Alice Under Discipline, Part 1

by Garth ToynTanen

  Where had all her inner strength gone? She hadn’t seen it leave; it had just slowly drained out of her, drop by drop, disciplinary imposition by disciplinary imposition, petty rule, by petty rule. Each new stipulation she had knuckled down to, each new behavioural restriction, had taken away a little bit more. She felt and arm come around her shoulders, comforting, almost motherly. It was all so cynical - it was what the woman did when about to leach away a little more of a girls’ self-respect; she’d switch to coaxing, and it was so hard to resist.

  “The quicker we get this over with, the quicker we can get out of here - and then you can have your nice clean school uniform on, get back to your desk and I can give you your medicine.” The glossy pink Wellington was now being held out towards the deflated, stunned Alice, the near pristine boot balanced upright in the woman’s hand and grasped by its sole. The embossed designer’s brand mark around the top of the leg was unmistakable even viewed in profile, the metal button at the side catching the light. “Now Alice, just think of this as a game if you must, but I want you run your tongue over this boot, polish it just as you have been taught to polish your stepmother’s boots, only now using your tongue instead of the cloth you would normally use. There is nothing to be afraid of; it’s perfectly clean, just as if it were straight off the shelf in the shop. Now I don’t want to have to fetch my cane; and just as soon as you have done it you can have your medicine.” Daphne Larkspear could see that even at this stage Alice was looking set to refuse - it was time to play her trump card:

  “If you don’t do it I’m afraid you’ll have to forgo your medication until tomorrow. And then I’ll make sure you take half a dozen with the schoolroom cane before you can have your medicine, bent right over my desk in front of Angel - and your stepmother and her housekeeper.”

  Once again she held out the boot to Alice’s lips, half turning her head towards the waiting Angel, the brown and yellow staining plain on the latter emaciated teenager’s otherwise pretty face. “I want you to take notice of this too, Angel Larkspear.”

  Tentatively Alice ran her tongue along the side of the proffered pink rubber boot as the woman slowly twirled it in front of her face, the rubber pungent in her nostrils and slightly tacky on her tongue. It wasn’t physically unpleasant - in fact there was something strangely reassuring about the tang of the vulcanised rubber - but mentally it was agonising. Then she pulled away, suddenly acutely conscious of the ridiculous spectacle she was presenting, her cheeks burning scarlet with embarrassment.

  The one-time school teacher laughed gently, again glancing back over her shoulder at her other ‘pupil, the shy and timorous Angel Larkspear: “You see Angel? And she hasn’t been through nearly anything like I had to put you through before I could make you do this.” She returned her gaze to the freshly recalcitrant Alice, her voice hardening and her face taking on a stern appearance. Shaking the rubber boot a little to underline her point she brought it once again to Alice’s now pouting lips, pressing the toe meaningfully forwards. “Come along now, Alice child, or there’re be no medication for you today - or even tomorrow at this rate. And you’ll be getting a good caning too; and double the six strokes I promised if there’s another hint of defiance. You have been told to do something, so do as you’re told, or no medicine; I mean it.”

  Alice burst out crying. The woman, grasping the moment, eased the boot yet again towards Alice’s generously proportioned sensuous mouth, easing the toe past the girls parting lips. Defeated Alice took the toe of the pink rubber boot into her mouth almost absentmindedly now, sucking on as if it were an infant’s pacifier and licking with her tongue, all pride for the moment subsiding under the combination of her all-consuming hunger for her medication, her fear of the cane and the sheer dominating power of the woman’s all-conquering will. With the woman twisting and turning the Wellington this way and that she lapped her way with her tongue all the way up one side of the boot, right around the top and then down again to the sole, being told more than once to keep her eyes open. Then she repeated the process again and again, polishing the rubber with saliva and sensuous overlapping tongue strokes, inch by humiliating inch, until the dazzling shine the rubber was taking on began to make her eyes ache.

