Chapter 4: On a Roman Cross
catherine
I was alone and helpless, crucified in total darkness.
More than that, I was sealed in. No one would hear if I screamed. There was not even the faintest hint of light. And it was so silent! The only sound was that of my own gasping breaths, so loud in the darkness. There was no sensation but the feel of my bare skin against the rough wood, the ache of my straining muscles. With no frame of reference, I felt like I could be ten feet above the ground rather than just a couple of feet above head height.
Hell, I thought, I could be a hundred feet above the ground! It’s like my entire universe is me and this cross. No sight, no sound, nothing but the feel of the ropes and the wood.
Eventually, I needed to push myself up to ease my breathing. That was even more surreal and frightening! I felt my muscles working, legs straightening, arms and shoulders easing. I knew I was rising higher, but with no visual reference, my mind refused to register any actual motion. When I could rise no further and had to stop, it was like I hadn’t actually moved at all.
And the passage of time, with nothing to see or hear, only blackness, there was no sensation of time passing, no way to guess how long I’d been there in the dark.
I imagined that I could see some faint glow in the edge of my vision; when I turned my head to look, it wasn’t there. Maybe my eyes adjusting to the dark? It had to be an illusion, a trick of the mind; there was absolutely no light in there, none at all.
When my legs could hold me up no longer, I slipped downward again, the only sensation the burn of fatigue in my legs, my straining muscles, the wood against my ass, the feel of my exposed pussy as my knees spread apart when I sank to hang in a squatting position. I only knew that I had moved downward when my arms grew taut.
I needed to pee badly, so I let it go, wincing as it burned my bruised pussy on the way out, hearing it splatter on the bare concrete below, feeling a little of its warmth on my bound feet. The smell of piss mixed with the smell of my own sweat.
Deprived of sensation beyond the feel of tired muscles, wood and rope on my bare skin, the sound of my breathing, and the smell of piss, it was like my mind couldn’t find the things it used to connect itself to reality, as if it had come loose from my body and begun to drift. And I began to fantasize once again of the place of execution outside of Rome, where I’m hanging nailed to my cross, a crucified slave.
In this place, crucified in the darkness, my mind groping for any connection to reality, it was like a point of light in the distance that it locked on to and moved toward. Part of me was frightened, wanted to push back, go back to what had been real, but I was helpless to pull away now. The point of light grew, its attraction stronger, inescapable!
I screamed when the agony of the nails, the burning red welts that I felt on my back, my ass, my legs, all came into sudden and sharp focus. Looking down across my naked body, now I saw that the ridged red welts covered my breasts and abdomen too.
I must have fainted again, I thought. Why couldn’t I have just died?
My exhausted muscles ached and burned, knotted with spasms. The few onlookers laughed and jeered at me, as did some of the passers-by on the road in front of me. I blinked my eyes against the brightness of the sun, moaning in agony and fear while trying to get used to the light again.
I dreamed I was someone else, somewhere else, while I was unconscious.
The hot, sunbaked dust of that place had a flinty smell to it. It was mixed with the smell of black, leathery rags of dried skin, carrion and warm piss. There were crows cawing, lots of them. Hanging by my nailed wrists, I looked around in wonder as if really seeing this place for the first time. My cross must have been ten feet tall. They had crucified me up high where everyone passing could see me displayed while I struggled and died, could look up between my legs and study the parts of me that used to be private but were now fully exposed to the public gaze.
Looking up, I stared at my left hand, transfixed through the base of the palm to the face of a big, rough horizontal timber by an iron nail. Its head hid the wound, dark blood oozing out from beneath its edge, trailing down my forearm halfway to my elbow. Straining to look down over my breasts, I saw my bleeding feet nailed side by side through their tops to the rough timber below. I grimaced as the memory returned of the executioner nailing my wrists to the crossbar as I lay there naked and already whipped, the feel of the spikes passing between bones, the solid sound of iron being driven through my body and deeper into the timber, punctuated by someone’s screams.
My screams.
I was writhing, screaming mindlessly as they hoisted the crossbar up and my feet couldn’t touch the ground anymore. They lifted it up with me kicking and dangling from it, set it in place, left me to hang there and struggle until exhaustion overcame agony and I was no longer kicking.
The agony…
When they roped my feet into place, I pushed myself up, had to take the weight off of the nails in my wrists, had to. All I had left to support me was my feet, tied to the cross. Even though the ropes dug into the tops of my feet, I was so grateful to have any way to escape the searing pain of the nails in my wrists. I was desperately pulling down great lungsful of air when the executioner probed my right foot with a finger, then set the point of a huge iron spike against it. I screamed as he drove the spike through that foot, then adjusted his position and began to repeat the agonizing process with the other one.
Gods! The pain was excruciating and it was everywhere! I was struggling and writhing, trying to find a way to escape it and there was no escape! I screamed and screamed until my head was spinning and everything started getting dark.
