Here And Now
When I regain consciousness, I feel completely lost at first. I remember hearing a train rushing towards me; the sudden panic; the fear of being mangled by an onrushing machine, but it’s a very fleeting memory, although it seems to have happened only an instant ago… or not at all.
Then I’m overcome by that strange feeling you sometimes have when you’re waking up in the morning, still half inside a dream you no longer recall, just dreaming that you are going to wake up at any moment now… But I can’t remember going to sleep. Not one bit. “I definitely did not go to bed… yet,” I tell myself.
Then there is a sense of disorientation. I have absolutely no idea where I am, even though I’m pretty sure by now that I’m wide awake. I move my head a little; I feel dizzy, but I’m back… Of course, at this stage, normal people would open their eyes to find out what is going on. “I’m simply in my bed, but I was completely drunk last night…” or “now I remember, we’re in a hotel room, it must be the jet lag…” or “I’m lying on the bathroom floor, I must have fainted after a too hot bath!” Sometimes it takes a few moments, but eventually you figure out where you are and what happened to you.
Having reached the conclusion that I must have passed out, I, on the other hand, have no way of checking my whereabouts. The first thing that strikes me is that I’m wearing all my clothes, including my shoes. Then, when I try to move, I can’t. A flash of panic: “Am I paralysed? But I can feel my clothes, my shoes…” I try to move my fingers and my toes. Everything seems to be working all right, and I realise that my body is restrained somehow.
Finally it dawns on me that I’m not lying down, but hanging by my wrists against a wall. I try—and manage—to get onto my feet; to stand up and regain my balance. I’m still feeling a bit dizzy.
Standing there, apparently strapped to a wall, I suddenly remember what has happened. My last memory before passing out is of walking in the street and being attacked from behind and knocked out with chloroform. “Oh! The irony of it,” I reflect, “the tragic irony!” Attacked and captured by the man I’ve been hunting…
Now I focus my attention on my surroundings. I prick up my ears, sniff the air, and come to the conclusion that there’s someone else here, not far from me. A man. “Who are you? Where am I?” I demand.
“Whoa, girl! Don’t you take that tone with me! You’re in no position to order me about…”
A harsh, impatient voice, with an edge of aggression in it that is hard to miss. A bit raspy, with the whiff of tobacco of a heavy smoker. The accent not very refined, to say the least. Definitely not a gentleman.
“Ah… erm… no, listen… Are you the pervert who abducted Loretta?”
By way of an answer I feel a blow hit my face, apparently the man’s fist. I’m stunned more than hurt, and think, “That probably means yes.”
“Is Loretta still alive?” I ask.
Another blow. “You ask too many questions, girl. You’ll find out in due time. For now let’s take care of what I want from you…”
“Why do you call me girl? I’m forty-four years old, you know.”
“Yeah, and I find you pretty sexy… girl! Your eyes are a bit off-putting, but your body looks hot.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, eh?”
I’m feeling really angry; angry at myself and at this coward who is hitting me. But then I feel his hands groping my breasts through my clothes. “So that’s what all this is about,” I tell myself. I don’t say a word. After the first reflex movement of trying to turn my chest away, I realise that I am at the man’s mercy, shackled to a wall, my arms raised, my bosom unprotected… So I stop moving and brace myself for what is to come next.
“Ah yes, this will do,” the man wheezes, and he keeps groping. “This will do nicely…”
“Just remember that those appendages of flesh belong to a human being, yes?”
Another blow, this time to the chest. “I’ll make you change your tune yet, girl. Cold bitches like you are what I like best. And you know why? Because you’re only starved for sex. I bet you’re gagging for it. By the time I’m done with you, I swear you’ll be begging for more…”
“Maybe. But you do realise, don’t you, that it will hardly be sincere?”
An hour later, I have been raped.
The man has gagged me with some kind of leather dog’s collar, after punching me in the stomach to make me open my mouth.
Then he has stripped me almost naked and untied my shoelaces, of all things.
Then he has hit my thighs and calves with some sort of horsewhip, making me squirm and ordering me to get up on my toes and to “jiggle those titties”.
Then he has violated me standing up.
