Chapter 9: Place the Slave on the Cross
catherine
I was down on my hands and knees on the concrete floor, cowering like a whipped animal, moaning in pain. I’d just heard the magistrate give the command for them to take me and crucify me. They would take me immediately to the place of execution and nail me to my cross.
They are going to nail me to my cross, I thought. I want this so much! And I am so afraid… And now it’s time, and there’s no going back.
No going back! Reminds me of that old Katy Perry song I heard, “Dark Horse” …
'Cause once you're mine, once you're mine
There's no going back
“Get her up on her knees,” I heard Andrew say. I had no idea why. Were they going to put the patibulum on my shoulder to carry?
Jim and Ron knelt on either side of me, took hold of my arms and shoulders and pulled me up straight so I was sitting back on my heels. Andrew knelt in front of me. He was wearing his rubber surgical gloves and had something in his right hand.
“Close your eyes, slave!” He ordered me. I hesitated a moment, then obediently closed my eyes.
I felt him fit something over my right eye, pressing all around the edge of it. I felt a coolness, like adhesive sticking to my skin and fought the urge to open my eyes. He repeated that with my left eye, then I felt him fit a cloth band over my eyes and tie it tightly in back. I knew before I tried to open my eyes I had been securely blindfolded.
I moaned in fear, fighting back panic when I opened my eyes to total darkness.
“She’s ready,” Andrew said. “Get her on her feet and take her to the place of execution.”
Arms and hands pulled me up onto my unsteady feet. It wasn’t just the whipping; I’d had only broken sleep since I’d been taken from my bed, and I’d been tortured yesterday. My mind wasn’t working very well at the moment.
It was only a few steps to the place of execution, as it turned out. But it felt, sounded and smelled like a different world. It was much warmer, even hot. And large, much larger than any room in our house could possibly be. It felt like open space all around me, outside, not inside at all. And the smells that hit me, the flinty smell of hot sand. I caught whiffs of urine, feces, carrion, sweat, wood smoke and unwashed bodies.
There were sounds, too. I heard a woman moaning in pain. There was a wooden creaking sound that I’d heard before; it was the sound a cross makes with someone struggling on it. There was the sound of hammering some distance away, and a man’s screams. Someone was being crucified, nailed to a cross. I could hear the cawing of crows, lots of them, some close, some farther away. And I could hear the sound of people. There were lots of people around, come to see me crucified along with these others.
Where was I? What had they done to me? I felt disoriented, my head swimming, unable to fit what I was feeling, hearing, smelling into reality. I wanted to reach up and pull the blindfold off, but the men had me firmly by the arms. I began to panic. It couldn’t be, but my mind was telling me that I was actually in a Roman place of execution.
“Sir?! Sir?! Please! What’s happening?” I called out, needing to hear my Master’s voice, needing something to anchor me back to reality. Was my Master still here? Where the hell was I?
There was no answer. I felt so alone, cut off from reality. I couldn’t understand what I was feeling, hearing and smelling. It was all so wrong!
I felt the familiar ache in the pit of my stomach that I got every time I was crucified. I was terrified, on the ragged edge of panic, afraid of the pain that I was about to endure, yet craving it, too.
“This is her cross!” Someone said, “Get her down here,”
The men turned me around, and then I felt their hands on the backs of my thighs, pulling up while they pushed my arms and shoulders back. I was falling backward, hands flailing, screaming, trying to grab something or someone. Blind as I was, it was terrifying!
Strong hands gripped my shoulders, lowering me down, making me lie down on the ground. I was relieved to feel something solid beneath me, but I felt sand and clods of dirt under my back, not concrete. Not the smooth floor of our basement.
This is not our basement! How? Where am I!?
I moaned in pain when they dragged me on my welted back and then I felt the timber under the back of my neck, and they pinned my wrists to the beam. A man straddled me, holding me down and immobilizing my arms. I could tell he wore no underwear because when he sat across my hips, I felt the sponginess of his balls and the warm hardness of his erection pressed against my naked abdomen. I felt the thin ropes as they bound my wrists to the beam, coiling the rope around a dozen times, then tightening it with wraps between my wrists and the wood. Then they stopped.
