As promised, a short snippet from the upcoming volume 2 of INSTITUTIONALISED. It is only a rough draft at this stage so there are still probably some typos that I've missed. This particular snippet, I must admit, I have put out before on some of the newsgroups so some of you will have seen it and if so please accept my apologies but I had to start somewhere. This section follows up from the page 4 extract currently gracing the pages of 'The Institute' web site (see link, over to the right somewhere)Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, and if so, and even if you didn't, please let me know: your feedback is essential and much valued either way (I'm a big boy now, I can take the criticism... I hope. And even if I can't, well...there's always a few more pints waiting down at the pub to rub away the pain).
As always; all characters and situations are fictitious and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.
(Click on title to read previous volume 2 extract)
…Crrrack! Crrraack!
…Arrrghhh!!!
A young woman screams; she can hear his ancient laboured wheezing, mummified and dust-dry, behind her, can smell his sweat, feel the brow-shed spray settling on her back like a fine rain of passion. He pauses, as much to allow for the blaze to spread across her buttocks as to regain his own breath; the exertion of swinging the supple, heavy-leather tawse through the sticky, heavy air of the little garret room threatens to finally bring about the coronary that she has so often prayed would one day free her. Elfin and petite, Meredith Hewson lies motionless and sobs heart-brokenly; she knows it won't be today, it never is.
How he loves this little room, the shelter he has so thoughtfully provided her, tucked safely away under the eaves; the tiny steel-barred skylight its only natural light, the narrow bed and chamber-pot-commode its only furnishings, besides that is the thickly-leather-upholstered bench-come-horse over which she is presently thoroughly and very professionally immobilised.
Neatly-bare arching ballerina’s feet are set widely spread with toes flat on the dusty grubby floorboards and heels hovering above. Calves, finely sculpted by nature in any case, are masterfully finished in perspiration-glossed elastic tension. Thick, broad, red-leather straps encase exquisitely-formed slender ankles, run across soft-backed knees and sweep around the very tops of her soft, white, quivering thighs, the uppermost edges of the latter bonds lying obscured in the shadowed heavy-overhang of buttocks perhaps best described as generous but in truth over-chubby. Despite her eighteen years the puppy fat still lingers, and lingers there most of all; youthful, roundly firm, elastic and resilient, it taunts him, drives him, veritably invites the three-tongued kiss of the tawse... and the next and the next...
She is bent tightly at the waist over the curving lip of the purposely designed horse whereupon a fifteen centimetre wide soft leather band is tightened down securely across the small of her back. The only movement permitted her tautly-rounded, reddened and abused cheeks is to be seen in the rippled-waves of flesh bouncing and reflected to and fro across each globe as each dances in turn to the rhythmic tattoo of pliant leather most expertly applied.
Whereas the side against which she stands rises perpendicular beneath her abdomen, the far side falls way at 45°. Thickly and softly padded it has formed its surface as a counterpart to, and around, the feminine contours of her torso under the persuasively secure down-force of a further set of restraints. A band of leather, a full twenty-five centimetres in breadth, runs across her upper back and shoulder blades. Her head lies, turned to one side, facing a large ornately-wrought gilt-framed mirror, the latter tilted with apparent carelessness against the attic’s sloping dusty-grey wooden side-beams. A red band of leather, of a breadth as if chosen to be the measure of her forehead, encircles her hairline, passing just clear of those sweetly-tipped pixie ears, lest she should be distracted from the appreciation that such a passionately-iconic spectacle so richly deserves.
She lies saintly; a martyr to lust and temptation, to one man's sexual repression, to an antiquated religious dogma so self-righteously-twisted as to translate and translocate the shame of one onto the blame of another with terrifyingly justified ease. She lies with arms secured back along her sides, broad leather bands encircling thin wrists and elbows and with the crown of her head angled down into the filth of the boards, the fungi-musk of dry-rot a bass note to feminine perspiration and the more metallic lingering relic-tang of his earlier abuse of her person.
Crrrraack! Yet another slap of the intolerant leather leaves its imprint, the three flesh-tanning tails of the tawse each sharply resolved in bruising red-blue relief. In the reflection before her the mouth agapes anew in a long and silent scream. A searing white flash blinds her thoughts, shatters further, and again scatters, the shards of personality she scrabbles, still, to gather to her.