I almost fainted then, but not quite, no, because he must have seen my eyelids flutter, knew that I was going to lose consciousness, and stopped hammering. He let me get my breath for a moment, recover my senses, and not out of kindness. He wanted me awake to feel every last blow of the hammer until he had finished crucifying me.
I was jolted out of my memories by growing panic.
My breath, I can’t get enough to breathe! I’m strangling!
There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t fight back the fear; it was too strong!
Oh gods, I have to push myself up again!
Pushing up on the cross is the worst torture of all. It’s a struggle that takes everything, arms pulling and legs pushing against all four nails until you raise yourself enough to get your weight over your feet. Then you can use just the nails in your feet to hold yourself up as long as you can bear that pain. As long as you can force yourself to bear it, because you soon learn the lesson through agony that you’ll endure it now or suffer worse later.
I groaned loudly through gritted teeth, pushing my feet down hard against the nails that impaled them, pulling down against the nails that held my wrists, trembling, afraid to move but unable to stop, raising myself slowly higher.
I managed to plant my ass against the post behind me and take some of my weight so I could stop for a moment and try to let some of the agony subside, try to catch my breath. I couldn’t stay in that position long, not with my knees bent so much. I gathered myself and pushed higher, finally getting my head up to the level of the crossbar, breathing deeply and moaning in pain.
The absurd thought came to me, this is what it feels like to be crucified on a Roman cross.
The guard laughed at me then as if he could hear what I thought.
Did I say that out loud?
He said something incomprehensible, then it was like something shifted in my mind and his words suddenly began to have meaning.
“Yes, it hurts a bit, doesn’t it?” He asked me, laughing. “How does that feel, being crucified on a Roman cross? Is it all you hoped it would be?”
“F-fuck you!” I mumbled.
“What did you say? Do I need to take the whip to your tits?”
“No, don’t whip me, please! I won’t say it again, please, I promise!” I called after him, shouting, but he was already on his way to get the whip he kept nearby to use on crucified victims from time to time if they needed a lesson in discipline or if he got bored.
The world was suddenly swallowed up in blinding light. I blinked my eyes, confused, disoriented.
“What were you shouting about? What are you promising not to say again?” My Master was standing there in the doorway to the fallout shelter, staring at me. Doc and the others appeared behind him.
I was still raised high, but the agonizing pain of the cross was suddenly nothing like it had been. I stared at my left hand in disbelief and saw only the neat coils of rope holding it securely, no nail. I cautiously peered down at my feet, and there were no nails there, either. I sagged downward on the cross to hang by my wrists again.
Is this a dream? Or was I dreaming when I was nailed to that Roman cross?
“You should see your face,” Doc said. “Are you all right? You look like you’re lost!”
“M-maybe I am… I mean… I don’t know what happened to me…”
“We were gone for about thirty minutes. Probably seemed longer, but it turns out the fuses for this fallout shelter aren’t in the fuse box upstairs with the rest. Had to track those down. But it should be ok now.”
He looked at me peculiarly again, then re-assumed his role as Master. “You’re only halfway through your punishment slave! You have a long way to go.”
It was four more long hours of endless, painful struggle punctuated by the most powerful climaxes I’d ever experienced, all triggered by the memory of that cross I had been nailed to in ancient Rome. I hardly knew where I was by the time they began loosening the ropes and taking me down from my cross. It was twice as long as I’d ever lasted before, but I was still disappointed to have to come down. I needed more. I always needed more.
A lot more. I have to go back. I belong on that cross by the road outside of Rome.
I collapsed into my Master’s arms, exhausted, unable to walk or even stand now. My Master caught me, picked me up easily in his arms like a child and carried me upstairs to bed, still naked. Did I mention that he’s six feet three inches tall and muscled like a football player? I really am like a child in comparison at only five feet two inches tall and a hundred and ten pounds.
And when we make love, wow! So strong, so hard, all over!
Doc checked me out, took my vital signs, checked my wrists and feet for circulation, then had a look at the bruises and abrasions in my pussy, showing them to my Master and instructing him how to take care of those.
Now that was a bit humiliating, even for me, having two men studying the inside of my pussy and talking about it, even if one was my doctor and the other my boyfriend.
“No sex for a while, not till the soreness wears off and she starts to feel like it,” Doc said, “And you,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “don’t try to force yourself on him either!”
He and my Master laughed at that and it got an impish smile out of me, too, as exhausted as I was. I was asleep in moments.
And I dreamed that I was nailed to a cross on a sunbaked execution site beside a busy road just outside the gates of ancient Rome.
... but then, tampering with the sensory input in a situation like that, adding disorientation, can bring a lot of unexpected things to the surface... and surely help bring about 'altered states'...
)
The question cat asks herself at one point is, "If I die there, will I die here too?" 
