I settled back, quite content in the fact that life was proceeding as it ought. Ah, but what a naive fool I was.
Chapter Eighteen
I returned to university with Elizabeth reminding me of my promise to do her bidding ringing in my ears, for she re-exacted that obligation from me before I left.
It seemed to me then that the flurry of courtship activities had reached its zenith and that now we would coast into the summer with wedding preparations on the agenda. Elizabeth and my mother would take care of most of those. My job was to finish my studies for the year, please my professors, and return home to marry my sweetheart. From then on we would enter a life of connubial bliss.
I intended to take on an assistant teaching fellowship at the university, and Elizabeth would join me in the pastoral setting. We would set up housekeeping amid the Gothic buildings, our own love nest in which we would please and be pleased by one another. There would be no more need of stable masters or head mistresses, and the only inventions necessary would be those that enhanced our pleasure.
I continued with my studies under the tutelage of M. Krempe and M. Waldman. The former was a modernist of the top order, shunning all the theories that had gone before, except where they fit into his own philosophy. The latter encouraged me to study the ancients and to question from whence the principle of life proceeded. I applied myself to serious study, now that my primary relationship seemed to be running smoothly.
Physiology was my main subject under M. Krempe's direction. Through his lectures I came to understand the concept of decay and corruption, while at the same time I observed as much concretely with the cadavers retrieved from the gallows. I was a serious student, meticulous in most thing, but my work with the cadavers excelled solely through the private instruction of M. Krempe.
Many evenings, in his personal laboratory, I aided him in the dissection process. He was a strict teacher and I found my own careful methods sharpened considerably by attending carefully to his instruction. He was quick with the strap, and I learned tout de suite, as the French would say.
One example comes readily to mind. We were working late, dissecting both an orangutan from the London Zoo which had succumbed to old age, and a murderer who had killed indiscriminately and suffered strangulation at the hands of the state for his misdeeds.
"Science," M. Krempe said, "has no limits. Is it not fortuitous that we are born in this century when we may experiment so boldly? You see before you two entirely separate species. I say to you now that they may be as one."
I did not follow readily, and that confusion apparently appeared on my face.
"Hands!" M. Krempe demanded.
In trepidation, I held my hands out to him, palms up. From the hook on the wall he removed the black leather strap. The thing was two inches wide, and half an inch thick, and long as a ruler. I braced myself. Soon the leather whacked my palms, first the left a dozen times, then the right. It left my hands stinging mercilessly, and tears forming at the corners of my eyes.
Still, though, his method of instruction was effective on me, which he had learned early on in our relationship. The pain drove me from my head immediately, where the confusion reigned.
On a second look, his meaning regarding the ape and the murderer became apparent to me.
"I see, sir, what you are getting at. Parts from one may be transported to the other."
"Yes, and it is only animation with which we must deal."
The stinging in my palms was subsiding sufficiently that I was again trying to make sense of his words, rather than just allowing them to wash over me. "Animation, as in making the parts function, as we do when a segment of brain tissue is pressed." I was thinking how when areas on each hemisphere of the brain are pressed, eyelids flutter, and muscles twitch. Apparently I had not caught his meaning.
"Hands!" He demanded.
Although the pain was dimming, I did not relish another assault. Still, I was his pupil, there to learn. If I were being thick, it was his job to thin out my mental blocks that I might see what is obvious.
I extended my hands again. The leather smacked harder than the previous occasion, and I received more, a dozen on each hand. Tears fell shamefully down my cheeks. My palms throbbed.
Ironically, my cock had stiffened this time, as it did on occasion when M. Krempe punished me. Through it all, though, I found myself more receptive.
He said, as though I were a dolt, "I am talking about what I have been talking with you about for the last year. Life. Creating life. Our job is first to forestall decomposition. Once that has been achieved, and fresh cadavers are no doubt the answer, we are then in a position to work on reviving the patient."
He was, of course, brilliant. I saw that in a flash. In a moment of gratitude for his insightful instruction, I fell at his feet and kissed his boots, licking them in the process, feeling my cock growing more solid and sure of himself.
The professor permitted this act, for he seemed to understand that I needed to express this to him. Suddenly he said in a low voice, "It is the intensity which will recreate that which has been snuffed out. Can you follow my meaning, Frankenstein?"
A chill ran through me. I had no idea what he was getting at. My palms burned and I feared the strapping I would receive if I could not follow his logic here. Still, there was no point pretending. He would then proceed and I would be hopelessly lost. Not only would I fail in my lessons, but I would receive a strapping in the end anyway. Still, I did not relish one again so soon.
"Sir," I said hesitantly, "I regret that I cannot decipher your meaning."
A stony silence filled the room. He removed the dreaded black strap from its hook on the wall, then said, "Come with me."
I followed him through a small arched door which he unlocked with an enormous copper key. We went down a narrow curved staircase. The air began to smell dank and I felt a chill.
At one point he picked up an oil lamp and lit it with a stick match. I followed into the gloom, fearing the worst.
Eventually we reached a small room with a long narrow table that sloped. "Undress," he said in that stern voice.
