Marie's Descent

Chapter One “What could I have done?” Cheryl shrugged and took a sip of her coffee. It was still a bit hotter than she liked it. “There were three of them.” She looked across the small round table at her companion and brushed back a stray lock of dark brown hair. The look in her eyes was defiant, even taunting. “Ah…” Marie fumbled with her own coffee cup, looking down and away from Cheryl. The coffee shop wasn’t exactly crowded this late in the evening, but there were still too many people here who might overhear what had become a very strange and disturbing conversation. She gathered up her courage to look back into Cheryl’s dark brown eyes. “That might just explain what happened then,” she said. “It doesn’t explain what you told me earlier. You can’t be serious about going back!” “Why not?” Cheryl smirked. “WHY?!” Marie exclaimed. She realized that she’d raised her voice well above the background murmur usually favored here. Blushing, she looked around to see if anyone was now paying attention to them in the corner where they were sitting. No one appeared to be. “I mean…why?” she went on, much more quietly. “You don’t know what they might do. You could get hurt.” “No, I won’t,” Cheryl replied smugly. “Well…not beyond some spanking, maybe. They won’t really hurt me.” “How can you be so sure?” “Because they’ll want me to keep coming back.” Cheryl’s smile was somehow annoying. She took another sip of her coffee. Marie looked at her friend as if she’d just grown a third eye. “And you mean to tell me that you’re actually serious about going back?” “I do. I am serious.” “Geez…” Marie shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?” “Oh, come on,” Cheryl waved a hand. “Don’t we tell each other all about our latest boyfriends?” She leaned forward over the table. Without quite realizing it, Marie leaned forward too. “Think about it…” Cheryl began in a conspiratorial whisper. Her eyes were intense. “Haven’t you ever had fantasies? I mean the really dark and terrible ones where you’re completely helpless and not responsible for anything that’s going on? Ones where you get your brains f****d out?” She smiled slyly, showing even, white teeth. Then she winked. Marie sat back in her chair as abruptly as if Cheryl had slapped her. She felt her face reddening. “I…I don’t need to know this,” she shook her head. “I don’t need to know any of this.” “Maybe I just need to tell someone,” Cheryl shrugged. She leaned back herself. “Maybe I just have to tell someone. Mmmm…I’m getting a little moist just talking about it.” Now her smile turned lecherous. Her eyes seemed to unfocus for a moment. “Stop it,” Marie whispered desperately. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t just get up and walk out. “You don’t want to talk about it?” Cheryl asked. She took a quick look around. “Maybe it’s too public here? We could go back to my apartment, and talk about it there.” She picked up her coffee cup again and sipped at it slowly, smiling at Marie with her eyes over the plain white china rim. She seemed to be enjoying her friend’s discomfort as much as she was enjoying telling her tale. “Not here, not there, not anywhere,” Marie shook her head. “Suit yourself,” Cheryl shrugged. She put the cup down on its saucer with exaggerated care. “I’m going back next Friday, right after work. They said that they might even keep me there all weekend.” She smiled. It was her smug smile again. Marie wished that there was a way to wipe it right off of her face. *** It was a little after a quarter to five that next Friday when Marie gingerly opened the heavy metal door. It was the door that Cheryl had described to her in such loving detail back at the coffee shop, painted a flat institutional gray. Someone had stenciled “No Admittance Employees Only” on it many years ago in big black letters. The lettering was worn and faded now, but still readable, right down to the ancient misspelling. It was uncomfortably warm down here in the basement. It looked and felt and even smelled like something from a bad horror movie. There were pipes running everywhere, thick dust all over almost everything, and a constant din of machine noises. Only the floor was clean. Someone must sweep it every so often. Marie took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway. On the other side, it was even warmer and noisier. She found herself standing on a landing made of metal grating. A long stairway made of the same material led downwards at a steep angle, passing close by a big metal tank. Cheryl had described that also. Marie was glad that she’d changed into her jogging shoes before ducking out of work a little early. Trying to navigate those stairs in heels would have been near suicidal. She let the door swing slowly shut behind her. The one light in this room was dimmed by accumulated dust and grime. She waited a moment until her eyes adjusted to the gloom and then began making her way carefully down the stairs. She felt like an explorer picking her way through ancient tombs. Cheryl had described the route in enough detail that she didn’t worry too much about getting lost, but she was beginning to worry about how long it was taking her to cover the route. With all the noise down here she’d never hear anyone coming up behind her. She didn’t want to get caught. She just wanted to see for herself what Cheryl had been talking about, and maybe make sure that Cheryl didn’t get hurt. If they just left her down here no one would ever find her. Marie wound her way along passageways, between rumbling machinery, up and down…mostly down…more flights of metal grate stairs. Finally she came to another metal door. This one was also painted gray, but there was an old Civil Defense logo on it, and the legend: “Emergency Shelter: Capacity 550 Persons”. The doorknob turned easily. She opened the door and stepped through. When the door clicked shut behind her, it suddenly became much quieter. It was also cooler and drier here, and she could feel her skin prickling at the change. She was in a room. It was about the size of a large bedroom, but completely empty. The walls were painted beige; the floor was covered with dark and light linoleum squares in a checkerboard pattern. There were banks of fluorescent lights set in the ceiling, but they were off. Illumination came from smaller emergency lights hanging on the walls. Each wall had a door, wooden, not metal, set smack in the middle of it. Guided by Cheryl’s description, Marie went through the right-hand door into a hallway. As she passed a water fountain she couldn’t resist the urge to stop for a drink. The chilled water was very refreshing after her long passage through the bowels of the building. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and went on. This part of down-below was almost as much of a maze as the levels above it. Marie lost her way once and almost panicked. She kept looking, and finally found the place that she was looking for. It was a very large rectangular room. The walls along the long side went straight up for only six feet or so and then angled inwards. That and the high ceiling reminded her of a barn roof. There was a name for that kind of roof, but she couldn’t recall what it was. Old wooden school desks had been piled up against the far wall, three high and four deep. Cardboard boxes had been piled there as well. The only open space was a narrow passageway that led to a door. A couple of old gray gym mats had been laid down on the wooden floor in the open area. She could see folding chairs and a folding table leaning against the wall to her left. The near wall had nothing stacked against it, but there were two double doors to either side of the entryway. The doors were made of framed, angled wooden slats. Some of the slats had been broken over the years, leaving gaps. Marie went to the left-hand doors and opened them. As she’d suspected, it was a large storage closet. There was another gym mat folded up on the floor, with a couple of large cardboard boxes sitting on top of it. From the accumulated dust, it looked as if nothing had been disturbed in that closet for years. She shut the doors carefully and went over to the other side. This must have been the closet that they’d taken the other mats out of. It was empty except for a couple of the inevitable cardboard boxes, and there was no dust on the boxes or on the floor. Marie slipped inside and pulled the doors shut behind her, then tried to find a comfortable spot to watch any proceedings from. She had just moved one of the boxes…it was heavy, as if it was full of books…so that she could sit on it while she peered through one of the missing slats when the overhead lights came on in the room. She hastily checked her watch. It was already half past five. She heard the door she’d come through swing open. The hinge had a distinctive squeak. A moment later she saw two men walking over towards the mats. Both wore dark business suits, one brown, one blue. The blue-suited man was tall and very wide across the shoulders. The other man was not quite so tall or so wide. They sported similar short haircuts. When they stopped on the mats and turned to face towards the entrance she could see that blue-suit was the elder, in his late forties or early fifties. The other man looked to be in his mid to late thirties. “Well,” blue-suit said to his companion. “Let’s get started. She’ll be here soon.” He began removing his jacket. “How do you think she’ll take it?” Brown-suit asked as he began doffing his own jacket. “Any way and every way we give it to her,” Blue-suit chuckled. He had a deep voice that carried well. “Once she comes down here, she’s ours until we let her go.” He began removing his tie. Marie shuddered. What had Cheryl gotten herself into? She saw the men lay their jackets and ties on one of the desks. That done, they just stood there, waiting. She heard the door open again. She heard Cheryl whimpering before she could see her. Cheryl was naked, being hustled along by another man in another dark suit. Marie was so stunned at Cheryl’s appearance that she didn’t notice what color this dark suit was. Besides being nude, Cheryl had her hands tied behind her with some kind of black rope. It looked like more black rope circled her torso just under her arms, and her bound hands were in turn tied to it so that her hands were kept well up in the small of her back. Cheryl’s hair was still done up in the usual way that she wore it at work. She didn’t seem to be struggling, but she didn’t exactly appear to be cooperating either. The man who was urging her along pushed her up onto the mat until she was standing directly in front of blue-suit. She looked terribly small and vulnerable that close to him. The way they were standing Marie could see them both in profile. There were black ropes around Cheryl’s torso just above and below her breasts. It looked something like a harness. The ropes stood out starkly against Cheryl’s creamy white skin. Her breasts looked bigger and fuller than Marie would have expected, but that might be due to the tightness of the ropes. Her n*****s were erect, pinkish-brown and tilting slightly upwards…but that might be an effect of the ropes too, Marie thought to herself, cattily. And, it seemed that in the winter Cheryl didn’t bother with bikini waxing. Still, Marie had to admit that all the time Cheryl had been spending at the gym these past few months seemed to have been worth it. Her body looked fit, trim and toned. Blue-suit reached down and took a tuft of Cheryl’s pubic hair between his fingers. It looked like he pulled at it gently. Marie heard her friend whimper again. “You came back,” Blue-suit smiled down at her. “That’s good. Now we’re going to train you so that you’ll be worth our while.” Cheryl whimpered. She was shifting her weight minutely from one foot to the other. She looked anxious, Marie thought, but was it from apprehension or anticipation?