Chapter 16: "The Arabian Doctor"

There was a ceiling, long, white, narrow, and far away; with bright florescent lights.

Cecily looked at it.

"Where am I?" she mumbled.

She was light, floozy, swimming in a bath of warm air and her body was lead. She forced her eyes to open, made them, looked round, but it was hard and it took effort. Every movement was sapping her energy. "What have you done? Where have you brought me?"

"You're at the barracks, Cecily," replied an echoey male voice. "We need to talk, but there's no need to worry. I'm sorting things out."

She saw a face: fuzzy and out of focus, yet still she recognized it as Albert's.

He was her boss, or perhaps her ex-boss, she wasn't sure which, because she'd jumped into a river, and somehow there had been a tramp and he'd stopped her.

"I've brought along some technicians," Albert said. "And also a doctor to make sure that everything's legal and above board. This is Doctor Wilson. Say hello, Cecily, and greet him."

There was a pain filling Cecily's stomach. Everything was blurry because someone had drugged her.

Who? Why?

And then she remembered the tramp and that he'd raped her. But what had happened next, and why was her memory blurry?

"I don't need a doctor," she mumbled, fighting a terrible treacle filling her muscles.

What had he given her and what had it done?

"That's not true, Cecily. I can see that you're not well and that you need professional assistance."

She groaned. "That's not true. I'm well and healthy, at least I was. I've never had a sick day in my life. You don't understand..."

Never mind the tramp. She saw a heavy muscular man and that he was standing next to Albert. Was this the doctor? He was wearing a cream Armani suit and he didn't look like a doctor. His hair was shorn and he had an hard, unforgiving face.

"Hello, Cecily," the doctor said in a thick, sickly Saudi accent. He had a lisp and he couldn't pronounce Cecily's name. Each of the sibilants was slurred and replaced with a hiss. "Cecily. The Major tells me you haven't been well."

"I'm all right," she groaned, screwing up her face because of the pain in her head and the sickness in her stomach. "I don't need a doctor... I'm depressed. I just need to rest..."

Who was he, this strange unfamiliar Doctor Wilson? It didn't make sense that he should be a doctor. He was an Arab and Wilson clearly wasn't an Arabic name.

"You do need a doctor, Cecily," Albert corrected, and he was patient, like a calm, long suffering father with a disobedient daughter, but not a Western father with a Western daughter. This was a different culture altogether. "You've had a mishap and Doctor Wilson is here to look after you. You need help, Cecily. Doctor Wilson can give you that help."

Cecily screwed up her eyes and forced them to focus. She saw that Albert was leaning across her and the doctor was a little way behind. There was a bright light behind them both and this blinded Cecily's vision. The light was coming from the Doctor. He had a torch and he was shining it into her eyes. "Oh my God! Where am I?"

She looked around and she saw that she was in the middle of a corridor. The walls were endlessly white and she was lying on a trolley and she couldn't move her limbs. They were wheeling her along the corridor and the fluorescent lights were high above her head, shining down into her eyes.

There were tiles: white tiles in the distance, and the tiles were moving closer as the corridor rolled away beneath the trolley.

"Doctor Wilson is here to do experiments, Cecily, experiments with the mind. You've given us a nasty shock trying to jump into that river but we've been here before and these lapses will stop. It's embarrassing, Cecily. It hurts me that you run from us, and so I've asked Doctor Wilson to take a look at you and make things better."

"God!" she muttered, twisting about in anguish on the trolley. She felt sick, ill, close to vomiting. "I don't remember..."

"That's okay. You don't have to remember. All that matters is that we're going to make things better: better, Cecily. Doctor Wilson has kindly promised to assist you and that's why he must perform the experiments on your mind."

There was blackness: darkness. Why couldn't she remember? Everything was a blur: floozy and sinister and dizzy. She remembered that Harriet had seen a red headed woman on her bed, and that Dominic had been fucking the woman's pussy.

"You need help, Cecily. You've been ill. It's an illness of the mind. Why else would you have tried to throw yourself in the river? I've looked after you. I've cared for you and yet you keep disappointing me and I don't like it. Things must change, Cecily. Things must change a lot."

She tried to focus, and there were tears in her eyes. She could see the Major - Albert; ah yes, and also the doctor; and two or three others, but what was that behind them?

