by Patricio
(06/30/04)
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Chapter 8
This is what he asks for, in his first email from England. I miss you. Send me a picture of your cunt each day. With a single word to describe her.
It's tricky. She wants to be moist for him. But for the first couple of days the dry mechanics of taking the pictures overwhelm her desires. She has to experiment with places for the digital camera, and get the hang of the timer in order to be in place as its subject, and then she doesn't like the way the flash highlights arbitrary parts of the image, so she decides she needs natural light, only she doesn't want any Tom Dick or Harriet peering in through her window (even if they'd have to have binoculars) seeing her photographing her cunt so it's difficult to find the right location so...
So it's the third day before the picture -- her labia just parted for him, glistens a little with desire. That's her word for the third day, after Exposed and Slit - Desire.
His landscapes are of rolling hills, with sheep in the near distance, and heather, and stone walls, and lowering skies. He writes as he has never spoken. He writes, I want you. He writes, Thank you for starting to become Violet. He writes, Are you in thrall to me or am I in thrall to you?
Thrall, she writes the next day, with a picture of her cunt widely, absurdly exposed, a diamond, her clitoris emerging. My Cunt, he replies, and she is chained by her ankle by a long chain to the hook he fixed in her bathroom ceiling, and she makes love to herself with a long science-fiction dream of how the hook is connected through fibre-optic cables to a distant place where he controls her, where he says, Yes, fuck yourself for me.
So it's spooky when the next day, in reply to a more demure cunt-image and the word Opening he writes back, Fuck yourself for me. How connected they are.
In the night she binds each ankle to each bottom corner of the bed, and it's difficult, she wants him there to force her to stretch, on her own she's unwilling to make the effort, she has to imagine his voice urging her to try harder, to make it hurt.
At last she's bound. Her legs splayed, her cunt open like one of her photographs for him. She closes her eyes and the science fiction film segues into a second act. Not only can he see her, he has tentacles that explore every hollow and mound, every peak and crevice of her body. "Yes," she says, "yes."
Later in the night a man stuffs a gag into her mouth and fastens it there with tape. If she weren't so sure she was dreaming she might have resisted him. By the time she realizes she's awake, that a man in a mask and gloves and dark clothing is really gagging her, her attempts at screams are already futile and he has metal clamped on her left wrist and he's twisting her body round and silly bitch why did she leave her ankles bound like that for her demon Englishman far away in England?
She fights, she spits and fights and grunts and flails and it's all to no avail: soon her wrists are handcuffed behind her and he has a knife, a knife pointing at her.
She stares at the point of the knife. He and she seem to be still, a tableau, for a long time. Her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The blade is curved, perhaps four inches long. The hand isn't shaking; it's black-gloved. The arm is in black. The mask, now her heart is still thudding but is slowly settling into a rhythm, she sees that the mask is of a puffy male face, wearing rouge and eye make-up. The head wears a wig, a long wig.
It's a ballet of fear. The point of his knife, held still for how long? -- seconds? minutes? -- now moves towards her face. She slowly sinks back, a mewling noise seeping from her, her arms painful beneath her, until she lays back.
The point of the knife rests against her right nipple. But he doesn't turn its blade to begin to cut her until just below the areola. And then, after her stifled gasp, she realizes, the wound is superficial. It's just superficial. Yes it is.
The knife cuts a line through her breast, over her ribs, over her belly, heading for her -- heading for her exposed -- please don't, please don't --
She sobs, as her bladder empties its contents onto the white sheet, and the knife lifts from her a moment afterwards.
Only to return, pressed against her left nipple. Again, beyond the areola, begins to cut. Another superficial line. It's only superficial. He won't, over her ribs and her belly and no, when he gets to it he won't really, no he won't --
The point of his knife just touches between her labia and she would scream if she could. The smell of her.
Oh and then it's, he takes the blade and thrusts the handle into her cunt. As the Englishman did, when he photographed her.
The masked man is holding something up to the faint light. Glinting. A small key. He drops it on the carpet. He turns to go. He hasn't said a word.
She hears the outer door slam.
It could be a trick. Silence. Listen longer. Still silence.
She lets herself weep, for a few moments, then gathers her strength.
It's hard to sit up. It takes a few tries, leaning on her left elbow then twisting, levering herself up. He's dropped the key to -- please the goddesses, that it's not a trick key -- in a cruel place. She's going to have to push the knife out of her cunt somehow, to avoid damaging herself, then half-twist forwards, keeping one leg or the other straight, then simply pitch herself forwards off the bed on to the floor and hope she doesn't break anything.
Concentrate. Don't think about the man. Focus. Don't think about how he got in, how he could get in again. Get the key. Get the key....
Two hours later she's free, and bathed, and the sheets are making a soothing sound in the machine, and she's drinking sweet tea, and has creamed her chafed wrists, and put salve on the right shoulder she hurt retrieving the key, and she's solved the mystery. She e-mails him: It was you, wasn't it? You never went to England.
She has to stop herself signing it, V.
He replies instantly. He's waiting. My Cunt, he writes, Of course. Make love to yourself with the memory.
She writes back mostly in expletives, interspersed with undertakings never to communicate with or see him again.
Then, still naked, she goes to lie back and look at herself in the mirror above her bed. V, says a thin wound from breast to pubic mound to breast.
She phones work to say she's sick, then lies back again and stares. What is she becoming? Violet? V?
And what might he become? The once-kindly Englishman who tricked her into believing he was far away so he could come to her room in the night and frighten her half to death? Dressed as -- she has surfed the Net now, she's found the image he was imitating -- dressed as the Marquis de Sade? What other tortures might he inflict on her next? Once she's written to him later, as probably she will, and sent him a photograph of her cunt, with a knife protruding from it, and the single letter, V?
