Chapter 1

The old man had been sitting in the cemetery for over an hour in the misting rain. The weather seemed to match his mood as James sat and thought about the things that were stealing the happiness from his life. He found himself doing that a lot lately. Ever since Mary left; not when she died but when the cancer took 'her' away and left that poor sick woman who died several weeks later.

A car driving by on the road blew its horn, somebody who recognized him and wanted to say hello. In a small town people are like that. Even after you tell them to go to Hell. He was aware that some of his friends were beginning to worry about him a bit. He knew all this sitting around pondering the whys and how comes of his life, made him seem slightly neurotic, crazy in a harmless sort of way.

Over the last few months James had been thinking of his life and what value it held without Mary. His whole world had been built around the two of them; he didn't think that he could ever be happy again without her. It was as if someone had ripped her from his heart like a huge tree, leaving a hole as big as a swimming pool in his soul. If only she had been a tree, then he could simply plant another one and wait a few years for it to grow.

What if he could replace Mary? What kind of risk would he take if he could get the old Mary back? Not her, he knew that was never to be, but a young and exciting girl like the one that he had fallen in love with. Could life become good again? Watching the younger people he knew, he doubted that anybody was going to be very happy. Nobody had the time for happiness these days. With all the damage that women's liberation had caused to the American family, it seemed that at least the women should be happy. But as James looked at the women he knew, they didn't seem happy at all.

The only people helped by women's liberation were big business. The fact that women would work harder and for less money was only the beginning. They made millions selling her the 'second car' so she could get to work. They made millions selling her the clothes that she would need to dress up five days a week. They made millions selling the machines that they made to take her place, washing machines and driers, microwaves and frozen dinners.

James began to think that anything you might do to reverse this way of thought would be a noble deed, a deed noble enough to shed some innocent blood for. Right and wrong were not fixed points any more; they wavered and moved about, different for a poor man than a rich one.

James felt that he had made a slight shift in the way his mind viewed everything. With this new viewpoint, he was re-evaluating everything. All his value judgments were themselves being judged. The rights and the wrongs of life had gotten hazy and unfocused in his mind. He began to believe that women were predestined to be submissive. It was this feature in their personality that allowed them to always make the sacrifices that their families sometimes needed. A mother would gladly go without food to feed her child. It was part of what made a mother a mother. A true lover will always be willing to serve her love. A woman is at her best when she willingly gives herself to another who loves her.

James trained animals for a living, could he train a woman to be an old fashioned girl submissive and obedient yet still let her keep her pride and spirit? He did it with dogs every day. The ideal burned in his mind, late at night he would sometimes wake up with a solution to an aspect of the training he would need to do. As his mind wrestled with the overall concept, some of the details began to come clear to him. He needed to write it all down and take the whole concept through one step at a time, see if he had missed anything. If, and that was a big IF, he did do something, he would be betting his life on the outcome.

It was two weeks later that he thought maybe his friends were right to worry about him. He felt just crazy enough to do something. He thought that he had worked it out to the point that it was time to fish or cut bait. He was ready to do something. And besides, he couldn't lose, without a partner life ain't worth living.

The thought that he might actually do this thing made him shiver with delightful anticipation. He started to tap out words on his keyboard. To his ears they sounded like the furtive tapping of Andy Dufresnes' rock hammer and just as surely as the hammer led Andy from Shawshank, his tapping tonight could free him. He loved that movie "The Shawshank Redemption". Just as a clear mind and a good plan had helped Andy to raise above all his unhappiness, it would do the same for him. It sounded almost like a prayer, 'help me rise above, Lord'. James smiled as he typed and he typed for the next three hours. Later he was in the kitchen drawing detailed plans for different devices that he would have to build, adapt, and invent in his shop. He figured that he had four weeks of steady work before he could be ready to make his first move.

Over the next few weeks James worked on his dream. He was lucky that his father had built a fallout shelter and taken great pains to hide it. He had hidden a large room under a storm shelter. It was impossible to tell it was there. He had even built a small elevator to get in and out with. There was no door only the elevator. His task was to convert that shelter into a cell, a place to train a woman as though she were an animal. It took a combination of both inventiveness and craftsmanship, neither of which could be rushed. When he was tired from making his arrangements he would take rides looking for the best spots to make the pick-ups. He had cruised by the spots where the hookers were found, but he had decided that they wouldn't do for him. He drove by the colleges, there were three in his city alone, and lots of pretty girls there, but they still had dreams of what life could offer them. In the end James had decided that he wanted an older woman twenty-seven or eight up to thirty-one or so. He wanted a woman who had already been disappointed by the rewards that life was giving her. So he began to look in supermarkets and shopping malls.

