Balfor and Terry 14

"Do you remember the first day you came here and I remarked on your beautiful white bum and how I might spank you to get it nice and pink and raw?"

Jeremy lay on a bed in Freddy's "hospital," still reeling from the hideous ordeal of his penectomy; the stitches had only just come out earlier that afternoon.

To see Balfor again after weeks of Freddy and Carmen was almost a relief. To think that the worst Balfor had done was a little hanging him by the nuts. How innocent by comparison; almost lame.

"I never did get around to that spank." Balfor continued. "I got carried away with making you sit on your balls. You had nice soft big ones as I recall, like little cushions to sit on. How long was it- about three hours? You got nice and juicy between the legs didn't you, as it all squeezed out."

Jeremy looked at him as if in a daze. No reaction. No indication of any emotion at all.

"Did you come while you were sitting on your balls? Did the squashy feeling in your nuts give you an orgasm? I forgot to ask." Balfor continued.

"No."

"No what?"

"No sir, I didn't come from when you made me sit on my balls sir."

"Oh well some do, some don't. Guess you're weren't one of the lucky ones. So it all squeezed out with no pleasure at all."

"Yes sir."

"That's interesting. I once had made a guy come three times just from sitting on his own nuts. Mind you he was sitting on them for thirty six hours. Young guys like you usually blow almost instantly. I suppose everyone is different. You must have felt something though, what did it feel like?"

"There was a slow sort of pumping feeling, deep inside." Jeremy felt like he was talking to a market researcher.

"I would have thought that would be slightly pleasurable."

"Maybe it was, I guess I was sort of too distracted to notice."

Balfor took a butt plug out of his leather bag and held it for him to see. "Aren't you going to say hello?"

"To you or that thing sir?"

Balfor ignored that comment. "This thing is called a butt plug and I'm going to jam it up your ass."

"It's big sir."

"Yes it is... Carmen will be here in a little while. I've suggested a game. Are you up to it?"

"Will that make any difference- sir?" Jeremy felt philosophical and sort of detached. He allowed an insolent lilt to creep audibly into his voice.

"Probably not. Carmen's been very busy lately and she hasn't had time to go out and get sex. I said she looked a little uptight and could do with a shag. Unbelievably, she agreed for once. Just between you and me, I think she fancies me, but as you found out, I'm a bit gay." Balfor adjusted his cock through the worn denim crotch of his jeans, giving his heavy, well delineated lunch a languid, satisfied squeeze.

"What are you going to do, um, sir?"

"I'm going to kill two birds with one stone. I'm going to cheer Carmen up and give you that spanking I promised you." He smiled rakishly, pleased with himself.

Carmen appeared dressed entirely in glossy black latex. She sat on the bed and started to fondle Jeremy's hair distractedly with a gloved hand. There were some multicolored dental dams flopping out of a pocket in her pants. Jeremy had learned about dental dams in an unofficial safe sex information session at school. He had not imagined that anyone ever actually used them.

Balfor removed the leather harness holding Jeremy in place on the bed, and rubbed the marks where it had made dents in his skin.

"Right Jeremy let's see you flip over on your belly."

Jeremy knew if he didn't do what he was told Balfor would make things worse. His face turning scarlet with embarrassment as he turned and twisted to left and to the right, but he couldn't flip himself over. He began to feel like a turtle stuck on its back. He kept trying to use arms and legs that weren't there any more. It was beyond frustrating. He wanted to cry, but he was not going to give these creeps the satisfaction.

"It takes a while for them to learn." said Carmen, helping him onto his belly.

"You're going to do a good job of licking Carmen while I spank your bottom. Isn't that going to be fun?... Well?"

"I thought that was a rhetorical question. Sir." Jeremy was feeling very sour and surly. It had occurred to him that it was hardly possible that these people could do anything worse to him than they had done already, and so there was nothing really they could threaten him with.

"O.K. We'll soon belt that insolence out of you."

Carmen demurely unzipped a patch of rubber in her crotch and swapped a dental dam for it immediately, almost frantically as if protecting her vulva from deadly radiation.

"Carmen isn't worried about HIV," said Balfor. "She's just terrified of man germs in general."

"Shut up." Said Carmen.

"It must be hard for a straight woman not to be able to touch a man. She's completely obsessive compulsive you know. When ever she craves actual skin to skin contact with another human it has to be a woman doesn't it Carmen?"

"Of course. Men are disgusting. You should know, dog fucker."

"Dog fucker?" Asked Jeremy feeling bold.

"He fucks the guard dogs out in the kennel. He likes to make the kennel torsos suck the dogs off, then he fucks the top dog and makes the torsos watch. Everybody knows."

"Kennel torsos?"

"If you don't sing real sweet for Mr Friedrichs you'll end up outside rolling on the dirt, getting fucked by the guard dogs all day long. I bet you thought the worst was behind you. Do you sing sweety?"

"You mean like- actual proper singing?" Jeremy wasn't sure. "Singing" might mean anything around here.

"Yeah honey."

"I was in the church choir." Jeremy had found singing in the choir interminably boring. How dearly he wished he could be back there now, singing the tired old hymns, even with Tommy Bartlett's death breath blowing on him from behind.

"Well if you were good in this choir you should be all right then, honey. You'll be dripping with baubles in no time and up to your ears in opulence. Won't that be nice?"

Jeremy didn't ask. He'd had enough revelations for one day.

"What's so terrible about fucking a dog?" Balfor inquired in all seriousness, though not genuinely hoping for a meaningful answer.

"Fucking animals is the lowest most disgusting thing a person could possibly do."

Actually Jeremy could think of one or two things lower.

"But people are animals." Said Balfor. "That's what we are. Animals. When we fuck each other we fuck an animal, so what's so terrible about fucking an animal?"

