, stark naked, until we reached the middle of the block. Stretching their arms as far out as they could, I handcuffed them, back to back, through the wrought iron fence.
Then I used dogs' choke collars around Norman's ankles and passed diagonally through the fence where I could attach them to Marty's. Forcing their feet through the openings made by passing the body of the chain through the rings, it wasn't necessary to use the small padlocks I had ready to lock the choke collars tightly to their feet.
Now I joined them in the middle with tightly wrapped heavy electrician's tape that was invisible from the outside, yet held them most securely backed up against the fence.
These two weren't going anywhere, not until someone released them. And they'd never be able to tell the true story for I planted in their minds the idea that a space ship manned by eight foot tall, eight-breasted green women with scales all over their bodies had ravished them and then disposed of them in this manner.
That night Kelley and I slept in the camper along the river bottom. Wonderful thing about being back in your old home town: kids know lots of swell hiding places.
Another great thing about small towns: the newspapers have to be much more discreet than in large ones. When they ran Gerald's picture, for example, both the faces and some of the body details of the participants in the orgy were retouched.
Not a word appeared about Joe.
Marty and Norman weren't identified, but both had been sent to the state asylum for study and observation and the paper had speculated that, if the invaders hadn't used a space craft, how else would one of the victims have been on the inside of the unscalable fence and the other on the outside with the gate a full half-block away?
From my standpoint, that was all to the good. Had all four been mentioned in the paper the same day, it might have tipped off Mr. Mortimer R. Nelson that his stooges were getting their comeuppances and he would be next.
Paulette was excited about our forthcoming plans. She had done her part beautifully. "Ooh, I just can't wait to see what Delia Sloan does after this!" she exclaimed. "She's had this coming to her since grade school."
We parked the camper outside the hotel, across from the ballroom entrance. Kelley looked nice in a blue lace dress over a taffeta slip with a matching blue velvet bow and veil. I was in yellow satin, a striking evening gown accessorized with a very wide, enormous-buckled gold leather belt, gold, high-heeled shoes and a tremendous gold leather bow in my hair.
The party was in full swing when we passed the door. Champagne was flowing freely. Too freely for the guests to remain under control. This was going to be perfect.
I noticed Mortimer R. Nelson, resplendent in gray ascot, striped trousers, wing collar and swallow-tailed coat, helping the guests enjoy themselves, acting as though he were the host, even though he was but the father of the groom. And Delia Sloan, I saw, was in a little waiting room next door putting on a blue garter.
Now we found the suite the Nelsons had taken and I asked Kelley to go back and start attending to Delia. She was to gradually sew her bridal gown on her tighter and tighter until, in time, she couldn't take a step and she found that the tight sleeves of her gown were sewn to her bodice. I heard Kelley herding all of them out of the room except Delia and explain that the designer of the costume had insisted she come down to attend to the final touches.
The door to the Nelson suite was unlocked. Mrs. Nelson heard me come in and she came out to greet me. It took but an instant for her face to change from a beaming smile to as hard a look as I ever encountered on a human being before. It was the same sort of hard, fixed look as that of the machine tool salesman on the 14th floor of the Transcendor Building and I told you how that helped me.
"Undress, Mrs. Nelson," I commanded. "Right down to your foundation garment." Her face was expressionless as she carried out my commands. She was a big woman and she had fine taste in clothes. The mauve taffeta dress was beautifully styled and its matching slip was hand detailed. Even her panties were of the same delicate shade.
"Call in Keith and make him put on that outfit," I ordered.
"Come to Mother, Keith dear," she said, a kittenish quality coming into her voice, an automatic smile to her face. He came in looking puzzled.
I stood in the closet where I could watch the scene and my stomach recoiled at its quality.
"But Mumsy," my ex-fianc� protested mildly, "I'm supposed to be getting married soon. I can't see why you're undressed again."
"This will be the last time I can make Keith into my sweet little Katrinka," she said. "You'll be Delia's to do whatever she wants to with after today. So just this once, dear, do like Mumsy says." She wrapped the slip around his neck and his resistance melted. Quickly he shucked off his clothing and, to my surprise, he was wearing men's underwear beneath it.
She even got this off of him and put the mauve panties and slip on him, then her gown and her shoes. She added her earrings and took out her lipstick while he remained completely passive, absolutely still, and she applied lipstick to his mouth. She stroked his stomach and his nipples through the taffeta and he groaned in ecstasy, "Oh, Mumsy, how I'm going to miss this fun we always had together!"
Then I stepped forth and led them to the French door above the ballroom where they could look down and see what was happening. They could look, but neither could move his arms or legs. They could only see what was going on.
The public address system was excellent. "Ladies and gentlemen," it intoned, "guests of the Sloan-Nelson wedding party, we bring you today something exceptional in the world of entertainment, the renowned hypnotist, the great-VICTORIA!"
Everyone applauded as I came forward to address the group. The lighting was perfect. I could see all of them from my little stage and every one of them could see and respond to me. Mortimer R. Nelson was the only one in the room to recognize me right away. His jaw dropped open and he quickly came to the front.