During this part of the ordeal, while the man is exerting himself noisily, groping me roughly, I tell myself, “Right, that settles it… If I get a chance, I’m going to kill you!” And biting hard on the leather strap of the gag, I keep repeating it in my mind: “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
But there’s worse to come. When he’s sated, the rapist holds a little speech: “Listen up, girl, I’ll explain this only once. I’ve invented a special device for handling my slave girls safely. As you’re blind I can’t show it to you, but it’s a clamp, see, with a very clever locking system. I’m going to put it around your neck and squeeze it shut in such a way that it will almost choke you to death… Now here’s the rule of the game: you do as I tell you, and double-quick, or you choke to death. It’s all up to you how fast I can transfer you to your living quarters and release the clamp. Got that? And don’t even think of doing anything funny, or you’ll die asphyxiated. Now let’s go!”
And suddenly I have the sensation of being throttled by two hands, with both thumbs closing around my windpipe in a deadly vice. Only the thinnest gurgle of air can still trickle through. “Keep breathing in,” I tell myself. “Suck in the air as long and hard as you can…” Meanwhile my tormentor unstraps my wrists and orders me to put my arms behind my back. He handcuffs me. Then he frogmarches me through a narrow passage to another room. There he throws me on a bed, locks some other shackles around my wrists, and at last releases the clamp. He then unlocks the handcuffs and removes the leather gag I am still wearing.
“How did you like it, girl? I see you got the point of this game: you moved really fast!”
I am gasping spasmodically—gulping for air—my throat on fire. I can’t utter a word. My ears are ringing with dizziness, and I can only make out the words spoken to me across a foggy divide, as if from a great distance.
“Not so talkative now, eh? No cheeky repartee… I like it better that way!”
Through the same dizzy haze I hear a soft voice pipe up: “Who is that, Master?”
“Loretta!” I tell myself.
“You’ll find out soon enough, pet,” the man says. “I’ll leave you two together now… Just remember that I can hear everything you say!”
Then the metal clanging of a barred door being slammed shut reaches my consciousness, and the rattle of a key turning in a lock. I can just make out the man’s footfalls receding.
“Who are you?”
That sweet voice again. Like a little girl lost in a deep forest. And my nostrils are overwhelmed by a not entirely disagreeable smell of unwashed female hair. I try to say something, but I can’t get my vocal cords to work. They only produce a squeaky, rasping sound. Then I try for a loud whisper. “Can’t talk! Can you hear me?”
“Oh… Oh yes, sorry. The clamp hurts really bad the first time… I remember. But you get used to it after a while…”
“You all right?”
“Erm, you mean apart from everything else, right? I mean, I’m not very happy at the moment, but I guess I’m all right, yes… But who are you, anyway?”
“Your father sent me. I was looking for you.”
“Well, you’ve found me now. What took you and Daddy so long? I’ve been here for ages and ages!”
“Your dad never stopped looking for you…”
“Okay… And now what’s the plan, anyway?”
“No plan… I’ve been captured.”
“Great! That’s really going to help.”
The girl stops speaking. “At least she seems to be all right,” I tell myself while I sit up at the edge of the bed. I have to struggle with my chains to do so. Groping around me, I discover that there are two long chains connecting my wrists to a solid ring bolted to the wall. Each movement you want to make is impeded by these cumbersome chains and accompanied by a concert of rattling sounds. The girl seems to be all right, but I suddenly have the feeling that I myself am standing on the rim of a deep well of despair. It wouldn’t take much to push me over the brink and throw me into the abyss, with no hope of ever coming back…
Casting around in my mind, groping for anything to hold onto in the recent events, I suddenly tell myself that in theory this nasty man is still a human being. At least he seems to be acting in an intelligent, rational way. “He was whipping my legs, but only to make me jiggle my breasts, not really to inflict pain… He could have whipped much harder; he could have whipped my breasts, but apparently he doesn’t want to damage the goods... And then that awful clamp: it’s a sick invention, but it works; the bastard only wants complete control when he’s moving us around… There’s a method to his madness.”
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I start to massage my neck and throat to ease the pain. At least, I reflect, I have the advantage of being a professional and experienced physical therapist. “That is going to serve me well to get through this ordeal.” Already I feel that I am taking a step back from the brink. After a while I try to use my vocal cords: “Baa… Baaa…” I find that speaking in a soft voice—what the girl seems to be doing—hurts less. It’s ironic, in a way: as a blind person you tend to overcompensate with a hectoring voice. That’s why the rapist was so taken aback by my tone, when I was only asking “Who are you? Where am I?” It had not been my intention at all to sound snotty… at first.
