The Box

CHAPTER TWO

Last week she had been called Allison. Ally to her friends. But now she had no name. No real identity. She existed to be sustained only by the box. She was vaguely aware of people around her. Of other entities encroaching on her consciousness but she could do nothing about them in her current state. Blind. Deaf. Dumb. Her movements severely restricted.

A slave to the box that provided her with air and comfort.

A slave.

A complete and utter slave.

And with that slavery came immense and almost total freedom.

*

"Simpson, Dodd, Carpenter, good morning."

"'Ello gel. How's it going?"

"HIIIII! Good, thanks. How are you?"

"Duckin' and divin' same as always! Listen, can you get any time off?"

" I've got about a week's leave owing me…"

"Good! Book it for two weeks time startin' the twenty fifth! Have you still got all those wigs?"

"Hey! I've got this really cool long black one. Makes me look like Morticia out o' the Addams Family."

"Good! You still planning to go back to Sydney for Christmas?"

"Maybe not, money's tight right now."

"Not now it ain't! J.D.Wetherspoon's in the Charing Cross Road. Know it?"

"Sure. Used to be an old cinema."

"That's the one! Meet me in there at half six. Oh, and you're gonna need those wigs Ally! Bye."

"See ya at six thirty."

She put down the phone with more than a half smile playing on her lips. She didn't need explanations right now. She had enough tantalising facts to keep her wondering throughout the day. Whatever it was, it wasn't normal and she loved the abnormal and the strange and she loved a challenge.

She loved to play.

But the essence of play was trust and she knew that she could trust the person on the other end of the phone. Trust them implicitly. They had done too much together for her not to.

*

"D'you know this suit's absolutely skin tight? Not a wrinkle anywhere. Not like mine, it's starting to go at the knees!" She was studying their silent guest who stood before them now in the same position as she had been 15 minutes earlier. Like a child who had been told not to do something, Sheila couldn't help but touch the rubber mannequin.

"D'you think she can feel this? Oh this suit's so soft!"

"It's not a suit. Well most of it isn't anyway." He was standing behind her with a big grin on his face. She was the most tactile person he knew and she just had to touch things.

She couldn't keep her hands off this particular thing.

"Well, what is it then, pillock brain?" All the while she was stroking and caressing. Touching the rubberised thighs and the latexed shoulders.

His smile just grew wider.

"Her skin. Her bare skin. Well, not bare exactly…"

"WHAAAT?" Rather than pulling away as some people might have done, Sheila moved in closer.

*

Allison recognised two of the three people sitting in what had once been the circle of the Academy Cinema, but where there had once been darkness there was now light. There were glass panels in the roof to let the light in and dark sticky carpet had been replaced by polished pine. The tall woman waved, smiled as she got closer and gave her a sly wink. She pushed a pint glass in her direction.

"Foster's all right?"

"Great thanks." The shorter woman with the fluffy blonde hair didn't exactly come out of nowhere, but she wasn't normally the demonstrative type. Ally tended to spark emotion in people.

"Hi! You look really great!"

"So do you! Have you lost weight?"

"No she bloody ain't!" Said a voice in the wilderness, but it went unheeded. They kissed each other on both cheeks, but it was a genuine display of affection, not an actor's greeting.

When they were settled down the tall woman touched Ally's glass and said,

"Right! Get some of that down your neck and say 'ello to Phil Bishop!" The pint remained undrunk as Ally looked up and more closely at the man who had probably made more court appearances than some of the Great Train Robbers.

*

It would be fair to say that Sheila was awestruck. She had examined the creature from every possible angle, she had squatted, she had crouched, she had even stood on a chair. She had felt inside the box, she had touched the umbilical cord once again, despite being aware of what it might, or might not contain, and she had touched the creature.

The dumb unmoving creature.

"I wonder what she's feeling right now. I mean, she's alive… she wouldn't be drugged would she? Or hypnotised?"

He shook his head

"And how did they get her to do this? Did they kidnap her?"

He shook his head again, a little nonplussed by Sheila's gentle stroking of the creature's inner thigh.

"I would imagine that she's in a fairly deep state of self induced meditation," He watched as Sheila's hand crept closer to the apex of her legs, "Though how long she's likely to keep it up with you around is highly debatable!" Sheila fixed him with a stare for a moment and then the confusion seemed to clear.

