Catamite

He was not some loathsome rapist, some thug who'd killed for the sake of money or some addled addict thieving for a fix. Neither was he insane or slow witted. She made sure of that. He was her social equal, at least by background, and his crimes were political and symbolic.

Of course they'd tortured him, so he arrived with a bruised body, cuts and punctures on his bare limbs and torso. He had a slice under one eye, and the men who’d made it told he’d flinched when they were threatening to kill him but otherwise kept his cool.

Now he was kneeling on the tile, just as still as when they'd worked him over  in the dungeon. His only motion was to twist his hooded head, listening for what he could not see. Just shy of six feet, with a body earned from living well, but not the ridiculously sculpted physique of a gym junkie. His hands were chained together in front of him, mitts locked over his fingers to keep him clumsy.

She put her hand on his shoulder approaching him from behind. “Adam.” She decided out loud.

The prisoner swiveled his head again, trying to see her through the thick weave of the sack. At her touch, his posture got even more stiff. “If you’re kill me, do so. You won’t get anything from me.”

“We have already seen what you have to offer, Adam,” she withdrew her hand, placing it on her hip.

“My name’s not Adam. I am Phillip Joeshi, proud to be son of General  Joeshi.”

“The Joeshi family is dead. The sooner you learn this, the easier it will be, Adam.”

Hearing this, the prisoner became silent again.

“Please remove his hood,” she gestured to the waiting guard. “I want to see if that cut they left is infected.”

Vision roughly restored as the large guardsman yanked the bag from his head, Phillip saw the woman for the first time. He’d heard her voice before as a visitor to his cell in the prison after his arrest, but he needed to see her face to identify her. “Annette Harrington.”

“Once you could have called me that, Adam. Do not call me that again.” the woman said sternly. The guard held him by both shoulders while Annette turned his head to examine the freshly closed scab under his left eye. Her grip was firm, but not painful. “This will scar.”

Annette was exactly half way between five and six feet tall, with a long straight nose and grey-green eyes. She was more familiarly found on the arm of her much older husband, Councilman Harrington, but Phillip had attended several of the same social events with her. As typical to her tastes, she wore a modest dress of deep indigo blue and her dyed and decorated hair was swept back so only a few white and multi-coloured strands fell in her face. Fashionable, discreet, well placed.

“Adam, look at me, and listen to me.” 

His mouth tightened into a sneer of dislike, but his brown eyes met hers. “I am not Adam.”

He doubled up. She’d kicked him very hard between the legs, with enough force he felt like he’d throw up.

They’d given him a prison jumpsuit again, one piece washed out grey, and the bag went back on his head.  Now his hands were cuffed with heavier transport irons, as was his legs. His balls ached.  He guessed, as they moved him, that he went up an elevator out of the prison, with a guard holding each of his arms.

The car they fed him into sat low, with large comfortable leather seats. He could hear Annette talking to the guard on either side of him as they fed him into the car. Once inside another male arm clamped onto one of his. He guessed it was a man servant or a bodyguard. The car door slammed shut.

“Home, please,” Annette said, her voice coming across from him.

The car took off. Phillip shifted in his seat, wondering what particular relationship Annette had to his arrest.  She wasn’t, to his knowledge, involved in anything but charitable organization and the plethora of social events ruling class ladies devoted their time to.

“When will you kill me?”

“Shut up, thank you,” she said calmly. “Adam, you are my slave. You will do as you’re told and perhaps you will survive.  But remember, there is no Joeshi family any longer. They were traitors and Philip Joeshi cemented that fact when he broke the pact.  You have no family, no rights, no wealth and no friends.”

“I would rather die than betray my name. My father is a hero.” But beneath the hood he wondered if they killed his uncle for the political crimes of his nephew, despite the man’s long term loyalty to king and council. It was not unheard of, but Philip had no pity. By swearing fealty to the regime he had betrayed the name of Joeshi and deserved to be caught in the backlash.

