Time had no meaning. And, on the other hand, it
had all the meaning in the world. Melanie felt that she had been lying helpless
on the floor of her bedroom for hours. There had been panic, frantic thrashing
around, flopping like a fish. Tears had come and with them a fear of
asphyxiation. At one point Melanie fainted, but fortunately not for long.
She could follow the slow march of time from the
shifting figures of the digital clock that stood on the bedside table next to
the lamp. They clicked off second by second and minute by slow minute. But they
had no real meaning. After an hour had passed she knew that no-one was coming
to her rescue. No-one knew she was there, alone, trussed and completely
helpless. She could not look forward to rescue with any sense of certainty, as
she would have done in an outdoor robbery, in a store perhaps when police or
security officers would have arrived on the scene sooner or later.
At first, after the burglar had left, Melanie had
begun to struggle in a disciplined, thoughtful way, testing the ropes carefully
to discover a loose turn or a weak knot that she could tease into unravelling,
fighting down the panic that threatened to overcome her second by second. The
unsettling, perverse thrill of anticipation she had experienced during the act
of being bound had quickly been replaced by fear and something akin to
claustrophobia. She was already hot and dishevelled. Her heavy hair, dark with
an auburn tinge, had been gradually spilled from its smart coif style when she
had been pushed onto the bed and her legs bound. The tying of the gag had
undone the hairdo fully so that now as she rolled from side to side it was
tousled, falling across her face and eyes. The ordeal began with the subtle
taste of her own lipstick and the soft slick silken feel of the wadding that
filled her mouth and resisted all the efforts of her tongue to dislodge.
Everything held fast. Within a very few minutes
Melanie surrendered to the panic that had been building up inside her and
bucked and tossed energetically until sheer exhaustion muted the panic just as
effectively as the immoveable gag muted any sound she made. There was a time
when she lay face down on the floor, her head to one side, and sobbed
uncontrollably. Finally, something that she identified from her safety first
training as shock, and real exhaustion, set in. Melanie was very fit and supple
but for the time being her reserves of energy were thoroughly used up, and for
a long while she lay still.
Belatedly, she took the burglar's advice and
followed her breathing attentively. She could breathe with comparative ease
through her nose. A little air could also be drawn in around the gag. But it
was stale and it grew increasingly difficult to breathe through her mouth as
the wad of silk became saturated and therefore more airtight. The gag caused
her to drool and a small line of saliva trickled down the side of her mouth
that was close to the floor. The corners of her mouth itched and her jaw ached.
The silk organza material stretched taut over her lips and around her cheeks
was scratchy enough to begin a slow chafing as she tossed her head from side to
side. Perhaps the discomfort would have been less if her captor had used one of
the pure silks, Melanie speculated, like the additional wadding that cushioned
the hard edges of the large knot that filled her mouth.
The coercion in and around her mouth was
insupportable. Her jaw was held open but the gag allowed some movement. It was
not a jaw-breaking tie and she found that she could open her mouth wider. But,
every time she did, the silken wedge seemed to expand to fill her mouth. It
became no looser with her mouth stretched wider than with her mouth open to the
lesser extent that the gag enforced. In the way it was tied it could not slip
into the back of her throat to choke her, but neither could it be pushed out
over her chin. It was there for keeps.
Melanie's bonds were similarly escape proof, but
without the deceptive flexibility that the gag appeared to allow. Her wrist
ties remained fixed. She still could not twist her wrists within them and her
struggles had no effect in loosening them at all. Moreover, she found that
making a fist and pumping up her muscles succeeded only in cutting off the
circulation to her hands. This happened during her frantic struggles and it
took many minutes of lying still before the tingling in her hands and the pins
and needles in her arms subsided. She had perforce to relax her hands and arms.
This made doing anything with her fingers difficult, if not impossible. The
same immoveable constrictions applied to her legs and arms.
She was now thoroughly dishevelled, almost in a
state of dishabille. The light blue skirt - it was a kind of satin material -
and the filmy silk half slip beneath it were rucked to her thighs. The third
and fourth buttons of her blouse had come adrift revealing a generous strip of
black lacy bra. The ropes that bound her arms above the elbows and those that
wrapped her body in a tight embrace kept the silk taut around her body and
partly across her breasts. A thin sheen of sweat covered Melanie's brow, face,
and neck and made her blouse cling to her body. The smart little neck square
that had ben folded into a neat choker was now a wisp of damp silk.
From time to time, Melanie lifted her head and
listened for the welcome step of anyone passing in the street below, perhaps
walking their dog that evening or strolling to the corner store. But on the
rare occasions when she could hear footsteps, she found herself unable to do
more than croak through the stifling silk that filled and wrapped her mouth.
She experimented a lot, lifting her head, taking a deep breath, and calling as
loud as she could. Neither a cry of help nor a scream produced anything more
than a thin throaty squeal or a very muffled 'mmmmpphh.'