"What? …Oh this!" And she smiled and turned her attention the mannequin's bottom. "It's not her you're worried about," She said, smoothing the soft rump, "It's you! You're getting a hard on aren't you?"

He studied the tableau before him. The slim barefoot woman with the short boyish hair with a reddish tinge and the taller, obviously female creature, who stood, unmoving, next to her. Where Sheila wore jeans and a torn black top, the creature wore, or appeared to wear, nothing but rubber. Shiny black latex, that glistened in the late morning sunlight.

From a distance a casual observer would have seen a jet black box still wreathed in white smoke with a weird semi human figure protruding from it clad in skin tight and shiny black latex. She was visible from just above the knees and from the time that the box had opened and she had risen slowly from it she had not moved or spoken.

Closer inspection would reveal that she was not in fact wearing much latex at all - in the form of clothing.

"What d'you mean?"

"What I said! She's not wearing clothes - it's been painted on to her skin! What she's wearing is liquid latex!" Sheila could not help but touch once more. She touched the smooth, black flat stomach and felt it contract a little as she did so and then she moved her hand upward toward the small but perfect breasts. The perfect breasts, with the hard erect nipples, which she had to touch. She just had to. Gently at first, like a child stroking a dog for the first time, she reached out and touched the shiny surface with her fingertips and then she moved forward and cupped the left breast with her right hand.

"It feels so soft… and so strange! But you're right. It's real skin isn't it? Living, breathing skin. And she's had this painted on her… But you can't do that, the skin has to breathe, she'd suffocate…"

He had moved behind the mannequin, Sheila followed.

'I'm not going to touch her, but if you look there," He pointed to the small of her back. "You'll see where flesh meets rubber…" She did as asked and saw that the rubber doll was wearing latex pants. Skin-tight latex pants into which incorporated her umbilical and all the other devices with which she had been fitted before she had been encapsulated in the box that was to become her home, or her prison, depending on point of view.

Sheila raised a hand; he instinctively knew what she was going to do and sighed.

"Can't you take my word, just for once?"

She looked a little abashed

"I believe you…"

"I would guess that the liquid latex and the rubber pants have been sealed somehow and that if you try to pull them out to look for bare skin you could well ruin the whole thing. She doesn't seem to be in any discomfort and she must have been sent here for a reason…." Sheila looked at him sharply.

"Yeah and not for you to bloody play with!"

"Or you," He said mildly, "So stop it right now!"

Everybody, even the most mature of people, have their childish moments from time to time.

"Hard on! Hard on! You've got a hard on…" She stopped chanting and looked up at him abruptly, "You'd like ME like this wouldn't you..?"

He knew it wasn't a good idea to look away from Sheila, so he didn't.

"I don't think it would be possible to keep you quiet for that long…"

She put her hands on her hips and thrust out her jaw.

"Oh! So I'm not good enough…"

He looked ceiling ward, praying all the time for help in understanding the female mind.

*

Phil Bishop had been something of a cause celebre in the fetish world. Prosecuted more times than he cared to remember under the Obscene Publications Act for something that he saw as completely harmless, he had finally exiled himself to Los Angeles where the authorities took a different and more liberal view of his activities and where, through careful publicity and appearances on TV show's like Jay Leno's and David Letterman's he had become famous rather than notorious

Phil Bishop was into bondage in a fairly extreme way, but before he had outed himself as a fetishist he had been considered one of the top ten IT engineers in the country. He could put into practice things that a lot of people could not even begin to imagine and for this he had, in his opinion, been hounded out of the country by the British establishment who, if the truth were known, probably practiced things in private that were far more despicable than anything depicted in his books and magazines.

Looking at him now, drawing feverishly on his napkin, Allison saw a slim man in his late forties. A man, despite everything, who seemed to have a perpetual grin on his face and a man whose mind seemed to be constantly engaged in the solving of problems.

"So? Do you think you can do it?" A light, lilting Birmingham accent, with just a touch of California lurking somewhere in the background. He was talking to her. "You're going to be in there for a long time."

"Yeah." The tall woman was speaking now, "But we're literally gonna be with you every step of the way. "

"Ally, it sounds really dangerous…" The large fluffy haired blond woman looked concerned. Phil Bishop was staring straight at her but he did not direct the outburst at her that she was expecting.

