Balfor and Terry 7

Someone had put him on a bed of ferns and moss in the refreshing coolness of a gloomy cave.

It could only have been Balfor. Terry's heart swelled with gratitude that his master would put in an effort like that for him. Balfor had even put his long john pillow under his head, and the courteousness of it almost brought Terry to tears.

It still felt unfamiliar, thinking of Balfor as his master. He had always thought of him as the captain, and therefore the boss, but to think of a man as his "master," lowered Terry into a whole new level of subordination that excited and stimulated him, rather than just grinding him down in the drudgery that had been work up until now, his toil, his ennui.

His life.

Terry would now if ordered to, uncomplainingly mop a thousand floors, clean a million bathrooms, hoover all the rugs in the universe just to feel Balfor's eyes appraising him again, and the fulfillment of his great potent cock pistoning in and out of him one more time.

But he was too ill to think about that just now.

Through the mouth of the cave he could see across to the other side of the verdant gully, all tree ferns and mossy trunks. Balfor was out there somewhere. Probably gathering food.

The certainty that his master would return having nowhere else to go eased and comforted him. He felt deeply unworthy of Balfor, and he knew that if they were not stranded together, he would leave and Terry would never see him again. But he would prove himself or die trying. He would somehow make himself worthy to be Balfor's slave.

Terry had never felt worthy of anything. He had grown up in poverty, and grinding poverty does not endow a person with a sense of entitlement. To see others everywhere driving in nice cars, going about richly dressed, living in big houses, while he and his grandmother had to struggle and scrape, had filled him with a fear that some how some where he must have done something terrible to deserve his lowly status.

Then as a teenager, with a teenager's energy and rebelliousness, he had embarked on behavior that fulfilled that flawed logic perfectly. He would make himself bad enough to deserve his station in life. He had hoped to attract the attention of the authorities with his abominable gang behavior, bashing and robbing queers and derelicts and spraying his pain all over the western suburbs of Sydney with bright angry graffito's, he'd hoped that he would make something in the world change. He had striven almost fearlessly into a hellish young adult hood dealing drugs and shooting them up hoping one day somehow to claim his prize of a final glorious rampant revenge against everything.

And then, a week after the cremation of his nanna, the only family he knew, feeling like a complete failure having lost another girlfriend who he had not been able to care about, and fired from yet another menial job, on the edge of tears, contemplating suicide while feeding the remains of his last meager wages into a poker machine, he had felt a nudge on his shoulder. A pale, overweight Nordic man with small cruel eyes, wearing a black leather jacket and introducing himself as Nils, had appeared next to him like a messenger from the under world, offering him good pay and travel - a thing he had not dared dream of, and a job on a ship, as long as he obeyed orders and didn't ask questions.

Nils's highly developed nose for desperation meant that he had been an excellent recruiter for an operation like Balfor's. The "Bren's" previous cabin boy had been killed during a raid by some Indonesian pirates, and so they needed someone new to occupy the lowest place on the pecking order to stop the unproductive fights and jostling resentment that had broken out among the more experienced crew since little Neddy got himself shot through the head.

Now it seemed life had placed in Terry's lap everything he most deeply needed, salvation and understanding, inner peace and a purgative wonderful punishment for his crime of just existing, that and the devotion and love made possible by his new self knowledge.

Was his time here on the island with Balfor not more valuable in that sense than all the riches in the world?

His feet and his cock still throbbed from the deep slow burns inflicted by Balfor with his cigar. His nuts were dead as the result of one hideously agonizing kick, pains from which he could still feel now and then shooting up into his groin as if someone was stabbing him there. His pelvis still ached from where his femur had pulled out of the socket. And the muscles and tendons of his jaw were still sore from their stretching around the cruel device that Balfor had temporarily installed in his mouth, back on the ship.

All his thoughts were colored with glorious, redeeming pain, and the pain was Balfor, and Balfor seemed to fill up the world.

For the first time in his life he felt good about himself, good about everything.

Good about these comfortable ferns.

Good about his cock too. Something was stimulating it in the darkness, something infinitely gentle, and yet scintillating all over it.

It's just scar tissue forming, thought Terry.

A fly landed on his face, he feebly batted it away. There was a mild smell of death. Like someone had left a rotten lamb chop nearby.

He went to check the bindings around his scrotum, and was surprised to find a leather jacket covering the lower part of his body, its arms were tucked underneath him and he was too weak to move them. He guessed Balfor had probably checked the bindings before he put the jacket there. But where had the Jacket come from? And more importantly, where was Balfor?

He was very thirsty and saw that next to him silhouetted against the light from the cave's portal was a plastic bottle. He just barely managed to prop himself up enough to test its contents and then drink the cool stream water that Balfor had provided for him.

He needed to pee, and knowing he hadn't the strength to get up, he simply let it go. He felt the warm fluid wash over his thigh, soak into the lining of the Jacket and then dribble down, absorbed among the ferns.

Unconsciousness engulfed him again.

Balfor was immensely relieved that Terry's fever had passed. His slave was going to live. Soon he would wake up and he would need food.

Soon Balfor could start using him again.