"People are not fucking animals!" Shrieked Carmen in a voice that could etch glass, flustered and offended by his cold logical atheism. She found it infinitely vexing that this hunk could be a 'mo and so indomitable at the same time, it went against everything she had been taught to expect. He dared to threaten everything she believed and at the same time she lusted after him for being so sexy and hated him for being such a sick dog fucking faggot.

"What are we then if we're not animals?"

"We're different. We're better."

"Why does that make it wrong to fuck them?"

"They're dirty."

"They're no dirtier than we are if you give them a bath. You'll have to do better than that."

"Because... Because they can't consent!"

"And that's so very important? They can't consent to being eaten either but that doesn't mean we go without our braised steak."

Jeremy thought it extremely rich that Carmen was arguing from consent.

Anyway what makes you think they can't consent?"

"Because they can't talk."

"Do you think people who can't talk can't consent?"

"Shut up! Just shut up!" Spat Carmen etching more glass. "You fucking disgusting dog fucker! You know exactly why it's disgusting! You're just a disingenuous smartass!"

"Isn't she sweet?" said Balfor to Jeremy. "I'd marry her and have her babies if I thought she could resist eating her young."

"Ha! You're the cannibal around here Balfor, Freddy never invites me to dinner. Why don't you tell Jeremy here how sweet his ball tasted? Which one did you have, the left one or the right one? - or is it too hard to tell which is which after they come off?"

Jeremy, lying on his stomach, reeled with helpless indignity. He felt like a pound of flesh, like a grazing animal at auction. He recalled the "Restaurant at the end of Universe" by Douglas Adams, the scene where the meal entreats the diners to enjoy him, offering them parts of his body.

"You ate my balls too? I thought it was just Mr Friedrichs." The words seemed to echo in his skull as his mind tried to reprocess them, so shocking it was that this string of words could issue from his own mouth and be meaningful.

"He ate lots of you sweetheart." said Carmen, "He's Mr Friedrich's right hand man. Right in there with him. He's got his place at the table quite literally." Then turning to Balfor, "Why don't you flex your muscles for him Balfor? After all they're sort of his really seeing how they were nourished with protein from the meat of his arms and legs. Don't you think? Go on show him what became of all the cut off bits."

Jeremy watched horrified as Balfor rose to the occasion, amiably flexing one of his massive arms, smiling as he did so. It was an impressive sight, but not of the steroidal condom-full-of-walnuts kind. Balfor was too proud of his big balls to risk shriveling them with hormones and steroids. This gave him an old fashioned kind of muscularity. He was not tanned either, but cream colored and hearty rather. He looked like something out of a late nineteenth or early twentieth century post card, a young strong man of the old world, before circuit training or Nautilus equipment had been invented. He only ever trained with free weights. He even had the not very carefully manicured facial hair to go with the look. It was like George Hackenschmidt got pregnant to Omer de Bouillon and they called the bearded baby Balfor.

Jeremy felt himself begin to cry. These people had taken away his dignity. They had stolen his sex and they had stolen his limbs and the worse part was he was still here to see it and feel it. He felt half way to being a ghost. The worst nightmare of his childhood had been nowhere near this baleful.

How utterly, consummately horrific it had been after Balfor had squashed and stretched his balls practically to death, to watch Freddy at work between his legs, blurred weirdly through a filter of tears. To feel those sharp slicing pains as his tormentor deftly cut the orbs out of their raw sac which still seeped blood it had been so badly stretched.

To know that the organs that made him a man were gone forever. What was he now? How was he to conceive of himself? He knew of no precedent for this. There were no role models to emulate. No precedents to access. He was lost. He had not imagined it possible to be deflated to such a level of desolation.

Yet at the same time he was a million miles away from it all, filtering the horror through a numbing gauze of disbelief and depersonalisation.

And then after a week of recovery from his neutering Mr Friedrichs had begun the tattooing of the soles of his feet and when he was finished Jeremy had been knocked out with drugs and upon awakening discovered the loss of his left leg and then he truly began to comprehend the scale of the abject degradation and torture that was planned for him.

It was beyond even this new comprehension though, to encompass the horrific ordeal of losing his other leg without anything to kill the pain what so ever.

"Don't take it." He had screamed out, frantic and desperate, pleading as if this could make a difference. "It's a healthy leg! There's nothing wrong with it! Your making me lame. I could work. I could be a slave and do work. You're making me useless! Your removing all my reasons for existing!"

"Nonsense." Freddy had said. "You'll soon discover that I have new reasons for you to exist."

And then the same with his arms as they were taken after designs had been pricked into his palms.

Freddy cut off his ears with a Stanley knife, explaining how he liked to cook them like pork crackling.

"I never cut off the nose though." Said Freddy. "It's hard to look at a face without a nose, and I don't like to create ugliness in the world."

Friedrichs didn't want to create ugliness. Jeremy felt himself drowning in irony. To think that he had been frightened of the dentist. The dentist! Nice old Dr Starkenburg!

Jeremy had descended into madness at this point, Dr Starkenburg being the last lucid thought he could remember before the fog set in. For several weeks he took on his five year old's personality and was sheltering in fantasy. In his delusion he thought that Carmen was his Mom. Every so often he would ask in a sing song voice when she was going to drive him to school.

Once this amusing mental breakdown had dissipated, and Jeremy returned to a fully sober apprehension of his situation, Carmen came in one day and began to manipulate his lonely little acorn of a penis with her latex gloved hand.

"Mr Friedrichs is going to penectomise you just as soon as you have one last orgasm." She said matter of factly. "It's a tradition around here, sort of like a condemned man's last request."

"Oh right. Of course. What else would it be?" he had said, voice quavering, lip quivering, brain turning to mush, able to think of nothing more to say for the occasion. He wanted to fall apart, to beg and to blabber but he knew that it would do him no good. He stared at the ceiling as his cock enjoyed itself almost independently of him as he fell apart again inside.

