Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

PUNISHMENTS Ray Garton

I arrived in Manning the day after I read of Jayne's death in the paper. It was front-page news across the country, the kind of story the press wrings dry.

I wouldn't have read it if I hadn't seen Jayne's picture, her big tortoiseshell glasses perched on her small nose, dull brown hair gathered in the back, her usually timid, fleeting smile opening brightly for the camera. It was a recent picture and she'd changed little in the last ten years.

I immediately arranged to take a day off work, saw that my pet, Clarissa, had plenty of food and water, and left Los Angeles for Manning.

I was raised in Manning, a small Seventh-Day Adventist village in the Napa Valley. My parents still lived there, but when I arrived, I went straight to the boy's house. It was easy enough to find; reporters were gathered on the sidewalk waiting for a glimpse of the killer. I parked my rented car across the street and stared at the house, wondering what the boy was like, how he'd met her. And if she'd done to him what she did to me…

When I was sixteen, I thought of Jayne Potter only as the woman who, each week, placed a square brown cushion on the church organ bench, sat down, and played for services. I didn't find her attractive; she had fair skin, dressed plainly, and always wore her hair in a bun or braided. She didn't wear makeup, but, because that was against Seventh-Day Adventist rules, neither did any of the girls at the Adventist prep school I attended. They, however, were the stars of my fantasies; although restricted by dress codes, they somehow managed to dress in ways that accentuated their curves and angles to the fullest. Repression is the mother of creativity, I always say.

Miss Potter attended every church function and gave more than her share of time to its causes. At a bake sale or potluck, she was impossible to distract, so great was her concentration on her duties; she seemed driven, as if she had to participate in church activities, as if she were repaying an important debt. But in spite of her sizable contributions to the church, the congregation seemed to ignore her; sometimes I even thought they were shunning her. Most people that participatory were quite popular socially. Not Miss Potter. She smiled and nodded a lot but spoke little and was seldom if ever spoken to.

It wasn't until she came down with a summer cold and my mother had me take her some homemade cream of vegetable soup that our relationship began. I drove to her place in my mom's car. Miss Potter lived on the north side of town in a mobile home nestled by itself at the foot of a shady hill.

It was a hot summer day, but she came to the door wearing a heavy white terrycloth robe. I didn't expect to be invited in, but she did so immediately. Once inside, with the glare of sunlight out of my eyes, I could see that she wasn't wearing her glasses and her hair was down, full and wavy on her shoulders and back, and I discovered something. It wasn't an instant discovery; it took a while to sink in and wasn't fully absorbed until after I'd left her. I discovered that Miss Potter was beautiful.

She didn't seem sick. Her eyes were puffy, but that might have been from crying. I would later realize that she had been. I lost count of the times I found her crying when I came over for my visits. In fact, I lost count of the visits.

Inside, her trailer was dimly lighted; only one small lamp was on by the sofa, but its dark gray shade shed little light. It was sparsely furnished and the walls were bare except for the most hideous portrait of the crucifixion I've ever seen; blood, dark and viscous, poured from Christ's head, hands and feet, and from the gaping hole in his side. His face was a long, cadaverous nightmare.

She thanked me for the soup, took it to the kitchen, then sat on the sofa with a smile, gracefully folding her legs beneath the robe. She patted the cushion beside her and I sat, but there was nothing graceful about my movements. I was a clumsy and shy teenager, particularly in the presence of females. Especially ones wearing robes. Miss Potter managed to put me at ease, though; we made small talk about school and the upcoming church picnic. As she spoke, she frequently patted my shoulder, hand, and knee — innocuous conversational gestures, but ones I'd never noticed in her before. She was somehow… different.

After insisting I call her Jayne, she discovered my interest in reptiles and softly said, "Ah, then, I have a book you'll enjoy." She scooted forward and leaned across my lap toward a small bookcase against the wall.

My heart quivered like Jell-O. A shadowed valley plunged between the lapels of her robe and flesh shifted slightly; her skin was white as summer clouds and a faint green-blue vein meandered over the curve of her left breast, disappearing in the shadows. I wanted so badly to follow that vein down her robe that my fingers actually twitched to reach out and pull the lapel aside. I blushed furiously and stood when she moved, preparing to leave.

