I slide the brown bubble-wrap envelope around on my desk, tap it, and fiddle with a corner. It’s been lying unopened since Monday, when it arrived in the post. I give the envelope another flick – it spins a quarter turn – tap it once more, pick it up, rip it open, and tip it over the desk. A case with an SD-card in drops onto the desk, some folded sheets of paper need fumbling out. I open them. Three are copies of foreign newspaper clippings – blue ballpoint-pen translations under the titles – one is a printed internet article. I bend open the envelope to have a better look inside, but that’s it, not as much as I thought there would be. I leaf through the sheets of paper. A block-letter, tabloid-style title, translated, says American amnesiac wandering naked in National Park, “I have been tortured by the Russians” he claims . It’s got pictures of a craggy looking young guy with a frightened, tear-streaked stare, wrapped in a blanket and with his hair sticking to his face, a forester and a policeman standing next to him, with hills covered in conifers in the background. It looks artificial. The drier clippings are shorter and lack pictures. Lost tourist admitted to hospital , and American visitor repatriated after police close mysterious case . The print-out is from a local American gazette. Jim back from Nightmare Trip. The twenty-three year old, abducted while visiting Croatia, is back from… I toss the papers on the envelope. So they caught the cunt who wrecked my life, and they tortured him.
While I never admitted it to myself, I’d always hoped they would. A nervous flush runs up my body. The sudden materialisation of my obsession comes as more of a shock than I thought. I need some air. I grab my coat, and go to the park. The SD-card is stuffed in my pocket should I want to break it into pieces, roll it up in a ball of chewing gum, and dump it in a bin, before it taints my computer and myself. Even at ten in the morning traffic is congealed, and I weave through the cars to cross the road – traffic lights are wasted in this city. Once through the wrought-iron gate, the park’s soft spring greens can’t dampen the sense of dread emanating from that thing in my pocket. Along the edge of the waterworks, I sit down on an old bench, the sort you’d see at the seafront, white paint flaking off. As much as I force my thoughts to waft around, they concentrate like flies around a pile of dung. Time to weave the wafting threads into some narrative, for my own sake.
While Sierpinski’s code was a buoy out of the icy waters of addiction and madness, I had to swim against the tide and the freezing wind myself. I begged Horton to come and live in when Sheileen pissed off after two weeks. I’m surprised now that she lasted that long. Horton had me admitted when he broke, had me readmitted when I snapped. That was the last time I was in hospital, just over a year ago. Since then I adhere to rote discipline, observe immaculate mental hygiene. No coffee, tea, or derivates, no cigarettes, cream, or sugar at all. No porn or erotic daydreaming under any circumstances. I’m allowed one slow, humiliating wank a week, supervised by Horton. It took me months to learn to wank and cum in front of him. Left on my own, I’d still toss myself off into oblivion – or from a cliff, in a bad moment. Rapid orgasms precipitate addiction – the game still slumbers somewhere in the pathways of my mind, poised to flare up, like herpes. Sierpinski’s code didn’t scorch it all out. I had to learn it the hard way – admission ensued. Should I lose control when Horton’s not there, I have an emergency chastity belt lying in the wardrobe. He’s got the only key. Far too often, I’ve had it with all of this – the doom, the gloom, the monastic life devoid of sex, drugs, and autonomy.