Although she was not very good at wanking his cock, it had been a long time by then since Jeremy had any stimulation, so the mere fact of something touching him down there was enough to get him fearsomely swelled and hard.

Freddy had come in with a riding crop then, and proceeded to crack it across his tender abdominals, delivering a pat spiel about how all this was appropriate punishment for a traitor like Jeremy and that death was too good for him and that was why he had not been delivered into it. Carmen moved her hand away and Freddy clapped the crop on Jeremy's cock for a while, pleased with the fearful cries and involuntary twisting and shuddering this caused. There were red welts on Jeremy's belly and cock by the time Freddy had finished his customary righteous, crop-crack punctuated speech.

Then Freddy had gone away and Carmen had spent a lot of time wrapping Jeremy carefully in tape and latex. How hot and horrified he had become in that suffocating cocoon, tight and constraining around his already demobilized body.

After leaving him like that for several hours, she got him hard again and then descended upon and enveloped his condom sheathed cock. Squeezing it painfully with her very strong vaginal muscles, bending it this way and that with her grinding and gyrating.

The experience was horrible for him. He cried out in his misery for Melanie. How gentle and soft his girlfriend had been by comparison. Jeremy had hardly known how to appreciate her.

This rape of the remainder of him by Carmen was absolutely soul destroying, it was the icing on the cake of everything he'd been through. He could feel aspects of himself collapse inside him like the floors of a falling building. She conquered him with her strident undulations, but his cock stayed hard in spite of him.

He blew a load of useless barren fluid into the condom, and with tears streaming out of his eyes to dampen the space between his face and the latex mask, he had a pathetic distracted sort of disappointing orgasm.

He knew it was his last, and it was.

And then Freddy had tattooed and sliced off his penis, with all the added horror and pain entailed and now Balfor was here to give him a promised spanking. He was in hell. He was in a level of hell that Dante had forgotten to describe.

The frustrating horror of seeing Balfor's muscles, nourished with his own stolen meat became too much for him to bear. His body shuddered as he sobbed and Carmen cuddled him to her rubbery breast.

"There there sweety."

"Oh Carmen. Look what you made me do!" said Balfor, "Now he's all upset."

Balfor sat on the bed and picked up Jeremy's rump, plopping it onto his denim and leather clad lap. He fondled his lilly white buns for a while, smoothing his broad warm hand on them. Jeremy stopped sobbing. The feel of Balfor's soothing hand on his ass was hypnotic and very calming, even for a straight boy in his kind of extremis.

When Jeremy seemed sufficiently relaxed, Balfor took the butt plug, a chubby short dildo really, and lubing it up minimally, he pushed it into Jeremy's arse hole.

Jeremy squealed in pain and humiliation as his sphincter cramped with the shock, but Balfor rammed it in inexorably anyway.

"You keep nice and tight and hold this in. If I see you pushing it out I'll get very angry."

Gradually Jeremy's panting subsided as his muscles relaxed around the pole of latex, but there was still a curiously arousing knob of pain where the head of the plug pushed uncomfortably into his prostate. He could feel the stump of his cock swelling inside him, and knew that if he still had his dick it would be going hard. He was almost glad that it was not there anymore to betray his involuntary excitement.

Jeremy was a lean, pretty young man who had grown from a willowy, shy sort of lad; for many years, one of his biggest fears had been that people might mistake him for gay.

Balfor wiped the lube off his hands with a damp rag and then gave Jeremy a little slap on the rump.

"I love the way Freddy leaves just enough thigh to keep their arses well shaped." Said Balfor. "I swear that man is a surgical genius. He doesn't really need to run this private prison you know. He could probably make as much money working as a plastic surgeon."

"Ah, alas I have lost my license to practice as you well know Balfor." Said Freddy checking in on them. "What's going on in here?" he asked.

"We're about to have a little spank" said Balfor. "Do you want to watch?"

"Sure why not." Freddy pulled up a chair.

Jeremy felt his face grow beet red as his embarrassment hit an all time high. Why could he not die? Why didn't the ground just open up beneath him and swallow him up? How was it possible that this could be happening to him?

"I've lost the mood." Said Carmen storming out, holding the dam in place with her hand as she went, glaring at Balfor. She was sweet on Balfor but there was no way she was going to perform in front of her boss. She would not be so demeaned.

"Oh well never mind." said Balfor, slapping Jeremy once again open handed. The sound rang out in the room loud and clear. Jeremy cried out. His humiliation bloomed as painful as the glowing hot tingle on his rump.

Freddy tittered.

"How about instead of licking Carmen through one of those stupid dental dams of hers, I make you lick the arse of the man who cut off all your parts?" Said Balfor. "And I mean your tongue on his arse, no intervening membrane. How would that be? assuming Mr Friedrichs is amenable?"

"Oh yes, why not, I haven't had my ornaments lick my arse for quite a while now. It takes all the fun away when they're too used to it. I've begun to forget how nice it feels."

"I hope it isn't too clean." Said Balfor.

Freddy laughed. "I showered this morning, after my daily crap as usual."

"Oh well never mind, at least we have about ten hours of crack sweat on it by now. That should flavor it up a bit for him. Have you had a busy day, lots of running around in between sitting down?"

"Yes quite."

"Ideal. I'd be tempted to lick it myself if I didn't know you too well already." Said Balfor laughing "Jeremy my boy, you're in for a treat. What do you say?"

Jeremy could not believe this. It was utterly too much. He did not know what to say or do. He had no idea how he was going to deal with what was coming. He had never contemplated anything as disgusting as licking an arse hole, let alone this particular arse hole. The thing was beyond comprehension.

"What do you say?" Asked Balfor again slightly louder, his hand poised above Jeremy's bottom.

Jeremy murmured something into the pillows. The but plug was already getting very uncomfortable.