I had the microphone as an additional control and when I heard him say, "You certainly have a lot of nerve, Miss Brownell, coming here like this-" I launched into the beginning of my program and the place was mine to command.
He was holding his thumbs together parallel to the floor and his fingers pointing upward in the manner of a motion picture director planning a picture to remind me of the pictures he had. When I came to an appropriate part in my talk, I indicated him and said, "Now here's an intelligent-looking man. Perhaps hell come forward and help me with my next little demonstration."
"I'll come forward all right," Nelson said, striding to the front of the room and starting to seize the microphone.
"It was so nice of you to offer to help like this," I said. "Now I want you to show these people how you ride a nice motorcycle."
They laughed delightedly as he went around the room his elbows jutting outward, holding imaginary handlebars and making motorcycle sounds with his mouth!
"Now I'd like for you to take off your trousers and hold them up for everyone here to see."
Amid the shocked silence of the room, the father of the groom solemnly took off his trousers and held them up. Then he tied a knot in the bottom of each trouser leg and closed the fly.
I left him standing like that, a statue holding up his pants, and proceeded to work on the complete wedding party. This was fascinating working with groups of six and eight at a time until I had everyone in that room hypnotized!
Now I put them in a huge circle, alternating men and women and ordered them to bend over and engage in an elephant walk. Each had to put his left arm backward between his legs, then seize the hand of the person in front of him with his right hand.
All were forbidden to release their grips. They were unable to let go. Now I left them in this state, holding the silly pose, completely under my control and I awoke them save only for their inability to let go!
Now, under my instructions, Mortimer R. Nelson took the microphone and told the audience that weddings are expensive things and he had always prided himself on being a good businessman. The Sloans, he assured them, were financial imposters and couldn't afford to give the kids a decent wedding (I could recognize the Sloans by their frantic efforts to break loose and Mr. Sloan's shouting, "That's a damned lie, you un-pantsed windbag.") So, Mr. Nelson told his guests, they would simply have to stay like this while he passed among them and improved the family finances.
One by one he lifted the wallets from the hip and breast pockets of the men in the room and tossed them into the bag made by his trousers with the legs knotted. He went from purse to purse, taking the money from them and throwing that into the pants, too. When he had completed his turn around the room, he went outside and handed the burden to Kelley. She put it in the camper.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said into the microphone, "This is the low point of my career. That man who just robbed you hired me to perform for you and ordered me to do this terrible thing under threat of revealing to my friends here in Morton some photographs showing me, as a young girl of seventeen, being ravaged by four boys of your town, a rape, I must inform you, to which he was a party, not as a participant but as an instigator. He bribed those boys to do that thing with motorcycles. I believe you will have no difficulty investigating this story and determining its truth when you get the pictures with which he threatened me. So I must leave you now. A tape recorder will play for five minutes at the end of which it will say the word that will permit you to free yourselves. I leave you and Morton with the greatest regret."
I grabbed Keith by the wrist and ran out with him into the camper. Kelley, at the wheel, drove away. Somehow they never did suspect this vehicle of being any part of the preposterous shambles that I had made of the almost Sloan-Nelson wedding.
CHAPTER NINE
SHANGHAI
When I was a little girl I saw an old movie on television based on a play of intrigue. It told about how a beautiful Eurasian woman had loved a man who betrayed her and married for great wealth instead. That man's one great love had been his beautiful daughter.
The betrayed woman went on to attain great power in the brothels of Shanghai and she had her agents bring her the daughter of the man who had used her so badly. The father spent years and fortunes looking for his daughter.
Then, when his former sweetheart summoned him, he saw the girl, dressed in the cheap, glamorous clothes of the women of the street, her face made up in a tawdry way, in a cage, obviously hooked on some sort of dope, a girl who had been used by countless men and the woman knew from the stricken face of the father that she had exacted full and complete revenge.
That old movie had had a profound effect on me at the time, I recall. Now it was my inspiration. Here I had the one man I once loved in his mother's mother-of-the-groom gown, and I had the means to do with him whatever I chose.
With the help of my dressmaker friend of the Transcendor Building, we made him special costumes, a leather tube into which we could zip him and render him completely helpless, gaudy sissified clothes in which no man would dare appear on the streets, outfits he could wear that looked normal except that they were so designed that, once he was in them, so was a huge post in the middle of my bedroom.
I kept Keith's appetites worked up to the exploding point with my body, my perfumes, my skillful touches, my knowledge of the things his mother had implanted in him. But never did I let him find any satisfaction.
I would dress him to the post and force him to watch while I had wonderful parties with my most virile men friends and even have beautiful girls kissing and stroking him while all this was going on.
I even gave him some imaginatively designed vibrators to use in bringing me to fulfillment time and time again, but his arms were in casts at these times so that he couldn't touch himself with them. We knew the foods that stirred his desires and we saw to it that he had them in quantities.
