Punish Me, Please Me

by Ashley Zacharias

  “I have only one sin worth discussing, Father. I have been gossiping.”

  He was confused to hear this. “I thought that you told me that gossip was the one sin that you never commit.”

  “Apparently I sometimes lie, as well,” she replied, casually. “I should confess to that, too, I guess. The worst part about the gossip, though, is that I told two other women about what has transpired between you and me in the confessional. I'm sure that you agree that I need a severe penance for this transgression.”

  Father Luke felt himself flush with fury. “You certainly do,” he spat out. Mary had promised him that she would protect him by keeping everything that happened between them secret. When Maria and Marilyn had asked for similar treatment, he had guessed that Mary must have prompted them to do it but had ignored his misgivings because things had become so interesting. He had reason to be as angry with himself as with her.

  But he would vent his anger on her, not on himself. He would order her down to his dungeon and beat her to within an inch of her life.

  Then he struggled to bring his emotions under control. He could not afford to do anything drastic. If he did anything without her agreement, especially anything that left physical marks, her husband would get involved and that would ruin him. “What penance do you propose?” he asked as calmly as he could manage.

  “I selected a severe penance that is completely appropriate to my sin. More severe than any of us have suffered yet. I will serve my penance in the undercroft room for twelve hours, beginning at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. I am dreading the suffering that I will have to endure but you will be assured that I am spending a full day regretting my betrayal to the depths of my soul. You deserve my utmost contrition.”

  “I will see you at nine tomorrow morning,” he replied coldly.

  He spent the evening wondering what Mary had planned for herself. Maria's spiked leotard had been especially brutal, but Marilyn's penance was no picnic, either. She had been suffering constant gnawing hunger for days and it would continue for weeks longer before she lost enough weight. Even Mary's chastity belt must have been oppressive when she had to wear it for day after day. If Mary said that her next penance would be more severe than those punishments, she must be planning something dreadful.

  When he entered the room the following morning, he found Mary waiting patiently. Her face was an emotionless mask. There was a bulging plastic bag on the table.

  Without ado, she removed a strange device from the bag. The size of her head, it consisted of metal straps bent into circular shapes and bolted together. “Because I spoke when I should not, I have reproduced an ancient device called a brank that stops a woman's tongue from wagging for as long as she wears it. And the memory of having worn it is certain to stop her tongue in the future. Once I lock it about my head, I will not be able to speak again until you unlock it.” She handed him a pair of keys, then said, “Please forgive my sin, Father.”

  Without another word, she raised the device and began fitting it around her head. It formed a kind of tight steel cage formed from two full horizontal hoops and one vertical half hoop. The lower hoop, hinged at the side, fit around her jaw and neck below her ears. From that, another piece projected upward across her mouth, bent around her nose, across her forehead, over the crown of her head, and then back down to the nape of her neck. This piece was hinged at the mouth where a heavy gauge steel angle iron was attached. A second solid hoop was fastened around her head above her brow.

  When she swung the front piece into place, Mary had to open her mouth to admit the angle iron. It intruded inside, sliding past her teeth to the back of her tongue. When she closed the hinge, the steel projection pressed her tongue firmly against the floor of her mouth. It was angled slightly downward to put even pressure on the full length of her tongue.

  The steel piece in her mouth had a small piece of sheet metal bolted to it. The edges of the sheet metal had been serrated and bent down so that dull points were pressing into her tongue. They were not sharp enough to cut her if she kept her tongue still but she dared not move her tongue against it. That made the device not merely uncomfortable, but viciously cruel. She would have to concentrate on holding her tongue still for as long as she wore the device.

  She gagged a little when the foreign object depressed her tongue and she had to pause and take a few deep breaths to accommodate it.

  When both hinges were closed, the straps met in the back of her head. They ended in loops of steel. She reached behind her head and threaded the hasp of a heavy padlock through the loops. When the lock clicked closed, the brank could no longer be removed without unlocking it.

  Father Luke examined the construction with fascination. The straps were bent from heavy gauge steel strips with a row of perforations down the center. He had seen these in hardware stores. They were used for hanging heavy things like pipes from floor joists. The steel straps had been bolted together, but the threaded ends of the bolts were pounded flat so that the nuts could not be unscrewed. They would have to be cut off.

  The weight of the device was borne by the straps over and around her head. The lock on the back helped counterbalance the extra weight of the strapping and plates on the front. When he bent to peer into her mouth, she parted her teeth to allow his examination. The device did not hold her jaw closed – she could breath freely through her mouth – but it held her tongue firmly.

  She closed her lips back around the tongue depressor and stared at him impassively past the strap that followed the bridge of her nose. The drool that was pooling in her mouth overflowed and spilled down her chin. With her tongue pinned, she could not swallow effectively.

  He wanted to ask her if she had made the device herself but she wouldn't be able to utter a single word all day.

  He looked at her hands clasped in her lap. She was not wearing a watch and would not be able to count down the hours that she would have to wait. And she certainly would not be leaving this room with this device locked on her head. There were no windows, so she would not know if he returned on time or had decided to let her continue to suffer past her self-imposed deadline and late into the night.

