Author's Note: Normally, SNUFF is one of those topics that I don't care for reading. But ironically, this is the second story with that tag that I've posted on this site. "Playing Games" (as those who've read the story know) doesn't actually end in death. I won't give away the ending of this story, however, I think (like the other) it deal with the topic from an unusual POV.

Personally, I don't particularly understand the fascination with snuff--which is healthy. lol. But even as a fantasy, I just don't get it. For me, it just seems like such a waste. To me, the point of kidnapping and torturing a woman would seem to be the gratification of watching her suffer. Obviously, that's not something I would do myself, but I can at least understand a motivation. But if you're going to kill her, you're removing your ability to do that more in the future. That's sort of like the Ebola virus that kills its victims so rapidly they often don't have time to spread the disease, which causes the outbreak to falter and not spread very far. In much the same way, "snuff" just seems like fantasy suicide to me.

For those who would actually be into snuff, I suppose the act would be much more about the power and control over another person--as is often the case with child abuse. But as a writer, I began to wonder what might motivate someone to be fascinated with the topic. There are a lot of artists who specialize in snuff art, and their work tends to be reasonably popular.

I didn't think I'd have enough in common with a perpetrator to write a believable 1st person story, so instead I decided to explore the rational that a female might have for being fascinated--with her own death. Like most sexually related urges that are often considered deviant by the mainstream, their origins tend to be hidden in the deep, dark recesses of the psyche. And I find it interesting to explore various possible rationales for them.


1

The video's picture quality wasn't very good.

The image was too grainy to see anything very well in the dim light; but the young woman who was watching didn't need to see the picture to know what was happening. Despite the poor sound quality, she could clearly hear the muffled protests of someone who was gagged and the scuffling and scraping of boots as two men led a reluctant young girl into a pool of light at the center of what appeared to be a basement room. It was too dark to see how many men there were for sure. They wore dark clothes, including black gloves and ski masks; but she strongly suspected that there were at least three; definitely more than two.

The girl wore a clingy crème colored sweater and a pair of white go-go boots that rose to just below her knees. Her light skin and the white clothing made her much easier to see than the men, who were dressed in dark clothing. Her mouth was stuffed with a black rubber ball-gag. A rope crisscrossed between her breasts and was wrapped several times around her arms and chest, pinning her limbs securely to her side at the elbows.

The young woman who was watching unzipped the fly of her shorts and slipped her hand inside, rocking her hips slightly forward as she pressed against her pubic mound. With the fingers of her other hand, she twisted one of her own nipples through the sheer fabric of her own clingy sweater. Just the thought of what was going to happen to the girl on the video was making her very hot and bothered. Snuff films always did. She reached over to her bag of toys without taking her eyes off the screen and pulled out a wooden clothespin. Her muscles stiffened for a moment and she gave an involuntary gasp as she clamped it onto her nipple, then she was reaching in for another clothespin.

The girl on the video was trying to fight the men. There was nothing faked about her struggles; they reflected the very real fear in her eyes. But against multiple strong men, and bound as she was, her efforts did little more than force her body into provocative positions. The men obviously knew this too, but they seemed to delight in grabbing various parts of her body: a leg, a breast, an arm, a hip or the side of her stomach. They began pushing and pulling her, sometimes in several directions at once, so that her body seemed to jerk about like a marionette with a novice (or perhaps a demented) puppeteer at the strings.

Someone flipped a switch.

The screen went white for a moment as a spotlight flared on. Then the automatic adjust brought the basement back into focus: the small circle where there was adequate lighting was a little less grainy, but the blackness around it was much darker than before.

In the center of the lighted circle, only a few steps away from the girl, was a metal horse or wedge: like an upside down V. A length of rope at either end attached the roughly two foot long metal horse to a piece of metal of equal length; suspended maybe five feet above it. A rope was threaded through an eyelet in the center of this piece of metal. The whole thing was supported by a pulley; the rope passing through it tied off to a metal ring along the far wall. This way, one rope could quickly raise or lower the horse to any position desired. Right now, it was hanging fairly low to the ground.

Directly in the center of the horse was a very large metal dildo that appeared to be permanently attached. It looked rather thin, but that was an illusion caused by its extreme length: at the minimum ten inches, but the woman watching guessed at least two inches longer than that. And an ominous looking electrical wire ran from underneath the center of the horse, and disappeared into the darkness.

If the girl on the video was struggling before, she became frantic now. She pulled so hard that for a moment her captors almost lost their grip and it looked as if she might even break free, but the men recovered quickly. The girl had obviously been struggling for a while; and was growing fatigued. Her last burst apparently used up the last of her energy, leaving her a bit listless. It was so easy for the men to drag her back towards the horse again that it looked almost fake. One of the men knelt down and looped a short length of rope in a slipknot around her booted foot, then standing, he walked around to the other side of the horse. He used the rope to pull her leg up, forcing her to step across the metal horse despite her renewed, but weak struggles.

She tried to step away again, but two of the men held her legs in place while another disappeared into the darkness. A moment later the horse began to rise, and the men holding her legs helped guide the dildo inside her.

The camera zoomed in for a close-up on the girl's face. She winced and shook her head back and forth as if trying to deny what was happening to her. Then the camera zoomed back out, showing the dildo as it sunk the last few inches inside her. She stood very still now, as if paralyzed except for the movement of her head. Her legs were forced to bow out unnaturally by the forty-five degree angle of the wedge. She stood this way for a few seconds, obviously dreading what was coming; then the man pulled on the rope again, hoisting the metal horse a little higher into the air.

Slowly the girl's feet left the floor. She leaned to one side as the horse tilted. Her legs swung freely, but the woman watching knew that she was using the position of her legs to help keep her balance, and the men weren't helping. One pulled her left wrists to the ring at the back of the metal horse. This caused it to start spinning very slowly, and forced the girl to turn somewhat sideways because the rope pinning her elbows to her side didn't allow her arm to swing straight back. Even twisting sideways, it obviously put an uncomfortable tork on her elbow joint. She leaned back a little, trying to ease the pressure, but this caused the horse to tilt backwards as well, rather like one of those mechanical bulls, bucking in very slow motion.

If the ropes at either end of the metal horse had been tied to the wall independently, the contraption would have been fairly stable. But by attaching these ropes to a separate bar, with one rope attached to its center, the horse was given more freedom to move. It tilted backwards when she leaned back because more of her weight was distributed towards that end of the horse; and the more in tilted the more she was inclined to lean.