It came into focus. God. She saw it: a photograph hanging on the wall at the far end of the corridor. It was a woman with her legs apart and she was lying in a large cauldron of tar. The woman was submerged in it and beneath the cauldron was a fire. There were logs and flames and they were lapping at the cauldron's edge, and the woman's expression was one of confusion.

There were several Arabs surrounding the pot wearing traditional thoub garments, that is, the white one piece costume frequently favoured by rich Saudi men. Each had his head covered by a shumagg - or a scarf - and an ogal - a head band - to hold it in place.

These men were like overgrown schoolboys in drag. They were like witches playing with their toys and they were dancing around the cauldron, while in it a naked woman was covered with black, sticky tar that clung to her face, her legs, her breasts and her thighs.

It was awful.

The smell of it was foul, acrid, and dry to the lungs. It was hot and unpleasant, and the steam hung above the cauldron like a heavy, poisonous storm cloud.

Cecily saw it and she sucked in her breath and she did her best to scream, for the photograph was disturbing and obscene.

Shit. She discovered that the sound was gone from her mouth and that she couldn't scream.

Shit.

Not only that, but Albert was whispering to the doctor and the words wouldn't stick in her mind. "If she won't cooperate," he was murmuring, "then I'll put the baby into care and I'll train it to follow in the steps of the mother. I'll do it, Mustafa. By the time it grows up, I'll have transformed it into a torture girl."

The doctor smirked at this and he looked at Cecily severely: at her flat belly and her Frankenstein breasts, and then down at her groin.

Hmmm. He was excited.

Cecily was wearing a satin blouse and a black pencil skirt with a deep slit at the back, but the Doctor's gaze held such power that he could see through her clothes to her flesh, and he wanted to fuck her. Cecily could read it, for his eyes were like darts, fierce, fiery and burning; and he had the power to pierce through her underwear to her bra and her panties and through these as well. He was exposing her womanly nakedness to his gaze; and Cecily couldn't cover herself and preserve her modesty because her hands wouldn't move.

"I want to go home," she moaned, her voice weakening and shaking, for the doctor was visually exploring every inch of her body, and he was turned on. He was examining the peaks of her ruined breasts and the valleys and chasms in between, and the more he looked at her, the weaker she got, and the more visibly turned on he was.

Oh God. She began shaking. He was studying her belly and her legs, and his eyes were lifting her dress and peering at her thighs and the tops of her stockings; nonchalantly peeling them away so that he could gaze at her without them, and then his eyes unfastened her bra and he tugged down her panties, dismissing both these garments as irrelevant, and he leered at her nude figure, staring at the space between her breasts and the other place, the lower place, the one between her legs, and he smiled. "I hope very much that we won't need to adopt little Ruth," he said. "I'm sure that given a few moments, Cecily and I will be able to come to an agreement, don't you think so, Cecily?"

And with these ambiguous words, the doctor leaned to his side and he whispered into Albert's ear. "The clothes," he fawned, clasping and reclasping his hands. "We must remove them for the sake of the experiment. Do you wish to do it yourself, sir, or shall I?"

Albert nodded gravely, his eyes haunted by lechery and pathos. He liked the idea of removing Cecily's clothes. That would be good. That would be special. "Ah yes," he nodded, well aware of how Cecily was clinging to his words. "Ah yes. How could I have forgotten? Let's do it. Let's do it right now."

But nothing was forgotten. Nothing was forgiven. Everything was part of his play. "Doctor Wilson is going to remove your clothes now," Albert enunciated at her clearly, helping Cecily to her feet and hooking his arm into hers and helping her to move forward. "You mustn't struggle, my dear. You must cooperate with us, if only for your baby Ruth's sake. You wouldn't want for Ruth to grow up to follow in her mother's footsteps, would you? So listen. For Ruth: we're going to the laboratory now. Do you hear me, Cecily? Doctor Wilson is taking you to the laboratory and he's going to undress you. He's going to take your pretty picture and he's going to hang it on the wall."

The colour rushed blankly to Cecily's face and she struggled for balance, staring blankly and helplessly into thin air.

God.

They were going to undress her. Obviously. It had been bound to happen. How could it not? And if she resisted, then they'd take her baby and give her to foster parents, and those foster parents would raise her and they'd train her to become a torture girl.

"I don't want to stay here," Cecily mumbled, struggling for breath. She could smell the overpowering stench of tar. "I want to go home."

"What was that, Cecily? Can you repeat it please? I didn't hear you?"