I wouldn't be on this bench, ruminating, fiddling with that card in my pocket, if I hadn't clicked on that game, two years ago. I would be free. How I had fantasised of finding the cunt who dumped that game on the net to make an easy buck, how I’d fantasised of finding him and strap him to a chair and force him to play his own fucking game for days on end into the deepest possible addiction to let him loose, helpless, into a world of irresistible temptation. I imagined him slowly bleeding to death from his cock, wanked to shreds, every orgasm flaying off another layer. The pain is unbearable, but he must wank. He can’t help it. He did it to himself. He screams for mercy. There is none. Dark, delectable fantasies. I let them go at the time, and broke down, and went to hospital where I dug up and lapped and honed those fantasies – hospitals are full of free time. They turned into an obsession. When I came out, I had Sierpinski track down the cunt. I fantasised of suing him to death. Make his life a miserable string of lawsuits and hearings and insurmountable legal expenses. Sierpinski couldn’t track him, he needed the proper licences for that, but gave me a name – I’ve forgotten what it was. Let’s call him Peter. Peter had the right paperwork – licences, permits, grants – he was good at what he did, and he found the cunt. My obsession flared up like nausea when the cunt turned into Jim, a tangible person now, and crashed when it became apparent that Jim was untouchable, sheltered far away in a country where the national sport is suing. A horde of expensive legal experts agreed about one thing: I couldn't sue Jim to death, even if I wanted to, even if I poured all my money into it, because Jim’s American. They’re immune. They do the suing. I deflated, let go, again, and landed in hospital, again, breath kicked out of me, fantasies destroyed, my obsession crumpled up like an empty bag of crisps.
I’m starting to shiver. People are walking by with their jackets open, soaking up the sun, some are having an ice-cream. Emotions that I hadn’t had to suffer since the second admission claw at my skin from the inside. I get up, crunch over the gravel to mossier parts of the park, thick with ferns and pines from older times, where the benches are black and brown, and sit down, stretch my legs, listen to magpies nesting in the top of the trees.
After my second admission, when I’d given up on Jim, Peter approached me with a proposition – the proposition wasn’t his, he was the middle man. Deep in the forests of Transylvania, or thereabouts, another bloke had had to suffer Jim’s handiwork – many people had, I assume. He though didn’t deflate, he was transfixed on revenge, he knew the right people in the right places. He was one of them, a man of mediaeval blood and gore. He asked me if I would be willing to share the costs of abducting Jim and have him taught a friendly but lethal lesson. I wasn’t willing. I had my own fantasies, now polished to perfection. I came up with a counter-offer, sent him the specifics and the money. That was a year ago. I hadn’t heard of him since.
And now I have this card in my pocket. I can’t throw it away, not when I do the maths – this card’s cost me 408k – and even less when I think of Jim. But it had better be worth it. If it’s just some genital frying and ripping out of fingernails, I’ll be furious.
With the SD balled in a fist, I leave the park, cross the street, and go up the loft by the stairs. I make myself a cup of camomile while the card decrypts – I have to calm down. There’s one folder containing another folder containing four sequential video files. I double-click the first. The HDD grinds while it summons the media player.
“Hello!” says a bubbly, blond lad in his twenties, waving a black gloved hand at me. He is ruining a hip half-hawk haircut with a worn wife-beater and Nike track-pants. “Here’s Jim,” he says, in East European American, “ready for your special treatment. He’s not happy. Say hello to the camera, Jim!” Jim is tied naked to an iron bedframe in a well-lit, wood-panelled room. Jim doesn’t answer. I press the space-bar, lean in, try to make out his head, and double click to go full screen. He’s got a VR-set and headphones duct-taped to his face, and his head seems taped to the bed-frame as well. I press play. Halfhawk turns the phone away from Jim and and tilts it over a table – I’m destabilised – “Here are my tools,” he says, “dildoes, lube, vibrator, electro, milker, and a few other things.” If it weren’t for the naked guy tied to the bed and the table-full of sex toys, this could be a video from a popular vlogger. A gruff voice in the background seems to be complaining. Halfhawk answers – subtitles pop on while he repositions the camera. Some bits of sound are missing. Edited-out names, perhaps.
- Get on with it, — , says Gruff Voice.
- Yeah yeah, let me do my stuff. You had your fun. Go outside, have a cigarette.
- I won’t leave you alone with him.
- Fine, I don’t care, but stop complaining.
“Sorry for that. My colleague is impatient.” Halfhawk says, swivels the phone towards the bed and brings it closer to Jim, “You see, Jim has headset and earphones on. Ready to play game. I’ll switch on the microphone.” He taps on a laptop’s mousepad next to the bed. Jim, so far immobile, jumps, mumbles, and tries shaking his head. There’s tape over his mouth too. His head’s mummified in it. “Tell me, Jim,” HH says, “do you know why you’re here?”