Instinctively, she moved her legs to counter.

Before long the horse reached its low point and started back the other way, allowing the girl to shift her weight comfortably forward again. For a moment the horse threatened to swing too far the other way, but one of the men steadied her with a hand about the waist, his fingers digging into her flat, but supple belly as he reached around her. He held the stretchy fabric of her sweater away from her breast, then snipped a small hole just the perfect size for her breast to show through. He repeated the process for the other breast; then carelessly snapped an alligator clamp onto one of her large nipples.

While he was doing this, one of the other men was tying her right wrist to the ring at the front of the horse. Before he could finish the first man had snapped a second alligator clamp on her other nipple. Then he dug out a set of weighted hooks, which he hung from the clamps.

One of the men was pushing a small, control-box, with several gauges and dials, out into the spotlight. He took two wires and handed them to the man who had just applied the alligator clamps, and the wires were connected to the metal chains. The girl looked down with sudden understanding and growing disbelief. She began to shake her head; but as the other men stepped back, the man at the control-box began to turn a knob. She arched her back and cried out in pain.

The girl watching the video was rubbing her fingers feverishly against her clit and panting with excitement at the pain from the clamps at her own breasts.

This wasn't the first time she'd watched this video, and she knew the girl's real ordeal had only just begun.


2

If you'd asked her, Sally couldn't have told you when her fascination with snuff began-or exactly how such a thing could have happened. Even to her, it seemed like an unlikely thing to fascinate a young and attractive girl. And she was attractive. Boys told her she was all the time, even boys she'd just meet. Even boys who couldn't possibly know how much money her father had-and, as an only child, how much she would probably inherit one day.

Her own eyes told her she was attractive too. She liked looking at attractive women almost as much as she liked looking at attractive men, and when she looked at herself in the mirror she was pleased by what she saw. Her breasts were perhaps a trifle small, but they were firm enough that when she wrapped them in rope they made an attractive little ball. They didn't swell up like gross, vein-etched balloons the way really large breasted women usually did. Nor did they become the shriveled little parodies of flesh that smaller breasts became. Her nipples were unusually large too, so even when her breasts were wrapped they made inviting targets for a pair of clamps. In fact, Sally's nipples were her favorite physical feature.

Men usually seemed to prefer her ass or her long slender legs, but she thought her backside was a little too skinny, her legs just a little too thin. When Sally was young, and her mother was still alive, she'd referred to Sally's legs as being coltish. This had caused her father to frown, and declare that when she became older Sally's long legs would undoubtedly lend her an air of elegance and grace. His prediction had proven true, but Sally's mother hadn't lived long enough to notice.

The only part of her body that Sally actively disliked was her hips. Her muscles had been thrown together on an V-frame body, leaving her hips much too narrow for her tastes. She thought a woman should be full bodied, with womanly curves. Not that she had the hips of a young female gymnast or anything, but they certainly didn't lend her frame what she would call the curvaceous look, either. Sometimes she wondered if God hadn't made a mistake. How could the head of a newborn child ever pass between such a narrow space? She used to worry about that when she was younger and saw the pain women endured as they gave birth in the movies. Surely the pain she would endure, if she ever gave birth, would be even greater, because her hips were so narrow.

And perhaps that was where her fascination with pain, (and the possibility of dying from it,) began-but Sally didn't think so, because even her earliest memories of thinking about giving birth were tainted as much with fascination as they were with fear. There was something about the helpless, inevitability of it. Once you passed a certain point, there was no turning back, regardless of how it went; you were in for the long haul, no more choice left in the matter. That was what frightened and appealed to Sally most of all: the idea of that inescapable fate creeping towards you without any regard for how you would feel about it or even whether you would survive it's passing.

Pain was something she'd gotten used to gradually. The first time she remembered experimenting with it was probably the time she'd placed a clothespin on her nipple as she masturbated to an adult book she'd found in a garbage can. It was odd the way pain made her wet. Her body broke out in a sweat; and her orgasm was so much stronger than ever before. Those first playful experimentations were more than a year before she started surfing the Internet, looking in earnest for pictures and stories and video clips, anything to satisfy her relentlessly growing imagination.

No, the birth of Sally's interest in bondage had nothing to do with the Internet itself, but the internet had provided her first real exposure to the harder, fringe aspects of bondage: like extreme torture and snuff. And she hadn't found those things until she remembered finding the secret place where her father kept his passwords written down.

As a young child, she hadn't known what the strange words and numbers on the small piece of paper meant. But the words and the paper fascinated her, for they had obviously been hidden. That meant they were hiding something secret and, because it was something her father had kept secret all these years, she desperately wanted to know what treasures this verbal key would unlock. It was an intriguing mystery, like finding a deteriorating treasure map in the attic. A pirate didn't come right out and say, "Here be me precious chest of treasure!" And he certainly didn't give clearly written, step-by-step directions on where to find it. Even at that age, Sally knew that much. What he wrote down would be bits and pieces-mental notes: just enough to help spark his own memory. And that was what Sally had: her father's mental notes. It was an illicit puzzle to be solved, and gaining the prize would give her access to something her father had tried to keep secret. A part of himself so valuable he kept it tucked away from the rest of the world. She'd puzzled over this mystery for several days, perhaps even weeks, before her lack of progress caused her to slowly loose interest. And over the years she'd almost forgotten all about it.

Around the age of ten, Sally stumbled across the gardener and one of the maids doing something strange in the stable's hayloft. They giggled and pressed their bodies against one another in a most peculiar way. Fascinated, she'd watched for several moments without being seen. they were too involved with themselves to notice smaller feet lurking about. And that in its self was very strange. The servants were always alert and very watchful; they always seemed so stiff and formal, even when they smiled at her. Not like these two, who completely ignored her and acted more like children. Sally managed to watch for several moments, in fact, before being noticed-and then everything changed. They jumped up, yelling at her to go away as they tried to cover themselves with their clothes. Sally might have found their antics comical if she hadn't been so alarmed by the extreme nature of their behavior. She was fearful that her father would surely scold her if he found out she'd been spying on them. She still remembered the time he caught her rummaging through his desk: his face had suddenly become something terrible and frightening. It was the only time in her life that she remembered him striking her. And later she would think how it was as if something had crawled inside him, turning him suddenly into this frightening and alien creature. She never wanted to see that look again, so she ran-afraid they would tell; and still a little confused about why they should. Obviously she had found them doing something they would never do in public. But it was all so confusing, because it was also obvious that it was something they found good; and enjoyable. Why should they hide something that gave them so much pleasure in life? And why should they be so angry when they realized she was watching? Angry enough to yell at her instead of simply telling her in their normal manner that she should go away now, and mind her own business, like they always did.