The two captors compelled Cecily to walk. They guided her across the floor towards a big white door on the far side of the room, but her feet were leaden and drugged and they were difficult to move, and they were becoming heavier and more leaden with each laboured step; and Cecily's balance was faulty.

She saw blinds obscuring the windows and a nurse standing attentively, watching her steps. "I'm not letting you go, Cecily," Albert whispered into her ear, manoeuvring her through the door and stealing a kiss of her neck as he did so. "You're not well. You need help."

But she was well. She told them again that she'd never had a day's illness in her life, but her lips barely moved and nothing escaped them.

Oh God.

She was in a second room now, a larger one. This room was the laboratory and it had plain white walls and equally harsh fluorescent lights. There were posters on the walls and books on the shelves, and a picture of a woman at the front, just as before. It was a different woman, sturdier, with bigger heavier tits, and she was naked just like the former one. Her legs were splayed open and her gash was covered in tar. But there was something else: she was heavy with child.

Cecily absorbed the scene, knowing that she was being watched by both the Major and the Doctor, and she felt confused, because the more she tried to avert her eyes from the terrible scene, the more she saw it.

Like the other woman, there was a cauldron of tar in the picture and the woman was being dipped in it.

Cecily daren't look. There was something erotically obscene about the picture, something primal and base, something cruel, because the woman was in pain and she was being humiliated and yet, ridiculously, she was playing with her sex and becoming hot and aroused.

"That's Harriet," Albert cried venomously, delighting to see Cecily's confusion and panic. "Do you recognise her? Eh? Do you remember her? Harriet's a torture girl and she became pregnant and she thought she could run away. Look at her! She's nine month's gone in that picture and about to drop. You can see the lump in her belly and the heaviness in her tits, but I taught her, eh, Cece, just like I taught the others. Harriet was tied to a rack and stretched, like the others were stretched, and that's how she endured her labour, being stretched, endlessly and relentlessly pulled apart, and electric current juicing her tits and zapping her pussy. When the baby finally popped out, I tarred and feathered her and I cut the nipples from her breasts."

Cecily wanted to appear interested in this history, but in truth, she was more worried about he things happening around her than in what had once happened to poor Harriet.

You see: there were four people in the room besides Albert and the Doctor, and one was a woman, and the woman was wearing a white coat and she was looking at Cecily like she was retarded or a recent scientific discovery. A man sat behind her and he was in front of a keyboard and he was trying to seem important, but it was the woman who held Cecily's attention because she was placing cotton sheets on a gurney, and the words "Harper Laboratories" were indelibly inscribed on the corner of each sheet.

Cecily lowered her head involuntarily and she saw bunches of cable lying strewn across the floor, untidy and random. Another man, the second, pushed them out of her path, but Cecily was too dizzy to think and too tired to speak. She shuffled past the clusters of cable with every one of her steps being a mammoth effort facilitated by Albert and the Doctor. They were dragging her forward. "Please!" her lips curled because Albert was standing her in front of the gurney and leaning her against it.

Her eyes were drooping and she looked at the woman and she begged for her help. It wasn't done loudly, but it was there in her eyes. Her lips moved silently and her heart cried aloud in pain, but the woman refused to look, to attend, and instead, Cecily felt cold hands on her back, unhooking her dress.

Jesus.

It was the Doctor. It was his hands that she could feel, his fingers, his icy caress, and Cecily felt sick. This vile man was touching her and undressing her. He was supposed to be a Doctor but Cecily didn't believe it and didn't trust him, so she kept begging the woman for help with her eyes, but the woman did nothing and instead, she moved away and typed something quickly on a keyboard and entered numbers and letters and acted as if everything were normal.

Except that nothing was normal, especially what the Doctor was doing. That wasn't normal. It was unpleasant and sick, for there was a pounding in Cecily's ears and a crawling of her skin for the Doctor was touching her back and unzipping her dress.

She felt the cold air and the clammy hands, and her arms wouldn't react and her hands didn't move.

That wasn't normal.

And then the doctor slipped her dress from her shoulders and pushed it down to her waist. He let it rest there awhile while he gawked at her, but then he teased it over her hips and he nudged it so that it floated down her legs to the floor.

"What am I going do with you, my dear?" Albert exclaimed, bending down and lifting Cecily's feet from the dress. She could feel his eyes peering through her green panties, staring at her ass cheeks and the womanly divide. She could feel him, his hot breath and his dirty lascivious gaze; and her face grew angry.