Jim mumbles. Either he said ‘no,’ ‘fuck you,’ or ‘lemme go.’ Impossible to tell through tape.
“Well, you’ve made some people angry, very angry, and they have special request. I’m here to make you horny, but I can’t let you cum. Only when the VR comes off can you cum. I’ve been told it should be impossible. We’ll see about that. I’m very good at making boys cum, but even better at keeping them from cumming – that’s my speciality, I really like it. Anything should make you cum after a day in my hands. But we’ll see. Perhaps the game is stronger than me, but I doubt it. We’ll see.” He taps on the mousepad. “Right, it is running.”
Jim jumps, shakes his head, mumbles hard into the gag.
- He needs more tape on his face, HH says to GV.
A heavyset guy in full cammos and balaclava, sleeves rolled up over wide, hairy arms, steps into the screen, rips off large bands of black tape, and rigs Jim’s head down hard. HH sits down next to the quivering Jim, snaps a red rubber-like double ring around the base of his shaven cock and balls, and starts toying with his limp dick. “Now, Jim,” HH says, “I’m going to make you need to cum. Very, very badly. In fact, I am going to get you to the point where you would do anything to cum. But I won’t let you. If I did, I’d be in big trouble, just like you, and I don’t want big trouble.” HH drizzles Jim’s cock with lube, and starts massaging it in both gloved hands. I hop the cursor around. It takes twenty minutes of applied fondling and a mind-altering blow-job to get Jim hard – not surprising given his situation. I had assumed that HH would be a woman, but the guy is skilled. I’m not complaining.
- Shit, HH says, could you plug the charger into the phone?
- Fuck’s sake, can’t you do anything yourself? You’re an amateur, that’s what you are.
The screen wobbles and flashes between light and dark – the lens latches onto anything it can – my speakers clip at the ear-splitting rattle of someone prodding in cables. I wince and nudge the cursor a fair bit further.
Jim’s humping. HH’s holding his cock with two stiff fingers, strokes it up and down with habituated precision. He slows down – Jim mumbles something through the gag. He lets go of the cock and presses down on Jim’s pubic bone. Jim’s cock quivers in the red rubber rings. ‘No. No, please.’ I think he says, muffled under tape. He’s squirming in the zip ties, tries to get at an itch he can’t reach. I look at the cursor – I’ve skipped about twenty minutes – they’re an hour in, an hour of, I assume, constant stimulation. HH starts again – lazy, metronomic, two-finger strokes, up and down, tip to root – slows down, and stops. Jim jerks up, his fingers stab for his cock, straining for some touch. The bedsprings tinkle and jangle like an out of tune steel drum. I hit pause. My face feels flushed, and I rub my cheeks, undecided whether I should continue, and press the space bar.
HH waits for Jim to calm down, grips his cock from the base, and slides up the same thumb and forefinger, still slower, lets go, and returns to the base of Jim’s cock to slide up again. For four sensuous rubs Jim fights to remains stoic, then starts to pant. At every blissful touch to the root of his cock he lets out a moan, then his voice rises in parallel with HH’s lingering fingers. Jim’s balls, trapped in the red rubber, tighten every time the two fingers reach his cockhead. One rolls up over the other, at every stroke. The muscles under his taint contract, force his shaft to flex – HH follows its dance. Jim can’t stop him. HH’s fingers, grazing up Jim’s urethra, tease out a drop of precum and leave the pads of his cockhead – again the shaft flexes, the cockhead swells, the balls roll. HH waits over the red rubber ring – the cockhead shrinks, the balls relax, Jim strains, moans, and pants. Two fingers grasp the base, go up – the dance goes on. I push my cock down.