The days passed, and as they did he accumulated all the equipment he thought he might need. He still had trouble sometimes believing that he was doing it, really doing it. Today he finished the last of the pieces to the loop and stick device. Sometimes as he worked on a piece of equipment, as he would admire his work he would also consider how it was going to feel to all those women he would use it on. He would get to thinking about what he was really doing and have to stop and sit down. If, God forbid, he was wrong, if for whatever reason the woman didn't come around. His entire plan depended on his being able to make them come to terms with and accept their new role. A man had to consider the complete damnation of the thing if he was wrong. In reality he was betting everything that he could correct the social imprints of a lifetime in just four weeks. If he didn't succeed? Well in that sad case then he would be just one more of a large number of sex criminals with an innocent young person held against her will. An outlaw and a pervert, with the innocent victim downstairs to prove it. Or more likely, he would have to sit in jail while she rotted undiscovered in the secret room. What if somehow they shot and killed him, what would become of the girl in training?

On this day the thought was too heavy to bear, he decided to call it quits for the day. James locked the shop behind him and walked the hundred yards behind his house to the mound of earth. It stood only four feet higher than the ground around it but it was where the key to his happiness would be buried. He walked to the backside where the door was located; from here you could not be seen from the road or from any of the neighbors' houses, opening the door he stepped inside.

James found himself standing in a room eighteen feet by thirty feet. It was empty, there were shelves but they only emphasized the room's emptiness by being empty themselves. He was still unsure what he should put on the shelves, but he wanted this room to look used. Checking with a quick glance behind him that the door was shut, James walked to the far corner where there was a sump pump set into the floor. Reaching down he found the concealed latch in the drainpipe and pulled the lever. A motor whirred to life somewhere and the entire thing, sump pit, grate, and four square feet of the floor rose up, revealing it to be a small elevator. The sump pump was connected to rubber lines that coiled and uncoiled as it went up or down. James stepped inside and put his key in the control and the car started to go back down. When it stopped James stepped into another world.

He was standing in a room larger than the one above; it was the size of a small apartment.

It contained everything that a well set up apartment might have in it. There was a sleeping area with a nice queen size bed. There was a kitchen and dinning area, a living area with a wide screen TV and a computer, and a bathroom with a shower and a tub. The most striking thing though was the cage in the corner next to the bed. It was like an oversized dog crate but the bars were much thicker and one side butted against the wall. James inspected the floor closely, he had really put in some time on that but he thought that it was the most important step in the training. He flipped a switch on the panel above the cage and watched as little silver studs came sliding up through the rubber floor. It was one silver stud every inch in every direction. The entire floor was covered with the studs, anything bigger than a postage stamp would have to touch at least one of the studs. One was all it took. James smiled as he flipped the switch back to off and the studs sunk beneath the rubber surface. He examined the dildo that hung from the wall in the cage; bending closer he checked on the rocker switch located at its base. He checked the two pressure switches built into the wall two feet to each side of the rubber cock. Again, he found everything to be ready. He was like a man who had built the world's best fish tank. Now he needed to get a fish to put inside it. If he had the nerve to go through with it, he thought as he rode the elevator back up to the storm shelter room.

James walked into his otherwise empty house. It seemed his whole life was empty these days; the thought was one more in a long line of depressing thoughts that he was going through. He wife of some thirty years had passed, his children had found other lives in other places. His son was in the army and was now in Asia somewhere; he moved around a lot. His daughter was married and lived with an airline pilot in London. James only got a chance to see them maybe once every couple of years.

Truth be told, he had been lonely even before Mary had passed on. For the last few months of her life she had turned more and more to the church for everything that she needed. It had made him jealous at the time; he had drawn her away from her strict religionist upbringing and let her taste the joys of sin. But before she died she had left him and went back to the church like it was an old lover. The woman did know that she was dying, so why wouldn't she want to get right with God? If it had remained between God and Mary, James could have accepted it with good grace but he couldn't accept the church and all those self-righteous assholes sticking their noses into what should have been their time.

