She caught up with Jennifer near the car park.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘You can see the girls are having fun?’
‘Perhaps it’s the audience,’ Jennifer said. She pointed at the row of expensive cars lined up under sheltering awnings. ‘They’re just rich men’s playthings. You can’t pretend that’s right.’
‘It’s human nature for some people to enjoy having power over others,’ Vanessa agreed. ‘But surely it’s better that they do it with willing subjects than unwilling ones. Luckily the flipside is that there are people who like being dominated. Bring them together and everybody is happy. And here it’s done openly and honestly and safely.’
‘Even if I really believed all that, I still don’t know if it’s right … not deep down! Wanting to master another person, to humiliate them and to force them to obey you and please you. Even if she was willing, what does it say about the dominator? How can anybody live with such sick desires inside them? They should fight it. But this place is like a sweet shop; it makes it too easy to give in to temptation. I think it’s obscene!’
Vanessa did not know what to say. Even after talking to all the girls Jennifer was barely conceding they were here voluntarily. She must get her to accept that at least, but it would need a dramatic demonstration. So be it, then.
Leaving the girls in the charge of MacDonald, with Mike still enjoying the match and Jennifer sitting on a bench wrapped up in her bitter thoughts, she went to see the Laird.
The girls were cleaned up after the game while Mike and Jennifer had tea. When Vanessa greeted them once more she was carrying a large holdall. She gathered up the Cherry girl coffle, ball-gagged and with hands cuffed behind them, together with their uninvited guests and led them all round to the side of the castle where the Land Rover and trailer used to carry them back from the hunt the day before was waiting. MacDonald himself was at the wheel.
The Cherry girls clambered into the trailer while Mike and Jennifer sat in the back and Vanessa took the passenger seat. As they headed off along the trail through the woods and up the hillside, Vanessa turned round to Mike and Jennifer and addressed them resolutely.
‘We’re going up here to prove something to you, so there’s no shadow of a doubt left in your mind,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have to do this, not after what you’ve seen and heard today, but you don’t leave me any choice.’
Mike looked anxious while Jennifer asked: ‘What are you going to do?’
‘You’ll see,’ Vanessa said.
As they reached the hilltop they turned onto the narrow track that ran along the inside of the summit boundary fence that enclosed the entire Glen. It was a tall structure of heavy-duty chain link capped by angled brackets facing outwards holding five strands of barbed wire. Beside the track was a carefully cultivated screen of shrubs and trees that shielded the interior of the Glen from prying eyes.
Where an arm of the woods came up to the fence they passed the tall splintered stub of a pine tree broken some height above the ground. A little way along the track lay the rest of the trunk, now sawn in half, where it had been dragged clear of the fence.
As they left it behind them Mike said with a sudden chuckle: ‘That’s where we came in. They’ve moved our bridge. Did we climb that in the dark? I must have been mad! Sorry about that but the weather was crap and this place looked so tempting. Still, it’ll make a great pile of firewood for the winter.’
Vanessa smiled slightly at his good humour but Jennifer made no response.
Mike pointed: ‘We camped just down there. Never imagined what we’d find in the morning, eh Jen?’
‘I never wanted to climb that tree,’ Jennifer said coldly.
‘But you wanted to find some shelter the same as me.’
‘Yes, and look where it got us,’ Jennifer snapped back. ‘We should have got out once we’d seen those girls being whipped as they pulled that cart.’
‘Come on, who wouldn’t be curious to see more?’
‘But then they wouldn’t have caught us,’ Jennifer continued bitterly. ‘We could have told the police and this whole stinking place would have been shut down by now!’
Macdonald could not contain himself any further. ‘This is private land, Miss Morton. You were the trespassers. What we do on it with our girls is our business.’
‘Not when it tempts people to do such evil things!’ Jennifer said shrilly.
She’s beginning to sound dangerously self-righteous, Vanessa thought. Is she religious or lapsed and stuffed full of suppressed guilt? Maybe this is bringing it back? Oh God I hope this works …
The Land Rover pulled up in a little scrubby hollow in the hill where the line of the fence was broken by a heavily padlocked service gate. They all climbed out, Vanessa carrying the holdall with her. MacDonald unloaded the girls, then climbed back into the cab and drove off.