"It IS dangerous. Potentially. But so is crossing the road and if you don't do that, you'll never get anywhere! I've never lost anyone yet Ally, and I don't intend to. If you move in to a new house you don't expect it to turn on you and it's the same with this. I've designed it to SUPPORT the occupant, not kill 'em and if she wasn't so bloody tall, Lady Heather would have done it, but she just won't fit…"

The tall woman smiled.

"How is the Mistress?"

Phil smiled back.

"Crabby! She's stuck in LA editing our movie with the videographer, but she should be here by next Thursday, just in time to help us get started. I think she'll enjoy playing with you Ally, that's if you want to of course…"

He looked at her expectantly.

Ally had already made up her mind.

*

Sheila continued to pace round the box, taking in every detail of the rubber doll that stood proudly to attention in front of them. There was a barely discernible strip of thick black latex that just above waist level that pinned her arms to her sides and her fingers had been laced into thick mittens that had straps around them that turned her hands into useless fists. The whole being covered with liquid latex.

Meanwhile Bill was studying her head. Or rather the shiny obsidian globe where her head should be. Surprisingly it was just about the only place that Sheila hadn't felt. He gingerly reached out a hand now and touched the material. It didn't have the eggshell hardness that he had been expecting; in fact he was quite shocked to find that his fingers made an impression on the material. He was even more shocked when the whole thing seemed to react to his touch.

Standing behind the creature that Sheila had started to call Bandy, (half Barbie and half Cindy), she was paying more attention to the curious arrangement on her back, just as her partner gave a stifled cry of surprise and she looked up to see Bandy's head collapsing.

*

Surprisingly perhaps, for someone who had been brought up in such a hot place, Ally loved the rain and much preferred an English winter to an Australian summer and she felt slightly light headed even now as she ran across the road avoiding the slow moving, virtually gridlocked, traffic on a wet and cold evening in October just a week before her big event was due to take place.

She was in a part of London she had never been before, a long, tree lined, rain shiny, boulevard of a road in Muswell Hill, a road, she had been told, where you could probably see the odd rock star or two on a good day and the road where Dr Virinder Chaudhari had her practice.

Doctor Chaudhari had been recommended by the blond haired woman as being sympathetic to their "cause" and "a bloody good doctor!" when Phil Bishop had insisted on her having a check up before her ordeal. She had been a little shocked at first but he would not take no for an answer.

"I don't care how fit you are Ally and I don't care how much yoga you do and how deeply you can meditate, we can't afford to have anything go wrong! It doesn't matter how you wrap it up, your system's still going to be disrupted and I want you checked out, for your own sake if nothing else…" Resistance, to coin a phrase, was futile and Ally knew when to fight and when to give in and on this occasion there was little for it but to give in gracefully.

*

It was an old but elegant and well maintained house with stairs leading up to the front door and a brass plaque that identified it as "The Beeches Road Practice", there was no bell visible and when she tentatively touched the door it swung smoothly open. She entered and found herself in a large hall decorated in restful, pastel shades that somehow seemed to make it look larger. She could make out sounds, gurgling noises and what seemed to be music although it wasn't really discernible from where she stood.

A sign to her left above a wooden panelled door suggested that she was close to reception so she gave a perfunctory knock and walked in.

It was a large, airy, room with a counter and a dozen or so comfortable chairs arranged around a large marine fish tank from whence the gurgling noise came. The music now readily identified itself as Beethoven's Ninth, the Pastoral Symphony and the room felt calm and peaceful and much more inviting than any other surgery she had ever been in. When she heard movement behind the counter and saw a fairly young woman with long dark hair appearing she moved instinctively towards her.

"HI! I'm looking for Doctor Chaudhari?"

The woman looked down at the computer in front of her.

"Name?"

"Ally, er, Allison Pearson."

The woman looked up at her appraisingly.

"Come through," She said, emerging from behind the counter and led the way out of the waiting room.

The room had Doctor Chaudhari's name on the front door. The tall longhaired woman walked in front of Ally giving her time to take stock. Long luxurious black hair; black knee high boots, no tights or stockings and a dress straight out of the sixties. A black and white quartered, sleeveless, Mary Quant look-alike, with a hem that finished half way up her thigh. The woman closed the door and motioned for Ally to sit down. Reflexively she took off her coat and before she could say anything the woman was standing next to her with a small syringe in her hand.

"Are you allergic to eggs?" Puzzled, Ally shook her head and seconds later she felt the needle enter her left upper arm.

They exchanged glances, Ally's mind alive with all sorts of suspicions, but the dark haired woman smiled.