The flies were doing their work. He had carried Terry still unconscious to the light at the mouth of the cave and saw that his scrotum was a pulsing maggot mass, like a dead mouse, and they were nibbling on the blisters all over his cock as well.

He had deliberated about whether to cut the dead scrotum off with Nils's pocket knife, but since the discoloration around the bindings had cleared up somewhat, he decided it would probably be better to leave the maggots to it. He could easily have pulled the padlock and chain over and off the now soup-like dead flesh, but that would have squeezed the maggots out through a small tear in the now blue grey and rheumy scrotum, that had been there since the kick, but had opened up considerably now that decomposition was well under way.

Better to leave a good population in there to really clean up the necrosis.

He laid Terry back down in the gloom, tucking the Jacket around him, hopefully to prevent him interfering with the healing horror going on between his legs.

The sight of flies and maggots crawling on Terry's cock had given Balfor an idea.

He smeared oil from some leftover fish he'd roasted for lunch on his own cock and balls and then he sat out in the afternoon sun, naked on a rock near the cave, waiting.

Soon he was visited by a growing number the island's unusually large greenbottle flies which came and went, playing in his pubic hair, or walking around on his soft rubbery genitals, tickling him fearsomely, probing at the opening of his foreskin with their tongues.

He pulled the foreskin back for them, but this shooed them away. He had to wait, but then they came back and walked all over his cock head, which had become cheesy and pungent enough in the three days since Terry had siphoned the piss out of it, to attract flies without the help of any fish oil.

He was greatly turned on as the smell of his own moist cock head permeated the air. The flies liked it as well, and soon he had attracted at least a dozen of them.

He chuckled as they tickled him, and watched their cavorting intently with great amusement, and quickly he developed a rampant erection, which hoisted his little guests upward on their growing tower of meat.

A cluster of five of the pretty insects, iridescent green and glinting the sun, gathered at his piss slit, dancing around it as they jostled for position, drinking his precum thirstily. He could feel their tiny proboscises sucking and mopping it up.

When they started to bite him, especially in the groove under the corona of his cock head, he became extremely aroused, but jerking off would have frightened them away. He sat in the afternoon sun for hours letting them tease him, wincing and yelping and laughing at himself with every bite, his cock hardening and softening and then hardening again before it came time to check on Terry, and after that he continued walking around with his cock poking out in front of him, still allowing the crowd of flies to dive bomb and buzz around it as he picked some of the fibrous yet sweet, dark purple fruits that grew nearby, eating some, putting the rest in a folded bark container for Terry in case he woke up, and then finally not able to stand the tension of the flies tormenting his beleaguered cock any longer, delicious though it was, he jerked the cum out of his rank fly-blown meat and then went down to the trap to wash it off and catch some more fish.

When he returned with his catch to the cave, wet from the downpour of an afternoon thunderstorm, he was glad to see that Terry had drunk some of the water he'd left for him. He sloughed the rainwater off his huge muscular body with his hands and sat on a large piece of rubble from the ceiling of the cave, and watched the dim outline of the sleeping Terry, breathing evenly. Some bats flew over his head out into the growing darkness from the fathomless depth of cave, which Balfor supposed was an old lava tube, and soon he lay down nearby like a big tired gorilla on a fern bed of his own and went to sleep cheerfully, knowing that Terry would be conscious tomorrow.

He had hardly thought of rescue all day.

In the dappled shade of the flowering Jacaranda trees that lined the Calle Rosario in Colon, peering up at some burned out and boarded up windows in the ornate facade of what had once been a very grand house, stood a faded yet still handsome red-head of about fifty five years of age, blue-mauve petals falling around him in the wind.

It was Gerald Macarthur, the proud father of Jeremy.

Jeremy's father was no longer a keen follower of baseball, but he was still a formidable police lieutenant.

It had taken him more than ten years to find this place. He'd had to wait for the Panamanian political winds to become relatively calm and favorable and he'd had to learn Spanish in order to do the footwork. A couple of serious nervous breakdowns had not sped his progress either.

In the test-hole spotted yard behind the house, some police and their laborers were digging finally near the frangipani tree.

A lawyer and a forensic pathologist also stood by.

The lawyer was Anselmo Nettis, Dino's father. He and Gerald Macarthur had become good friends.

Together they had pieced together enough evidence and cut through enough red tape to lead them into the house where their boys were taken never to be seen again.

Gerald had not known such a hellish time or been so unnerved in his life since the uncertain months following Jeremy's disappearance.

It astounded him the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to discover the truth about what had happened to his son.

Only a week ago he had nearly drowned one of Freddy's former henchmen in a bath tub.

Gerald had always been an honest policeman, and a devout and regular churchgoer, never had he imagined that life would lead him to such appallingly desperate behavior; But it had got him the address of the house when all other avenues had failed.

And now here he was, hopefully about to get some of the mythical stuff that popular psychologists and talk show hosts gab about - "Closure."

"We've found bone!" came a shout from one of the men in the ditch. It echoed hauntingly to Gerald through the halls of the empty house.

Chewing on a digestive, his stomach cramping with dread for his son, he went through to the back to see.