"Fuck! What do you think she saw?" She heard the gardener saying as she climbed down the ladder and fled the barn.

"I don't know," the maid replied angrily. "But you can be sure it was an eye full."

Before the age of ten, Sally's fantasy life had a well-developed sexual flavor, although it was based mostly on mystery and intrigue. Adults clearly had a special little secret they didn't want to share. She explored her own body, trying to figure out why those two in the loft had been groping each other that way, and had not been able to figure it out. Touching herself brought no particular pleasure. It felt just as good when the cat brushed against her leg because it was hungry.

And then it happened.

She couldn't even remember how old she was when it happened, but as she was washing herself she felt an odd sensation. Suddenly she began to understand what it was the adults had been hiding. And she thought it was a rather selfish thing to do too.

It wasn't long before she was exploring her own sexuality on a regular basis. Masturbation had become a mysterious and beautiful but guilt-laced obsession that frequently kept her up long past her bedtime. Shortly after that, at the age of fourteen, she discovered a second great obsession: the Internet. This one she had accidentally rediscovered while researching an English paper for school. The topic of sex seemed like the perfect marriage of her private interests, and the necessity of passing her class. She'd given up on the idea long before actually writing the paper, but she'd thought about the idea long enough to run an Internet search on the word SEX. And to her amazement she was overwhelmed by the sheer number of responses to her query. It was rather obvious that an awful lot of people shared this little secret-and they had an awful lot to say on the subject. There were pages about sexual diseases, safe sex, sex education, sex discrimination, and censoring sex, sex on TV. The parade of secrets went on and on. Whole websites focused on a single TV shows or rock bands with SEX in their name.

Much of what she found, it turned out, didn't really interest her all that much; but it did gave her ideas for other keywords to search and soon she'd uncovered plenty of things that did fascinate her. When she started following the links a frustratingly large number led to a pop-up dialog-box, which rudely inform her that she was trying to enter an adult site and if she didn't have a password she couldn't enter. This, of course, she took as just one more sign of the adult conspiracy. It was a frustrating impasse, but she was used to that sort of thing from adults by now. It was their way of keeping children separate and excluded from their own exclusive little world. Even the house servants, who were usually more lenient with her questions than her parents, would only glance at one another nervously when she asked the sort of questions that they always brushed aside by patting her on the head and saying, "Gracious child, you're too young to be worrying about such adult questions. Why don't you go outside and play awhile?"

Adult questions! She understood that it was code language designed to keep their private little secrets hidden. She didn't quite understand what was behind them, but she saw through their condescending little smiles. They were afraid she would discover their little secret for herself, and then... and then... Honestly she wasn't sure what would happen, but she was certain it was bound to be something truly wonderful. Every shred of evidence seemed to confirm this undeniable fact: the secrecy of adults, the wealth of information hidden on the Internet, the none-to-subtle inferences to it in movies and magazines, and on TV. Even the increasingly tantalizing whispers of her own body screamed that it was precious knowledge that must be know. It was everywhere, and yet it remained stubbornly just beyond her reach: a prize waiting to be won--if she could only just figure it out.

Once again, as she had been so many years ago, she was caught up in a mystery to be solved-and this time she was not so young that she could become bored with it after a mere few weeks. She began reading everything she could about the Internet. She created and maintained her own site, just to learn more. By this time she had learned to gain access to a great many tantalizing pictures, but as hard as she tried, and as far as she got-there were still continual blocks to her progress. Popup windows telling her she was not yet allowed inside the club, which meant that as lurid and enticing as the pictures she could access might seem to her, the ones hidden deeper inside had to be even better. By now she had her own computer, but her father was still careful to supervised setting up her password and monitoring her history-and she still couldn't figure out how to bypass the settings she knew were keeping her out.

All that changed when, out of the blue one day, she remembered finding her father's secret hiding place, and the small, mysterious slip of paper. She had recalled this memory before, from time to time, but now everything clicked. Suddenly, she realized what the strange words and numbers were for.

After that, she'd snuck into her fathers study. The maid had already finished cleaning his room and he was at work, so her chances of getting caught were slim-but she still felt a thrill as she crept towards his desk. The slip of paper was still in the same place, looking much the same as it had way back then. She stood beside his desk, furiously writing down all the passwords, and freezing every time she heard a floorboard creak or the wind rattling the window. Then she scurried back to her own room and started really surfing for what she realized was the very first time.

It was still slow going. She had a list of dozens of passwords, but still didn't know what they went to, so it was a slow and tedious process of matching the locks to the right keys. Still, the only thing she really had to worry about was the off chance that her father might try to log onto the same site while she was already on it. But she didn't think he was likely to do that at work, and even if he did, he still wouldn't know who was using his password. She decided not to use her credit cards to join any other sites, even though all of his tended to be somewhat boring vanilla sites. He received a monthly list of her purchases, however, and she didn't want to risk him wondering what one of them was for. Sally had a vivid memory of her parents fighting, back when her mother was still alive. Her father had asked what one of the expenses on just such a list was for. Sally couldn't remember exactly what her mother had said but the exchange hadn't left either of her parents very happy.

Even with the limited range of vanilla sites that she could access without raising suspicion, Sally was able to find all sorts of bizarre stuff-things she wouldn't even have imagined before. Things that made her feel a bit nauseous the first time she looked at them, and yet there was something magnetic about them that simply wouldn't release her eyes. A lot of it was impossible to believe. It had to be faked: like the special effects in a movie. There were needles, as much as a foot long, dozens of them, piercing a bound woman's breasts; while another woman's orifices were being shoved full of baseball bats and Champaign bottles. One man had his forearm shoved in nearly to his elbow and the women didn't even seem to mind.