"They grow this in eggs. There's a particularly nasty type of flu virus going around this year, wouldn't help if you caught that, would it?"

She stood next to Ally looking her up and down for a few seconds and then she threw the disposable syringe into a sharps bin behind her and turned her attention back to the site of the injection. She took a piece of cotton wool and dabbed delicately at the small puncture and then she moved a little closer and a little closer still and then she lowered her head and bit, very gently, into Ally's neck.

*

"What the fuck have you done?"

He felt like a small child who had just smashed something precious.

"I haven't "done" anything. I touched her head and…."

Her hands were on her hips now and her legs were slightly apart. Sheila was in attack mode, but attack breeds defence.

"Come here." He said quietly, noticing that Bandy's head seemed to have stopped deflating, "It's all right I haven't killed her!" That much was true. Bandy still stood in front of them seemingly unruffled by the deflation of her head. He was working at a small thin collar around her neck. Sheila studied him curiously.

"What is it?"

"It holds her "head" in place. Or rather, it holds the inflatable hood that was covering her face."

"You're so clever!"

It was one of those remarks that didn't necessarily sound sarcastic, but which required him to turn round and study Sheila's face just to make sure. As he did so the hood loosened and rode up to reveal the features beneath. Sheila's gasp of astonishment was enough to make him turn round again.

*

Whilst Ally was in the surgery, a few miles due east, in a quiet close adjacent to one of London's smaller parks, a tall woman with long brown and braided hair was lying on a bed in a dimly lit bedroom.

Perhaps lying was not the most accurate description of her current position. Perhaps spread-eagled would better describe her situation. Naked and spread-eagled, with just a tiny patch of trimmed pubic hair to cover any modesty that she might have left.

Thick leather bands round her wrists and shapely ankles were attached to chains which were in turn fastened to more leather that held the chains tightly in place in discrete and specially designed niches set into the highly polished walnut and vaguely Art Deco head and footboards, holding her immobile. The only lighting came from two small halogen spotlights set in the ceiling, but the tall woman would not have been aware of them because over her eyes was a thick, padded, black leather blindfold.

She wore nothing else apart from a large, pink and obviously wet ball gag, the largest size available, held in her mouth by a thick black leather strap that was buckled tightly, she might say too tightly, if indeed she could speak at all, at the back of her head.

The bedclothes were ruffled, suggesting that the occupant had been as restless as the straps would allow. Also on the rumpled duvet were other things that suggested that at some point a series of fairly violent movements had taken place.

There was a feather.

A long white Goose feather, lying not far from her left foot. It's twin lay over to the right where it almost touched a heel. A heel of a foot with carefully painted blue toenails.

There were two objects like blunt ended alligator clamps but matt black in colour and connected by a silver chain, lying only inches away from her left breast. Her plump, large nippled left breast, which, according to her partner, was perfectly symmetrical to her right, although both at that precise moment, looked a little redder and a little more prominent than was normal.

There was also something else.

Something lying between the woman's outstretched legs. Something long and shiny. Its surface was actually matt black like the clamps and covered with small knobbly features but right now it gleamed slickly in the overhead lighting.

When some senses are taken away others tend to be heightened and although the noise at the bedroom door would have gone unnoticed by most people, the woman on the bed heard it clearly and strained, just a little, at the chains that held her in place.

The bedroom door swung open flooding the room with light. The figure in the doorway appeared to be studying her captive, her head posed thoughtfully to one side. She was not a small woman. Not as tall as the one on the bed but large in other ways .In body and personality. Her large and not particularly saggy breasts were just covered by a towel that was laughably too small for her, showing as it did just the tiniest wisps of blonde pubic hair above her legs.

In her hands was another towel with which she was drying her fluffy blonde hair. As silently as she could, she crept forward on bare feet until she was close to the bed and then she reached forward and ran a soft hand gently up her captive's bare thigh. There was no reaction.

The element of surprise gone, she sat down on the bed feeling the mattress give slightly under her weight and dropped the towel with which she had been drying her hair on to the floor and then she leaned forward and touched the small patch of pubic hair that belonged to her friend and partner and then she bent over and, very gently, kissed her naval.

She paused for a second or two and then she kissed it again and began to trace upwards with her extended tongue, kissing then licking, licking then kissing, until she reached her large soft breasts, where she broke and planted a kiss, first on one nipple and then on the other and then she continued to kiss and lick until she reached her victim's unprotected throat and she kissed some more.

