Between here and there, exists a place that is not really a place. In as much as it can be thought of as a place, it is a place where thought plays at being substance, and substance is nothing more than void. A state where before, now, and later are all utter strangers to one another. A place of light and shadow … well … mostly shadow. It’s a threshold of sorts, between what you might call reality and an even stranger place that I call home. I often visit there and watch the people go by, but they never see me standing with my shadow body, or feel me caress them with my shadow hands except to shiver with a chill creeping down the spine. Sometimes, when this palsied, dying universe twitches and gasps in just the right way, shadow-thought becomes solid-substance and I step from that shadow state to play with lesser creatures.
There is something about black patent thigh-high boots that is an irresistible turn-on for me. If the legs they encase go up under a tight black skirt over which is a bare mid-drift, all the better. Further, in this case, her short jacket was unbuttoned and that barely covered and yet accentuated the black lace bra that supported her perfectly shaped and generously sized breasts. Her small, slender body was perfect.
She leaned against the brick wall. One foot on the ground, the other propped against the bricks behind. An unlit cigarette dangled from her lips, and she dug in her purse for the means to light it.
Easy or hard, I had to have her. I tried charm first. I pulled my lighter from my pocket and flicked on the flame. I held it to the end of the cancer-stick. The flame lit up a face framed by a helmet of black hair and she glanced up at me with her too-big blue eyes. “Let’s play a game,” I began. “You be L’il Red Riding Hood, and I’ll be the Big Bad Wolf.”
She looked up at me like I was some sort of alien slime. The tip of the cigarette glowed an angry red as she inhaled and then she loosed a long stream of acrid smoke into my face. She made three assertions then, and each of them was wrong in every respect. “Look, you’re probably a nice guy, but I’m not going to have anything to do with you, and you are just going to go away, now.”
I glanced each way up the street and saw no one. No cars approaching and no one on foot either. That was not unusual for this part of town at this hour. As I said earlier, easy or hard, I had to have her and there was no one to stop me. I grabbed the lapel of her jacket and pulled her off the wall, turned her, and pounded the flat of my palm into her ass to get her moving in the right direction; toward the opening of the alley. I followed the slap with a foot on her ass and a shove that got her pretty much flying the way I wanted her to go. She lunged forward from the kick, almost caught her balance despite her heels, but inevitably fell forward on to her hands and knees. She looked back over her shoulder at me, and the fear on her face was intoxicating.
You might think I’d be worried about her screaming, but there was something about that street and especially that alley. Something that deadened sound. You see, I’d used it before, and it was exactly what I wanted. I usually wasn’t lucky enough to find what I wanted standing right outside of it, and I was feeling very fortunate. I scooped up her purse and flung it down the alley. A passer-by was unlikely, but there was no reason to risk someone getting curious and coming to investigate.
I use to be all about using found objects, but they can often be either too much or not enough. Neither a bit of pipe or piece of re-bar, or a newspaper or plastic cup make a good substitute for a whip. I had once come up with a stray length of barbed wire, and that was interesting. No, more often than not, you just can’t lay hands on what you need. Now I always brought what I wanted.
I uncoiled the single-tail whip, and the leather creaked as it moved. It was new and I was ready to break it in. I played the whip out behind me and cast it forward over her head where it gave out that lovely Crack!
She scrambled forward, finally regained her feet, and shot down the alley. She negotiated the left turn and then the right; a kink placed there by some mystery of property lines. I followed her with a whoop, “I’m coming to get you, pussy!”
I rounded the corner and there she was, like so many before her, standing with her back to the wall and nowhere to go. I knew that space. I’d played there before. Hell, I’d practiced there before. I knew the distances. I threw the whip again, and it cracked just inches from her terrified face. She felt the wind of it; even felt the little bits of the popper fly into her face as they frayed off the end.
Is she a left or a right? I wondered. They always went either left or right now. She turned to the left and I smashed the whip into the bricks next to her before she could move. She turned back to face me. Now, one of two things would happen. Either she’d turn and try to flee the other direction, or she’d surrender.
Her jacket opened and closed as her chest expanded and her breasts shrugged the leather opening apart. It was as if that was the opening through which the breath entered her body. She stood, back against the bricks, and looked at me. Then, and even though I’d heard it many times before it was still beautiful, she said, “Please.”
“What’s your name, bitch,” I said softly.
“Nija.”
“I’m Walter, but my friends call me Walt,” I said. “Are you going to be my friend, Nija?”
“Yes, Walt. Please, don’t …” she trailed off.
“Well, Nija, you can either lose a little bit of flesh from your left thigh, or you can take your jacket off for me. I don’t much care which. Understand, you will take it off for me. The question is, how much will you lose before you do?”
“Please,” she repeated.
Crack! I took her dead-center in the two-inch gap between the top of her boot and hem of her skirt.
The sound she made was half-scream and half-groan as her hand covered the welt.
“Please,” she said again, and now I took her in the other thigh.
I’d had one woman that refused to cooperate no matter what I did, and I was hoping that I didn’t have another one like that on my hands; she was much less than satisfying. I’d eventually left her a bloody heap on the ground, but unmolested. I admired her tenacity, but she wasn’t much fun.