"Say "thank you sir!"" Balfor slapped him very hard, jolting the plug into him like a shot. Jeremy's tight little white boy's bum wobbled like a blancmange as the crack echoed in the room.

"AHHH... thank you... sir..." he began to weep. He wanted to die. Anything to be away from this utter nightmare. He supposed he had deserved to be punished for his crime but not like this. This was cruel and unusual, as cruel and unusual as it was possible to get and wasn't there supposed to be a law against that?

"He's a nice middle class boy." Said Freddy. "And he's straight. I think it will take a lot of persuasion to get that tongue out... Perhaps you should warm him up for a while Balfor, to get him in the mood for cooperation."

"His dad's a police lieutenant you know." Said Balfor. "That's why he's so well trained and good with his manners. I guess that was why he thought he could get away with all that unpaid for coke as well. He's always had daddy to protect him, so he thought he was superman. It's a shame."

"Looks like you're his daddy right now Balfor." Mused Freddy.

Balfor took off his half slung back pack and pulled a bull whip out of it.

Jeremy saw it and whimpered, burying his face in the pillows where Carmen had been sitting. He wished she'd come back. The prospect of munching carpet through latex was so innocuous by comparison.

Balfor doubled the whip onto itself several times and slapped Jeremy across the arse cheeks with it. Red welts appeared like rosy shadows where it had contacted his flesh.

"Yep, you'll pink up nicely boy." Said Balfor. "I'm going to keep this up now until you beg me to let you lick Mr Friedrich's arse instead. You know, Mr Friedrichs, the guy who cut off all your arms and legs and your balls, and took your dick off as well recently? That Mr Friedrichs? Do you reckon you're gonna beg for it?"

"No sir. Not in a million fucking years." Said Jeremy through gritted teeth, knowing this was just bravado. He had experienced enough of Balfor by now to know that he could make him do pretty much anything he felt like.

"Good. That's just what I wanted to hear. The longer I whip, the redder you get, the better I like it."

Balfor set in whipping his arse at a regular regimental beat. It was not long at all before Jeremy's alabaster globes began to look more like rose quartz.

Jeremy whimpered and sobbed and then cried out as Balfor increased the intensity of his assault with every lashing.

Searing flames of pain flashed and licked at his buttocks burning him deeper and deeper. He could barely breathe. He gasped rather than drew proper breath and tears streamed down his cheeks. Let Balfor kill him. Let him whip him to a soggy blob of bloody flesh, there was no way he was going to beg to lick arse, let alone that particular arse hole.

He thought of Melanie. So glad she was not here to witness this. He smiled inside to think of his life growing inside her. He knew he would never know his child. Never play after work and on weekends. Never see the first steps, hear the first word.

Misery began to engulf him. He remembered that he had endangered the lives of children with his selfish carelessness, as Balfor had pointed out so many weeks ago.

If a man endangered his own child that way, threatened him or her with severe deprivation, would he not want him punished in a similar way to that which he was suffering now?

He had to admit yes.

It was indeed probable that people at the bottom of the cocaine food chain would have gone without because of his crime. Perhaps a crime within a crime did deserve a punishment within a punishment.

Perhaps that was the reason for the extreme misery at this hell hole.

Mr Friedrichs was clearly enjoying this. Jeremy could see that his pants were tenting.

Balfor was enjoying it too, Jeremy could feel the man's heavy cock growing like something hydraulic, pushing into his side through the denim where he lay against his flaggelator's crotch.

The sound of Balfor's whipping clapped loud and bright on the air. Every contact of leather on Jeremy's rump lashed him with horrendous stinging pain. He squirmed and wriggled, utterly incapable of escape or any defense what so ever.

He had been tied up during his kidnapping and thought at the time that that was the limit of helplessness a man could feel.

To be missing his arms and legs was like irrevocable bondage in another dimension. He could feel his lost limbs now, phantom appendages poking out at odd angles, non existent muscles desperately trying to flex as his frantic brain sent impulses to nowhere.

He felt the humiliating butt plug wobbling inside him. The shameful secret arousal deep inside that he knew would lead nowhere. He felt a rivulet of piss escaping from his truncated urethra, no doubt soaking into Balfor's jeans, but he was too frightened of further punishment to be proud of soiling his tormentor in this way; besides, he had not done it on purpose. Intent was everything in a power exchange, he realized, and at the moment he could not muster any effective intent what so ever.

He felt the inner fog increasing as massive frustration engulfed him and threatened once more to drive him into madness.

Why could he not have settled down to a humble life with Melanie? A little family in a rented bungalow in the suburbs? What would have been so terrible about that?

Why had he gone so recklessly for the big unattainable prize?

The relentless advertising had gotten to him. On tv and on billboards, on buses and trains, on the baseball pitch, even on his uniform it was everywhere and utterly inescapable. He had become a part of it. The glossy overdriven one upmanship of runaway capitalism had eaten his soul and was it any wonder? Why had he not resisted it? He knew other people did. His father was immune. His mother God bless her was immune. It was because he was stupid and a weak willed conformist. That was it. He was desperately dumb and stupid and a loser. He had been consumed by the need to consume, and his greed had pushed him to deeper and deeper debt and worse and worse acts of desperation. His life had been a hell long before they had bundled his sorry naked ass into the boot of that sedan in the lane behind the jewelry store. His father had always known it. He was good for nothing.

He had been sustained in life by the thought that maybe one day he would grow up and feel like a man and be worthy of his father's admiration. Maybe after years of doing what he was told he would get to feel like an adult, worthy of his responsibilities; arriving at that promised place. He never would now, no matter what happened, he would never ever get to feel like a man.

It was all probably just an illusion anyway. He would probably have grown old waiting for a feeling that never actually comes to anybody. He hoped so. It was a consoling thought for a human remnant in his position.