The hypnotising motions tease out plaintive moans of need. The fingers are up again, tipple over the slit. A string of precum follows them. HH rubs the goo between his fingers, plays around with it while Jim calms down, and drops back into his punitive sequence of upstrokes and moan-wrenching releases. Jim’s balls tighten. Their colour has gone darker. His moans stretch, his shaft quivers more. HH waits longer between each slow, two-finger stroke – then stops, hovers over Jim’s cock. Jim strains, winces, and fucks the air. A repetitive, pleading litany seeps though the duct tape. HH gets up, grabs something off-screen, and returns to the bed, leaning over Jim’s face. He snips off the tape gag.
“Please,” Jim swallows, “oh God, please, please let me cum.” Jim’s first words are hoarse. I doubt this is his natural voice. “Please, my balls hurt… Oh, fuuuck, nooo… ” His breath reaches deep into the exhale when HH resumes stroking his cock – still with two fingers, still up-strokes, still letting go – Jim can’t handle it. Freed of the gag, his moans are more urgent, more demanding, his squirming sharper and interspersed with gasps, choked inhales, and instinctive hyperventilation. Please and no more systematically precede sharp sobs. Jim’s mouth falls opens, he exhales on the onset of a vocal fry, gasps, and blocks his breathing. HH lets go, mid-stroke, grazes Jim’s tip once, slides over the pads of his cockhead, and gives the shaft under the cockhead a tap. Jim strains, his cock tries to jerk, quivers, and he fucks the air, screaming loud enough to clip on the recording. HH waits for Jim – still fucking emptiness – to lie motionless in sobbing dejection and goes back to stroking, this time with one finger. He glides over the urethra with the back of a finger, slick in lube and precum, and nudges the cockhead, then repeats the motion, sometimes grazing Jim’s balls too. Jim answers with involuntary, babbling exhales as the finger slides up and taps. Jim’s fucking nothingness in the dark, drones in between sobs. HH slows down.
“Please don’t slow down, please no, I can’t take that. I just can’t. Please. It’s too much. I can’t– No, don’t slow down. Please!” I’m sure Jim understands that begging won’t change his fate – perhaps he’s hoping it might ease his suffering. I doubt it will.
“One more,” HH says, “then it’s time for something else.”
Jim starts shaking. Gets out half a please before swallowing, and babbles on.
HH’s strokes are grinding down time. He uses the tip of a finger to trace the urethra. Is he even touching it? Jim’s sobs – many concealing a plaintive no – get longer and louder. His arms flex, I see him grab for something, he clutches the metal bedsprings. “Oh fuck, oh fuck…” he says, and shakes, the bed rattles. HH stops moving, and retracts his hand. Jim jerks up, holds his breath, jerks up higher, strains, waits – and screams, thrashing on the bed, cursing the entire world to hell and beyond. His cock quivers. A sad drop of tortured-out precum trickles down. HH gets up and kneads the tent in his trackpants.
“Time for something else.” he says.
I press pause. My face is hot. I’m hard and wet. I minimise the video window, turn off the computer, and have a shower with the tap turned to gasping cold. It takes me a long time to calm down and to work myself into the emergency chastity belt. Horton will demand an explanation, both why I needed the belt and why I want out. This is a nuisance.
I sink down into the comfy desk chair – a gamers’ affair – open the video, and – knowing I shouldn’t – press play. HH massages his crotch, disappears off the screen. Jim is still fucking the air. On its highest point his cock catches the light and flickers its wetness over the screen. He’s begging the invisible torturer to return, to grab his cock, knead it, rub it, suck it, but most of all to finish him off. He doesn’t care how. He can’t take it. Please. HH enters the screen with a blue, slick dildo. He sets it aside, squirts lube over his fingers, and drops his hand between Jim’s tied-down legs. Jim jumps. When HH slides towards his hole, Jim catches on.
“No, not my hole, no you fucker, not my hole. Don’t you – please no. Not my hole.” He’s not demanding anything, he’s panicking.
HH slides deeper – Jim jerks against the ties.
“Let it happen.” HH says. “I am going in, you can’t stop me. It won’t hurt – I’ll make sure it won’t hurt. It’s about pleasure.”