“Okay,” she sobbed, and slipped off the jacket and dropped it on the ground.
“Turn around and face the bricks,” I said. Once they started cooperating, they generally continued to cooperate. She was no exception, and she turned. I stepped forward, put my foot between her shoulder-blades and pinned her in place. “Hands behind your back,” I ordered, and when she complied, I snapped the cuffs on her. The coil of rope came out next. I looped that around the chain of the cuffs, then up through the big eye-bolt I’d sunk into the bricks just as high up as I could reach.
I pulled down on the ends of the rope, she turned sideways to the wall, and her hands went up behind her back, strappado style. I didn’t stop until she groaned, “Oh, god, please stop!” I tied the ends off and took out the knife. I looked down at her; right side pressed against the bricks, arms almost straight up, chest heaving with fright. She turned her head, looked up toward me, and I imagined those big blue eyes that I could not see in the gloom. I got so hard that I dumped my plans to go slowly with her. The knife made short work of her brassiere, skirt, and panties.
The single-tail was all about gaining immediate control. Now that I had that, I switched to the cat. The cat was all about control of a different sort. The single-tail could cut straight to the bone. It required a lot of control not to do serious damage. The cat would let me whip her into a frenzy of either utter pain or of a mix of pain and pleasure. Which it was depended more on her than on me, but I’d take either. “No!” Nija said as if she knew, not the obvious fact that I was going to whip her, but instead what the whipping was eventually going to do to her. The tails hissed in the air and slashed into her ass, hard. I backed off then, but laid lighter strokes over every part of her I could reach, building up the force slowly until I was back to the level of the first stroke.
I grabbed her by her hips and pulled her away from the wall, turning her ninety-degrees so that her back was pressed against the bricks and her arms went straight up. I kicked her legs wider and said, “Stay!”
Her skin was feverish with the whipping and she was shaking. I slid my hands along her sides. The left side was hot while the neglected right side was cool to the touch. “Please, no more,” she groaned.
“But you’re all uneven,” I said. “Don’t you think I should fix that?”
“No,” Nija said, then added, “Does it matter what I say?”
“Not in the sense that it will change what I do,” I replied. “But it does matter to me what you say.”
“Then even me out, and after that do whatever is next on your list,” she whispered in a rush. “Just, please Walt, please, don’t cut me.” Why had she said that? Didn’t she understand what she was dealing with? Even before I’d thought about it, the knife was in my hand and against the skin of her ass cheek. “No!” she pleaded even as I slowly sliced into her flesh. “Oh god, no!” It wasn’t the scream I expected. It was quieter; more of a moan. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Eighteen cuts I gave her. A stack of three parallel cuts on each of her glutes, three on each breast, and three on each side of her lovely mouth. Those last six on her face had a very unexpected effect. “Oh god, Walt, please, please, fuck me!” she growled.
I slashed through the rope holding up her wrists, picked her up, and tossed her down onto the stack of flattened cardboard boxes. “Spread your legs,” I ordered and poked her in the thighs just above her boots to move her along. She opened her legs. I took down my jeans, knelt and thrust myself into her as hard as I could. Some of my past victims had screamed at this point and she did, too; not with the pain of a dry pussy torn open by a big unlubricated cock. She was wet and she screamed, “Yes, Walt! Fuck me hard!” I did while slapping her face, savaging her nipples with my teeth, and clawing at the slashes on her breasts and ass. When I surged come into her, she thrashed, coming herself.
My breathing slowly began to even out and my heart settled into a more normal rhythm. Always in the past, when I came around after, she’d be sobbing or begging, but Nija was calm under me. Her hands were stroking my head and back. I began to wonder if I’d found the one woman in all the world who liked taking it as rough as I wanted to dish it. Was it possible that we could have an actual relationship? I guessed I’d have to back off some; I couldn’t use her this hard all the time without a serious risk to her health. The thought made me sad and I questioned if getting involved with her was even a good idea.
She continued to stroke my head, and I had another thought, Her hands were cuffed behind her, weren’t they?
I opened my eyes to a world filled with light much too bright for my alley. I pushed up off of her and looked out across the rolling dunes of black sand covered by a sky crowded with an impossible number of stars which cast that bright glow. One bloated red star sat near the horizon looking as big as the moon. I looked down at her. At her unmarked face. The cuffs were on each wrist, but the chain between was broken. She looked up smiled and said, “Now, Walt, my love, how about a bite to eat?” Her hands pulled my throat down to her mouth, now filled with needle sharp, shark-like teeth. As she pulled, I felt her nails rupture the skin of my back and tear through to the ribs. As she bit into my neck, I felt my carotid rupture, the spray of arterial blood, and … darkness filled my head.
I scored his last femur with a diamond hard finger-nail and split it in two, lengthwise. I licked the the marrow out of both pieces before discarding them onto the pile with the rest of his bones. I always save the best for last. My physiology is different, which means among other things that for me pain really is pleasure, and it doesn’t hurt if it’s mixed with some good sex, either. I heal just about as fast as I can be injured, and it takes a lot of energy to operate my body. You might wonder why I didn’t keep him around for a bit of future fun? The only thing I can say to that is: Hey! A girl’s got to eat!