She trailed her tongue up onto her chin across her soft peach like cheek, then delved it into her ear and then breathed gently into it for a few moments. Meanwhile her hands were stroking gently at her captive's body. Going with the grain, fluttering against her breasts and then slipping down to her outer and then her inner thighs and then bringing them up to hold her face in both hands and lightly caress her cheeks.

"Ooh that gag looks sooo big, it must be hurting your jaw by now. Raise your head! That's it. Bit more. Little bit more…Good girl!" Soft eager fingers reached behind the woman's head to unbuckle the gag and lay it, sodden and dripping with saliva, gently on to the bed.

The captive pulled a number of faces, smiling, frowning and generally grimacing until she had worked the stiffness out of her jaw, but she was still tied up, still blindfolded and still naked. She let her head drop back onto the soft pillow as it were a lump of lead.

"Fuck me! I thought that was never gonna come out…" If she had any more to say it was stifled by the blonde woman leaning across her, saying "Hi" quietly and kissing her gently on the lips.

*

The adrenaline was beginning to pump through Ally's body, but it wasn't fight or flight that was concerning her right now, it was the feel of soft lips and warm breath against her skin. Like most people Allison Pearson had encountered a lot of dilemmas in her time and would, undoubtedly, face many more. But what she was experiencing now was probably one of the most difficult she would ever come across.

On the one hand she was in a strange place, with a woman she didn't know being seduced into God knows what and on the other….

She suddenly realised that there was absolutely no dilemma at all and she extended her arms drew the woman hard against her and slipped her tongue into her ear.

*

Unsurprisingly Sheila was as close as she could get to Bandy without actually touching her and now she could see the reason for the apparatus on her back.

"A mask, a breathing mask! That's what all the noise was. She's been on oxygen all this time!" She looked at him reflectively, "S'posed to be good for the skin y'know, maybe you should try some – look what it's done for Michael Jackson!"

"What? Made his nose fall off?"

But Sheila was no longer listening. She was staring into the black and shiny, fibreglass visage with hollow but unseeing black eye sockets and a stylised silver mouth with painted on teeth that covered the facemask through which she was drawing oxygen. Although Bandy now had features of some description they were no closer to finding out the true identity of their "guest" than they had been an hour ago but the breathing noises were louder than ever, she looked at him pointedly.

"Did you sound like this when you were in hospital?"

He shook his head.

"Don't know. Never been on oxygen!"

She muttered something under her breath. Something that could have been, "well it's never too late to find out". But it was said too quietly and he was too far away from her to be sure. In the meantime Bandy's breath continued to rasp metallically in and out until it seemed to fill the entire room.

"Oh Bill for fuck's sake do something, it's like sharing a room with Darth bloody Vader!" He was already touching the shiny black shell.

"Might not be a good idea to take this off. Might affect her breathing."

Sheila was kneeling on the floor and trying to peer inside the box at the same time.

"Why? What does she normally breathe? Methane bloody gas? Mind you, if she lives with some beer swilling, curry eating nonce who shoves her head under the covers when he farts, then she probably has to…"

He wanted to laugh but he didn't want her to see him, so he adopted his best poker face.

"It looks like it's in two halves y'know, held together by four little screws…"

Suddenly another face was level with his.

"Well don't just stand there," Said the face, "Get going! Typical bloody man! Never knows the right time to screw!"

*

"Are you gonna let me up sometime today or am I gonna be flat on me back all night?" The blonde woman smiled as much to herself as to the tall blindfolded woman.

"Would it be the first time?" She said sweetly, running a gentle hand up and down the tall woman's bare left leg, who, in turn, tried to raise herself off the bed.

"Don't start with me bitch….!"

The blonde woman leaned forward and kissed her dark haired friend on the lips once more. Only this time it was a much longer and much more passionate kiss than the last. The dark haired woman sighed and relaxed back onto the bed and the blonde woman, pleased to have the upper hand for once, rolled on top of her. She pressed her lips tightly against her companion's and felt her resistance slide away and her mouth fall open. They moved sensuously against each other and then she felt a warm moist tongue enter her mouth.

"Oh Linda," She whispered as best she could, "I love it when you're angry!"

*

Ally hadn't really been aware of leaving the chair, it had been a slide rather than a fall, but she could remember easing a tentative hand under the hem of the dark haired woman's dress and finding soft, smooth and silky skin underneath as she did so.