Thinking of that very first exchange between my captor and me, I now suddenly remember his last remark before he left. “I can hear everything you say…”
“Loretta?”
“Yes? Call me Lorry. Everybody calls me Lorry…”
“Lorry? All right. Now, Lorry: what did the man mean, when he said that he can hear everything we say? Are there microphones hidden in here? Do you know anything about this?”
“No… it’s the first I hear about it!”
“Okay… Now tell me: have you had any company before? It’s not like he has been eavesdropping on conversations from here before?”
“No! I’m always alone… But the Master says these things sometimes, you know. Like you’re supposed to know something, but you actually know it’s not true… For instance: how long have I been in here, anyway?”
“A little more than a year.”
“See! Only the other day he made me believe it’s been much longer. Two years, more like…”
“No! Definitely no more than a year! But why are there two beds in here? I’m assuming that you are also chained to a bed?”
“Well, can’t you see that for yourself?”
“Actually, no. I’m blind…”
“What? Blind! Show me your face… Oh yeah, I can see it now. Your eyes are all funny… Well, that’s great! What help am I supposed to get from a blind old lady, huh?”
I am a bit shocked: talking to this teenager turns out to be more difficult than what I experienced recently at the hippie commune. You would think that such a young girl must be shattered by the experience she’s been through this past year… So maybe the fact that she’s being so obnoxious is only a positive sign. “I was also young once,” I tell myself, “these hippie creatures are not so different from me and my school friends when we were sixteen…”
“Listen, Lorry. Never underestimate the capabilities of the disabled… As for being an old lady: how old would you say the ‘Master’ is, himself?”
“Old… About the same as you… you know…”
“Hmm… I thought as much… That’s why he calls me ‘girl’. He seems to find me very attractive, which is a good thing. So tell me: why are there two beds in here? Has there ever been another girl with you in the time you’ve been here?”
“No, I told you! You see, the reason there are two beds, is that sometimes the Master doesn’t want to go to the trouble of transferring me to the Pleasure Room, so he just comes in here and fucks me on the clean bed. That is, the one I’m not using at the time… And that’s fine by me, because then he doesn’t need to use the choking device for so long.”
“But he does use it, even to transfer you from one bed to the other inside this room?”
“Oh yes! Otherwise I could attack him, see? He doesn’t want that.”
“All right. So, if you’ve been alone all that time, if there hasn’t been another girl in the picture, then maybe you’re the first one he’s ever abducted. This gives us some hope. Maybe I can talk the man into letting you go, now that he has me…”
“I don’t know about that… He has often told me that he’ll never let me out of here.”
“Yes, but you know that the Master says these things sometimes, even if they’re not true… So, to recap, there are two beds in here, and we’re chained to the wall and have to stay sitting or lying down all the time. And how do you go to the toilet?”
“There’s an Elsan toilet next to my bed. You know: a chemical toilet. It’s shoved over to your side when I change beds… I guess that now that there’s two of us, we won’t be changing beds any more…”
“No. But I assume the man brings you clean sheets from time to time?”
“Oh yes! And I’ve become really good at changing them. I didn’t use to, but I’ve become a real little housewife in here…”
“And what about the grub?”
“Well, what about it?”
“Do you get enough to eat?”
“Oh yes! The Master says he wants me to stay nicely plump and chubby. So he brings two meals a day, and most of the time there are also some biscuits and chocolate bars I can have at lunchtime or when I feel peckish…”
I reflect that the great Master seems to be rather busy catering to his victim. Bringing clean sheets. Food twice a day. Well-well-well… And if there’s an Elsan toilet, he must be taking it away from time to time to empty it somewhere and refresh the chemicals.
“All right. And what do you do all day long. Is the light on, right now?”
“No, of course not! It’s the middle of the night, can’t you see? Oh! I guess you can’t, can you? I can only just make you out… The main lights are on during the daytime, but when it’s time to go to sleep, they’re switched off, and only an emergency light is left burning…”
“Like in case of a fire alarm you can evacuate the building?”
“Very funny! It’s more like so you can take a leak if you need to in the middle of the night.”
“And what do you do during the time the lights are on?”
“I read books if I have some, and otherwise I always have my dictionary…”
“The Master brings you books to read? What kind of books?”