He put up with it until the end but after Mary had left him and went back to her God, James had quit the church and asked the holy-rollers and bible thumpers to stay away from him and his home. Since everybody belonged to one of the four churches that dotted the highway passing through town, he was pretty much a hermit. Just an old fart that was content to live out his life by himself.

Until lately, but here in the last few months he had found himself changing. James had gotten to the point that he wanted the comfort that only a woman could give to him. That's how the whole thing got started; he wanted a woman but he didn't want the sort of woman that was out there today. James wanted an old fashioned woman. This is where the daydream used to stop, because they didn't make women like that any more. Everything was different now though because he thought that he could make an old fashioned woman starting with a girl of today's world.

James poured himself a cup of coffee and carried it to the bathroom with him. Once inside he stripped off his clothes and adjusted the shower water temperature, sipping on his coffee while he waited for the cold water in the pipes to warm up. As he waited he looked at himself in the mirror. He saw an average man of medium build, with gray hair and a bald spot that was growing. All his life people had made remarks about how sparkly blue his eyes were, but the man he was looking at in the mirror had blue eyes that seemed to hold sadness rather than a sparkle to them. James missed his wife; not the old and sick woman who had just died but the young, hot, eager, and willing girl he had fell in love with. If people had seen a sparkle in his eyes, it was Mary who put it there. She had been his sparkle, but toward the end she lost that sparkle inspiring spirit. The cancer took her sparkle as well as his before it took what was left of her. He had lost that bright and twinkling happiness, it was gone forever. She was gone. Forever, leaving only sadness and emptiness in his soul.

James mentally jerked his mind from the downward spiral he had been on. She was gone but he and she had enjoyed so much together. "Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." The old quote filled his mind as he struggled to rise out of the depression he was sinking into. He had to do something or he was going to go crazy or kill himself.

He took another drink of his coffee before he let it get too cold to drink. As he sat the cup back on the sink he scanned down his body in the mirror. His body was in good shape for his age; all that working out with the dogs had kept him fit. The only unusual thing about him was his shaved pubic area; he had shaved his privates for the last twenty years. His mind rushed back to the first time. He had wanted her to do something that would put her in a submissive posture as she did a chore for him. The only thing he could come up with was shaving his privates.

The guy in the mirror smiled as he remembered that first time. Mary had knelt before him and lathered hic pubic area and then so carefully shaved him with a bic razor. Her fingers covered in shaving cream, she had lifted each of his balls as she shaved around them and behind them. It had been very sexy and it was something that they both enjoyed. James had had to do it himself since she went into the hospital; now he thought that he looked cleaner and neater. Somehow he felt that it would be similar to letting her grave go unattended, to allow a wild growth of hair growing between his legs.

He checked the water and then stepped inside the shower. He lathered himself up with the last of his wife's designer soap. She had found a good deal on the stuff and had bought a case; it had lasted him fourteen months longer than she had lasted. He wanted so bad to be able to talk to Mary about what he was planning. He considered his plan again, and wondered if she would've approved. Somehow he felt that she would've been very supportive about the scheme. The more he thought of it the more he thought that it might work. Best of all it would be fair for everybody, even the girl. James decided that he should at least go out scouting for a woman. If he found one he could take then he would take her, if not then some other day he would find the right girl in the right place. He rinsed the soap from his body and dried himself with a large fluffy towel. Tonight was the night. He dressed and started out to his truck.

James shook his head as he thought of all the money and time he had wasted on the secret room and all the equipment inside. As he walked through his kennels the barking of his dogs drowned out his thoughts. James trained dogs for service work and sold them to various state and government agencies. He took the time as he walked through the kennels to stroke each dog's head and pat his back; every dog got a kind word and a friendly pat on the back. By the time he reached his truck his body had already re-acquired the smell of a dog again.

James drove by all the spots that he had scouted in the past. He knew where it would be safe to take a woman. He knew where the cameras would see and he knew where the blind spots were. He drove through three supermarkets and a strip mall without seeing anything promising. He had time; he could wait until he found the snatch with no risk to himself, he just had to keep looking until he found it. It was nearly nine now, the mall would be closing and everybody would be coming out. When he got there he was surprised to see that the lot was fairly full. That's when it hit him that today was Friday and the stores stayed opened late on Fridays. But since he was here, he thought that he would take a look-see. He had been on his first lap when he found a Volvo parked in one of the blind spots that were safe from the cameras. A closer examination on his second lap on the lot revealed a school-parking permit from the University of Tennessee, and a Curves gym membership decal. This could be the one; he found a parking spot that was concealed from the cameras yet close to the Volvo. He settled in to wait and see what she looked like.