“Fuck! No! Don’t!” Jim bats around more threats in the dark, then let’s out a shrill squeak.
“I’m just touching. Just rubbing. Need more lube…” HH says, bends to the side, picks up a drinking bottle, and squirts a fat glob directly under Jim’s balls, catching it in his hand. Jim is now begging. I imagine him tearing up. “Just relax into it. Really.” HH is working between Jim’s legs. After wobbling sobs, in the beat of a sharp inhale, HH sides deeper. “Oh God.” Jim says. The sound of high-pitched defeat.
“There you go. See? Nothing to worry about. Try to enjoy it.”
- Could you switch the mic off? HH says.
Gruff Voice mumbles. There’s no translation.
- Just tap the mic icon. It’s time he went in deeper.
GV crouches down in front of the laptop.
- Where’s the icon? he says.
- Bottom right. No, more to the right. Yeah, that one. Thanks.
“Don’t leave me alone. Please.” Jim says.
Gruff Voice shakes his head and leaves the screen. I hear him drag a chair about.
HH slides his hand out, rubs the lad’s stomach, and lubes up the dildo. Jim starts sobbing when it slides up between his legs.
I nudge the cursor.
HH’s rocking the blue dildo and rubbing a lazy black nitrile thumb over one of Jim’s nipples. His cock, untouched, spasms in the red rubber ring – his cockhead has turned deep crimson. Blueish veins have popped up. He breathes through his mouth, dropped open, and swallows hard enough for it to be audible. HH pushes down on the dildo and speeds up the fucking. He’s making small, sharp, shaking motions with his wrist.
“No, not again. Please.” Jim says, sobbing.
His stomach rises, wobbles, he arches his back, freezes as his cockhead swells – HH stops – and sinks back into a flabby state of torpid suffering with a single, dissatisfied grunt. He looks like a soaked marshmallow. HH continues, the dildo continues. Jim begs for it to stop when it’s moving and for it to move when it stops. Neither happens.
“No, not again.” he goes – HH’s repetition of simple, gentle motions wrenches out more suffering and begging.
“Please, no more. Please.” Again Jim is dragged from miserable straining to even more miserable denial.
“Oh God, please.” he says. HH continues. He’s a monster. I have to pause.
My cock is strangling itself in the belt. I huff wide-eyed under the second shower of ice water, dab myself dry, and make some tea while my mind keeps being drawn to the repetitive imagery like fingers to a sharpened blade. I’m not going soft.
I change into clothes that don’t reek of sweat and arousal, wander around town for movement and cool air, have a late lunch in a steamed-up ramen bar, go to the park, even go for a ride in the car hoping the roadwork tailbacks and all the frustrated honking and blaring around me might put me in a Zen-like state, far away from any thoughts of sex. Perhaps I should have balled the SD in gum and lost it to the bin. I’m afraid that Jim’s ordeal is burrowing much deeper than Jim’s original creation.
*
I’m waiting in a bathrobe on the settee, in the dark. I haven’t moved since dusk set in, after another cold shower. Horton lets himself in and switches on the lights.
“You alright?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Clearly.”
“I’ve – I had to put the belt on.”
He doesn’t answer. I know his stance. He’ll stand like that until I spill the beans.
“I looked at, things.”
“Porn. How? Your internet is porn-blocked.”
“It’s not quite porn.”
Horton sighs but says nothing. I rub the crease between my eyes. Where do I start? I hand him the newspaper clippings.
“What’s this?” he says.
“Read it.”
He flips through the foreign clippings, reads diagonally through the American article. “Jim back from nightmare trip, Croatia, abducted … tortured with electricity and forced homosexual acts. Local police, with no leads, closed the case. What’s all this? What am I supposed to make out of this? What's it got to do with your being in the belt?”
“That Jim in the articles is Mr. You won’t last twenty seconds.”
He frowns.
“You don’t think he got abducted in Croatia by sheer coincidence?”