It was truly amazing how many sites she found where women-especially young women-were being tortured and abused. It made her wonder just how much pent-up male hostility there really was, lurking silently just beneath the surface of our seemingly civilized society. It frightened her. She wondered if all men were angry, simmering pots, just waiting to explode, and despite her very real fear the thought intrigued her. She couldn't get it out of her mind. She imagined the world suddenly gone mad with all men banding together to brutalize and abuse all women, the way it seemed they did on the web sites she preferred the most. Men were bigger and so much stronger; what would stop them? They dominated the police force, the military and the government. They could pass any laws they chose and easily enforce them. They could turn all women into little more than slaves, if they really wanted to. What stops them? Sally found herself masturbating to that thought as she fantasized about what such a world would be like and what the men might do to her specifically. What stops them, she wondered. Her heart raced as her fingers dipped into her moist warm folds-and sometimes she couldn't decide if it was racing from fear or excitement.

What frightened her most was the unrelenting persistence of her own fantasies. Despite the revulsion some of the pictures caused in her, she couldn't take her eyes from them. And she always found that she preferred the pictures where the women were bound and appeared to be unwilling and in pain. Having the freedom to get up and leave somehow made it less real.

Maybe this was some subconscious expression of hostility that she felt towards herself. That was the kind of crap they liked to teach her in school during those days, but she didn't believe it. It was easier to imagine that she was just another one of Pavlov's dogs, like all those frustrated bastards out there, responding to bells and whistles she wasn't even aware of; and couldn't remember; and didn't even know where or when they began. She tried. Sometimes she spent hours trying to remember the first time she'd ever thought about bondage or torture or snuff; trying to track down that exact moment when the irrational obsession first began. The exact moment; the event that made her mind snap from that of a normal child to... this. But as far back as she could remember, her favorite parts of movies or TV programs were always the scenes when the helpless female was being kidnapped-or that tantalizing glimpse when the cops swarmed to the scene of the crime and found that bound and mutilated body. Especially when she was younger, she liked the scenes where the hero's lady friend was all trussed up and waiting for the hero to come save her, but as she became older she developed a distinct preference for those earlier scenes with the real victims. Perhaps this was a sign that her tastes were changing, becoming attuned to the harder stuff. But sometimes it just seemed she'd finally figured out that the hero almost never arrived too late. Even in early grade school, she'd daydreamed of being kidnapped. Those were rather innocent fantasies, of course, and some cute boy would always come along to save her-but that was just an excuse for the inescapable ropes she was bound in and the coarseness of the villain's hands grating against her bare skin. Being rescued was anti-climactic, almost an afterthought thrown in simply as a means of closure.

Sally had never really been poor at socializing. It was just that as a child she'd become so used to playing alone, other children rarely found a reason to visit her fathers mansion unless they were invited over for a party or something. As a child, with nothing to compare it to, it never occurred to her that she might miss the company of other children. Her mother didn't like her to play with the children of the servants; and even though Sally's father seemed to sense the depth of her isolation, he didn't actually encourage her to play with them either, at least not until after his wife's death, and by then she was already set in her ways. Sometimes he would all but insist that she play with them. And so, outside of her school, they became her only consistent playmates. But much of the time she preferred to play by herself. There were three girls and one boy, among the servant children, and none of them were quite her age. Nor did they seem to share her interests. She found it positively droll to realize just how long a bunch of girls could stand to play with a couple of dolls. It might have been different if she could convince the other girls to tie the dolls up with string and placed them on a railroad track while the ken doll came to the rescue in just the nick of time. But they just looked at her like she was that odd stranger who, while living among them was most definitely not one of them. She had a little more luck with Jimmy, the boy, but not much. Things might have been different if she'd been a few years younger than him instead of the other way around. He seemed to felt a bit isolated too, being the only boy. And fortunately he didn't like playing house or dress up any more than she did. The other girls were eager enough to him to go away and she could tell by their tone and they way they looked at her, that although their mothers would never permit them to say it out loud, they were happy to include her in that command.

Jimmy was willing to follow Sally's lead when she created her exotic fantasy worlds. "Let's pretend that we're brother and sister," she told him once, as they lay on top of the huge, blue gas tank that was next to the stables. It was so tall they had to set three bales of hay in a stack just so they could climb to the top. Once they made it to the top they would lie on its warm surface for what seemed like hours, feeling the warmth of the sun's rays and the deeper, more immediate warmth that radiated from the tank and didn't go away, even when the sun went behind the clouds for a few moments. It felt like a living creature, and Sally liked to press her ear against the metal and listen while she spoke or hummed. She created an eerie sort of music that made her think of strange beings on alien worlds, while the vibrations made it seem like the tank was almost alive.

"Let's pretend that we've gone to the beach," she said. "And we've lain down on a rock and fallen asleep under the sun."

Jimmy closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep.

"And when we wake," she said, as he snapped his eyes open. "We're not really on a rock at all, but the back of a huge sea creature that's speeding across the water."

Jimmy's eyes widened in fear as he felt the wind whipping through his hair as the mighty creature swam through the water, crashing through the waves and threatening to take them under but never quite doing so. She could almost feel the sea wind in her hair, and the creature's muscles rippling beneath her fingers, its melodious breath punctuated by the plumes of water blowing from its spout, like a whale. "Is he going to dive," Jimmy asked looking nervously about, and not for the first time.

"I don't think so." She pointed her finger in the distance, and said: "Look, I see land. It must be taking us to the shores of some strange and mysterious place. A place no human has ever seen or heard of, because this is the place where animals are like people and people are kept in cages like their pets."

And sure enough, they were meet on the shore by a group of talking animals, who stripped their captives of their clothes, because beasts never wear clothes, and bound them because from now on the laws decreed that they could never walk free again. Then they were chained together in a long line with other newly captured humans and taken to the slave market. This, of course, was the hayloft in the stables, which was the sight of most of their games; and even when Jimmy wasn't with her it was one of her favorite places to play.

When no one was around she would steal bits of rope. There was always plenty, and if the servants noticed that it was gone, they never accused her of taking it. She kept the rope hidden in the hayloft, a secret place where she kept all of her most interesting toys: a small clamp and the bit from a horse's head-harness that she'd taken from the foreman's work shed, along with a single pair of lacy, black underwear she'd snatched from the laundry when one of the smaller maids was washing her own clothes.

Sometimes, she would have Jimmy tie her up, as part of the story she was spinning out, but she was always a little afraid his mother might call, and he might wander off, leaving her helpless and bound. The thought made her tingle, but she was afraid of what her father (or even one of the servants) might say if they found her tied up all alone. She preferred to tie herself up, so she could control the way the ropes were tied: tight, inescapable bonds instead of the loose wraps of rope that Jimmy was capable of. It also allowed her to slip out of her plain clothes and either slide into the pair of lacy black panties or use the ropes against her bare skin.