He remembered the shame of stepping out of his childish Bugs Bunny boxers, the ones that Melanie had bought him for his birthday. The last item of clothing he had worn. He wondered if he would ever wear clothes again and if so what form could they possibly take- a sack with a drawstring at the neck? A diaper underneath for his constantly leaking urethra?

How sad. A frivolous pair of Bugs Bunny boxers. It seemed to sum him up completely. He cried for himself, for his abject childish haplessness which the print on those underpants symbolized so well.

Melanie had been so proud of his having to wear boxers. Briefs had become too tight and constricting on his low hanging egg sized balls, he had explained.

She loved to play with them. It took him a long time to get hard and she liked to have something impressive of his in her small hand to get her aroused. It was like she was a stud farmer weighing the merchandise of her prize bull. He loved it.

She liked him to be in boxers also, so she could flop his ball sack out through the fly and fondle it before he was completely undressed.

He doubted he would now ever have to undress again. These people were obviously going to keep him as nude as a neutered hairless cat until the day they finally got around to killing him.

What a strange feeling it was to be perpetually naked and vulnerable and yet have no private parts to hide.

He had been reduced to a nothing, and stupidly he had thought that would be the end of his torment.

The pain of Balfor's rhythmic lashing was rapidly getting too intense to bear. He ground his teeth, writhing in misery. Sweat flowed freely off his face and body.

He realized he had been screaming. He had gone out of himself again, as had happened when Freddy cut bits off him without anesthetic. It was as if he were watching himself from another dimension, wobbling and shrieking in a mirror world.

Balfor's stroke after shocking stinging stroke was jerking him back into himself rapidly however, and he realized that pretty soon he was going to be begging for the chance to lick his torturer's sweaty date.

It suddenly occurred to him that there had never been any choices in his life. Perhaps choice was an illusion, more accurately conceived as a contest between impulses. He was either motivated as an organism to do one thing or another and the thing that he had been taught to call choice was merely a rationalization after the fact of one impulse triumphing over another.

Like Balfor was triumphing over him right now. Like the impulse to avoid licking arse hole was losing to the impulse to avoid further pain on his buns.

"All right yes. Please! Stop whipping me! Yes! Please."

"Please what?"

"Oh no... No! I mean yes. Please let me lick... Mr... Friedrich's...

Ass hole."

"One more "please"."

"Please."

"Good boy!" Said Balfor. "Wish granted."

Freddy got up out of his chair, stood up on the bed, turned around, pulled down his pants and briefs and knelt on them without pulling them off over his boots. His belted trousers formed a convenient pillow where they sat strung between his ankles.

Freddy held up his shirt tails while Balfor manhandled Jeremy so that his head was resting on the folded trousers, Freddy sat down without much ceremony on Jeremy's face.

"Is he licking?" asked Balfor.

"Not yet."

Jeremy was enclosed in Mr Friedrich's hairy legs between his boots and under a tent of shirt tails, the horrible male stink of the monstrous man reeking in his nostrils. His arse crack was draped over his face but as yet he had not managed to force himself to poke out his tongue.

"You better start licking, Jeremy." Said Balfor.

"I can't. This is sick! I won't do it. Why don't you just kill me for Christ's sake?" He cried.

"I think you had better light one of those cigars of yours Balfor, otherwise we're going to be here all day." Said Freddy pragmatically.

Balfor took a cigar out of his shirt pocket, bit off the end and lit it, taking a few puffs to get the end nice and fiery. The air filled with the scent of the cigar, aromatic and masculine.

Jeremy knew what was coming but he still could not make himself poke out his tongue.

Jeremy screamed as Balfor touched him on the belly with the fire, then his ground it for just a moment into Jeremy's fresh pink penectomy scar.

Jeremy screamed and struggled uselessly to wriggle out from under his captor, and then terrified of further pain, his tongue came out. He started probing for the opening of Mr Friedrich's coit. He found it and tried not to think about the repulsive taste that began to harmonize with the already awful smell he was experiencing. He had expected it to taste like shit, but it didn't. It tasted like the very essence of Friedrich's. An indescribable mix of stygian flavors. It was as if Jeremy were taking onto his tongue the quintessential evil of his tormentor.

"How's he doing?" Asked Balfor.

"Not very well." Said Freddy, I think he's a little shy and inexperienced. "I can barely feel it."

"You better work that tongue a little better Jeremy or I'll burn your nipples with my cigar. Do you want to be left with numb, scarred nipples?"

Jeremy's nipples had always been more sensitive than he had liked to admit. He began to flick his tongue in and out of Friedrich's arse hole as delicately and as skillfully as he possibly could. He hoped that if he did a good job this would all be over and they'd just go away and leave him alone.

"Don't attack it. Don't rape it with your tongue." Said Balfor, "Lick it like the delicacy that it is. Be gentle. Make love to it. Pretend it's a mouth and you're kissing it. Apply a little pressure but don't thrust exactly." Balfor delivered this advice with as much aplomb as he would had it been a golf lesson.

Jeremy worked his tongue over and around and in the torus of muscle pressed against his face with terrific concentration. He began to get used to the humiliating flavor, his mind could not help but associate it with the wonderful feeling of relief from the pain of his whipping. Although his bottom still stung, the pain was no where near as fierce as it had been as Balfor reached the crescendo the flaying.

After twenty minutes or so, Freddy said, "All right I think he's done enough rimming, why don't you leave us alone now Balfor and I'll show him the rest of what he's in for from now on."

"Fine," said Balfor smiling wickedly, "I'll head off to the kennel since I've got a cigar lit already..."

Balfor left, taking his bag of whips and toys with him.

"You are a filthy, filthy man Balfor." Freddy called after him.

The distant and diminishing sound of Balfor laughing echoed from the hall.