  Finally it was over, the rigorously domineering woman stepping back with her arms folded below her more-than ample bosom and carelessly tossing the boot to the floor as if to underscore the sheer futility and pointlessness of the task she had just coerced her charge into performing. To Alice’s increased chagrin the discarded boot bounced side-on to where she had been earlier kneeling, skidding into the puddle of vomit and pee Alice had left behind. “Oh well, you’ll just have to clean it up again later - practice makes perfect.” Shrugging her shoulders the woman laughed before again calling out to the awkwardly shuffling Angel standing, head bowed, in the background:

  “Do you see, now, Angel, why you won’t be going anywhere? I know you have been trying to think of a way of getting away from me, of wheedling your way out from under my thumb - and there’s no use in your denying it, you ungrateful child. But you can see now what drug dependency can do to a person; young Alice, here, was at least partly broken well before anyone ever took a cane or a strap to her backside. Addiction, even to prescription drugs, can be a very humbling experience for a young woman, Angel. I don’t think poor Alice has quite taken in yet just how addictive the ‘drug substitute’ her doctor has been prescribing her actually is in its own right - have you Alice?” Alice could only dumbly shake her head in the negative as the woman continued addressing Angel, the pencil-thin teenager now looking decidedly pale.

  Daphne Larkspear continued, relishing the effect that what she had to say was having on her two young charges, but on Angel - as the focus of her diatribe - in particular: “Nor, I imagine, has Alice ever had any inkling that the tranquilizer she has since been switched to is even more prone to inducing dependency than the original drug she was put on - both physically and psychologically. Well I have had a word with Alice’s doctor, through her stepmother, and she agrees with me that you’re far too highly strung, young Angel Larkspear. So... as from today you are going to be started on the same tranquilizer that Alice has been on. And under conditions that are planned to assure the rapid development of a nice healthy...” she laughed lightly “... psychological dependency”. The physical side of it - the stomach-knotting craving - will develop later. But not to worry, dear; apparently with the incremental dosage scheme Alice’s doctor has in mind you’ll soon catch Alice up. So as from today it is going to be: two capsules or the cane, for you my girl. Or strictly speaking ‘two capsules and the cane’ or the ‘cane and two capsules’...” again she gave a little laugh “...because we both know that once you’ve had a few strokes of my cane across your naked backside you’ll do as you are told. You always do in the end.”

  It was that very moment that Alice heard the door again open, the jangle of keys making her jump nervously - she was becoming increasingly jitterier by the second now, her flesh crawling and seemingly no longer satisfied to contain her skeleton. Wave upon wave of nausea was battering away at her strangulated twisted and churning guts and her brain had started to swell within her skull, or so it seemed.

  The pair of boots that drew to a halt in front of her were caked in sludgy loose muck. Instantly recognisable as her stepmother’s latest acquisition, the berry and black split-colour rubber of each of the boot’s uppers was largely unscathed other than for discrete streaks, spots and speckles of dark brown mud and the occasional yellowish streak of something as yet unidentifiable. Behind her stepmother - and leading right up to where she was presently standing, smiling condescendingly at her stepdaughter - extended a trail of loose clods of mud, dollops of what to Alice looked to be horse droppings, and watery slurry-like puddles.

  Alice immediately burst into fresh floods of tears. At the back of the room Angel, too, had begun to weep, though with her the cause was somewhat m
ore complex; she had just been informed that she was going to be deliberately turned into a pathetic addict, just like Alice. Both teenagers had reached breaking point. The floor was ruined and both girls knew the filth-laden trail would lead back right across the schoolroom too; both room’s floors would have to be scrubbed and polished all over again, right from the start. Whatever happened now, the rest of the day would see the two of them again down on their hands and knees in their ‘domestic education’ overalls and pinafores with nailbrushes in hand; it was a spirit-crushing prospect.

  “Well, well, Mrs Larkspear. Well done - I’ve been watching on the security system.” Smiling she turned her attention to her crestfallen stepdaughter. “So, Alice... You enjoy polishing rubber boots? Is it the taste of the rubber you like, or the smell perhaps? It’s nothing to be ashamed of - unless it becomes an obsession, of course; then we’ll have to have a word with your doctor about it. Meanwhile I’ll do my best to understand what it’s all about - I’ve read a lot about fetishes you know.” Filled with a mixture of dismay and disbelief Alice slowly shook her head, her head hanging in shame, her eyes averted and unable to meet those of her stepmother.