  Of course, there was no books, television, or radio in the room to speed the passage of time. She could do nothing but sit in silent agony for hour after hour, contemplating her sins.

  A tear trickled down her cheek. Already she was suffering to the point of tears. And her long day had barely begun.

  Father Luke locked the door on his way out, not to keep Mary in, but to keep everyone else out. It would not do to allow anyone to discover her predicament.

  If she were discovered, she wouldn't be able to explain herself.

  * * *

  It was impossible for Father Luke to think about anything but the solitary, silent woman confined in the undercroft. An hour in the device would be dreadful. Two hours agony. Twelve hours unimaginable.

  But he was not imagining anything. A real woman was suffering dreadful torture in the undercroft, a short walk down from his office.

  He was tempted to walk downstairs and look in on her to reassure himself that she was not in distress. But that would be useless. He knew that she was in distress; and that leaving her alone was part of it. She did not deserve even a slight distraction from her punishment so he left her to suffer alone for hour upon hour.

  He was still angry that she had betrayed their secret. Even if that betrayal had resulted in two other women delivering themselves into his hands for delightful punishments of their own, it was still a betrayal and it could have gone badly for both of them.

  When the hour hand finally circled the dial and returned to nine, he rushed down to the undercroft and unlocked the door.

  Mary was sitting on one of the chairs, her hands folded in her lap, much as he had left her.

  The front of her blouse was dark, soaked with saliva. Her cheeks were streaked with tears and her eyes red from crying.

  She sat completely still.

  He p
ulled the keys from her pocket, but she slowly shook her head.

  He was confused. He was supposed to free her now. Surely she desperately wanted to be free. Yet she was refusing something and could not explain why.

  As he stood in confusion, she rose smoothly from the chair, walked to him, and sank to her knees at his feet.

  He had become accustomed to his female penitents kneeling to service him at the end of their penance, but Mary couldn't do that now. No part of him was going into any mouth that was filled with jagged steel and blocked by heavy straps.

  She unfastened his clothing to free his erection, then pulled a foil packet from a pocket and tore it open. As she unrolled a condom over him, his heart leaped for joy. If the woman could not use her mouth to thank him for her penance, then she must be intending to allow him into her sex.

  She rose to her feet, turned, raised her skirt to her waist, spread her legs wide, and bent herself over the edge of the table.

  He was confused by what he saw. She was wearing a chastity belt again but it was different from her other belt. This one covered only her sex. Instead of the piece that ran up the crack between her buttocks, it had two pieces that angled across her cheeks, leaving her anus unobstructed.

  She pulled a tube from her pocket, squeezed a large dollop of lubricant on her fingers and worked it deep into her asshole.

  Her meaning was unequivocal. Her mouth and sex were both blocked so she had prepared her only available orifice for his use.

  She rested her cruelly caged head on the table and waited.

  He walked over to her and pushed himself inside, not too quickly, but slowly and firmly, taking pleasure in feeling her sphincter muscles reluctantly part to admit him.

  She might have wanted to scream or call out, but her tongue was still gripped firmly in its steel trap. She could only moan, softly and deeply.

  He worked a slow steady rhythm for several minutes before he finally came.

  It was good. Her ass was tight and hot. He had never done this before and wondered how often she had. She had never confessed to letting her husband sodomize her but that did not mean that they didn't do it.

  When he finally withdrew his flagging member, he had to remind himself to free the woman's head. He turned the key to unlock the padlock but let her remove the device from her own head. He did not want to accidentally scrape the steel points across her tongue. She took exceptional care in withdrawing it from her mouth.

  She said nothing as she returned the device to the plastic bag. Then she looked at him and said, “Tankew, Faddah.” Her tongue was so sore and stiff that she could barely enunciate the words. Fresh tears were flowing down her face.

  He had many questions that he wanted to ask but knew that she would not be able to answer them until her mouth recovered from its cruel mistreatment.

  She left the brank in the room for him to lock in the cabinet in the corner.

  He wondered if she would want him to use it on her again some day.

  * * *

  At nine o'clock, he entered the dungeon room and found, as on previous days, Marilyn Esciu waiting to be weighed. She had now been fasting for five days and had to be almost desperate enough to eat the can of dog food that was stowed in her purse.

  She told him that she had not been cheating and he believed that because she had been losing weight rapidly. It was good that she was telling him the truth because the penance for lying to him would be a few hours of contemplative silence enforced by the brank.

  By stubbornly clinging to her determination to starve herself to death rather than eat the disgusting paste of meat scraps, offal, and cereals, she had lost almost ten pounds in five days. A few of those pounds would be the contents of her gut that had been full and was now empty, but most of them would be lost fat. Her face looked thinner to his eye.

  Though he was no doctor, he knew that her health could be damaged if she lost much more weight at such a rapid pace. It was time to adjust her fast.