While he sat there James considered what he wanted from a woman. He wanted her to be smart, he wanted to be able to talk with her and respect what she had to say. He wanted her to be sexy, he wanted her to love sex and to enjoy it to the degree that her body had been designed to enjoy it. But most of all, he wanted her to know that she belonged to him. No matter what, she was his, to do with as he pleased. In the past the bride realized this when her father 'gave' her to her husband. She was his, maybe not her mind, but her ass belonged to her husband. Both the man and the woman understood this. That's what James wanted, a woman who would know that she belonged to him. She would never have to worry about mistreatment from James; like his dogs she would be loved and valued.

James' attention was drawn back to the Volvo by the motion of a woman walking toward the car. She was trim and had a brisk gait to her walk, she held herself tall and erect, seemingly confident and at ease. She wore a sweatshirt type of garment with a hood attached. James couldn't see her face. That made her even more of a good choice because it gave back a bit of luck to the game. She was twenty feet away when James decided to go for it.

He opened his truck door and reached into the bed, his hand gripped a long aluminum pipe with a sack on one end. A wire with a handle on the end ran up one side of the pole and formed a loop at the end. The sack, which was leather and lined with sponges on the inside, was attached to the loop of wire. It looked similar to a fly-fisherman's net only with a longer handle.

She was ten steps away when James sprayed the starting fluid into the sponges. He emptied the can as she turned to get her keys from her purse.

She never heard him as he swooped the sack over her head, pulling the handle and tightening the loop tightly around her throat. She was knocked to the ground by the force of the heavy sack hitting her shoulders, as she was falling the noose drew so tight that she couldn't make a sound. She was being strangled! She gasped for air, she tore at the loop at her neck with her hands. Suddenly the noose loosened, she could breathe, and she took several deep breaths, and passed out cold.

James removed the bag and checked to see if she was OK. She was, and very pretty with short red hair. He took her to his truck and placed her in the passenger side floorboard. He reached into the glove box and got a plastic bag. Opening it he removed a long clear flexible tube which shone in the dim light greasy with Vaseline. He ran the tube down the girl's throat to where it entered her stomach, just as he would a dog that needed feeding but for some reason couldn't eat. James then blew four sleeping pills into her guts, and withdrew the tube. He checked her pulse, slow and steady; he raised her eyelids and checked her eyes, pretty dilated. She would be out for a while. He got back out and got the loop, her purse, and keys from the parking lot. He got in, cranked the truck, and drove away. From the time he had picked her, it had only taken three minutes.

The woman never moved on the twenty-minute drive home. She was out cold when he stripped her and admired her beauty. She was totally unaware as he took two vials of blood from her arm. She never knew when he put her in the cage and locked the door. In a way it was a shame, because if he followed the plan he wouldn't be in the same room again for two weeks. He went back up on the elevator, watched, as it became a drain and sump pump again. It would take one hell of a search to find that secret room, James thought that he was safe on that score. The old man had a little bounce to his step as he walked up to the house.

Inside he took the time to put on a pot of coffee before taking the purse up and spilling its contents onto the tabletop. James glanced at the make-up, the clutter, the trash, and found the wallet. He thumbed through its credit cards and found her driver's license. Her name was Ruth Ann Traywick, not that it mattered, he would give her a new name. She had turned twenty-seven this last month. She had the receipts for her dry cleaning some six months ago; he put it in a bag. She had her parking permit at Wilder and Young Law offices. She must work there; he wondered if she was a lawyer, that would be especially sweet. He found her gym card and where she rented her videos. He smiled when he found a packet of condoms. What he didn't find was photos of a boyfriend or of family. He seemed to have caught himself a loner. He looked at the clock and was disappointed to see how little time had passed. He turned on the TV and tuned it to channel 069; the picture shown on the screen was Ruth Ann lying in the cage, still out. He left the picture on and made sure the sound was up. He fixed himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich.