Why the hell wasn’t the maid coming down? I had placed her money on top of the note I had written; she could not possibly have missed it. I heard her walking about. She had finished using the vacuum cleaner, but still was not coming down. My note said to come down immediately. But perhaps, I thought hopefully, she only picked up her money at the end when she had finished cleaning. She would read it then. That must be it.

I had bound myself in chains for erotic pleasure in the basement of my house, but had failed to escape and was now in agony. I was standing with my arms stretched up and out and secured by handcuffs. My feet were held wide apart by cuffs around my ankles forcing me to stand on tiptoe. I am tough and at first the position had not seemed too strenuous, but it forced me to make the terrible choice between trying to support my weight by my arched feet or my hands. Eventually I could do neither; my muscles tired and the pain in my feet, ankles, calves, thighs and hands became too great and I just hung limply from the handcuffs around my wrists. Any attempt to flex my feet and legs just seemed to induce more pain rather than relieve the pressure on my wrists. The sporadic electric shocks, which caused some of my muscles to twitch, did nothing to help. All feeling had long since left my hands and I was certain I would have permanent nerve damage.

A mouth-filling gag prevented me from calling out for help to the maid so tantalizingly close above me. I could make some noise, but apparently not enough to be heard. For the last hour I had been trying to attract her attention, but had failed, and the effort had both exhausted and frightened me. I couldn’t breathe through the gag, at least not sufficiently to sustain life, and my efforts to make a loud enough noise were beginning to block my nasal passages. Fearing that I might die of slow asphyxiation, I lapsed into silence. I couldn’t make any significant sound with the rest of my body; most of it was in tension and my arms and legs were almost completely immobilized.

My maid, Solana, was my second backup, my third escape method, but she was not performing this function very well. I didn’t really need a maid, but had decided to hire one and use her as a safety. She came every Saturday afternoon. This allowed me to indulge in self-bondage every Friday night and Saturday morning with the assurance that if something went wrong she would be there to release me.

I hadn’t needed her before this, I had always managed to escape, but now that I really needed her she wasn’t responding. She didn’t know she was my safety. The arrangement I had was that if I didn’t answer the front door, she was to go round to the back door, locate the hidden key, and enter the kitchen. Her money would be on the counter and she was to perform her usual cleaning chores. After that she was to lock the back door and leave by the front door which was self-locking.

So every Friday night I concealed the back door key, wrote a note telling her to go immediately to the bedroom or basement, wherever I had bound myself, and put it on the counter along with her money. And every Saturday morning, after I had released myself, I would retrieve the key and discard the note. But not today. My primary and secondary escape methods had failed, and I was left to rely on her.

I was doing a self-bondage session inspired by a story I had read on the Internet. The author had used a safety backup consisting of a can of oil that had to be spilled to release the backup key. But in my erotic stupidity I spurned such devices. If one can free oneself at any time, even at the cost of some unpleasant cleanup, then to my erotic mind it was not secure bondage. Once I had bound myself I wanted my continued bondage to be involuntary, not subject to some tradeoff between the pain of the bondage and some other task. No, I had to be bound securely with absolutely no possibility of escape till my timers released the key. Of course this left me vulnerable to natural disasters such as a fire, but I was prepared to take those risks. I craved the feeling of true helplessness. Or at least I did before I put myself in bondage. Sometimes, as now, I bitterly regretted my decisions, but my escape methods had never failed before.

I had done something a little different this time. I wanted to be uncertain of the time of my release. For my main timer I had used three separate ice timers. Wanting my minimum bondage time to be half an hour, and allowing myself half an hour to get into my bondage, I had accordingly set one ice timer for an hour, one for an hour and a half, and one for about two hours. To make sure that I could not know which one was active, I had concealed them behind a beam and run the strings over it. Although I had tested this release, something must have gone wrong. Perhaps there was too much friction, or perhaps the string had snagged on a splinter.

My backup timer also seemed to have failed. This consisted of two lamp timers connected in series. The one outside the box was set for an hour. The one hidden inside the box was set for somewhere between zero and six hours, thus the total time would be at least one, but not more than seven hours. I did not know how long since I had spun the dial while it was hidden from sight within the box. After spinning the dial I tested that it was off, so it would not come on immediately the first timer activated. When the second timer finally turned on, it would power on a 100-watt light bulb. This would quickly melt some candle wax releasing the embedded string which would allow the key to swing down to my hand. I had tested this release and it appeared to work reliably, but now it also seemed to have failed since I had been in bondage for more than twelve hours.

I couldn’t account for the failure. I had used a new bulb, so it was unlikely to have blown. I thought initially there might have been a power failure, but such failures are rare, and even when they do occur they seldom last more than a few minutes. This would not reset my timers which are the primitive electric motor kind. In addition my shocking machine had been delivering its irregularly spaced shocks with no excessively long intermission. The maid had also used the electric vacuum cleaner, so my theory of power failure seemed incorrect.

My blindfold prevented me from seeing what had gone wrong. Some self-bondage devotees use the timers to turn on lights which then illuminate the dials of combination locks. But no, not me. I wanted complete external sensory deprivation so that I would be forced to concentrate on my condition, the aches and pains of my rigid bondage. To that end I had also blocked my ears. But I could not completely shut out the sounds of the world. I had heard the vacuum cleaner and the clacking of the maid’s shoes as she walked about on the wooden floor above my head. But before she had arrived my little internal world of suffering was essentially isolated.

I vowed I would never put myself in bondage again. But I recalled I had made such vows several times before. But after each such session the pain was slowly forgotten and the craving for bondage returned, and I was eventually compelled to try it again. I would start gently but quickly build up to more strenuous sessions. But this time I had definitely gone too far. Already I thought I had damaged my wrists and hands beyond repair, and unless the maid came down soon I would surely die. Even if, by some miracle, one of the keys should now fall into my hands, I lacked the ability to release myself. My hands were numb, there was no way I could even hold, let alone manipulate, a key.

My bonds were much too secure for me to escape. Not for me the use of ropes with the potential for slipping or untying knots. No, I had to use handcuffs, chains, and padlocks. There was even a sturdy metal collar around my neck attached to a heavy chain.

Surely Solana had finished by now. She had been here a long time, hours it seemed. She had been quiet for several minutes. Perhaps she was finally reading my note. But then I heard her walking towards the front door. I heard it open and close. Then silence.

How could she leave? Why would she ignore the instructions on my note? Then the awful thought suddenly struck me - she couldn’t read English! She was from Guatemala and hadn’t been in this country long. She spoke English well enough so I just assumed she could read it. But perhaps she couldn’t. Perhaps she couldn’t read my note!

What a fool I was, all these last months assuming I had a safety backup when in reality I did not. Although I had followed my cardinal rule of testing all my release methods, it had never occurred to me to test my safety backup.

I was doomed. The house was now locked up tight. The next scheduled visitor would be Solana herself when she came in a week’s time. Surely I would be dead by then. But even if I weren’t she wouldn’t be able to get in the house. When I failed to answer the front door she would go round to the back. On finding that the key was missing she would almost certainly leave rather than try to break in. She would assume I had gone away on a business trip or vacation and had forgotten to leave the key or inform her.

She might telephone. But my answering machine would provide no clue to my whereabouts. It might be weeks or months before anyone found my body.

I gave up. I was certain I was going to die. Rather than suffer the continued agony of my bondage, and the increasing pain of the electric shocks, coupled with thirst and future starvation, I decided to kill myself. I tried holding my breath. But I could not overcome the primitive life force of my body which was determined to survive no matter what.

I was trying to asphyxiate myself yet again when I heard footsteps descending the wooden stairs into the basement. What was happening? Was I dead already and in some kind of purgatory? Was this a ghost? Was it some burglar? I froze, my emotions oscillating between fear and hope, although fear seemed predominant.

Who or whatever it was stopped on the concrete floor in front of me. I strained my ears but could hear nothing. My hair was standing on end and I imagined some unearthly creature from beyond the grave looking at me.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my face, and my blindfold was removed.

“Senor,” Solana exclaimed, “you look most unfortunate.”

My relief at her presence overwhelmed my sense of embarrassment. Indeed I must have looked peculiar to her, cruelly chained and dressed as a street hooker, but with gag, nipple clamps, testicle weights, and wires from my shocking machine going to various parts of my body, including my exposed penis.

“You want me to release you?”

I nodded.

But first senor, I take a picture.” She took out her cell phone and took several pictures.

“I think, senor, you not pay me enough money for the cleaning I do.”

I asked if she were trying to extort money from me, but of course she could not understand what I was saying.

“Perhaps, senor, you pay me twice as much for my cleaning?”

I nodded; I did not seem to have much choice.

“Starting today?”

Again I nodded.

Finally she released me.

It seemed an inauspicious start to what turned out to be a very satisfying and long-term relationship. When I asked her how she knew I was in the basement she said that maids who clean houses get to know a lot of things, and it is difficult to keep secrets from them. She was pretty sure of what I was doing in the basement and pretended to leave to give me an extra thrill. As to the failure of my timers, I think friction was the cause of the ice timer failure, and stupidity the cause of the electric lamp timer failure. Since I had not looked at the timer in the box when I adjusted it, I had somehow left it in the off position. The nerves to my hands were indeed damaged, but gradually recovered over the next several weeks.