For a moment Vanessa had an image of the odd group they made. A dressed man and woman, herself naked but for her fedora and the dozen Cherry girls naked, cuffed and gagged, while below them lay the castle in its wonderful valley.
‘Right,’ she said firmly, ‘as you can see we’re alone and nobody’s going to disturb us.’ She focused on Jennifer. ‘You’ve said you still can’t believe the girls are here voluntarily. Well, now’s your chance to put that to the test.’ She fished a key out of the holdall and held it up for them to see. ‘I’m going to open that gate in a moment and I trust you’ll keep to our agreement and not try to leave yourselves. Instead you’re going to choose which of these girls goes out there.’
She had their undivided attention once more. Even the Cherry girls stirred uneasily. They knew nothing about this. Vanessa hoped their honest surprise would register with Jennifer.
‘Now, if they’re being held here against their will they should be ready to take any opportunity to escape, right?’
‘You expect one of them to walk out of here naked?’
‘No.’ Vanessa pulled out a parka, T-shirts, jeans and a pair of walking boots from the bag and laid them on the ground. ‘If she follows the path along the outside of the fence she’ll come to the main road soon enough, or she can cut across the hills …’ She brought out an OS map and put it on the clothes. ‘She can take her choice and with a head start there’s not much chance she could be caught, agreed?’
‘I suppose so,’ Jennifer said.
Next Vanessa held up a clear plastic wallet packed with banknotes for Jennifer to see. ‘A thousand pounds in cash … want to count it? Enough to hire a car or pay somebody to drive them to a railway station or get a room for a night and certainly enough for them to get away from here. And once she was safe she could inform the police and get this place raided and save her sister slaves, agreed?’
‘All right, agreed,’ Jennifer snapped. ‘Get on with it!’
Vanessa laid the money on top of the other items. She went over to the gate, unlocked the heavy padlock, and swung it to and fro a few times to show it was really open. She came back to Jennifer. ‘Now, you’ve talked to all these girls. Pick the one you think most wants to escape.’
‘But they all said they liked it here,’ Jennifer protested.
‘Obviously that’s just because they were too frightened to tell the truth,’ Vanessa said, reversing their roles with relish. ‘But now they’re just ten steps from freedom, surely they’ll make a break for it. Come on, pick one of them.’
Jennifer was looking confused and angry. ‘All right … her!’ she said, pointing at Olivia Eight.
Olivia had her mane of dark frizzy hair tied back in a ponytail, matching the tight curls of her pubic triangle. Her lips were full and sensuous, her skin the colour of rich coffee, her buttocks chubby and rotund and her heavy conical breasts capped by thick dark-chocolate nipples.
‘A safe, politically correct bet,’ Vanessa said dryly. ‘Of course, how could a black girl possibly want to be a slave?’
She freed Olivia from the coffle, uncuffed her hands and removed her
gag. ‘You’re free to go, Olivia,’ she said. ‘There are clothes and money and there’s the gate.’
Olivia did not move. ‘I don’t want to go, Mistress,’ she said.
‘But Miss Morton thinks you do.’
‘Then she’s wrong. Like I told her this morning, I like it here. I’m happy. Why should I want to spoil it?’
‘Go, please, for God’s sake get out of this terrible place!’ Jennifer suddenly cried out, making Mike flinch.
Olivia looked at her with large liquid brown eyes but still she did not move. ‘I don’t want to, Mistress.’
‘Maybe she needs some encouragement,’ Vanessa said. She took a lash from the holdall and swished it through the air in front of Olivia. ‘If you don’t walk out that gate I’ll use this on your rear, understand?’
‘As you wish, Mistress,’ Olivia said, getting down on her hands and knees and raising her bottom into the air submissively. Her glossy smooth cheeks made a perfect target, cleft by the dark valley of her bum cleavage which opened out round the pitchy ring of her anus and melted into the ripe swell of her full-lipped vulva.