Why had she got herself into this mess? Melanie
relived those first fateful minutes when she confronted the burglar, and
wondered at the casual way she had invited him to tie her up. She realised that
she need not have volunteered the information that there was rope in the house.
There was in fact a lot of it, and he had used it all on her. She knew that her
first thought had been to cooperate because she was terrified for her own
safety. She had wanted him to take what he needed and leave as quickly as
possible. Melanie had not screamed because she knew from experience that very
little sound could penetrate the walls of the well-built structure. But perhaps
she had cooperated too readily. If she had been bound with only a few items
such as her scarves, some of which still lay scattered across the dresser, it
might have been a different story. She might have been able to work herself
free after a little trouble.
Melanie relaxed into her bonds and began to
consider ways and means of getting free. Several possibilities had crossed her
mind before, but in her panic she had not considered them soberly. Now she
worked herself upright with surprising difficulty, pressing her body against
the large divan bed so as to get onto her knees, until she was sitting
side-saddle on the carpet, a position that is natural for many supple women.
Her legs felt like jelly. With her arms so tightly fastened behind her, making
her body a single bundle of helplessness, the danger of falling back onto her
side was ever-present. She looked about the room for anything that might be
used to set herself free. 'I've plenty of time to suss this out,' she thought
ruefully.
Was there really a way of getting out of this
mess? The window was too high to reach, to kick out for instance. Similarly,
smashing the dresser mirror, or the huge floor-to-ceiling mirror that was part
of the built-in wardrobe was out of the question. Her fingers were virtually
useless and Melanie did not relish trying to cut her wrist bonds with broken
pieces of glass. The same caveat went for scissors - the ones on the dresser
were too small to do much good anyway - and there was no knife in the room. Melanie
contemplated somehow getting through the house to the kitchen and attempting to
free herself with a knife from there. But the same note of warning about using
sharp things with hands that were almost numb stayed in her mind. Anyway, the
bedroom door was closed, the door knob out of reach, and Melanie did not have
the energy to try stunts like standing on legs that were bound together
immoveably. There was no rough surface anywhere in sight on which she might
attempt rubbing her bonds.
Being almost a fanatic about fitness, Melanie had
studied books on safety first and home survival. In fact, one volume on
survival that lay on the coffee table in the living room contained advice about
what to do if she ever found herself bound and gagged. She had only been
reading it that morning looking for ideas for the romantic thriller she had
begun to write. Maybe, Melanie thought with dismay, she had been too
cooperative with the burglar because fresh in her mind were ideas about ropes.
The reality was that the book's advice about wriggling out of ropes was
obviously of no use whatsoever. How long ago it seemed now, the bright fresh
morning light as she walked the few blocks from the underground to an office
she would see the last of for two weeks.
'If I can't get out of these bonds,' she
speculated, 'maybe I can do smething about the gag.' What had the book said
about it? She remembered that rubbing one's face against something such as a
carpet could loosen a gag. But she had tried that already during her convulsive
struggles, with a notable lack of success. Hooking the gag over something,
however, was a possibility. Melanie looked around for anything in the room that
might offer this step towards freedom, because if she could free her mouth she
could yell loudly enough to be heard from the street outside, couldn't she? She
knew immediately that this was not realistic. The thickness of the walls would
see to that. And Melanie realised that her thoughts were beginning to wander,
because the same ideas about getting free from the ropes and the gag were
turning over and over in her mind. But it would be such a relief to have the
stifling gag out of her mouth.
The wooden knobs of the chest of drawers beckoned,
and with slow painful efforts she began to inch her way across the floor
towards them. Her slow passage across the carpet pushed the folds of skirt and
slip higher up her thighs, so - although there was no-one to witness her
embarassment (and how she wished there was!) - in a spirit of modesty she lay
down upon the floor and rolled her way across. The choice to travel quickly so
exhausted Melanie that she lay still for at least ten mnutes, catching her
breath as well as she could though a gag that was now heavy and sodden in her
mouth. When at last she managed to prop herself into a sitting position again,
with one shoulder against the front of the chest of drawers, she found to her
vexation that the drawer knobs were too rounded and smooth to slip beneath the
folds of cloth wrapped tightly about her face.
With a sob of frustration, Melanie sank to the
floor and lay on her side, utterly defeated. The bedside clock continued its
inexorable measurement of time, but Melanie closed her eyes wearily and tried
not to think about the hours of torment that lay ahead.
*
Meanwhile, Brendan had been driving in circles for
hours, never going far from the suburb where he knew the beautiful silky woman
lay bound, gagged and helpless as a result of his doing. His mind was in
turmoil. Common sense told him that it was wiser to put many miles between him
and the house he had just robbed, to dump the stolen car, and go to ground in
his comfortable apartment by the ocean.