I did as instructed, for the room was hot and already I'd begun to perspire. My cock was at half mast, yet I did not feel embarrassed before this man, my master.
"Lie on the table, head down," he instructed me, and I did as ordered. Along a panel running down from the high end of the table were large beveled plugs, like doweling, that were smooth on the top, but went through underneath. When I had positioned myself, and the professor rearranged me so that my derriere was sloped over the high end of the table, he removed one of the dowels beneath me. Immediately my cock felt air rush in to greet him.
The professor used a pair of tongues from his wall of equipment that I had just become aware of to reach into the hole and pull my penis and balls through. I felt him attach something to the underside of the table that hung below my member, the cool feel of metal touching my shaft.
He then tied my wrists to the low end of the table, and each of my legs to that same peculiar panel from the high end to the floor. My legs were together, thrusting my genitalia forward. Next he fixed a strap around my waist, securing me so that I could not move.
"Sir," I ventured nervously. "If there is something here I should be understanding, perhaps you would enlighten me."
"There is always something to learn, in every situation," he said. "I think the lesson will be made clear by tomorrow evening."
Tomorrow evening? It was barely nine p.m. Whatever he was planning would take twenty-four hours? A quiver of fear and fascination ran along my spine, and my cock, no doubt prominently displayed through the hole, jumped in anticipation.
The professor was at the wall, lowering something by way of a chain. I heard him behind me moving equipment, and turning cranks, locking things into place, as it were. I tried to look behind me, but the room was so gloomy that the lamp could not penetrate the dimness. All that I saw, or thought I saw, was a large machine,
built of sturdy metal, the height of a man.
I wanted to ask: to what am I about to be subjected? but felt that silence was golden in this situation. I heard cranking, as when one winds a clock.
Suddenly my ass exploded in pain. Then again. My rear end jumped, but there was nowhere to go. The explosions kept coming, split seconds apart.
Leather —and I knew it was the black strap —whacked across my ass so quickly I could not catch my breath.
M. Krempe came to the front of the table and spoke, although I could barely follow his words. My thoughts were decidedly elsewhere.
"You are familiar with clockworks, and many of the German mechanical sex toys of the fifteenth century. I have taken those concepts a step further. Behind you, or, I should say, attending to your behind, is a mechanical creature, wound like a clock to tick out the seconds in two parts. And, like a clock, the winding will last approximately twenty four hours, until the gears wind down. By then the concept of ignition should become clear to you."
Already I was groaning. The strap had been ingeniously placed so that the hand of this mechanical monster apparently moved up and down. In other words, the strap caught my ass from the top and moved two inches or so at a time down, to the middle of my thighs, then back up again.
The pace was frightening, for the thing behind me tick-tocked like a clock, each tick-tock heralding the strap that followed immediately.
"I shall leave you now to contemplate your studies," M. Krempe said, and with that he departed, taking the lamp with him, plunging me into hot darkness and leaving me to the mercy of what was merciless by nature.
Since I was alone, safely hidden from the eyes and ears of others, no doubt, I gave myself over to howling. I could not believe that the professor would abandon me here for twenty-four hours solid, and yet with each crack of the hard leather strap that reality seemed more and more certain.
I do not know how I lasted through that strapping. At first I resisted such awesome pain. The leather bit me again and again, and I struggled to avoid it, squirming this way and that to the extent my restraints would permit, hoping to shift just enough that it would not further heat a spot already blazing. But the restraints held me fast. There was, in truth, nowhere to move to.
This reminded me too much of my own invention, although the professor's was superior in that I would have to do nothing but receive the strap, whereas Elizabeth must pedal in order to work the leather flaps against her bottom.
In the few thoughts I could hang onto, I realized that this machine could be programmed with not just strap, but paddle, cane, whip even. The possibilities were endless. I only hoped to survive intact to investigate its possibilities.
About survival, I quickly had my doubts. I had never endured the lickings Elizabeth had. For all her ministrations, mine had been mild, while hers, at least in my eyes, severe. And now I was being subjected to what she herself had not endured. A solid day of strapping.
I prayed my behind would numb. But the diabolical design ensured that it would not have such an opportunity. The strap must have struck a dozen places on its route up, and those same dozen down. My right cheek and back of that thigh were fairing slightly worse, it seemed to me, the edge of the leather cutting there the hardest. But when I'd decided that, then the left cheek became prominent in my awareness, and the pain there and in that thigh immense.
I cried as I had not done since childhood, shameless, completely. It was inevitable that my resistance would give way, and it did. At some point, indistinguishable from all others, I began to accept the strap. It had become my entire reality. It was all I knew. The heat it produced on my ass made me think of a tree struck by lightning once in a storm. The lightning sizzled the trunk, and steam rose from it, crackling. And then the sparks, followed by small flames that grew larger, until the tree became engulfed by fire.
My bottom felt on fire. And yet did I not move once again, from accepting the strap to longing for it? If only the flames would rise high enough, I would be engulfed like that tree. I tried to raise myself into the air, as I had seen Elizabeth do. I now understood her desire for chastisement. I wanted the strap. Longed for it. Needed it for my fulfillment. If only it could work double time, singeing me until I burst into flame.