  “Well, it looked to me, from where I was standing so to speak, as though you were most enthusiastic. Though I have to say; I was standing in the stable yard at the time - I can pick up the webcam feeds on my smartphone you see. Anyway; I have never seen such enthusiastic work! And such attention to detail, too! I just thought I’d pop up and see if you wouldn’t mind giving my new boots a quick brush-up and shine... Perhaps if I were to sit myself down in the chair and put my feet up... I am a little weary...”

  Alice could feel her head shaking, almost as if it were an involuntary reflex she could do nothing about. She could only watch with horror as Daphne Larkspear stared at her, anger glinting in the diabolically twisted woman’s eyes, the realisation dawning slowly that she was refusing to do as she was told, almost as if it had not been her decision to make. She was still trying to nod, to say yes, when she felt Mrs Larkspear grasp her by the back of the neck and felt herself being roughly hustled towards the side of the armchair, before being flung over the arm that doubled as bolster cushion when she was bent across it for the cane...or worse. Licking an already clean, new and practically unworn rubber boot held up to her face by Mrs Larkspear had been one thing. Kneeling in defeat before her hated stepmother had been another. She still had some pride - but knew only too well that she was about to regret having retained that morsel of self-respect...

  Dampened by Alice’s mishap of earlier, the sheer but strong fabric of the whipping drawers glistened across the tight spherical contours of her dimpled chubby bottom, seeming to shimmer where the glossy material curved inward at the centre before disappearing from view entirely as a shadowy ‘’V’-shaped valley of white fabric that sunk deep between the girl’s deeply-cleft buttocks.

  Daphne Larkspear tapped the tip of the plaited leather riding switch against first one cheek and then the other in turn, watching in pleasure the exquisite quivering of tightly compressed flesh and drum-skin-tight fabric rippling together in choreographed perfection, as if one bonded entity. The sensation that ran through her as she raised the switch high, back behind her right shoulder, was something most akin to ecstasy. She paused for moment, a fleeting instant, savouring the taste that power brought, devouring the helplessness of the teenage girl bent double before her, soaking up the unimpeachable, glossy pinkish-white succulence of the girl’s bottom, squeezed, sculptured and moulded into two perfect outreaching half-moons by the tightly-laced Victorian style whipping drawers. Then she slashed the riding switch in, surprising herself with the viciousness with which she brought it lashing down, watching as the plaited leather bit deep into the compressed out-curving flesh across the centre of the girl’s bottom, the tip momentarily curving around the far flank before springing back.

  For a split second there was only the reverberation of the crack of leather against drum-skin-drawn fabric pulled humanly tight over resilient, springy girl flesh. Alice’s head, thrown back in a moment of impact, lolled wildly, her eyes bulging with something akin to insanity and her mouth gaping silently as if mute. Then with a huge gulp of breath that could be heard echoing off the blank walls the scream came. It was a high-pitched grating screeching scream, one that seemed to wind itself ever upward in pitch, as if grasping for an ever higher register in seeking somehow to offset the agony growing across her scorched behind.

  One stroke with Daphne Larkspear wielding her stepmother’s riding crop and already Alice was regretting with all her heart refusing to lap at her stepmother’s boots. Indeed her eyes, having sought out her stepmother’s feet and the glossy but mud splattered designer Wellingtons, now stared beseechingly at them, her lips moving as if in prayer, the word ‘please’ forming silently and going unheard through her own now subsiding cries, gasps and sobs. In the face of such a shattering flogging as clearly she was about to receive, the humiliation of licking those boots clean seemed suddenly so insignificant. It seemed such an easy thing now to have shut her mind to the gritty, earthly taste of mud - for she was sure that was all it would turn out to be - after all she hadn’t been instructed to go anywhere near the soles, just run her tongue up and over the legs and uppers. It would have been a humiliating but merely symbolic surrender, that was all.