“Adam,” she said softly. “There are fates much worse than a bullet in the back of the head.”

“Try me.”

“Believe me Adam, I will,” though he could not see it, Annette shook her head chidingly. “You will learn to obey, and in time it will become your very nature.”

Sullen in his hood, Phillip stayed silent for the rest of the hour long drive. Point made, Annette kept herself busy with a book.

When they reached the house, and navigated the check points that assured for the security of the property, she watched dispassionately as her new property was dragged from the car and thrown onto the ground. She heard the man’s grunt of pain- with his wrists manacled he wasn’t able to catch himself and fell heavily on the flagstone walk way.

“Crawl on your belly.”

Phillip tried to rise and her body guard gave him a sharp kick in the ribs. Phillip grunted again. “Bitch.”

“Crawl. People walk, but Adam, you haven’t earned the right to be a person yet.”

It took several more kicks to get him moving towards the house, dragging himself with his elbows. The hood gave him near perfect darkness and the foot against his side was the only guide. He inched his way along, still wondering what Annette was planning. He hadn’t broken under torture yet, but then again he hadn’t known much worth learning.

The stone was hard and rough, though the thick fabriced prisoner’s uniform protected him from the worst of it. He could hear birds and dogs barking. He imagined this must be the Harrington country property. Before her death, when he was a little boy, his mother had attended parties here.

Inside, naked and shivering somewhere in the large building’s cellar, he was blasted with cold water and held down and shaved with electric trimmers, both of the heavy stubble that he’d grown in his week in prison and the thick dark hair on his head. Annette stood off to the side, holding her cotton gloves in one hand.

She licked her lips, excited to see him stripped and forcibly bathed. The loose, wavy mop of his hair had been quite handsome, but if she wished she could allow him to grow it back. The next step was most crucial to her plan. She had her new property spread eagled on his back, limbs bound to a clean table. The lights were bright and a man in an ugly green coat with a black bag waited to the side of the table, accompanied by a woman dressed in a similar fashion.

When Phillip was properly secured, the woman and the man laid out medical tools.  He felt them swab down his scrotum with something wet and cold, numbing. The woman who did the swabbing declared it was lidocaine.

“What the fuck are you doing to me?” Phillip lifted his head up, just in time to see the man tap a needle with one gloved finger.

“Shhhh. I had considered an orchidectomy, but Dr. Martlet assures me this is better and safer,” Annette took Phillip’s head in both hands, holding it to the table. “This is a non-scalpel vasectomy. I’m told it was a Chinese idea originally. It’s supposed to have fewer side effects.”

“Jesus Christ!” Numbed from pain killers, Phillip couldn’t feel as the doctor and her assistant manipulated his balls skillfully, using hemostats to penetrate the skin.  Annette stroked his face, but held him down to the table.