Freddy had become hard from the prolonged stimulation of Jeremy's tongue and as he got up off his face, Jeremy saw the man's incredibly ugly pencil dick, bent, scarred, unevenly pigmented and ropy at the base with bulging purple varicose veins. The stiff skinny horror poked obscenely out above a tiny pair of unevenly sized raisin like balls, a scouring pad of wiry ginger pubic hair sitting on top of it all like an afterthought.

Although he knew himself to be straight, Jeremy wished Balfor would come back. If he had no choice but to submit to a session of man on man sex he would rather do it with one who was handsome and healthy looking and who smelled nice. Even if Balfor had just whipped him like a sorry dog.

But no. Balfor did not come back.

Jeremy was pushed over onto his stomach again, He felt the butt plug which he had forgotten all about, drawn uncomfortably out of him and then the horrible nauseating jabbing pain as Freddy replaced the latex pole with his own reedy needle dick and instantly started rutting like an insane jack rabbit.

Jeremy wailed a long sustained keening cry, vibratoed slightly by Freddy's thrusting.

"Excellent." Said Freddy. "A perfect "A" precisely four hundred and forty hertz. You're going to be a good singer aren't you!"

He came mercifully quick and pulled out.

Jeremy sighed audibly with relief.

As Freddy pulled up his trousers, Jeremy wondered wryly when all this punishment was going to start improving his soul.

He consoled himself with one thought, one possibility; the hope that his father, a man who knew how to be outraged, would not rest until he had avenged this.

"I'll send Carmen back to clean you up." Said Freddy on his way out. "Welcome to the madhouse Jeremy!"

Gerald and Anselmo surveyed the rusted form of the badly smashed Land Rover deep in the ravine off the road to Mandinga. They were both depressed that the accident had deprived them of their revenge on the primary torturer of Calle Rosario.

Gerald's foot ached from kicking the vehicle's carcass over and over again with impotent rage. How dare this Manuel Friedrichs die and deprive him of his right to avenge his son? How dare he? He picked up what ever bleached bones he could find lying about and crushed them with a rock, stamped on them with his foot, or threw them into the stream below, furious with frustrated, impotent rage.

He had wanted to crush the riotously painted skull he had seen at the police headquarters in Panama City as well.

"Remember dear. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. Promise me you'll keep that at the back of your mind no matter what else happens. Do right by Jerry but don't lose your way." his annoyingly pious wife Veronica had said that to him as he had turned to board the plane to Panama. He had nodded to her, but in his heart he had made no such promise. He did not trust the Lord's idea of vengeance to have caused the monster to suffer enough. But then he would suffer the eternal torment of Hell wouldn't he? Gerald doubted it strongly and remembered again how far all this had caused him to stray from his faith.

In his heart a fury had been kindled that he knew would not be extinguishable until he found the other one. That Balfor Cooper.

"Anselmo, Where would you go if you were a drug smuggling sadist who needed to get out of Central America?" He asked his friend.

"Somewhere in South East Asia I suppose, or maybe Russia now that the wall has come down." Anselmo answered him.

"Russian organized crime tends to be a bit xenophobic." Said Gerald. "They don't employ non Russians if they can help it. I think we should focus on South East Asia. Especially avenues involving selling Asian product in Australia or New Zealand. Something tells me that Cooper would have gotten homesick by now. He'd want to drop in somewhere resembling home pretty regularly, now that he's getting a little older."

"I like how you think." Said Nettis. "But where do we begin? South East Asia is big place."

"I guess we contact the police in Hong Kong, Maybe Singapore. Jakarta I don't know. We've got research to do, contacts to make.

"Then we do it." Said Nettis.

"Then we do it." Said Macarthur. "What choice do we have?"

They climbed out of the ravine up the ropes they had rappelled down earlier, energized with fresh hope generated by the new direction they had found for their efforts.

"I'm probably going to have to mortgage my home to pay for this." Said Nettis. "The government is not well disposed to funding personal vendettas, even when it is in close cooperation with the police. Maria isn't going to be happy."

"Me too." Said Gerald. "Ditto with Veronica."

Both men knew that their wives would agree to the expense however, there was no going back now, not now that they met Parnell Baxter, and he had shown and explained to them the nature of what had happened to their sons at Calle Rosario.

Gerald and Anselmo had been amazed by Parnell's attitude in spite of his losses, and his level of adjustment to his new circumstances. He had known both Jeremy and Dino briefly in his days as a house ornament, and assured the men that their sons had not ended up in the kennel. He had been there to the last, so he would have known.

Anselmo had renewed hope that Dino was still alive now that he knew his son had not been in the kennel nor had appeared in the grave. Also according to Parnell, Dino had somehow become Freddy's favorite. That was so like Dino it made Anselmo smile. It was most likely that his son was indeed the Athos Hermes who he and Gerald had gone to see in Buenos Aires.

Why had he run away from them? Had he fled his father feeling shame because of what had befallen him? Had Maria and he really been such distant demanding figures that their son might imagine their love so strictly conditional; conditional upon his staying intact as a man? Or was it his own pride keeping him from them? Perhaps he simply wanted to spare them the horror of knowing his condition.

Perhaps he had grown ashamed of exploiting his new circumstances, allowing himself to sink into the pornographic underworld of Extreme Body Modification, Sadomasochism and Amputee Fetishism for the sake of money. Perhaps that was the cause of his reluctance to reestablish contact with his family.

Anselmo would have to find out before he could rest without guilt.

Murni's Warung is a highly ornate traditionally open-constructed restaurant built on the edge of a deep verdant canyon just outside of Ubud in Bali. It has many levels descending to the cool bottom of the chasm along which a river tumbles pleasingly over rocks and boulders. Ferns and palms and creepers adorn the steep slopes and larger trees at the top extend the rampantly luxuriant tropical effect.

Dino and Carmen were there on the second level down, waiting for Oliver and his father to join them for dinner. Dino was wearing dark glasses with his almost black Zegna. They made him looked blind as well as limbless.