The panties were a little loose on her, but she had stolen a needle and thread, cut the panties at the side and sewn the pieces back together so that they fit more snuggly. Wearing only the black panties, she would wrap her body in a tight webbing of rope. It was difficult to tie her hands or arms together and she worried about not being able to get undone if she did her job too well, so usually she would simply loop a piece of rope around her free hand and pretend that it was tied. Sometimes she would put a loop in end of the rope. One loop she would place over the end of the ladder, and the other she would slip around her elbows. Then she would turn herself around, wrapping the rope around her body as she turned. When she got to the end she would slip the loop off the end of the ladder and hold it in her hand, pretending her animal owner had tied her up and given her a chore to do. She always picked something that was difficult but not impossible. One of her favorite games was to imagine that she was packing her animal owner's traveling bad. She would tie herself up in a chest harness, then run a crotch rope through her legs and toss it over a rafter, and tie it off to the chest. Then, the chore was to reach down to one of the shelves where there were small hand tools which she could pick up in her mouth and move to a lower shelf-and then back up to the higher shelf. The reason this was difficult was because the further she bent over the more pressure the ropes put between her legs and that made it increasingly difficult to keep her toes positioned on the ground. If she lost her footing she would topple forward, with her head pointing down and the rope between her legs supporting her weight. Then the only way to get down was to use her legs to push against the shelves as she slide the rope back over the rafters until she was in an upright position again. The tasks she set for herself were invariably grueling affairs that could take several hours to finish-and force her into the more uncomfortable positions multiple times.

Sometimes she'd just rest for a while as she hung from the ropes, using her free hand to masturbate herself by jiggling the rope until she could barely stop herself from crying out with the intensity of it.

During these times, she would imagine that her cruel masters had left her hanging in the prison and would only return to release her when she had everything back in it's place on the shelf where it had originally been.

Sometimes, after a hard rain, Sally would pull a pair of shorts on over the black panties and a rope crotch harness, then walk along the small creek that ran through her father's property, following its length from end to end and back again. She imagined that she had escaped and was fleeing from her animal owners, but her body and arms were still bound; only her legs were free. And so she ran towards the ocean, hoping to find the blue creature that had brought her to this place, while hiding among the reeds along the flooded banks, or beneath the tree roots that hung a few inches above the water, she would creep carefully forward, listening for sounds of pursuit-or, when reality intruded, for sounds that one of the servant had come looking for her. Occasionally she would chance across one of the grounds keepers tending the lawn that stretched to within a dozen or so yards from the creek; and she would crouch down, in real fear of being seen.

Sally lived for such moments.

She didn't particularly like school, although good grades always came easily for her.

She was quiet and shy. "Stuck up", some of the children called her; but she never wanted for friends in high school. They latched on to her. She was attractive, intelligent and always impeccably dressed in expensive clothes. But she found the things other girls talked about boring. Even when they talked about sex, it was mostly idle, vanilla gossip. It didn't interest her much. And when they asked her to do things after school, she usually found some way to politely decline. By then, she preferred spending much of her time on the Internet or exploring new places where she could hide while she played her games.

When she went to a party, she seemed to cling to the walls and the doors always seemed so inviting. She wished she had something worth saying and someone worth saying it to. Not that the boys ignored her completely. They would ask her to dance, but rarely had anything more interesting to say than the girls did. She had little real interest in their offers of forming a permanent relationship. And after the silence became awkward they usually thanked her politely and moved away. Before long, most of them seemed to assume she was a closet lesbian; or that she thought she was too good for anyone else. The rest seemed to think she was really just a good little girl who couldn't possibly be thinking about being tied to the teacher's desk while everyone in the class jabbed her with their pencils and flogged her with their belts until her whole body was bright red, and then finished her off by fucking her ass with the broomstick from the closet.

Strangely, the few who were bold enough to make some kind of sexual suggestion, tended to be so utterly cocky and obnoxious that she found it impossible to generate much interest in them. She might imagine what it would be like if one of them would clap his hand over her mouth as she was leaving a room and drag her kicking and screaming into one of those secluded back rooms, but she had no interest in telling them all that that was what she was thinking. Or going with them willingly. Even if it weren't for the endless nightmare of nasty rumors it was likely to start-it just seemed like asking for it would have take away most of the fantasy's fun. And honestly, she wasn't sure she'd be able to overcome her shyness to ask anyway-even if she wanted to.

The people she met on the Internet were different. They were more likely to have something in common with her, and if not, it was far easier to ignore them and simply move on ones way. Not having to meet someone face to face also made it easier to ask the kinds of questions one needed to ask in order to find out the answers that one wanted to know. On the Internet, she always had time to think up the clever replies that always lay unspoken in real bits of conversation. There was no pressure in a chat room, she could say and be whatever she wanted to be. But more important were the things they said to her.

She meet Darin on one of those art-based snuff sites, although she didn't learn his real name until months later when they meet in person. He was one of the sites featured artists, and she'd emailed to tell him how much she liked his work. When he'd emailed back they'd struck up a conversation and it hadn't taken him long to discover that she was female, which seemed to take him a bit by surprise, but also sparked even more interest. From the pictures he sent, she learned that he was a good-looking, young man, with dark, curly hair. "I'm too short to be called tall, dark and handsome," he wrote in his letter. He went on to tell her how recently he'd taken the plunge, trying to make a go of his art. "But calling the existence I manage to scratch out struggling is like saying a rock is dying. LOL"

He was desperate for commission work, and he was very, very good, so Sally decided to write back and asked if he would be interested in doing a snuff piece using her as a model. Before she knew it, she was making arrangements to fly to Denver, where he lived. She could hardly believe it. They were actually going to meet IRL. In Real Life.

Just thinking the phrase made her palms begin to sweat. Everything she'd ever read said it was foolish to meet a stranger like this. And she already knew that he had a fascination with dying women. It was undoubtedly the craziest thing she'd ever done in her life-and by far the most exciting. She didn't care about the danger, she was willing and eager to take the risk; and a small part of her wanted something unpleasant to happen. A very small part, but still she was so eager, that she found it impossible to wait. She wrote back hoping he wouldn't cancel altogether if he tried to move up the date. "Something else has come up," she explained. "Couldn't we do it this coming weekend instead?"