The wonderful offering made Vanessa shiver with pleasure while liquid warmth began to fill her loins, but she forced her voice to remain level. ‘Easy choice, pain versus freedom. Should be a no-brainer. Maybe she thinks I’m kidding …’ She drew back her arm.
‘You can’t do this!’ Jennifer said.
‘If she wants to stay here she gets treated like a slave,’ Vanessa said and swung the lash across Olivia’s upraised bottom. Its many tongues hissed through the air and curled round the contours of Olivia’s buttocks with a crack. Olivia jerked and gave a little grunt but held her position. Darker stripes burned on her soft skin. The heady sense of power Vanessa had last felt while dominating Julie and Kashika in the B3 cell infused her and she swung the lash again. Crack went the leather tongues again as they licked round the dusky orbs, making Olivia’s bottom flesh shiver. The slave girl whimpered and her eyes sparkled with tears but still she did not move.
‘Stop it, stop it!’ Jennifer shouted.
‘All right, what about a different girl?’ Vanessa demanded. ‘Pick another!’
‘I can’t!’ Jennifer said wretchedly.
‘Then we’ll try all of them. Get over here! Kneel down!’
The rest of Cherry Chain hurried forward and knelt in number order beside Olivia. A dozen lovely raised bottoms all in a row; different hues and degrees of rotundity and fleshiness, each with its own distinctive sex pouch peeking from beneath it, and at that moment all utterly subservient to her will.
Vanessa walked along the line trailing her lash across the range of fleshy hillocks. ‘I’ll lash each one of you in turn and keep on until one of you gets up and goes to the gate. You’ll save yourself pain and your sisters as well, understood?’
They nodded. Vanessa positioned herself behind Amber’s pale body and swung upwards with the lash, catching the fullness of her buttocks and causing the leather thongs to cut up into her cleft. Amber yelped behind her gag but did not move. Vanessa took a step forward to Charlotte and repeated the motion.
Swish and crack, down the line she went. Even Kashika’s darling bottom received its due punishment. She could not stop now. It had to be done. She hoped … no, she knew, they understood. This was for all of them.
And then there were a dozen rosy bottoms and a dozen smarting, glistening quims. But not a single girl had attempted to rise. They had reacted as true Shiller slaves and she was so proud of them.
Vanessa wiped her brow and turned to Jennifer, who was looking on in mute incredulity. ‘Do you want to have a go? Maybe you think I’m holding back my arm. Can you beat some sense into them?’ She held out the lash handle-first towards her.
Jennifer snapped out of her trance and shrank back in horror and disgust. ‘All right, you’ve made you point! I believe you. They want to be here. But it’s still evil! Just stop hurting them … and leave me alone!’
And she turned and ran off along the track back towards the castle.
Mike looked between Jennifer’s retreating back and Vanessa and the girls, and then shrugged helplessly and ran after her, calling out: ‘Jen love, it’s all right …’
Vanessa frowned at Jennifer’s dwindling figure and then looked down at the Cherry girls. ‘You were all fantastic,’ she assured them. ‘But I might have screwed up. There’s something going on in that woman’s mind I don’t understand …’
Ten
THE MYSTERY ABOUT Jennifer troubled Vanessa all that night in her cell, despite the warm company of the Cherry girls huddled close about her and Kashika sleeping in her arms.
She had kissed the lash marks she had put on their bottoms and they had kissed her in return, assured her they would do whatever she asked of them, and given her pleasure as only slave girls knew how, but still she was restless. She had forced Jennifer into accepting the girls truly wanted to be slaves. That should have left her with the problem of deciding if it was right to make money from their activities. Jennifer might fret over this but surely it was an order of magnitude less challenging than believing she was witnessing forced slavery and could be viewed with much greater emotional detachment. Instead she was becoming steadily more anxious and distressed. Why?