More tears fall. A muddy grey mire of dust and decayed pigeon droppings, further diluted, spreads its margins and deepens its incursion into the arid underfoot dirt, fated to retreat in drying; only the brown tide ring will remain to tell the story, it and its myriad brethren lying around and about.
The mental scars run deeper of course, crisscrossing well-rutted through thoughts and memories, worn deeper still and added anew with each abusive act performed upon her, and the subsequent beating it naturally earned her.
It wasn't even sex, not as such, not as she understood it to be. If he could only bring himself to ‘use’ her as nature and God, surely God, intended. It would be just as abusive, it would be rape just as certainly, she found the old man repulsive after all, and certainly she would earn just punishment for her tempting of him just the same, it was the devil's flesh, she understood that now, but it would be a natural act for all that. She might have been left with some semblance of self-respect, some sense of pride in her femininity, at the end of it all. And, yes, perhaps she might even be granted some modicum of relief from the eternally nagging frustration that accompanied her every waking moment, and her dreams too, those twisted phallic-daemon landscapes from which, pursued by yearning, she would again and again be chased, slithering drenched in sweat back into the darker reality of that dingy little attic and the unending hours of enforced Bible study - all that she might be purged of her sin.
And she would be purged in a different way too, before his every visit. She was no stranger to the Bardex nozzle, having to lie facedown on top of the little bed with knees drawn tightly up and buttocks pushed invitingly skyward, the latter naturally parted by the enforced position yet parted further still by the latex-gloved hands of his housekeeper.
Crrraaack! He has switched sides, the strike comes across the opposite buttock cheek; the silent cry comes again dryly in her throat, little more than a hoarse squeak now. She is cried out now, finished, yet the beating continues; it has to, it is an exorcism more than a mere punishment. And he has to exorcise the devil from the two of them, drive out the beast from within himself as much as from within the miscreant lying before him.
Always he has one eye on the roof beams above; he is, after all, a man of the cloth, he knows well the symbolism of the roof, the symbolism of charity, that which covers a multitude of sins. His other can't avoid contact with the origin of several of those sins, he has violated her there, mere moments before, and his thick seed trickles now from between those deliciously fleshy peach-mooned buttocks, yet if there should be some penalty, a penance demanded, then it is she who must pay; it is the girl who must be punished for the possession of that puckered rosebud, surely the devil’s-embellishment, that it should have driven such insane lust into God's own servant. This it had, time and again, demanding that she be chastised time and again; those once perfectly flawless globes were now marked and marred by countless strappings, canings and horsewhipings, just as that rosebud, set between, stretched and distorted by countless repeated and persistent violations, seemed plundered of its dewy youthful innocent freshness.
Whhhoosh! She cringe is in her bonds, nerves tearing, shredding, expectantly waiting the impact, the strike that never comes.
WWhooosh! Whhhoosh! Whhhoooossh! The stagnant, heavy atmosphere is rendered again and again and again, the three leather tails forcing still-air through turbulently splitting and twisting paths and each offering up its own whistling overtone to the diabolical aural assault; mere practice swings, nothing more.
Time and time again her buttocks tense, attractively dimpling; she tugs impotently at her bonds, her eyes squeezing tightly shut as if she might cower unseen behind their wrinkled shuttering.
Behind her, unseen, he is pirouetting around with surprising agility and a lightness of foot belying his age. He is exploring the cramped space beneath the tent of angled roof timbers with the tawse's backswing, seeking to best accommodated its arcing envelope, optimise his degree of freedom in wielding it, maximise the inertia imparted the flailing leather.
Whhoosh! Whhhoooossh! Whwhooosh! Still more practice strokes: he is twisting his body, shifting his weight from foot to foot and swinging the leather strap first this way and then that, exploring ever-increasing sweeping arcs and looking for all the world like some daemonic tennis professional.
Her nerves are stretched to their tensile limit, fraying, splitting, failing - she cries now as she never has before, screams her near-silent squeaking, hoarse, scream as if in pain beyond the mere psychological, as if each blow were indeed landing.