Carmen's phone rang. "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" was her annoying tinny ring tone of the moment. It was an sms message from Oliver. He had gone to the airport to meet his father. Apparently the flight was going to be late and so they should just eat and then go home without him.

Dino and Carmen were not upset about this news, neither being too keen to meet Oliver's father, in spite of their friend's protestations that his "old man" was really quite "hip."

Dino sipped his "Micky Mouse" - a kind of coca cola ice cream spider, and Carmen mined her way through a huge bowl of tropical fruit salad. Every so often she'd offer Dino a piece of this or that exotic fruit and they would comment on the unusual flavour and texture of the varicolored bits and pieces.

Neither Dino nor Carmen wanted to discuss the shocking news that they had seen on Oliver's satellite tv two nights ago. They had pretty much exhausted the subject.

The Calle Rosario affair had been blown wide open and was rapidly becoming an international media feeding frenzy.

Dino had seen Parnell Baxter talking about his experiences. It was nice to see that Parnell was still alive, but the experience of watching him on television had been unsettling to say the least.

Carmen's relief that he had not mentioned her was very obvious.

More disquieting had been the news that Dino's father was still looking for him. They had shown old photos of him. He was quite alarmed, and worried that someone might recognise him.

A warm feeling spread inside Dino to know that Balfor was still alive, and that Freddy was dead. For once the Gods had got it right. He began to entertain a guilty hope that he might actually get to see him again and maybe fuck once more.

Oliver had wanted Dino to get in touch with his father. He said there was a lot of money to be made in family reunions of that sort. the big media companies pay a fortune for exclusives. That was typical of Oliver's thinking. Always looking for the financial angle.

Dino had flatly refused. He did not want to be an international media event and have to live it down for the rest of his life. But then again, it was inevitable wasn't it? He would have to live Calle Rosario down for the rest of his life, why not this too? And so what if his parents found out what had become of him?

He did not want to have to think about it. He took another mouthful of "Micky Mouse."

Dino started to spend more and more time in between slurps pretending to stare at the exquisitely carved and painted ceiling of interlocking, tessellating wood and thatch and tile. It always puzzled him how well the Dutch oil lamps with their ornate brass and white glass worked with the more traditional elements of the Balinese style architecture. Actually he was gazing above mostly in order to surreptitiously crane his head to spy a strange man with a benevolent face, reminiscent of Herge's "Tin tin" who sat diagonally opposite them, listening to something on a walkman, unable to conceal his reciprocal curiosity and desire to stare at Dino.

Dino sometimes liked to play games like this with strangers who couldn't help but ogle him when he and Carmen were out.

The strange man suddenly got up and left. Dino noticed that he'd left his walkman behind.

"Carmen - that strange man has left his walkman behind" he said. "let's grab it before the staff take it to lost and found."

"Ooh you are naughty." Said Carmen, moving like a lynx cat across the divinely furnished room to snatch the shiny state of the art MP3 device from the stranger's table. "I like how you think."

"What was he listening to?"

Carmen put the head phones on and fiddled with the buttons on the tiny gunmetal grey oblong for a moment.

Her face went distant and then a puzzled look and then a horrified look, and then another puzzled look flashed across it.

"What is it?"

Lost for words, she took the headphones off and put them on him.

"Oh- My- God-" Said Dino.

"I believe that's my walkman you're listening to, if you don't mind." Said David Travis, holding out his hand righteously to receive his property. The manner in which Carmen removed the headphones from Dino and gave the device back to him filled him with wonder. She looked at him as if he was a demon from hell who might turn them both to stone.

"How did you get that recording?" Dino asked him.

"It's unusual isn't it. A very strange sort of voice. I can see how it might give you the willies as it were. It was donated anonymously to the Cornell University Music Library. I'm an assistant librarian there, though I've almost finished my archive training. I'm going to be an archivist. Hi- My name's David. David Travis, and you are..."

"My name's Dino, and this is Carmen."

"Hi." David shook hands with Carmen, visibly disoriented at not being able to do so with Dino.

"Do you know that music?" David asked them.

"You could say that." said Dino.

"It's English you know. Henry Purcell; Very beautiful isn't it. The recording is very idiosyncratic. You won't hear it arranged quite like that anywhere else."

"I wouldn't expect so; that's me singing back up by the way."

"What?"

Dino sang his part of the song for him. It was the quickest way to prove his point. For a little while the restaurant was filled with the achingly beautiful sound of his voice.

David was flabbergasted. He instantly recognised Dino's voice from the recording. He took a chair and absent mindedly sat down at the table with them without an invitation. A thing he would never do under normal circumstances.

"You're going to have to tell me all about this so I can document the recording for the library." he said taking out a notepad.

"Did you see the news two nights ago?" Asked Dino, "The story concerning a secret private prison kept by a drug baron in Panama? the one where the limbless skeletons were found in the backyard? And the weird skull of the man responsible for most of the torture painted all over with spirals and symbols by that demented farm girl?"

"Yes, but what's that got to do..." Suddenly it all clicked in his mind as the thoughts crashed together like dodgem cars. Dino's limblessness, the limbless skeletons at Calle Rosario on the news. The music, his wondering whether the main singer had in fact been a proper castrato, cut before puberty. "It's a proper castrato isn't it- on the recording. It has to be. That sick bastard made a proper castrato."

"I'm not a thalidomide baby." Dino answered him shrugging his shoulders, a gesture he was still capable of.

"Oh my God" said David. "You really were there; a part of that? Did he cut your um, as..."

"Everything." Said Dino. "Everything that can be cut off and eaten without killing a man. But unlike Felipe who was the real castrato, he didn't do me until after puberty so my voice had already broken."

"You poor bastard." David said, awe struck, glancing down at Dino's crotch and wondering what it looked like under the expensive suiting.