The hours were spent moving back and forth from resisting to wanting, to needing, and back around again. Throughout all this my cock had reacted. The professor had apparently attached something to him that would catch his emissions. And emit he did. Again and again. I had never orgasmed so often, or so frequently. Between the agony inflicted on my backside, and the constant ejaculations, I became soon overwhelmed.
I lost track of time completely. My thoughts dissolved. I could not recall what I had not understood in the first place which had put me in this position, nor whether or not I now understood it. My world became ass and cock, beating and coming. Resistance, wanting, needing. I took on machine-like qualities. When the pain built sufficiently, my cock would thicken and elongate. As he thickened, the pain increased, as the pain jumped a notch, my cock pulsed harder and faster. Ass, cock, ass, cock. And, when the crescendo had been reached, my jism spilled from me, as copious as the tears spilling from my eyes. For the first time in my life, I lived entirely in the moment. An eternal moment composed of alternating pleasure and pain.
When M. Krempe returned the following evening, the machine was already winding down. My bottom and the back of my thighs were tender as a newborn's scalp. I knew the skin had suffered, but I no longer felt it. Long ago it had numbed. In fact, I suspect I slept for a brief time through the strapping, although I may have just entered a daydream state.
When the professor released me from the table, he helped me stand. My legs were weak and, with his aide, I managed to climb the steps and fall into a bed on my stomach in one of his rooms.
He carried with him a bucket of sorts and, when he saw me looking at it, explained, "Your seed should not be wasted. I have many experiments which can make use of such potent energy."
I nodded, knowing what he meant without really understanding. It was as if the mysteries of the universe had unfolded to me and there was nothing which did not make sense.
"Have you discerned the concept of intensity as a spark which will ignite life?"
"Oh yes!" I cried. Understanding had reached deep into my cells. Change was fostered by intensity. What I had suffered was intense. Because of that, I had altered. I was more in tune with life. With the magic moment on which all life is founded. I knew suddenly the secret of regeneration, and the professor could see that on my face.
"Good, than the lesson has been effective. You may rest now. This evening we shall proceed with our studies, now that we are in accord."
I drifted off in a stupor of euphoria. Still I heard the tick-tock, and, the way it is when one has traveled by train or boat for a long period of time and still feels aboard after disembarking, I felt the strap striking me, stirring me anew.
I doubt I have ever slept so peacefully. For the first time I understood what Elizabeth craved, and I was determined that she should have it.
Chapter Nineteen
A week later another letter arrived from Elizabeth.
"Victor, darling, your machine is wonderful! I use it daily, a hundred strokes, like brushing my hair. And like the hair on my head, my bottom shines all the time.
"Oh, my love, how can I ever thank you for such a considerate and caring gift? I hardly miss Miss Heidi, although there is something to be said for a hand holding a hard wooden ruler which will not be stayed. And, as you requested of me, I have ceased my riding lessons. There, too, a crop that is out of my control has a certain appeal. If there is one drawback to your spanking machine it is this: because I can control the machine, I am not at liberty to give myself over to the power controlling me. To counter this, I frequently set goals for myself. I have increased the rotations of the pedals five per day. I began with forty, then forty five, fifty... You get the idea. Now I've reached a hundred.
Who knows how far I might go?
And the beauty of your invention is that I may do my sessions quickly, before bedtime, or first thing in the morning. The effect lasts until the next session and provides a delicious stimulation throughout the day or night.
"Oh, Victor, how can I ever repay you? My own little teases are but mere flirtations, whereas what you have given me speaks of an intensely erotic experience. I long to play with this machine under your command. I can see you now, strapping me down, instructing me to pedal until you say stop! And I, your little rebellious angel, resisting yet eager to please you, pedalling until my heinie burns and my little cunny weeps with desire for you.
"Victor, when will we be together? I fear that summer is approaching rapidly, but events here at home are not going as planned. Your mother is talking about delaying our nuptials until fall. It seems a cousin of yours is marrying, and —you know how given to appearances your parents are —this cousin made her preparations in advance of ours. Your mother thinks it would dilute both occasions to have them occur in the same month. She is writing you today to persuade you to postpone the event. Of course, we must bow to her wishes. But oh, my darling! How can we wait? I throb and pulse for you night and day! What will we do?"
The letter disturbed me on several counts. I had already read my mother's letter, which arrived the day before. As my parents were paying for the wedding, I knew that the control I had over the preparations and the date were minimal. My parents were given to holding up appearances to a degree with which I did not agree, but with which I could respect, given their generation. And, as it turned out, my studies with M. Krempe were taking an important turn. Since my lesson in his basement, I had come to see very quickly many of the concepts which he had been working with, the same concepts with which I'd struggled for the past year. Together we moved his experiments along far faster than he had anticipated was possible and, as well, we ventured into the new and exciting territory which I had envisioned. Our work was innovative and indispensable. This meant I would likely still be at university until the fall, finishing up what we had began.
Darker Passions: Frankenstein Page 10