At the door she gave me the book, gently touched a cool hand to the back of my neck, and said, "This will give you an excuse to come back and see me." As I stepped out, something brushed my behind; it could have been a shifting wrinkle in my jeans or the corner of the end table by the door… or her fingers.

Of course, it was her fingers, but I couldn't bring myself to believe it then. I did, however, masturbate my way through variations of that fantasy for the next few nights in the secrecy of my bedroom. Masturbation is, of course, another no-no among Adventists, but I've often attributed any stability I may now possess to my refusal to stop masturbating even after my biology teacher told the class it could cause a nervous breakdown.

I wanted to talk about this fantasy, as boys do, with my best — and nearly only — friend, Gary Sigman, but Gary wasn't saying much to anyone that summer. The previous fall his parents had divorced; both were teachers at the Adventist grammar school in Manning, and lost their jobs because of it. (The church cannot prevent divorces, but it does punish those involved for allowing their marriages to fail.) Gary became pale and withdrawn. Everyone attributed his subsequent sullenness and weight loss to the upset of the divorce. Everyone but me. I knew something else had happened to Gary; he looked older and didn't laugh much anymore. But it was out of my reach, so I decided to let him make the first move to open up. If he had, we might have spent those summer evenings on my back porch whispering about Miss Potter. But he didn't.

When I returned the book three days later, Jayne met me at the door wearing that same robe. I thought that was odd; it was midafternoon and surely she was no longer ill. She greeted me pleasantly and led me to the sofa where she presented me with another book. It was huge and full of color photographs of rare and exotic reptiles.

"I don't want to loan it out," she said, sitting close to me and opening the book on our laps, "but you're welcome to look at it here if you want. Anytime."

As we paged through the book, her leg rubbed slightly against mine; beneath the book, my crotch began to bulge. I realized I had imagined nothing three days before but didn't know what to do; dry-mouthed and trembling, I stared blindly at the book, aware only of the burning friction between her leg and mine. When she unexpectedly pulled the book away, I found myself staring down at my erection. Jayne was staring at it, too. Smirking. She slowly reached over and touched it. Caressed it. Squeezed it slightly. My lungs convulsively sucked in a breath.

"Do you like hot fudge sundaes, Paul?" she whispered, leaving the room to clatter around in the kitchen a moment. "I do. Would you like one?"

I think I shook my head.

She returned with a bowl of ice cream, chocolate syrup, nuts and a cherry, and said, "I would." Placing the bowl on the coffee table, she knelt before me and began to undo my belt.

I was paralyzed, I imagined my mother's horror should she walk in and find me. I remembered Pastor Helmond's recent sermon in which he declared, "Sex is a sweet-tasting poison which will surely kill your soul!" I remembered my Bible teacher at school telling the class, "Sex is such a dangerous, unhealthy diversion that, when faced with sexual desires, even married couples should take a cold shower or run around the block instead of having intercourse unless, of course, it's done only to reproduce." Long before I even knew what it was, I was told sex was a moral crime, the most treacherous curve on the road to heaven. But when Jayne took me in her hand, I lost all fear of the Lake of Fire that I had so long been warned about. Placing the bowl on the floor between my legs, she turned off the lamp, spooned ice cream and chocolate onto my cock, sprinkled nuts over it, placed the cherry on the head, and hungrily, lovingly, and oh so deliciously devoured her sundae.

Her sofa converted into a bed, which we put to great use that afternoon. I was clumsy at first, but soon lost my self-consciousness as she covered my body with nibbles and kisses. I wanted to see her, touch her, taste her, but when I tugged at her robe, she refused to remove it. I rolled on top of her, but she pushed me away and gasped, "No, no, like this," and rolled onto her knees and elbows. I knelt behind her, she guided me in, and immediately began to groan. It wasn't a sound of pleasure, it was a groan, and I feared I was hurting her somehow. When I started to pull out, she snapped, "No, do it! Hard!"

My thrusts were uncertain at first, but I soon lost myself in waves of new sensations. The robe's hem gathered between us, but when I tried to slide it up so I could stroke her back, she quickly pulled it back down again and began uttering garbled words between her gasps.

I leaned forward and whispered, "What? What'd you say?" but she spoke into her pillow after that. It would be weeks before those words became clear to me.

