The Stair

*** An Adult tale of Female Domination

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.- Carl Jung
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.- Karl Marx

*** The Dress.

I awoke to the sound of her heels on the stair. It must have been the creak of the door that actually woke me, but it was the click of metal on the terracotta tiles that brought me to.

The faint light from the open door surrounded her slender form like a glow to my light-starved eyes. Her face had that enigmatic smile that she always wore when she entered my little kingdom and looked down at the husband that she kept for her private use and torment in the cellar beneath the house that we had bought together.

As I looked through the bars of the cage I could see that tonight she was wearing that long dress that I had bought for her, the one that we always called the ‘hope and charity’ dress because it was for charity events that it was intended. Smooth silk, unadorned and flowing like liquid over her slim figure.

At last she stood before the cage and passed a hand over her long curls. It was a little habit of hers that used to so enchant me. Now it left me breathless with desire. How I longed to return to those simple days when every instinctive move of her body and head was a signal of her love for me.

The love that had turned to hate.

Maybe not exactly hate, more distaste…

“Darling,” she said, “I just thought that I’d look in on you for a moment before I went out. It always fills me with such joy to be able to keep you up to date with my love life.”

I nodded but the gag in my mouth prevented words of contrition tumbling from my lips.

Her slender hand moved a stray curl from her cheek as she spoke.

“Do you remember Ken Halderwell?” she asked rhetorically. “Well we have arranged to meet tonight and then perhaps go to the theatre. Who knows what will be happening after that, though I think that the fact that he has booked a room at the Savoy may well mean that I won’t be back until tomorrow.”

I tried to speak but only a whimper issued from my lips.

“Oh, darling, are you hungry or thirsty?” she asked in a mock concerned tone. “Perhaps we have time for you to drink a little?”

I tried to shake my head but she just ignored the movement and turned to get the tube from the hook on the wall. When she had attached the tube to my gag her hands closed the covers over my eyes and smoothed over the leather with a firm motion to make the Velcro take grip.

“That’s better. You know that you are not allowed to see my body any more, not since you decided that there were other women besides me!”

I heard her slip off her dress and then a slight tugging at the tube as she got herself comfortable. I tried to move my head but she had already hooked it with a ring at the top of the cage where I crouched as the first of the liquid entered my mouth.

I heard the water leave her body and pour into the funnel and her sigh of release as she enjoyed relieving herself for my benefit. As I struggled to swallow she chuckled to herself.

“That’s so much better now. I really didn’t want to go out with all that inside me. I will feed you tomorrow and tell you all about my adventure, so get yourself in the right frame of mind because I would not want you to cry again like the last time.”

I heard the click of her heels on the stair, the slight creak of the door and the turn of the key in the lock and then I was alone in my darkness.

*** The Plan.

The house was paid for, the car was paid for, but the rest of our lives was a mass of bills that we paid as they became due. I suppose that is one of the consequences of working for a software firm. The money arrives in gushes as the work is finished and the salary is paid in bonuses and shares in the software.

If it sells, then you are rich.

If it bombs then it’s nose to the grindstone.

After a year it became clear that the company was going to fold with huge debts unless it was bought out by one of the larger sharks in the pool. My share of the company was twenty per cent. That meant that I had a fifth of the profit and a fifth of the debt! The trouble was that the debt was eight million and the profit was measured in hundreds of thousands.

It was my wife, Eve, my lovely wife who came up with the insurance scheme as I sat one evening trying to make sense of the company accounts.

“Life insurance,” she had said as she looked at the balance sheet that I had sketched out on a piece of A4. “We transfer everything into my name, we insure you for a load of money and then you die!”

I looked up at her, shocked.

“I have to die to get us out of our money problems?” I asked incredulously.

“Don’t be silly darling. You don’t die, you disappear and then I claim the insurance. We hide you abroad or in the cellar and wait until the money comes and all of the company debts are declared invalid due to your death.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, Eve,” I said doubtfully. “How long does it take?”

“Seven years. But that is seven years abroad, darling,” said Eve seriously. “You will find work under an assumed name and I will guard the fort and visit all the time!”

“I’m not sure,” I replied.

But the idea took root as the debt mounted. We arranged the insurance, a sum of six million with payments of five thousand a month.

“At this rate we will have to move in the next three months,” I said. “There is a panic at the firm because we only have enough money in cash to operate another six months. After that it’s bankruptcy and the end of it all…”

“Then we should really get a plan together and decide how you are going to die!”

“Abroad, on holiday? Perhaps if we go to Greece or somewhere that the police are not too efficient?”