She told her father she wouldn't be coming home from college for the weekend: she was going away on a skiing trip. Then she flew to Denver, and they spend the first half of the morning meeting and discussion their plans. They bought a bottle of wine at a liquor store and had a few drinks when they got back to his apartment, then he took her into the spare bedroom which he'd turned into a photo studio and she posed for the camera while he snapped the photographs he'd need to work from.

She was surprised how easy he made it to take off her clothes and pose in front of the camera. She didn't feel self-conscious at all. He had this sparkling personality that somehow managed to be both unassuming and demanding at the same time; a personality she could as easily imagine as the villain who was tying her up or the hero who was coming to save her; and she never stopped to wonder which way she preferred to think of him.

"You seem to like the camera," Darin observed, as she pranced before him. "And I know it likes you. Ever thought of doing a bondage shoot? You can make a little money and I think you'll have fun at the same time." He shrugged, looking at her to gauge her reaction.

She shook her head. "I don't need the money," she said, realizing that they hadn't actually discussed an amount for the commission he was going to paint. The way she had worded it, he might not expect any money at all. "Besides, my father surfs the adult sites on the net all the time. I don't think he'd appreciate finding me there."

"I just thought," he shrugged. "You're beautiful, and you obviously like it. I think you'd make a great model."

She'd heard that before, but suddenly she didn't trust him. He'd already taken several dozen compromising pictures of her, several of them completely nude, and many with her fingers groping her own breasts or probing between her legs. The only way to make sure he didn't betray her was to prove to him that it would be worth a lot more if he didn't. She hadn't thought much about what she was going to pay him either. Her father provided her with a weekly allowance that was more than she'd ever needed to spend. Except of course for the one time when she'd bought that new car she drove around at college. She hadn't even told her father her plans, and his only response was to say that she should have bought a Mercedes or a BMW. She'd just batted her eyes like a dingy blonde and told him she'd test driven plenty of the more expensive cars and this one had everything she needed. Then she'd kissed him on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "besides, I don't want to seem that different from the other kids."

No, she could make it well worth Darin's time without raising much of a fuss from her father, especially if she had something to show for what she'd spent. Her father was an avid art collector-although he tended toward far more proven, and thus expensive artists. But Sally thought he would approve of her newfound interest in collecting; and Darin's work-at least the pieces that weren't snuff-were good enough that her father just might consider it a reasonably good investment-which seemed to be the only reason he could imagine for buying art.

Sally smiled. "We can still take the pictures," she said. "I just don't want them plastered all over the Internet. The same goes for the paintings you'll be doing for me. They're mine."

She noticed the change in his expression. His mind was obviously already churning at the possibilities. And he was looking at her again, reevaluating what he saw in light of this new and apparently previously unanticipated attitude.

"I'm to own full rights," she went on. "I expect that you and I will be the only ones who ever see them, at least until my father dies. I don't even want you to show them around in your portfolio. Not only that, but every time I commission you, I want you to make two paintings-not just one-that way if my father should ever question why I've paid you five or ten thousand dollars, I'll have something to show how I spent my money."

It took a few seconds for the words to sink in. Five or ten thousand dollars! It was obviously a lot more than he'd ever imagined. More than the actual amounts, she suspected what took him most by surprise was the casual way she'd jumped by five thousand dollar increments.

He handled it well though. "No problem, babe," he said with a smile and a casual shrug, as if people offered him five thousand dollar commissions every day.

"Good," Sally said. "Now what kind of bondage gear have you got to go with that camera?"

After that she'd slipped smoothly back into a more passive sort of role. In fact, she found it almost eerie how easy it had been to slip in and out of that bitchy little princess sort of mask.

After that, she and Darin began to meet regularly. Instead of flying home from college every weekend, she would fly to Denver about once a month. Her father thought Darin was a new boyfriend, and even asked when he was going to meet "the young man". She'd just smiled noncommittally and told him she didn't think it was that serious. But in a sense Darin was her first and only real boyfriend. He was clearly polyamorous by nature, but she didn't mind. She wasn't the jealous type, and she didn't think of him in an exclusive sort of way, either. Sometimes, Darin even let her watch his bondage photography sessions with other women.

After her second commission, and the promise that there would be many more, Darin bought himself a small house, with a mortgage that wasn't much more than he was paying for his apartment. It had an unfinished basement that he began turning into a dungeon; and every time Sally visited she brought him another toy to fill it. Sometimes it was just something small and simple, like a pair of cuffs or nipple clamps. Other times it was something more elaborate, like a piece of furniture or a fitted body-harness-custom made for her, of course.

Then one visit he mailed her a copy of his key. She'd called from the airport, and knew that he would be out when she arrived. That was part of the plan. She washed the dishes, and started vacuuming the floor; and was just beginning to suspect that he had devised a clever way to get all his cleaning done when someone grabbed her around the arms from behind and wrestled her to the floor. Carefully, he secured her arms and feet. Then he gagged and blindfolded her, so she wouldn't know what was coming next. There would be no safe words this time-just as they had agreed. And although she was quite sure it had to be Darin, she hadn't actually been able to get a glimpse of his face since he was wearing a ski mask. Clever that, she thought, since he never spoke she could never be completely certain he was the one in the mask. The uncertainty was as exciting as the things he did to her.

That evening he'd bound her spread eagle to the dining room table and covered her body in hot wax. Darin always had plenty of candles around the house. He was a bit of a romantic, and liked to light them at the table whenever they ate in. By the time he was done, she suspected Darin would have to go out and buy more if he wanted to set the mood for their next meal. The first drop of wax splashed down just between her legs, on the tender flesh just below her clit. She gasped and arched her back at the unexpected sensation. He stopped then, having given her just enough of a tease to know what was coming; and began to cover her breasts with clamps. Then he shaved her pussy, and began to whip her cleanly shaven mound, more gently at first but quickly building the intensity until she was screaming into her gag. At last he stopped, but he was far from done. He began to drip more hot wax on her tender, red flesh; moving around on her body but always coming back, saturating her crotch until there wasn't a single patch of skin that wasn't covered. Then he began to whip her again, until all the wax had flaked off.