"Yes well..." Dino was struck with David's clear eyed sanguine up frontedness. His charming lack of guile and delicacy. Very North American. He was reminded of Jeremy for a moment.

"So Felipe is the name of the castrato. You know this could be huge. I've been wanting to release this recording but there was no way of getting in contact with the people who made it. Do you have any idea how much this is worth? A rare recording like this would be absolutely lapped up by the high brow end of the music market. The whole world should hear this, it's exquisite."

"I'm sure it's not to all tastes, and anyway it will be inextricable linked to the crimes in Colon."

"Nevertheless it should still be made available. It's unique. It would be terrible if all that suffering really was for absolutely nothing."

David drew a moist towelette from a plastic sache in his satchel and wiped his face and hands with it. He did this so naturally that Dino did not even notice. Carmen did though, with avid interest. She had an eagle eye for fastidious cleanliness in men, hoping one day to find one she could actually bare to touch.

"Well, Manuel Friedrichs, the skull guy, the fellow who made Felipe a castrato is dead obviously" said Dino, "and so is poor Felipe, so is the other singer on the recording. His name was Jeremy Macarthur, the son of the policeman who started this whole investigation frenzy, you would have seen him on the news too. That leaves me. I guess I'm the only one left who could give legal consent to a commercial distribution of the recording."

"And I just happened to bump into you today? This is too incredible! It calls for a serious drink. Waitress, the wine list!"

David insisted upon Dino and Carmen sharing a very good bottle from the Warung's wine list with him. He was quite shaken by the enormity of the coincidence. To bump into one of the back up singers of possibly the most rare recording in the world while listening to that very recording in remote restaurant while on a holiday in the far east. It did his head in. He associated coincidences with fate and doom. They tended to make him feel an unsettling proximity to the divine. He decided to try not to think about it.

"So the monster responsible for the Calle Rosario Atrocity is the one who sent the recording to us at Cornell?"

"I expect so. You didn't send it out did you Carmen?"

"What's she got to do with it?"

"Nothing. She's just my nurse." Said Dino in perfect deadpan.

"She wasn't at the torture house?"

"No! God no. She's a sweety. Wouldn't hurt a fly."

Carmen breathed an almost visible sigh of relief, but was also a little nonplused at being described as "just" a nurse, especially in front of a new man who she thought was quite charming and sort of cute now that she had gotten a good look at him. He was squeaky clean, and very neat and well dressed as well, without being effeminate about it.

"There are other recordings." Said Dino. " You should probably hear them all, you might like some of them, if you like the Dido. what hotel are you staying at?"

"I'm at the Ananda just up the road from here."

"Excellent! Why don't you come back with us to our friend Oliver's house, you can stay for a while; it's in the hills behind the Neka Art Museum, a fifteen minute walk from the Ananda at the most. You could stay or go once you had heard the recordings; your choice. I'm sure Oliver could put you up. He wouldn't mind would he- do you think Carmen?"

"No I don't think he would mind at all." She said in her most seductive voice, looking as deeply and seductively into David's eyes as she dared, fearing her lust might appear too obvious.

"I can't wait to hear these recordings." Said David to Dino, "What are they of?" He was a little taken aback with Carmen's interest in him. Women as attractive as Carmen did not usually notice his existence. He was glad to be going home with her, and worried about how forward he should be with her.

"Ive got recordings of Felipe singing some Handel, some Verdi, lots of Puccini." Said Dino trying to recall exactly what Carmen had saved along with his tattooed hands and feet and foreskin as they had hidden in the hole in the cellar. "The Dido and Aeneas is his best though, I should warn you." Dino was not silly enough to imagine that David would be interested the recordings which were just Jeremy and himself. It was the proper castrato the world would be after.

"Oh fantastic. It would be so much easier to sell a collection of recordings. I was worrying that it might be difficult to market just a single one. It is only a fairly short excerpt from the Dido and Aneas after all... Oh boy. Lets see Decca, Deutche Grammophon, L'oiseau-Lyre, maybe Phillips would be places to start; I mean to look for a distributor for the music." Said David excitedly. "I'll have to call them all of course; fish for the best deal!"

"David." Said Dino. "You are going to have to promise me something; that my name will not be mentioned anywhere. I don't want my parents to know that I'm still alive. It would kill them; kill me too. Do you understand? No word of me."

"Yes I think so." he replied, trying to imagine how he would feel in Dino's shoes and not really being able to. Secretly he did not see how it would be possible to keep Dino's identity a secret once the recording was released, but he would do his best.

"One more thing."

"Yes?" David's mind was already swimming with too much detail. Too much input and was quickly turning to fog.

"We have to find a Melanie Carter. With luck she's still living in Portland Oregon. She was pregnant to Jeremy when he wound up at the prison house on Calle Rosario. He used to talk about her all the time. If she had his child, then that child should get a share of the profits. Don't you think?"

"Melanie Carter? I'll just write that down. Of course. Yes. That's only fair, that their child should get a share."

On the way to Oliver's house, Dino sensed as Carmen pushed him along in his chair, that some kind of emotional tension was brewing between her and their new friend. Knowing the twisted extent of Carmen's emotional dysfunction, he found this intensely amusing, and yet there was a hint of dread as well. If she and David fell in love and somehow against all odds created a relationship for themselves, how would he fit in? Who then would look after him?

He began to wonder whether he ought to get needy and manipulative or just allow Carmen enough rope to hang herself, as she had always done in the past before even getting into bed with the men who attracted her.

If worse came to the worst he supposed he could always drop her in it, just by coming clean to David about her role at Calle Rosario. Yes, he to himself with satisfaction, he had Carmen by the short and curlies as it were, and that was fair and just really considering what she had participated in.

Maybe he would be generous and allow her a brief affair with this fellow, if by some miracle she could manage it.