“So we send someone in your place. Then he disappears and then travels back under his own name. Then we sit it out.”

That was the plan.

Simple and rounded.

There was no great problem finding someone to go abroad for ten thousand, but first we had to prepare a sort of priest hole for me to hide in, at least for a month or two.

Our old Victorian house had two cellars. One was entered from under the stairs and formerly served as a larder and wine cellar. The other was the small coal cellar that was at the front of the house. A door in the kitchen led down the steep steps into a dirty space that was high enough to walk in but was really only four by four yards in area.

It had one advantage, the door could be concealed behind a fitted kitchen unit that slid aside and the lack of windows did not betray its presence.

I am not much of a handyman, a do-it-yourself guy. I am happier with a computer keyboard than a screw driver, but I cleaned the space out, tiled it over and fitted a sink and small toilet ready for my stay in hiding.

I went on holiday.

Actually I bought the tickets for the ferry and trains and then passed my passport to my wife.

“Tomorrow night you move into the cellar, honey,” she said, “and then we begin the plan. Three weeks wait and we will go on a holiday together and escape for a while we figure out how to pass the seven years! I was thinking the south of France, but perhaps Spain is a better idea?”

That day a delivery van arrived and dropped of a massive box. My wife got the deliverymen to take it down to the cellar for an extra twenty pounds tip.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“It’s something special for you to help you pass the time while you are in our little priest hole. We will open it tomorrow night when we move all the other furniture ready for your stay.”

The next day I went to the office and tried to behave normally. I must have succeeded because we went for a quick drink at a local bar before driving home.

She was waiting for me in her sexiest dessous.

“I think a small drink is in order and then you will spend your last night on earth in heavenly company,” she joked. “I think that you should have a last meal and a last fuck before you die!”

She poured me a whiskey and I sipped it whilst admiring her exquisiteness. In a corset of red satin, sheer stockings and high heels she was a picture of all that I desired in a woman.

I laughed at her joke.

I should have cried.

*** The Cage.

I awoke with a terrible headache. I could not remember what had happened after the drink. I opened my eyes, but I was in the dark.

It was pitch black.

I stretched out a hand and found cold metal. I knelt on the hard wood on which I was lying and hit my head on a low ceiling. It did not take long to realise that I was in a cage, a prison that was not even large enough to lie in. Metal bars fenced me all around, through which I could just pass my hands to feel that the cage lay on a cold tiled floor.

The thumping of my head subsided as I lay still wondering what had happened.

There was a creak of a hinge and a little light entered the room from the top of the stairs. I looked up and realised that I was in the cellar that I had, myself, prepared.

A pile of cardboard lay leaning on one wall and I recognised the box which had been delivered had contained this cage. With a click of her heels my wife came down the stairs. She was still dressed in her dessous, a picture of pure allure.

“What have you done?” I cried out to her. “Why?”

She just smiled and flicked her hair.

From her décolletage she pulled a small piece of paper and waved it in front of the bars of the cage.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked lightly.

I looked at the paper and recognised the logo at the top of the paper. ‘Hotel Thistle’.

“It is the receipt for the hotel where I stayed just three weeks ago,” I said as I looked into her eyes.

“Might I ask who you were with?” she asked in a sweet voice.

“Ken Halderwell of course,” I replied hoping that the lie would pass muster.

“Oh! Ken?”

“That’s right, honey. We had our meeting with Logical Software Solutions in Manchester and that’s where we stayed.”

“But, there is a little problem, honey, with your story,” she said.

“Mmm,” I replied.

“Ken was in London that day because I bumped into him and his girlfriend in Harrods, so I ask again. Who were you with?”

“Honey, please let me out of here and we can discuss this through.”

“What is there to discuss?”

The Hood.

The next time that she came to the cellar she was in her jeans and a loose knitted top. In one hand was a large shopping bag, in the other was a box cutter. She wore flat soled trainers and her hair was pulled back into a long plait.

I looked up hopefully as she came to the cage and kneeled just out of reach.

“I have decided that I am going to enjoy punishing you for your little indiscretions, honey,” she said as she pulled a metal dog dish from the sack. “You see, I have been checking through more of the bills and credit card statements and I now realise that my suspicions were right. My little hubby was having an affair which seems to have been going on at least a year or two. What do you have to say about that?”

“I am so sorry…” I started.

“Not as sorry as you are going to be!”

“I love you and only you!”

“Is that so?” she said as she pulled a loose black leather bag from the shopping bag. “Then put this on! If you love me.”

She stressed the word ‘love’ with a smirk.

I took the leather from her hands and with dismay I realised that it was a sort of hood.