On her next visit they decided to play the same game, but this time Darin brought along a friend. Together they overpowered her, and bent her over a chair, her hips resting on the wooden back, her legs spread precariously wide and bound securely at the ankles and knees. They'd stretched out her arms and tied them securely to the seat of the chair; then placed clamps on her nipples. She cried out as they added weights. Then Darin's friend took pictures with a video camera while Darin fucked her doggy style, rammed into her so hard the weights bounced. Each time they did she felt a little orgasmic wave, as if there was a river of sexual energy running from her nipples to her clit, like tiny symbiotic creatures that had burrowed inside her and was nibbling from the inside at her breasts.

Their scenario was long and eventful. Their best one ever, and Sally looked forward to watching the video again and again. She paid Darin's friend, Mark, $300 in exchange for the video, then asked if he was going to join them again the next time she dropped by.

"I like it," she said, "when Darin can give his total attention to me."

Sally's photo scrapbook was growing. Each time she visited, Darin lead her into something new-something a little more daring and different; more painful. When she was at home, she would look at her pictures and watch the videos. It was almost like reliving the experience all over again. But her favorites were still the pieces of snuff art that Darin had done. She didn't bring them out very often. They were large, and she didn't want them to be seen by anyone else, but she enjoyed masturbating to them more than all the others.

In one, she was fatally impaled on a long, increasingly thick wooden stake. A thick flow of blood ran down her legs and a smaller trickle leaked from the corner of her mouth where the tip of the wood could just be seen. In another, she was being electrocuted. Her body was still arched as the electrical currents ran through her, but it was obvious she wasn't going to survive. Her skin had already begun to blacken where the electrodes were attached at her nipples, clit and tongue. Her favorite, however, was the one where she was being fucked from behind as she hung from a rope. Her violator was a huge, lizard-like creature. It could easy have supported her weight so that the rope wasn't really a threat to her life, but instead he had chosen to pull her backwards at a sharp angle; and it was obvious that each time he pulled her down on his monstrous cock, the slipknot tightened a little more around her neck. Her wrists were securely tied behind her back; her legs had been left free and at one time she must have been kicking frantically at the air, but now she had almost lost consciousness. Her eyelids had begun to flutter and her legs hardly moved at all.

She could sit and look at that one for hours, masturbating as she imagined what it would feel like for that noose to tighten around her neck and the air to slowly and inevitably run out as she became too weak to fight anymore.

Sometimes she would hold her breath for as long as she could. But she knew it wasn't the same. There was no fear, no pain, no inevitability; I just wasn't the same thing when it could end whenever you wanted it to.

It wasn't enough. She wanted to experience it all.

"Ever seen a real snuff film," she asked as she and Darin were eating their dinner at the kitchen table, after a vigorous session. Her ass still stung, and it felt damp now where it pressed against the chair.

Darin looked at her thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke. "That shit's illegal, you know. I mean, the stuff I do in my art, that's a fantasy... and maybe it's better left that way. When you start talking about the real thing, you're talking about taking a person's life. Not to mention spending a lot of time in jail!" He laughed then, trying to make a joke out of it. "I like the fantasy, but honestly, there aren't enough beautiful women in the world for me to feel good about that."

"I'm serious," she said, refusing to be deterred.

He was avoiding her eyes, staring a little too hard at his plate as he rolled the spaghetti onto his fork. "You don't have to be the ones who make that stuff to get sent to jail. Maybe you better ask yourself if it's really worth the risk."

"It's worth fifty thousand dollars to me," she said, "Plus expenses."

He looked at her for a long moment, frowning, and she wondered what was going through his head. Was he disappointed? Was he thinking it was time to get rid of this psycho bitch? She was just about ready to laugh and tell him she was only joking when he nodded. "Alright," he said. "If you're really set on doing this, there's this guy I know. I've never really meet him, I don't even know if he's for real. He's just someone I meet surfing... but he told me once that he can get a snuff film for real. For all I know, he could be shitting me."

"I don't want him, Darin. I want you to do it."

"Oh, for God's sake." He pushed back in his chair and stood up. "You can't ask me to do something like this, Sally."

"I have someone specific in mind," she said. "And you're the only one I can trust to do it."

"I can't believe you're talking about actually killing someone."

"One hundred thousand, then. That will give you another fifty to help pay for Mark and whoever else you want to bring in on this. Mark can work the camera while you do the rope work. You're better at that anyway."

Darin looked at her for a long time then shook his head in wonder. "You must hate this person an awful lot."

Sally smiled. She was starting to have fun with this. "Believe me," she said. "I want this very badly."

After another moment he sighed and asked her whom she had in mind.

"Me," she said, without so much as a smile.


3

Sally was having second thoughts.

She had been for a long time-even before she felt the padded hand clasping over her mouth and began breathing the soporific fumes. Her last thoughts before falling unconscious into those awaiting arms was to wonder if this nauseating smell was chloroform; and then to hope that this was Darin and not some real psycho. She still wasn't completely sure. There seemed to be a few more men than she'd expected, but perhaps Darin had brought someone else in on it. She hadn't been able to recognize any of them by their voice, either. But then the men hadn't spoken more than a few words. They obviously knew what they were planning to do, and the few gestures they used appeared to be enough.

The thought that these men might be total stranger, with an agenda of their own, frightened her more than she'd ever thought it would. Thinking it might when deep down you knew it really wouldn't was a lot different from knowing that it would-and knowing that there was nothing you could do not to stop it. One thing was absolutely certain: she had passed the point of no return a long time ago. She couldn't believe how much more exciting that made it. It really didn't matter who these men were, it was too late to back out now. Even if the ball gag hadn't been there to prevent her from calling it off, she didn't think they would believe her. She was, after all, supposed to be playing the role of the frightened victim-and that meant lots of screaming and pleading. The more convincing the better. No, it was far too late to change her mind now. The inevitability of it was stifling. Her entire body seemed to vibrate with the thrill of the countdown, as if she had downed a few too many cups of strong coffee.

Darin had already taken her a lot further during this session than he had during any of the others. That was exactly what she had asked for. She hadn't specified anything specific; she preferred not knowing. The uncertain anticipation heightened it all. Besides, he was always a lot more inventive when it came to dreaming up interesting positions than she was. Not to mention that he had come up with tortures that she wouldn't have dared suggest on her own-just as she'd knew he would .