I went home on weak knees, saying little to my parents on the way to my room. I remained in a stunned silence until the following afternoon when, at her request, I returned to Jayne's trailer like a somnambulist returning to bed. Once again she was wearing that robe; once again she seated me on the sofa. There she stripped me and licked every inch of my body except my cock until I put her hand on it myself and breathed, "Please… please…" She opened the bed and, as before, left her robe on and cried out as we writhed together, her sobbed words buried in her pillow.

There was only silence afterward; although we exchanged small talk before, we never spoke after. We never spoke of what we did. As we lay side by side that second time, I tried to stroke her hair, her neck, but she pulled away and curled into a trembling ball. Finally she whispered hoarsely, "Come back at three tomorrow."

Her strange behavior was lost on me at first; I was too overwhelmed by the fact that I was HAVING SEX. On top of that, it was with an OLDER WOMAN. And I suppose I got a charge from the fact that my lover was timid Miss Potter. Church became a new experience altogether; each time I saw Jayne mount the organ bench after carefully putting her cushion in place, I immediately grew hard — right there with Mom and Dad in our usual pew. I covered my erection with my leather-bound monogrammed Revised Standard Version Bible. I watched her throughout the sermon; sometimes her hips squirmed on that cushion, and I wondered if she was thinking of me.

She wasn't.

In the middle of our third week together, Jayne went into the kitchen to make lemonade when I arrived. I spotted her cushion on a chair against the wall and, knowing that her firm ass squirmed over that cushion during church services each week, I couldn't resist sitting on it myself. I gulped the cry of pain that came from what felt like hundreds of tiny needles puncturing my behind. I shot to my feet, grabbed my ass, then picked up the cushion. It was made of heavy brown corduroy and was flat and hard on the bottom. But it was not cushiony.

It was stuffed with tacks.

When I heard her coming, I dropped the cushion, spun around, and tried to return her smile. She leaned forward to put the tray of lemonade on the coffee table, and I stared at her ass, thinking of how she always kept it covered when we fucked, realizing that perhaps it wasn't as smooth and touchable as I'd thought…

For a while my thoughts were on that cushion and the questions it raised. But as we began to fuck — and that's what we did; I preferred to think at the time, in a naive sort of first-love way, that we were MAKING LOVE, but that simply wasn't the case — she started calling out again and I listened carefully to her words. '

"I'm sorry… punish me… I'm so sorry I made you hard… p-punish me, Daddy, punish me!"

I stopped when the words registered, but she reached back and gripped my thigh, dug her nails in, and cried, "Don't… stop!"

I think she tried to hide her words after that, but I knew what she was saying. I know now — and probably knew then, to some extent — that I should have realized something was very wrong with quiet, timid Miss Potter and I should have stopped seeing her immediately. But she was my first lover and my first addiction. I never allowed myself to consider ending our relationship; I knew I couldn't. But her cries for punishment — from her father! — stayed with me and echoed in my dreams.

Jayne told me to return on Sunday, three days later. It was our longest separation yet and made me realize how attached I'd become to our visits.

I fidgeted a lot as I watched her in church that Saturday. After services there was a potluck lunch and I went to the car to help Mom carry in the food she'd brought. I asked her what she knew about Miss Potter, but she obviously didn't want to talk about her, so I dropped it. After lunch, as Dad and I were bringing the freshly washed dishes back to the car, he said, "Your mother said you asked about Miss Potter. How come? You hear something?"

I got a little nervous. "No. I just wondered… well, she's so involved in the church but has no friends, no family. Just wondered, that's all."

"Well, I'll tell you. Get in." We got in the front seat and he chewed on a toothpick as he spoke. "Miss Potter's a good woman. She's devoted to the church but gets no thanks for it. Your mom doesn't like talking about her because… well, she just doesn't think it's right. There's a lot of people in this church could take a lesson from her. Anyway, when Miss Potter was a little girl, her father, Hudson Potter, was pastor of this church. One night when she was nine or ten, Jayne left her house, walked to the St. Helena police station, and said her daddy was… molesting her. Sexually." He cocked a brow. "Know what I mean?"

I nodded, feeling a chill coming on.

"There was a big scandal. Pastor Potter was suspended for nearly a year. Stopped coming to church and just stayed in their little house by the grammar school. Nothing was done, really. It was all hushed up. One Sabbath about eighteen months later, Jayne asked to speak before the congregation. Said she made it all up after having an argument with her daddy. The devil had taken hold of her, but now the Holy Spirit was moving her to make amends. Everyone nodded and clicked their tongues like they'd suspected as much and offered to return Potter to the pulpit. But by then he'd become a recluse. Most said his daughter had broken him. Ruined him with her cruel lies. He died at home about a year later. Jayne's never been forgiven even though most of the people here don't even know what happened."