The dark haired woman was now on top of her, something she seemed to relish, and then Ally felt gentle fingers sliding up her own thigh and soft breath against her cheek and then, with no warning, a sharp intake of breath.

A hand stroking the soft sensitive recesses of her inner thigh. Lips against her neck. A husky, breathy voice in her ear.

"You're wearing stockings!" Hand touching her lightly on the cheek

"Uh huh. Always do in the winter. Hate tights. Can't stand knee-highs. Socks make me look like a man. Don't wear much in the summer though." Ally tried to rise. Tried to roll on top of the dark haired woman, but she resisted and pushed her back against the thickly carpeted floor. Nevertheless Ally continued to slide her hand delicately up the woman's thigh and now it was her turn to be surprised because as she got higher and the flesh became softer she found… precisely nothing.

She tried to stifle a gasp.

"Something wrong?" Asked the dark haired woman, shifting position so that Ally could see up her dress.

"You're not wearing knickers!"

"NEVER wear 'em. Winter OR summer…'cept when I make house calls!" And she shifted her position again so that her knees were pinioning Ally's arms to the floor and then she reached back, never taking her eyes off her face and picked up where she had left off, running her fingers around Ally's stocking tops, tracing the suspenders, letting her hand run its way lightly towards her crotch but pulling away before it actually got there. Watching the anticipation on Ally's face, she moistened her lips with her tongue and then bowed her head and kissed her gently on the lips.

"Bet you've never been under the doctor like this before." She said, rucking up Ally's short leather skirt as high as it would go.

*

"Well?"

"Well what?"

A sigh. A palpable sigh.

"Is it coming off?'

He was standing to the left of Bandy and Sheila was directly behind her.

"These screws are very small, but I think it's loosening."

"Yeah and you know what thought did! What's this?" There was another collar holding the base of the fibreglass helmet in place. In trying to shift the collar a little and therefore help loosen the helmet, Sheila had uncovered something that she was peering at curiously. He glanced across at her.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

Another sigh.

"You've found something. What sort of something?"

Sheila looked puzzled.

"Dunno. It's attached to the mask, I think. It's like a glass fusey sort of thing but it looks like it's got some sort of liquid in it. A sort of silvery stuff."

Suddenly he was by her side.

"Where?"

"There. What's wrong?" Very slowly he took her hands by the wrist and lowered them until they were at her sides. Mystified she looked into his eyes hoping to find an answer.

"Bill what the fuck is wrong?"

His face looked grim. Much grimmer than she could ever recall seeing before.

"Did I ever mention Celine?"

To call her reply snotty would have been an understatement.

"Oh yes, one's girlfriend in another life!" She realised what he was doing as he was talking. He was trying to steer her way from Bandy. Sheila, who, he was convinced, was somehow related to the mule family, was not prepared to play ball. "Bill I don't know what's the matter with you all of a sudden but I ain't budging until you tell me what's wrong."

Another sigh

"Celine was from Northern Ireland. She lost one of her brothers in the "troubles". She didn't talk about it very much but when she did, she'd talk about the things that used to go on, like kneecapping and punishment beatings and how they'd learned to check everything to make sure it wasn't booby trapped and how one of the ways they did that was to learn how to recognise mercury switches." Sheila looked at him blankly. "A mercury switch is exactly what it says it is: a switch filled with mercury and because mercury is a liquid metal it's very sensitive to movement. Now I want you to come away from Bandy right now because what you've been touching is a mercury switch and they use mercury switches to make bombs!"

She looked at him for any sign that this was some sort of joke but there was none.

"Oh don't be daft!" She said derisively, but she took a step away from Bandy and the box as she said it, "If someone wanted to…"

At that moment a sharp humming noise became audible and as it grew louder Bandy's whole demeanour seemed to change. Her muscles tensed and it looked as if she were trying to thrust her head forward. Her arms, pinioned as they were to her sides, were trying to move and her fingers, held uselessly inert by the mittens and the straps, seemed to be trying to flex. Then another noise joined the hum. A low keening noise that seemed to be coming from Bandy herself and then, all of a sudden and for no apparent reason, as both Bill and Sheila looked on powerless to intervene, her whole body began to shake violently.

© Wallace 2003. The writer asserts the right to be recognised as the author of this piece. This is a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead, or to any events either real or imaginary.