But now, she began to wonder if it was too much. Her crotch seemed to be on fire as she straddled this wicked little swinging horse. She couldn't believed her own body could feel like such a crushing weight. It tingled with a feeling of numbness that did little to quiet the pain. She was long past the point when she'd begun to think she couldn't stand it any longer. But the session seemed to go on and on. Her body felt battered, both inside and out. It ached with fatigue and stung where the whips had raised welts. Muscles she hadn't even known she'd had felt strained and torn, especially the ones in her pussy that had cramped when they'd flipped the electric currents. And yet, the fact that she was helpless to prevent whatever he was going to do next was enough to make her giddy with erotic delight. Her stomach was anxiously fluttering with nervous butterflies as she breathed heavily around her gag and waited with unbearable anticipation.

They were lowering the horse again. She had been riding it, on and off, for such a long time that removing the pressure from between her legs was almost better than an orgasm. It was like sitting down and taking the weight off her feet after a long day of endlessly standing on them; it was like letting someone who was really good at it massage those tired feet.

It felt good to have the floor beneath her again.

When they began to untie her hands, she breathed a mental sigh. It meant they wouldn't be using the horse to hoist her off the floor again. She stepped over it almost eagerly when one of the men pulled on her nipple chains. She wondered what they were going to do to her next. Her only stipulation had been that they couldn't do anything that would cause permanent damage, and nothing that would be visible when she was wearing normal street clothes.

Darin's expression had been almost comical when she'd told him she was the intended target of the snuff film she wanted him to make. "Are you fucking crazy! I can't do that," he'd shouted, becoming so agitated about it that it had taken her a very long time indeed to make him understand that she didn't actually want to die. She wanted him to revive her once she was unconscious. "That means you can't kill me in a violent method."

"What's not violent about dying?"

"Well, I don't actually have to die, I suppose." She put her hand up to her throat and firmly gripped her own windpipe, wheezing excessively as she sucked in an exaggerated breath of air. Then she smiled. "I just want it to look like I have. I want the realism of real torture and really loosing consciousness and really lying there on the floor for a few seconds. We can make it look longer when we edit, but I want this to be a fairly high-quality production. Do whatever you have to do to make it happen. "

"And what if you don't wake up when we try to revive you?"

"Then I guess you don't get the money," she said with a light hearted smile. "Just a snuff-film for real. That ought to be worth a few thousand on the black market..."

Sally turned to the sound of something scraping across the concrete floor and saw one of the men pulling something heavy into the light. When she got a good look at the narrow table he was dragging, she pulled back, causing the chain the man was holding to tug at her nipple clamps. The table's top surface would come to about her hips and its surface was covered with short, little needles. They were no more than a quarter-inch long, but they were plentiful and looked sharp enough to break her skin. She knew what they wanted from her, and she knew that eventually they would get it, but she fought as hard as she could.

It took two of the men to force her face down over the table. She tugged at the ropes that still pinned her elbows to her side, trying to get her hands into a position to hold her self back. But they batted her hands away easily and forced her down.

The sharp points pricked at the skin of her belly and breasts. After that she tried to keep as still as possible. Struggling now would only rip at her skin. Then she felt the weight of one of the men as he pressed himself down on top of her; forcing her all the way down on the spiked bed.

It didn't hurt as much as she'd expected. Her skin began to itch, more like a hundred mosquito bites than the stabbing of a half-dozen swords. She could feel something trickling from at least one of the wounds. Was it blood? Her crème sweater was already ruined. It would have been even if they hadn't cut holes for her breasts, but soon it would be soaked with blood as well as sweat.

It no longer took two men to hold her down. One was enough, his hands gripping her head and the back of her neck, as he pressed her erection closer to her mouth. She hadn't noticed when he'd taken it out, but now she could smell it: musty and hot. It pulsed in front of her eyes. Mesmerizing her, like a snake.

Was he going to undo her gag?

She felt a strap being pulled tightly across the small of her back and tightened down with a buckle at the side of the table. Another strap was pulled across her shoulder blades. Then she felt hands spreading her legs, tying them to the metal rings on either side of the table.

The man in front of her was covering his erection with a large, ribbed dildo harness. It was hollow in the middle, allowing him to slide the sizeable length of his shaft neatly inside it but giving him another full half-inch in diameter and two inches in length. Only when he began to walk around behind her, did she realize that it wasn't for her mouth. He had shown it to her so she would know exactly what was happening to her.

He gripped the cheeks of her ass, forcing them apart; and she felt something cool and greasy, as other fingers probed her sphincter. Then his rubber shaft was pressing against her ass. Involuntarily, her muscles tightened. The shaft pressed harder and she could feel her hole slowly opening, like the petals of a rose opening in rapid time-stretching her membranes until it felt as if she had passed the parameters of their design. And then, suddenly, he was sliding more freely; forcing his shaft the rest of the way in with one deep and painful thrust. She screamed into her gag, as her body shook with delightfully intense pain. The shock of his body collided with hers and caused her body to press uncomfortably against the needles. They seemed to rip at her skin, but she was tightly strapped to the table. There couldn't be much real movement.

It felt like tearing again as he pulled out of her. Then he was shoving back inside her. In and out, in and out. He found a steady rhythm, using his hands against her hips to help force his way in and out. In and out.

At first there was only the pain, and she reveled in it; but slowly it began to mix with a deeper pleasure. She began to breathe a little harder and before long she was moving her hips to meet each new thrust. Her body was dripping with sweat. As if they could tell just where the pleasure was coming from, someone had slipped a finger between her legs and was working her with their finger as the shaft continued to slide in and out of her.

It seemed to go on and on, and she didn't even notice the belt being slipped around her neck. Not until she felt the gentle pressure beginning to block off her air. It didn't take much, just a gentle twist of the wrist to make her breath come in labored little wheezes. Another thrust seemed to force the air out of her, and she couldn't force her lung to fill again. Already her head seemed to growing lighter from her exertions, and she couldn't help thinking, "Not yet. I'm not ready."

A vibrating sensation filled her chest, quickly becoming more erotic as it intensified and swelled, its center moving downward in her body until it was centered at the focus of her pain and pleasure. Fingers rubbed at her clit even as it tugged at the side of the ribbed dildo, and now the strange vibrations were an avalanche washing over her in waves. She needed to breathe. Her muscles tugged at her diaphragm desperately trying to draw air into her lungs, and the harder they worked the more strongly the vibrations centered on her clit. Her body went rigid. The level of her pleasure so profound that all she could see was white. All she could hear was an ecstatic buzzing: like bugs in her ears. She wished these wonderful feelings could go on forever.

Then the world began to fade to black.