Jennifer was clearly an intelligent and caring woman with a strong will and social sense. Discovering what she at first thought was a nest of slave traffickers had obviously shocked her, but that must begin to pass now it had been demonstrated beyond doubt that it was consensual. She didn’t have to approve of the girls’ chosen lifestyle to accept it. That might give rise to displeasure but not the intense level of feeling she had displayed.
Vanessa turned the problem over in her mind long into the night. If Jennifer was trying to deny a secret craving for slavery then she might understand the turmoil in her mind and the attempt to deny what was going on around her and wish it destroyed so as to remove the temptation. She herself had gone through something like that. Yet Jennifer was not a submissive, that Vanessa was sure of. She knew the signs from her own responses.
Could Jennifer be Rochester’s spy after all? Might she now be torn between unexpected sympathy for slave life in the Glen and her mission to bring it down? Had she been misled in the same way Vanessa had been? She and Mike might be working together, or had she been lying to Mike and was now fearful of telling him the truth?
Then sometime before dawn the solution came to her. Of course, that explained it all! Really, it was so obvious. And now she knew what she must do to defend the girlflesh castle.
The next morning she carefully briefed the Cherry girls, then MacDonald, Shiller and the Laird. They agreed with her reasoning but thought her plan was risky. However they had no better alternatives to suggest. The matter of their unwelcome guests had to be resolved soon.
As the Laird said: ‘We’ve got the Highland Games due in two days. Apart from our regular guests we’ve got several visitors dropping in just for the event. I don’t want that being raided by the police! Let’s get this couple sorted out.’
When Jennifer and Mike were escorted down to the dungeon they both looked tired and from the stiff looks they exchanged Vanessa suspected they had been arguing. Well, she was sorry she might have contributed to their falling out but for the moment it suited her plans. With Cherry Chain kneeling attentively to one side she addressed the unhappy pair.
‘Now, I think its true to say that you’re fairly relaxed with what we’re doing here, Mike, yes?’
Mike frowned and glanced at Jennifer. ‘Well … yeah, I suppose you can say that.’
Vanessa laughed lightly. ‘Oh, I think we’ve got past supposing. I mean you wouldn’t exactly turn your nose up at a job here, would you?’
For a fraction of a second Mike looked dismayed, then forced a quick chuckle. ‘No … I can’t say I would.’ Jennifer glared at him and he added hastily: ‘But only as I’m sure the girls are volunteers and as long as no lasting harm’s done to them.
A bit of S and M’s all right in its place, but I couldn’t agree to real suffering.’
‘Which is a perfectly reasonable attitude and I respect you for it,’ Vanessa said sincerely. She turned to Jennifer. ‘But you’ve still got some reservations about what goes on here, right?’
Jennifer chewed her lip, scowling at Mike as she did so. ‘Yes, you could say that.’
‘And you two have been arguing about these reservations?’
‘I like to think we’ve been trying to discuss them rationally,’ Mike admitted. ‘When she’s not running off and hiding in the woods like she did last night.’
‘I just wanted to be on my own for a bit and think,’ Jennifer said simply.
‘I spent half an hour looking for you!’ Mike retorted.
‘Why not spend the morning apart so you can both sort things out in your own minds?’ Vanessa suggested, soothingly. ‘What about it? Mike, you can take half the Cherry girls for a walk. Talk to them yourself so that you’re absolutely sure they’re happy. Try out some of the facilities.’ She chuckled again. ‘See if you’d fit in here.’
‘That sounds good,’ he said quickly.
Vanessa motioned and girls Amber One through to Lisa Six stood up and came forward. They’d been linked together in a half coffle. Vanessa handed Mike their lead leash, then glanced at Jennifer’s set face.
‘Don’t you trust him with them?’ Vanessa asked. ‘Of course it’s understandable. The Glen’s a tempting place for anybody with normal desires and urges. But we try to be honest about them. It’s a place where people can be themselves. I hope you’ll remember that.’
Jennifer looked at her oddly, but before she could reply, Mike said lightly: ‘It’s okay, Jen. One girl you might worry about but six would be too much excitement!’ He tapped the inhaler protruding from his chest pocket meaningfully.
The Girlflesh Castle Page 18