  Standing directly in front of her errant stepdaughter, towering over the prone form helplessly bent tightly over the bolster strapped to the armchair, Karen Lamberton-Marchment found herself shuffling awkwardly. She was absentmindedly kicking the drying muck from the vulcanised rubber soles of the glossy split-colour berry and black custom designed boots that had become the focus of the whole affair as she looked on. Even viewed through the Dacron fabric of the whipping drawers her ex-teacher had put her stepdaughter in the weal that had immediately flared up across Alice’s behind was vivid enough to make her wince. A deep poppy, tending to purple towards its centre, the weal’s raised edges could be made out even through the fabric. The thin, biro-red, thread-like line beginning to weave its way along the very centre was testament to the fact that with this, the very first stroke, her ex-teacher, Daphne Larkspear, had managed to split the girl’s skin right across her bottom. It was something she knew would not go down well with Alice in view of her stepdaughter’s vanity; it both horrified her and excited her at the same time. She knew too that it would be something that her ex-teacher would now work on, even if she hadn’t intended to have gone so far so soon in the progression of the girl’s punishment. In forming that latter notion she was not mistaken and she watched in fully comprehending silence as laying down the riding crop along the armchair’s seat and practically under the girl’s pretty, upturned nose Daphne Larkspear moved round in front of her weeping stepdaughter, taking the girl by the chin and gently tilting her tousle-haired head until the girl’s eyes met those of her chastiser.

  It was Alice who spoke first, before her teacher even had time to begin, her voice broken, hesitant, the words spluttering out between shuddering sobs: “p please, I can’t... please... can I, may I... please let me...” She was interrupted by a sharp slap around the face, Daphne Larkspear drawing back her hand as if to strike again... and then holding back, satisfied that the warning alone was enough to silence her distraught ‘pupil’. Holding up a finger she placed it to her lips in the classic gesture to be quiet before placing it to the girl’s lips in turn.

  “Sssh! You know we don’t speak to our betters until spoken to first - I can see we are going to have to set you to copying out the school rules again once this is over; and young Angel here too. That’s how it works, you know that; one breaks the rules, you both get punished. How’s about the full set of official stipulations, one thousand times apiece in your very best handwriting? What do you think about that, Angel?”

  From the back of the room there came a despairing groan. Young Angel Larkspear didn’t think she could go through all tha
t again. Surely it would send her quite insane, eventually, page after page after page with no letup, no window she might gaze out of to ease the tedium - the classroom windows were mounted far too high up for that - no sound other than the scratching of the pen, her own breathing and the incessant invariant tick, tick, tick of that damn old classroom clock. Somehow that bloody old broken down school clock was the worst part of it - and it didn’t even tell the time, the hands didn’t even revolve. The teenager was still standing on the pedestal in the corner where she had been placed, her nose pressed against the highest of the four circles painted on the wall, her hands hitching up the pleated rear of her school skirt to display her school knickers as required with her elbows awkwardly tucked in tightly to her sides.

  Whether or not it was Daphne Larkspear’s intention to ultimately send her insane was neither here nor there for the moment. At present Angel Larkspear had other problems to focus her mind on: Her neck had already developed a painful crook in it from having to keep her head tilted back at such an acute angle and the muscles between her shoulder blades throbbed from the effort of keeping her elbows in as close as possible to her sides while simultaneously keeping her skirt hitched, up as she had been instructed. Now, to make matters worse she found she was desperate to go for a wee.

  It was the most humiliating, embarrassing situation an attractive teenage girl might find herself in, dressed from head to toe in a proper, genuine school uniform, placed standing facing a corner like a naughty girl and feeling as if about to wet herself. But she knew there was nothing she could do about it. This place had been set up as a sort of private prison for that other girl, Alice; there were bars on the windows, locks on doors and everything that went to make up a prison. But even had she been at Mrs Larkspear’s home, or anywhere else in fact, she doubted there would have been anything she could have done - she just could not stand up against Miss Daphne, she just didn’t have the self confidence or the strength of personality, Miss Daphne was always telling her so.