“Mostly crime mysteries and thrillers… The thing is, I never read books before I came here. Then, when I started reading, you know, to pass the time, I found that there were a lot of words I didn’t know. So I asked the Master every time he came down, and that annoyed him a bit, so he gave me an old dictionary… So now, even when I don’t have anything to read, I study my dictionary. It’s amazing, the words you find there that you’ve never heard about, and that are still quite interesting… Right now I’m trying to memorize whole lists, like oleaginous: pertaining to oil; olfactory: connected with the sense of smell; and oligarchy: a small group of people who run a country, and so on and so forth…”
“Sounds impressive, well done!”
“Are you a teacher or something?”
“No, not at all… I just believe knowledge is important, that’s all… Can you imagine how it is to be born blind? To have no idea what light or colours look like? No possibility to visualise a face, or a street, or the sky… So your whole world boils down to what you know. That’s why words are incredibly important to me. Most of the time a word is all I can know about a thing…”
“Hmm… It sounds like being blind is very much like being locked up in a cellar by a pervert, huh?”
“Maybe, yes. You know, Lorry, you must promise me that when all this is over, you’ll go back to school… Your father told me that you’re very smart, but that you never did well at school…”
“Great… is that all my old man has to say about me, huh?”
“No, Lorry, no! He loves you very much! He told me that the idea you could still be alive in some rapist’s clutches drives him crazy with grief… The police have stopped looking for you, and it drives him nuts. That’s why he asked me for help…”
“Yeah, but that’s where his love becomes pretty useless, you know? You’re talking about when all this is over, but you said yourself that you don’t know how to get us out of here…”
“Yes, but now that I have been kidnapped as well, the police are going to start looking again. Your dad will make sure of that… Anyway, you have to start thinking about the future: decide what you want; make plans.”
“Really? You seem to be very confident all of a sudden. Maybe more than you actually feel?”
“Well, as I see it, there are only two possibilities: either we soon get killed by the rapist, or we soon get out of here. In both cases it makes sense to make plans for the future…”
“Or, maybe, we stay prisoners here for many, many years…”
“Even then, you still have options: you have to decide what you want to do. If you want to do something about your education, I can help you. We can start working on it tomorrow… Start a new life, you know what I mean?”
“Hmm… Look, I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad for the company; I haven’t had a normal conversation for a year… But still, I don’t understand how you can be so upbeat… I don’t find that very convincing, you see?”
“Well, let me put it another way: have you ever thought about how it is to be a soldier in the war? When you’re sent into battle and every moment can be your last one? My husband was a bomber pilot in the war: every time he took off, he knew it could be his last bombing mission… But he always told me that he enjoyed every minute of it, one minute at a time. He just loved flying that big Lanc…”
“So your husband was one of those criminals who dropped bombs on the civilian populations of Germany, huh?”
“Yes. With hindsight you could say that, of course. But at the time we didn’t think we could do anything else… We had to fight back; we couldn’t let Hitler just get away with it; doing nothing was never an option.”
“And did your husband survive?”
“No…”
“Bad example, then…”
“Well, actually he was murdered, and not by the Germans… But isn’t life always like that? You could die at any moment, you can never tell, and in the end no one is immortal. But in the meantime we must make the best of what we have…”
“Hmm,” Loretta says. “Let’s get some sleep now…”
“Yes, of course. Tomorrow we have a busy day… Nice talking to you, Lorry.”
But while I try to go to sleep, I feel the abyss of despair closing in on me again. Suddenly I am one step closer to the rim of a deep well of depression, contemplating the long fall down to the bottom, with no way of climbing out again. I have been raped. It feels completely unreal, like nightmares often do. “I must keep it that way,” I tell myself, “as unreal as possible… A nightmare. It didn’t really happen, not to me anyway.”
I try to reason like a dictionary. Rape: Forcing someone to have sexual intercourse against their will. In this instance, the male has selfishly satisfied his own base instincts without a thought for his female partner. The female had no choice but to submit to being overpowered by superior physical force. Try not to take it personally. It would simply not do to go to pieces because of this.
Apart from that, I have the uncomfortable feeling of existing in a kind of limbo; I have had no opportunity to map my surroundings… it feels as if I’m floating in an abstract, hostile environment. I put my hand to the wall next to my bed and probe its texture with my fingertips: smooth concrete, with the sharply edged pockmarks left by air bubbles…
“Do you mind?” Loretta mutters. “I’m trying to sleep, so please stop moving. It makes those chains rattle so…”
“Sorry, I’ll try to sleep as well now. By the way: my name is Daisy.”