"Do… do you think she was telling the truth?"

He chewed on his toothpick a moment. "That's between her and God, son."

It was another warning I should have heeded but didn't. Five deadly words occurred to me after Dad's story: Maybe I can help her.

After sex the next day, when Jayne once again refused to let me touch her, I said, "But I want to. You… you do things to me that feel so good, but… you won't let me touch you… make you feel good."

"Is that what you want?" she whispered, smiling.

"Yes."

"You'll do anything I want?"

I smiled. "Of course."

God, I was such a babe in the woods.

"Then come back on Tuesday at three and you can."

My next warning came Tuesday morning when I went grocery shopping for Mom. As I left the store hugging two brown bags, I saw Gary Sigman leaning against the car. He looked horribly pale and thin in the bright sunlight. Before I could greet him, Gary said, "I saw you leaving her place, Paul. Twice."

"What're you —»

"You know. Stay away from her. She's sick." He stared at me silently for a moment, whispered, "She'll make you do bad things," then hurried away, leaving me with my groceries.

It bothered me, yes. I gave it careful thought, yes. But did I do what he said?

No.

Jayne had the bed open when I arrived, and she immediately began to undress me, whispering, "You promised… anything I ask… anything that will make me feel good…" She had me lie on my back, reached under the bed for something, then put it on the bed beside me. Hiking the robe up only slightly, she turned her back to me, straddled me, and sighed as I entered. She moved on me slowly for a moment, then pointed to the object on the bed, rasping, "Take that."

I did. It was a three-foot-long whip with three strips of braided leather sprouting from the handle, each knotted at the end.

"Now whip me!" she hissed.

When I stuttered for a moment, she repeated the order firmly. My first strike was weak and uncertain, and she cried, "Harder!" I brought the whip down again — "Harder!" — and again — "Har-derrr!" — until it was smacking loudly against the taut terrycloth on her back. "Yes!" she cried, bucking furiously on me. "Punish me! I'm sorry I made you hard, Daddy, sorry I told, sorry, sorry, sorrysorrysorry! Punish me!" Her laughter was breathy and high, void of humor but so full of joy. I think that's what did it to me, what shattered my initial fear of and disdain for the act: her joy. She loved it.

We were both out of breath afterward and neither of us spoke. As she lay panting on the bed, moaning with each exhalation, I slowly dressed, then left.

At home I went to my bed in a daze, thinking of everything — my household chores, a phone call I had to make, maybe driving down to Napa tomorrow — except what I'd just done…

My visits to Jayne's became a blur after that. The whip always awaited me on the bed. She never removed her robe. We flicked in various positions, and with each blow of the whip she cried out with delight. After a while so did I. Although I never admitted it to myself then, I came to enjoy those whippings. Part of it was the pleasure she derived from her pain. But there was something else, something I couldn't have identified back then if I'd tried or wanted to, something within me that remained hidden and dormant until I took the whip in my hand; then it crawled from its lair, suddenly in command, and swelled with pleasure at each strike. While most of those visits are hazy memories, even after only ten years, I vividly remember the day she finally took me to her bedroom.

It was a small trailer, so I assumed she slept on the sofa bed. Not so. Jayne had simply been preparing me for her bedroom.

In the living room she opened my pants, knelt down, and began licking my cock. "This is our secret," she whispered, attacking my erection voraciously with lips, tongue, and hands. "I'm sharing it with you because you're… so… good to me." She brought me to the edge quickly and when she saw my trembling she mumbled, "Come. Come in my face." I did and she laughed, rubbing my semen over her face and neck. She stood and kissed me tenderly. I was startled to realize it was our first kiss. Staring intensely into my eyes, she breathed, "I… know… you'll be so… good… to me." Then she led me to the back of the trailer.