But he could not get the young woman's eyes out of
his mind, the way she had looked at him over the gag with a mixture of pleading
and ... something else that he could not quite define. Excitement? That
couldn't be. She had been genuinely frightened. Or was it the way she had
cooperated that shook him so badly? She didn't have to tell him about all the
rope in the cupboard. But she was not to know at that point that he had a large
roll of duct tape waiting to immobilise her svelt body and limbs in its sticky
unyielding embrace.
Brendan admitted that he had enjoyed tying her up.
His still partial erection proved it. The fragrance and warmth of her body
lingered with him, augmented by the expensive silks of her apparel. The backs
of his hands tingled at the memory. There had been something of innocence
almost, in the way she had submitted herself to his expert ministrations,
trusting though unwilling. It did not matter that she had no options. She could
have put up a hell of a fight if she had wanted to. The muscle tone in those
soft limbs told Brendan that she was fit and active.
And when she entered the bedroom he had been
preparing to spring, to prevent her from letting out a scream, and his
intention was to be as rough as necessary to subdue his victim. But she had
disarmed him completely. He could describe it as freshness and natural beauty,
qualities that seemed to fit perfectly although he knew they were cliches. And
she was beautiful: small, graceful, refined. He remembered her slender,
sensitive fingers as he bound her wrists, how they remained relaxed most of the
time until they stretched involuntarily, as if in pleading, when he tightened
the cinching.
He felt a heel, the way he had purposely trussed
her so tightly. With all the other women he had been forced by circumstances to
bind he had left a way out, a loose knot in a strategic position that could be
reached by questing fingers, or an open door. On one occasion he had
intentionally tied the bandaging gag loose enough for his prisoner to work the
packing out of her mouth and call for help. Why had he tied this fay woman so
tightly? He had not taken a dislike to her, quite the contrary. Maybe it was
because he did not want her to escape.
'To hell with it,' he muttered to himself as he
turned onto the freeway that would take him to the beachside, 'Brendan,
Gentleman Burglar, nah. Someone will find her. A rich woman like that probably
employs a cleaning lady who'll come in the morning and set her free.'
*
While Brendan was having these thoughts, Melanie
was gazing hopelessly around her room for the hundedth time. The digital clock
showed that it was just 1.34 am. She had arrived home late from work because of
last minute shopping somtime around 7.00 p.m. That meant she had been tied up
for more than six hours. Her body felt stiff and sore all over. Her shoulders
in particular ached abominably from having her elbows tied into the small of
her back. Her mouth and especially her lips felt chafed and raw. There was
almost no feeling left in her fingers because the heating of her body in a room
that had now grown warm as well had the effect of making her arms and legs swell,
as they do when travelling in cramped conditions in buses and planes. The only
sound she could now make was a faint croak because her mouth and throat were
dry. As if all this was not discomfort enough, Melanie had a splitting headache
and her face felt hot and sticky from the wrappings of the gag.
She tried to think about something, anything, that
would help to take her mind off the frightening ordeal. What sort of man could
he be to tie a woman up in such a way? she wondered. His hands had felt strong
and she fantasized that they might also be surprisingly tender if given the
chance. 'Oh my god,' she thought with a start, 'I must be going crazy. Am I
getting a crush on my burglar? Impossible.' She tried to think of something
else, but she could not help feeling curious about what kind of person would do
such things to her. There she was, thinking in circles again!
Melanie lifted her head and with swimming eyes
looked at the clock. The time was now almost three. In another two hours the
sun would be pouring in through the gap between the window curtains. With a
sigh she resigned herself, closed her eyes, and tried to relax in her bonds.
But she had no sooner dropped her head to the
floor when she jerked up suddenly, startled by a faint sound coming from
somewhere in the back of the house. The tight gag deadened her hearing and she
could not be sure, but it had sounded almost like the squeal of that window
with the stiff frame. She listened with a mixture of apprehension and hope.
Surely it could not be another burglar. And it was too early for adventurous
kids, some of whom had trespassed into her back yard on a number of occasions
to retrieve their basketball. At that time of morning it was more likely to be
the neighbour's cat. But a cat that opened windows?
Melanie strained anxiously to listen for any
further sound. She had probably been mistaken anyway. But there it was again,
this time without a doubt the squeaky floorboard near the kitchen pantry. Thank
God for old houses! She did not know whether to be relieved or frightened when
she now made out soft footfalls in the hallway approaching the door of the
bedroom where she was imprisoned. She remembered telling one of her friends
that she would appreciate it if they visited the house occasionally while she
was away. Maybe that was it. Some people were early risers. In a fever of
anticipation, Melanie lifted her head and attempted to yell. No sound came. But
he key was turning in the lock.
The main light in the room was switched on.
Melanie blinked and turned her head away for some seconds until her eyes had
become accustomed to the brightness. When she raised her head to see the
identity of her rescuer her heart missed a beat. It was a man dressed in black
with a stocking mask over his head. The burglar, her burglar, was back.