I knew what that meant. It was all too much, the darkness, the sounds and smells of this place. I panicked even more, desperately trying to keep control over myself.
I wanted to beg, appeal to my Master to stop. Tell him I couldn’t go through with it, I wanted to stop now! I tried to fight the panic, gritted my teeth and moaned in anticipation.
There was no safe word. Nothing I said mattered. This would only stop when my time was up, my Master stopped it, or Doc stopped it. I had agreed to that long ago, and deep down, even now, that’s the way I wanted it.
I’m a slave. I have to do what my Master tells me. I have to!
I want this so much. I just have to get through them driving the nails. Once this is done, I’ll be ok. Yes, it’s going to be ok, it’s going to be ok, oh please please please let me be strong!
I felt a coolness on my left palm, something rubbing it and instinctively jerked my head around, trying to see. Then I felt the sharp point of a nail pressed against it and clenched my teeth. I could visualize that needle sharp point pressed against the spot Doc had put there. My hand was bound, fixed in place. I couldn’t escape what was coming any second now.
I heard the metallic clink of the hammer striking the nail head, and I screamed in pain as I felt the point of the nail pierce my hand. I was twisting, writhing, trying to pull my left hand away, straining against the ropes that held it fixed solidly against the timber. I heard the clinking sound again, accompanied by a deeper thud as the nail pierced the back of my hand and went into the timber. I screamed again as another blow pushed the nail through my hand, pulling at the wound on its way into the wood. Two more blows of the hammer, and they stopped.
It was over. My straining body went limp. Only then, when I felt my ass drop onto the dirt, did I realize that my whole body had been arched between my neck and heels. I drew in long, ragged breaths, moaning in pain. The wound in my hand throbbed, and there was this awful feeling of something foreign piercing it, inside of it. I instinctively wanted it out, right now! It was much worse than I anticipated, more than I was prepared for.
But it wasn’t over yet. I still had to endure them nailing my other hand to the cross.
“Oh God oh God oh God!” I said, gasping, whimpering, my body stiff and straining, toes curling into the dirt.
I felt the coolness again as he rubbed my right palm, and I was struggling to pull my hand away, crying, tears under my blindfold. I felt the sharpness of the nail pressed into my palm, and I knew what was coming, and God it was going to hurt so much!
No don’t don’t don’t, no I can’t please don’t! I have to do this. I have to. I WANT to!
And then I screamed and felt my body jerk as the first hard hammer blow drove the needle-sharp nail straight through my right hand. A few agonizing hammer blows later, it was done and I lay there limp as a rag doll, sobbing.
My hands were nailed to the patibulum, the wounds throbbing. I was sweating in the heat and with the pain, so much pain already. And it was only beginning. I was being crucified, truly crucified.
Can this be real? I thought, my head swimming. I’m lying here in a Roman place of execution. This is really happening! They are crucifying me!
I want this, I thought. Oh God, please let them finish quickly. I don’t want to lose my nerve!
Somehow, through the pain, I thought I saw something in the edge of my vision, some blurred shapes that refused to resolve, people moving. It was like my mind was swimming back up into consciousness from a dream, still groggy and only gradually remembering who and where I was.
I deserve this punishment. I am a slave. I am being crucified on a Roman cross. My wrists are nailed to the patibulum. I am a slave being crucified on a Roman cross. I am a slave being crucified on a Roman cross. I am a slave being crucified on a Roman cross. I am a slave…
Suddenly, my vision resolved into sharp focus and my pain along with it. The throbbing of the small round nails in my palms transformed into the pounding agony of the big square nails that now impaled not my palms, but my wrists, and fixed them to the beam. I screamed and screamed in agony, my body writhing desperately in the dirt, the raw whip marks that crisscrossed my back burning like fire.
Joe
“What the hell?” I said, “She was barely sobbing and then she started screaming and writhing like she’s in agony! What the hell just happened? Is she ok?”
Doc was touching icons on the tablet computer he was using now to monitor cat. “Her vitals spiked, pulse rate and respiration took a big jump. She looks like she’s in panic! Something changed, all right! Look at her! She’s whipping her head around, looking at things!