For days, weeks, months I kept him hungry for me, wanting me more than anything else on earth, only to see other men freely enjoying the pleasures that would have been solely his had he stood up to his mother that time when I needed him.
Gil was the messenger I chose. He went back to Morton and learned that the Nelsons had moved to Chicago, had sold all they owned there. In Chicago he found Mrs. Nelson living in a hideaway apartment on the West Side. He phoned from LaGuardia.
Gil brought her to the room I'd set up for just this, a dark room through the heavy glass wall of which she could see all that was going on. A speaker high in the ceiling let her hear every word spoken in the room which served as our studio of sex.
Keith was rampant in a black stretch bikini-type men's posing outfit. He wanted me so much he was crying. I was lying on the bed with legs spread out inviting him. His wrists were tied behind the post at the end of a long slip knot I held in my hands. "Do you love me more than anything or anybody in the world, Keith?" I asked.
"Oh yes, Irene, I do," he assured me fervently.
"Even more than your Mumsy?"
"I hate her for having kept me from you when I wanted to marry you. I hate her for trying to make me marry that Delia Sloan and for making Dad hire those four boys to do that to you."
"Doesn't the fact that those four and many other men have possessed my body make me less desirable?"
"Oh no, dearest," he proclaimed fervently. "It makes you more desirable. I want you. I need you."
"Even if we get married, would it be all right with you if many other men party with me?"
"Of course, darling."
"Will you help them be comfortable, serve us drinks and food in bed, bathe us and bring us anything we need while it's happening?"
"I'll do anything--anything you wish me to do, dearest."
That was when I pulled the end of the cord that released the slip knot that held his wrists. That was when, with a sob of joy, he ran to me, dove into the nest of my outstretched arms and legs, when he was a tiger, growling and thrilling, purring and tearing into me with frantic, desperate haste, finding a roaring, violent pleasure in expending himself into me, throbbing tremulously for a while as passion forced him to fulfillment.
His pace slackened. I bit on his earlobes, picked up a mauve taffeta slip and put it over his head and arms, then played with his nipples through it.
Instantly the driving piston found its way deep into my carburetor once again and violence was the word for Keith, hunger that only this glorious movement could satisfy. I played with him as my possession, as one might with a mechanical toy, and his response was that inevitable. Keith had to respond to me, had to delight in the response. I owned him more completely than I did anything T possessed, for his needs were totally dependent on my whims.
I added a green satin scarf of huge size to the outfit and stroked the taffeta covered nipples of the man with this most satisfying of fabrics. Again his response was beyond belief, beyond any normal human capacity.
Mrs. Nelson saw it all, watched in horrified fascination, as she saw me making her son into the real, sex-motivated man all males should become and, with every stroke, she knew that he was driven farther from her.
Then Keith finally dozed off. I picked up a small microphone from beside my bed and asked, "Is he mine now, Mrs. Nelson?"
Then I pushed a button and the glass wall slid aside
She hesitated, then came into the salon.
"In view of the size revenge you've taken, Irene Brownell, or Victoria, whichever you are," she said, "I don't believe apologies are truly in order, are they?"
"They're usually worthless," I said. How strange it was to feel more in command of the situation.
"I can tell you, though, that, after considering everything, I can't honestly blame you and I have to admire the way you fought back."
That really surprised me. "Well, thank you," I said.
Now Keith stirred. His eyes opened slightly, then all way. "Hello, Mom er, Mother," he said. Suddenly his voice became deeper. "I hadn't expected you here."
"Are you pleased to see me?" She spoke so coolly that I had to admire her in turn.
"Not in the least," Keith said. "Irene and I were in the middle of a party and we really shouldn't be interrupted like this. So if you'll just go away, perhaps we can get together some other time."
Her face mirrored appreciation when she looked at me, contempt when she looked at him. But she did go. Keith tried to push me back down again, but I ordered him back into his leather sheath and zipped it closed.
"Not when you wish it, Keith," I told him. "Only when I do. Not for your pleasure. Just for mine. Is that clear?"
There were tears in his eyes, but he did say, "Yes."
Want something long enough and when you finally get it, the elation is short-lived. You need constant stimulation, a long parade of new incentives. At least that's the case with me.
I need men, many of them, for the physical satisfaction I can obtain from them and for the psychic pleasure I get from completely subjugating, humiliating, binding, torturing and degrading them. I need the big game hunter's sense of bagging trophies.
Men are mine. Big, strong, virile men I can bend to my will, enjoy and, on occasion, ruin.
Fortunately the supply is great. No matter how much my appetites grow, I can always find more, find their weaknesses, compel them to pleasure me with their persons and with their suffering.
You, for example, look like a likely specimen to add to my collection. Come, tell me what you'd like me to wear and I will wear it. Tell me what you'd like for me to do to you, and I will do it. Thrill to the painful pleasure of being mine, slave. Come crawl to me with that whip in your mouth. Let me take it from you.
You have looked into my eyes, you writhing, helpless man-thing, you. Now you must suffer in my own delightful purgatory, the special punishments I've designed just for you.