For an infinitesimally short, infinitely long, heavily-pregnant moment there is silence - all is still, deftly still... then... then...
The moment is irreversibly shattered: Ccrrraack! Crraaack! Cer,rrraack! Cerrr,rrraack!!! Forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. Right buttock, left buttock, right buttock, left buttock: a never-ending staccato rain of flesh-searing pistol shots, going on and on and on… Her eyes are wide open now, bulging, her mouth gaping in eternal mindlessly-soul-wrenching scream.
He is shouting, hollering in punctuated rhythm, red-faced, demented by anger, a strange anger, an anger born of confused and displaced guilt.
“Unholy slut! Harlot! Devil-spawned temptress of filth…”
Cerr,raack! Cerra,aack! Crrrrraack! Cerrr,rrraack!: forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. Pain flashes across her eyes in electric-white bolts, unimaginable pain, pain beyond enduring, then slowly, ever so slowly, begins to recede, fading along with his accusing, cussing voice, swirling and spiralling down into the welcoming arms of the abyss, the safety of the darkness. She is losing consciousness, blacking out as she has so many times before, so very many times, blacking out…blacking out… blacking… out…...
...White! All white! Everything! Everything is white!
White curtains are drawn around the bed, a common-or-garden hospital bed albeit with the chromed sidebars and grey metallic framework safely sheaved in soft matte-white plastic.
Through sleep-bleared eyes and blinked back tears the ceiling above defies focus, a depthless expanse of nothingness, a glance to the left and the right providing little beyond a glimpse of featureless walling and an obtusely-viewed misty day-white rectangle perhaps a meter to her left, the window somehow reassuring in its presence.
She has been tossing and turning fitfully for hours, her head swinging left and right then left again across the pillow, trickles of saliva left as traces of her distress upon the soft latex.
Soaked in sweat, the rivulets trickling down under the latex covers, her dark brown eyes had startlingly snapped open, gazing wide and uncomprehending from beneath curling dark lashes before just as suddenly disappearing behind defensively collapsing eyelids. Then slowly, ever so slowly, those lids had lifted again, fluttering, flickering, uncertain, those big brown velvet eyes swinging back and forth scanning for any hint, any clue that might separate dream from wakefulness, the normality of the situation seemingly too abnormal to fit her rational of reality.
The nurse leans over from the right-hand side, her smile friendly and welcoming yet tainted mildly with concern, a hospital nurse, a quite conventional hospital nurse, her white plastic apron softly crinkling over the perfect polyester-white of the uniform dress beneath: “ welcome back”, the words whispered in consideration of her patient’s alarmed state.
“…Wha…wha…where?”
“It’s okay, honey…everything’s all right now; we’ll look after you. You're in hospital, dear, a very special hospital. You’ll be quite safe here, quite safe now. Quite, quite safe….”
To be continued
Copyright (c) 2008 Garth. P. ToynTanen
I have to rush out today – I am off to Eastbourne on the sunny Sussex coast where my mother is enjoying a few days in a guest house. I am going to be there later today and will probably (hopefully) spend the afternoon outside a bar at the end of Eastbourne pier writing in the sun - and it is blazingly sunny here in London at the moment, so I’m quite optimistic. This evening, I hope, will find me ensconced in the Eastbourne Wetherspoons pub; come and say hello if you are an Eastbourne type, appreciate a good ale and happen to be in the vicinity. Tomorrow I may visit Brighton or Hastings. I am taking my trusty bike and hope to tour around a bit up and down the south coast, visiting Wetherspoons branches and of course writing if and when inspired – I am taking my netbook computer with me. I next expect to be back home at my desk on Tuesday 8th June (next Tuesday) but WiFi internet connections willing, I may update the blog while on the move and hopefully I will still be able to view my emails – so don’t be shy, write today.
Luckily I have recently been scouring the web for just that of late. I have been looking for inspiration to inform certain ideas I have developed that revolve around the possibilities inherent in the concept of an exploitative private or charity-run workhouse, but always with an eye to how such a scenario might be integrated into the concept of a behavioral research unit and perhaps overlap with the latter's asylum-like structure. 
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