Just as a church is a house of God, Jayne's little bedroom was a house of pain. The window was blackened and dim light bled through the red shade of the room's single tiny lamp. It was a garden of chains and straps and pullies all tediously connected and threaded through eyelets in the walls and ceiling. Visually, it made no sense. One wall was covered with whips of various lengths and designs. Paddles and manacles and small insectlike clamps hung from hooks. Mounted above them was a long, barbed, harpoonlike object. I wanted to be horrified by it all, and perhaps I pretended to be at first; but as that creature inside me began to awaken, teasingly flicking its black tongue, I shivered with anticipation.

Then I saw the oddest, most incongruous thing of all hanging on the wall above the bed: a large framed photograph of a man with thick black and silver hair, narrow glistening eyes that seemed to bore into my head, and a craggy face as cold as steel. Pastor Hudson Potter, I was certain.

As I began to undress, Jayne dropped her robe and quickly turned off the light. But in that instant I saw the scars and calluses on her body. All over her body.

She lit a candle and took some of the accoutrements from the wall: a short whip, manacles, clamps, spherical weights on thin chains… and the barbed rod. She attached the clamps to flaps of skin between her legs, then the weights to the clamps, groaning through clenched teeth. The tender flesh of her pussy hung impossibly low, like the flabby sinking skin of a very old woman. Climbing onto the bed, she put the manacles on her wrists and ankles and had me attach them to the chains hanging from the ceiling. At her request, I turned a crank on the wall, and she slowly rose a few feet above the bed, weights dangling from her rubbery labia. I was trembling as I flipped the latch that locked the crank.

"Now," she whispered, "whip me. Punish me."

I started slowly, like the first time, whipping her legs and sides as I knelt on the bed.

"No, no! My cunt! Whip my filthy, sinful, evil cunt!"

"Juh-Jayne, I can't —»

"Do it!"

I did.

She writhed and laughed and cried obscene apologies, her head hanging back so she could look at her father's icy face. The weights bobbed and she began to bleed as the teeth of the clamps bit into her flesh.

That was when I began to laugh and whip her harder. My cock stood at attention, and I began to stroke it with my free hand, breathing faster.

"Now, Paul, now! Put it in me!"

I stopped, confused. "What —»

"The rod!" she growled. "Drive it in! All the way in! Fuck me with it! Punish me!"

I hesitantly lifted the pointed rod from the bed; the barbs curved like small evil grins. Something happened to me then. A clean bright light inside me went out and a ragged hot flame spat up in its place. I think I smiled as I eased the rod into Jayne —

"Fuck me with it Daddy Daddy I'm sorry —»

— a bit deeper —

" — Daddy sorry I told sorry I made you hard sorry Daddy punish meee!"

— until the first barb was touching her vagina. I think it was the blood that stopped me. One of the weights plopped onto the bed taking a piece of flesh with it and I caught some blood on my face. I realized what I was about to do and gasped, pulled out the rod, dropped it, and ran to the bathroom to vomit. It wasn't because I was horrified or disgusted by what I was doing, but because I wanted — wanted so badly — to do it.

Jayne screamed obscenities at me as I lowered her to the bed, unhooked the manacles, and dressed. As I left her for the last time, I heard her crying, "I'm sorry, Daddy, so sorry… I need to be punished… punished…"

Gary Sigman committed suicide two years later. Had Jayne done that long before, things would have been very different for us all — especially for the boy who finally did what she wanted. But suicide is a sin.

Despite my parents' disapproval, I drifted away from the church; instead of attending an Adventist college, I went to UCLA. There I met Roz, a beautiful business major. One night while we were making love, I began to pound the mattress with my fist, lost in passion. When I finally heard her screams, I realized it wasn't the mattress I was pounding. I expected her to press charges, but she didn't. I paid her dental bill and never saw her again.

I tried prostitutes for a while, but they weren't safe. One night I left a motel room in Hollywood and met the girl's pimp in the parking lot. When he saw the blood on my hands and shirt, he beat me senseless. He hurried in to check on his girl, and I limped to my car and left, certain he would kill me if I didn't.

I remained parked before the boy's house for two hours, watching the reporters surrounding the front yard.

I considered visiting my parents, but they would want me to stay a while and I couldn't. I had to get back to my pet, Clarissa. Sometimes, if left alone, she stops eating, just out of spite. Sometimes I have to force her.

I found her on Sunset Boulevard. In the right light she even looks a bit like Jayne. She's about seventeen or so and says she has no family. I keep her in a box in the spare bedroom.

I guess I forgot what I was waiting for; I started the car, drove away from the house, and left Manning.