  Most days she gave him head after her weighing – he wryly thought that his seed was the one thing that she was allowed to eat without eating dog food first – but she made no such offer today. Instead, she began dressing immediately.

  He waited until she was fully dressed, then said, “The time has come to change your regime from a total fast to a Black Fast. From now on, you may eat two kaiser buns each day, one in the morning and one in the evening, along with your water. But you eat them dry. No butter or jam or any other addition to them. Unless, you want to eat your can of dog food first, of course. If you do that, then you can eat whatever you want.”

  “Not for all the food on earth,” she snarled. Hunger had made her rather ill-tempered.

  He smiled. When she lost another five pounds, he would end the black fast and put her on a more reasonable diet. She would lose her remaining weight more slowly but it should be gone in a month or so. That would be a short time to lose twenty pounds, but not dangerously short. His long-term plan was to enforce a maintenance diet with weekly weighings and returning her to a few days of total fasting if she gained more than three pounds over her target weight.

  If she kept doing as he said, she would never have to eat a bite of dog food. He liked that. He wanted to control her, to force her to obey him, but did not want her to eat anything disgusting. He had researched the contents of dog food and knew better than her exactly how disgusting it was.

  When he opened the door to leave the room, he was shocked to find the other two special penitents, Mary and Maria waiting patiently outside. “What are you doing here?” he asked, his heart suddenly leaping into his chest. Having all three women confront him at once could not be good.

  “Father,” Mary said, “if you could wait for a few minutes, it's important that we talk to you. You deserve a full explanation.”

  He stepped back into the room.

  The other two women followed him.

  “We, the three of us, are working together. We call ourselves the Magdalenes,” Mary said. “after Mary Magdalene, Jesus' consort. Or possibly his wife if you believe Dan Brown. Or his pet social work project if you believe early church propaganda. We are completely dedicated to the church but we believe that, in one particular aspect, it has been following a false doctrine based on faulty theology and misinterpreted history. Demanding that priests be celibate made some sense in the middle ages. At that time, secular power was passed through hereditary lines and that was a failing. The church authorities didn't know much about inbreeding or genetics but they could see that the nobility decayed visibly from one generation to the next. The church held as much power as the aristocracy and the most certain way to ensure that the priesthood never fell into the same cycle of decay was to ensure that priests had no children. Lacking effective birth control, that meant celibacy. Even then, though, enforced celibacy posed serious problems. Priests are normal men with powerful sexual drives that cannot be suppressed indefinitely. There is nothing new about sexual scandals in the priesthood. There have been rumors about licentious clergy throughout history, extending all the way up to various popes. Today, though, in the age of the Internet, secular governments, and powerful forensic technologies, the truth will out with an inevitability never seen before. Rumors soon become criminal cases and the church risks mortal damage. We Magdalenes offer a practical alternative.”

  “I see,” the priest said, darkly.

  “I'm sure that you do, but let me make our intentions clear and specific to ensure that there are no misunderstandings between us. In a nutshell, we offer ourselves for any sexual use that you might otherwise be tempted to force from an altar boy. Instead of using his mouth, you may use ours. Instead of buggering him, you can bugger us. Instead of bullying and abusing him, you can bully and abuse us. The one thing that you cannot do is take us vaginally. That is reserved for our husbands.”

  Mary raised her skirt to display a chastity belt – the one that covered her vagina but left her anus freely available. The other two women fo
llowed suit to show that they were wearing the same device. Marilyn must have slipped hers on when she getting dressed.

  “Any time that we are alone in your presence, we will wear these chastity belts to safeguard that which we reserve for our husbands' exclusive use. It's not that we don't trust you, but it would be a tragedy for everyone if a mistake was made.”

  The priest shrugged. “It doesn't matter. I'm going to end this now, anyway.”

  “There's nothing for you to end,” Maria replied. “We're going to do what we are going to do without your consent or approval. We're making an offer and it will stand indefinitely. You can take advantage of it whenever and as often you wish, now or next week or next year or never, but nothing that you do will change our terms.”

  “Incidentally,” Marilyn said, “there are a couple of reasons for there being three of us rather than just one. First, you can't claim lack of variety. If you get bored with one of us, you can use the others rather than preying on our sons.”

  “I'm not a homosexual,” the priest replied archly. “I have no interest in men or boys.”

  “Our daughters, then,” she answered. “Same problem, same solution. You can use us and only us to satisfy your natural needs. You try anything with anyone else, consensual or not, and we will go ballistic. We will go straight to the police and tell all. We won't lie. We won't claim that we were raped or abused against our will–”

  “Unless we were,” Maria interjected, recalling being forced to lie on a concrete floor with little spikes digging into her nipples for an hour. She had not planned on that.

  “Right,” Marilyn continued, “unless you actually have abused against our will. We tell the police all of the details about whatever has happened between us, including admitting our willing participation, and let the lawyers sort out who committed what crimes. We will tell the full and blunt truth simply so that we don't have to worry about coordinating our stories or being consistent with forensic evidence that is uncovered by later investigations.”