“Did her eye patches come loose? Her blindfold?” They looked unchanged. What the hell?
“No, that’s not it!” Doc said. He’d switched apps, and now he was looking at a different screen. It had a large image of a cross-section of a human brain with a series of thumbnails below that looked like views of a brain from different angles and different slices.
“Is that…” I started to say.
“Yes, that’s cat’s brain. Andrew has my bMRI unit stuck to the inside of his tunic. I told him he better not fucking break it, either! He put a microtarget on the back of her head, underneath her hair, when he was putting on her eye patches and blindfold. It’s just a millimeter-size magnetic dot, adhesive-backed. The bMRI uses that to get a lock on its target.”
“bMRI? I know about MRI, fMRI I’ve heard of, but what’s a bMRI?” I asked, puzzled.
“They call it a ‘Battlefield MRI’ because that’s what they originally designed it for. It’s an fMRI that uses an ultra-low magnetic field, very low power requirements. Military had them for a couple of years, then released them to the public. I just got mine about a month ago, in fact.”
“No shit!”
“And yes, I have an app that communicates with it!” Doc said proudly. “So I can peek inside of cat’s brain and see what’s happening there.”
“Well, I’m damned impressed!” I said. “So is there actually anything inside of her brain, other than sex, porn and schemes to get herself whipped?” I asked, grinning.
“The answer is, maybe!” Doc replied, still looking at his screen. “Look at where her brain is lit up. All of these bright spots are associated with pain. This one here, the dorsal posterior insula, is actually an indicator of pain intensity. See how bright that is? Lots of activity there, so lots of pain. Now look at it five minutes ago.”
“It’s lit up, but nothing like you just showed me!
“Right. And look at this area here. That’s her visual cortex, not lit up at all.”
“Ok,” I said, “so…”
“Fast forward slowly and watch.” Doc pulled in a window showing the video of cat lying there sobbing, just after the second nail had been driven through her right palm. Seconds clicked by as I watched her moaning and sobbing pitifully.
Then all of a sudden there were tiny flashes in her visual cortex, where it had been dark before. And cat’s head began to move, like she was trying to see…
All of it happened at once. Her visual cortex flared into activity, that pain center that Doc pointed out burst into sudden brightness, and cat screamed like she was in pure agony.
“Shit!” I said in wonder. “Back that up and play it again, slowly this time!”
I watched it all happen again. There was an instant where everything just changed for cat, all of it.
“Fucking amazing!” I said.
“That has to be where she slipped into her altered state of consciousness! In her mind, she’s being crucified in ancient Rome. That’s what she wanted and fantasized about. We took away her sensory input that wasn’t Rome and replaced it with ours – damn strong sensory input, too! Hot as hell and It really stinks in here! She wanted to be there, and that sensory input reinforced her belief that she’s there. Now she’s slipped into an altered state of consciousness; she’s being crucified by the Romans, inside of her mind. It’s completely real to her.”
“What do we do now, then?” I asked. It dawned on me that Doc was right. She was definitely turning her head, looking around at things, even though her eyes were covered with the black patches and blindfold.
“We continue,” Doc said. “In her reality, she’s being crucified, so we finish crucifying her here. Don’t be surprised if her reactions are extreme, way out of proportion to what we’re doing.
What we do here might only serve as cues for what she’ll experience in her reality. We’ll be able to see that and learn as we go. Nailing her foot here might make her experience having a big square Roman nail driven through her foot there, in that reality.”
“So what she sees and feels is what a woman being crucified in ancient Rome would feel?
“Well, I think it’s what cat believes a woman would see and feel. And the more she experiences what she expects, the more solid and real this altered state, the world that she’s now experiencing, will become for her.
“The thing is, she had to want to go into that world, and once she’s been there for some time, we might have to get her to want to come back from it, too.”
I was thinking about that when Doc sucked in his breath and stared at his tablet screen.
“Look at that!” Doc said.
“What?”
“Her amygdala just lit up like a neon sign!” Doc said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, alarmed.
“It’s fear! It means that she’s really frightened of something!”
I looked at cat. “Of course she is,” I said, “they’re about to lift her up onto her cross!”