He crosses his arms. “You’re talking nonsense.” he says.
“You remember how I wanted Jim destroyed? That I’d hired a private investigator to hunt him down?”
“Yes – difficult to forget that.”
“What you might not know is that I wasn’t the only one wanting Jim destroyed. Jim had other victims. Many other victims. But nothing much happened to Jim.”
“How do you know that?”
“My bloke. Follow up.”
“Fair enough.”
“Now, one of the others who got affected by Jim's handiwork was a guy called Szabó. Just like me he almost ended up topping himself. Just like me he wanted Jim sued to death. And just like me he sent a bloke in search of Jim. Both of our blokes bumped into each other – small world and all that – did some exchange of information, and found Jim. By that time I knew that Jim is American, well out of my reach, and I let it go.”
“I remember that. Not pleasant times.”
I look down, start fiddling with my fingernails. “No, they weren’t. Anyway. When I first heard of Szabó, in an act of foolish altruism, using my bloke and his bloke as a liaison, I sent him Sierpinski’s file with all the instructions. It brought him back from hell, more or less – same as it did for me. Szabó, in parallel, was also well aware of Jim’s being out of reach.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“My bloke, his bloke, still exchange of information, lots of money pumped into it. So far, all’s clean. Now it gets murkier. I was about to let it all go, again, when Szabó lets me know he could arrange a hit job. He’s got revenge fixation – he could not let it go. He’d lure the cunt with ludicrously well paid jobs, five star hotels, spas and resorts, weeks filled with call-girls and unfettered debauchery, all at his expense, the works, then dispose of Jim, mediaeval style. I got all the details. He’d planned it like a moon landing. He knows the right people. Lots of blood and gore. Make it last a good while. Make the cunt wish he’d never been fucking born. And asked if I would be prepared to share the costs.”
Horton pales. Perhaps I got too exited. “For fuck’s sake, Fredrick, please tell me you haven’t actually–”
“No, I haven’t actually. I suggested an alternative – an equally ancient but different punishment. An eye for an eye, all that crap. Something I’d been fantasising about. You remember my obsession?” Horton nods. The dark and the feeble lighting make him look pale. “Well, if I were to pay half, I wanted to have some say in Jim’s punishment. Not that I felt any sympathy for him – Jim – but I thought death was a bit extreme, and also, in a way, not quite satisfying enough – too final. I wanted him to suffer. A lot. And longer. Much longer. Much more.” I look Horton in the eyes. He tries to hide the onset of horror. I try not to smile. “After I’d heard of Szabó’s plot to torture Jim – to death, most likely, something I didn’t want to be involved in – I told him that if he wanted me to pay half, he’d have to delay his execution until I’d arranged an alternative – he agreed. I went to see Sierpinski and had him write another program, a variation on that cursed game, but this time with settings I’d decided on. That second program, with my explicit instructions and settings, I then sent to Szabó, and waited. That was about a year ago. I hadn’t heard of him since, until I got a copy of the proceedings, by post, which I’ve been watching. They got into me.” I don’t think Horton has blinked since the word execution fell. He’s clutching his keys.
“Proceedings? You’ve been watching videos of proceedings ?” he says. “Torture?” His voice is thin and weak, on the verge of fear.
“Yes, my proceedings, my torture. My obsession.” I’m starting to salivate.
Horton doesn’t move still. I get up.
“As I said, they got into me. Hence the belt.” I say and tap the metal trough my bathrobe. “I’ll show you.”
He recoils. “I don’t think I want to see–”
“Just a tiny bit.” I say, and hold up my hand.
I tell Horton to sit down on the settee – he doesn’t – switch on the big screen, and connect it to the computer.
“That second thing you had Sierpinski write,” Horton says, “that other program, with your explicit settings, you said, what’s that all about?”
“Ah. Glad you asked. It’s a little game I thought up. I think he called it ‘You will never cum in your life again, try as you might.’ A bit long for a title if you ask me, and not very catchy, but it’s all right.”
(I 2021)
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