“Shhh, honey, shhhh…”

~~~~~~

Groin tingling and oddly insensitive from the pain killers, but still distantly aware of the wrongness, Phillip knelt with his forehead pressed to the cool, rough but clean cement floor wearing nothing but a medical scrotal support. The doctor had long since left, leaving pills and instructions for Annette and not even a backwards glance for her patient.

He would have rather defied his captor, and the weight of Annette’s foot on the back of his neck was light enough he could have shrugged her off, but she was backed up by her ever present body guards, and a long prod held in her right hand. She’d shown him how it worked once, on a lower setting, pain of the shock still leaving a hard cramp in his calf.

Maybe if he could catch her off guard, he thought, he could take the prod from her and hold it to her neck, or maybe find some weapon and force her guards to back down.  So he listened, quietly as she spoke.

“Adam, you will obey me. You will refer to me with propriety, as Lady and let no foul word or curse escape your lips. You will not speak unless spoken to, and until I say otherwise, you will crawl on your hands and knees. Tell me that you understand.”

Phillip waited a moment before grudgingly answering her pause. “Yeah.”

He screamed as she held the long prod to his thigh.

“I don’t want to put you through intense training for the next forty-eight hours, as the doctor advised, but you will learn this simple thing. Do not forget your manners. Adam, you will say ‘Yes, my Lady’ or ‘No, my Lady.’ Anything else is not acceptable.”

Phillip grunted, wishing he could massage his calf. It wasn’t much worse than being roughed up, and less frightening than when he’d held fast as a jail guard had held a knife less than an inch from his eye, but the electric prod was hard to ignore. He wanted her out of his face while he figured out what she’d done to him and he was still loopy from the surgery  “Yes, my Lady”

“Good boy, Adam.”

The Harrington country home was palatial, huge by necessity to house the support staff needed by such an old family. He’d never been inside it before, having no interest in assuming his late mother’s social habits, but all great houses tended to be built the same. The room that Annette escorted him to was stripped bare except for a foam pad placed in front of an old white painted wrought iron radiator. One of the guards provided a heavy, padded manacle, a psychiatric restraint cuff, and Annette personally locked his right wrists and tested it by tugging and pulling. Steel chain and a heavy lock held him to the radiator with enough slack that he could move to a sitting up position on his mat, but not stand.

Annette left him without a backward glance or further instructions. He guessed he was in a cramped, undecorated room in the servants’ quarters on the third floor, and he could see the slight angle of the ceiling suggested he was under the roof. The location suggested upper floor, the sort of miserly quarters   made available for a maid or footman who was needed to be close by even when they slept.

The light was on, under a cheap smoked glass shade and an unmoving camera was perched in the corner, red LED blinking an insistent, steady pulse. If he sat up he could see the window, set slight dipped into the sloping roof. That gave him a sense of time though not much in the way. That and three visits each day to see him given a plastic bottle of water and a breakfast shake still in its package, and to briefly give him the use of a blue plastic bucket. Checking his crotch showed healing, and simple stitches, as well as the lingering stain of the numbing solution they’d washed him in.

As Annette promised, two full days passed, without a word being spoken to him. Pills were swallowed, ordinary gel capsule ibuprofen and an unidentifiable orange pill that took several gulps of water to pass.  Boredom made him memorize the uneven plastering on the ceiling and guess at the age of a wallpapering repair, where it looked like a stain or a rip in the paper had been replaced with a carefully cut piece of paper pasted on top. The view from the window gave him nothing to watch but clouds. As far as calories went, he was running a deficit. He’d lost weight in prison and now, reading the labels on the meal replacement bottles, even though they were well fortified with nutrients, he was consuming exactly half the amount he needed.

At noon on the third day, as far as Phillip could guess by the window, the same guards that had been feeding and looking after him unlocked his wrist and hauled him out of the room. Downstairs again in the basement, where Annette was waiting with her long orange prod in her hand. He could see she’d changed her hair again, new colours to satisfy ever shifting fashion, but her clothes were the same conservative blue from neck to mid calf.

“Adam, how are you healing?” Annette’s face seemed to show genuine concern, though he knew that ladies were masters of feigned sympathy as they represented one charitable project or another in an endless quest for self promotion.

Phillip watched her, sourly. “Fuck you, you mutilated me, bitch.”

Pain in the large muscles of his thighs left him badly cramped and she kept pulling back and retouching him in the naked buttocks and backs of his legs, while three guards stood on his legs and arms. Phillip screamed.

“I’m pleased to see that Officer Dairedo told me the truth,” commented Annette dispassionately. “This picana is well designed. Would you like some more, Adam?”

Philip snorted from the floor, feeling the heavy boots of the guards grind his joints into the floor. His eyes were watery and his breathing snuffly and moist.

“You do, Adam?” Annette approached him again, prod held out.

“No, my Lady,” Phillip managed. “Please…”

The pressure on his limbs eased up. He’d have fresh bruises now.

“Now Adam, the sooner you learn to obey, the less damage you will take. Perhaps you hope if I find you defiant enough I’ll have you shot, but there will be no escape through death. I have decided to make you my pet project.”