You are in a forest. It is night. The place is oddly familiar but you are confused by the darkness.
Your arms are bound behind you and, when you look down, you see that you are naked.
You know that you are being hunted and when you hear the baying of the hounds and shrill wail of horns you begin to run.
The loam of the forest floor is soft and cushions your bare feet but you quickly realise it also saps the strength from your legs, hampering your progress, slowing you and fuelling your fear. Oddly, the fact that you are bound is comforting. Your lover enjoys binding you and you enjoy it when she restrains you. She is a skilled lover and when she teases you while bound, her cool fingers caressing your bare skin, tracing down between your breasts and across your belly, your body burns with desire long before the those slender fingers find their way between your thighs to stroke your eager sex and push your body to a pleasure that sometimes makes you scream.
The pursuers are closer now. You can hear the muffled beat of hooves, shouts among the trees and you glance back expecting to see one of the hounds behind you, jaws snapping at your heels but they have not caught you yet and, at that moment, your feet splash into a stream. The cold water is a shock, jarring nerves that are already taut but also stirring a memory; you have seen enough films to know that wading through water throws dogs off a scent and leaves no trail. You pause for a moment in a half crouch catching your breath, considering whether to go up or downhill. Down will lead you out of the forest and, if you run fast enough, you might make it to the little wooden church; but you realise there will be nobody there at this time of night. In this town, church is for Sundays, weddings and funerals. Even if you reach it, you fear it will not offer the sanctuary you seek.
You turn up the hill.
There is mud and smooth rock beneath your feet now and you fear you may slip, unable to save yourself with your bound hands but you push on, picking your way by the flashes of moonlight that glint off the water, legs straining as the climb becomes steeper, your breathing increasingly ragged as your chest becomes raw; you are aware of your heart hammering in your chest and know you cannot go on much further without pausing to catch your breath and rest the burning muscles in your legs.
For a short time longer, fear of capture drives you on although you are not sure exactly what terror it is you flee.
Finally, you can go no further and you drop to your knees in the cool mud, your head thrown back and your mouth wide as you suck air into your chest with every remaining ounce of your strength, your breath is raw in your throat.
Mercifully, the sounds of pursuit are more distant now.
As your breath returns, you struggle briefly against your bonds. If you could free yourself it would be easier to run, perhaps to hide or even climb; you would not be hunted like a frightened beast. The straps across your chest taunt you, if your hands were free it would be but a moment's work to loose them; if another was there, they could easily free you. The restraint is the familiar leather sheath that pins your arms behind your back pressing your elbows and forearms and palms together. Your lover often binds you like this, telling you how she loves the way it makes you look, forcing your shoulders back and pushing out your breasts, making you stand taller. When she first used it on you, certainly the first time she left you alone in it, you did try to escape but never succeeded. You have watched videos online of girls escaping from such restraints but you have never been able to.
And, even if you could, why would you want to?
It is not the first time you have been bound like this outside either. After introducing you to bondage, your lover has come to dominate you, taking you out on a leash, restrained and usually naked under a long black cloak; although she will remove the cloak when you are in the forest, leading you naked and trembling and igniting a fire between your legs that she will later satisfy. She says she likes to see you naked in the forest, especially at night, the moonlight on your skin. That is, you decide, why you are here. Robyn has led you into the woods and is playing tricks on you; she will appear in a moment with the cloak and wrap it around you, taking you into her arms and kissing you before teasing your body to an orgasm that will make you scream.
However, you have no memory of coming here with her tonight.
This must, therefore, be a dream. That is why you have no memory of her leading you here, you are dreaming. The familiar comfort of the restraint makes sense now as does the feeling of weakness when you were running. Difficulty moving is a feature of dreams, something to do with sleep paralysis induced by REM sleep. Your subconscious knows all this and knows the local legends around this forest; ‘The Devil’s Course’ as it is called by the townsfolk, on account of reported sightings of mysterious riders at night in times gone past; rumoured to be the Devil and his daemons in search of mortal souls.
Robyn is probably sleeping next to you.
If your arms were not restrained you could pinch yourself to wake up.
You struggle again thinking that perhaps the movement will shake you awake or that Robyn will wrap an arm around your sleeping form and that will rouse you from the dream.
Then you hear a sound behind you. A snap that is not loud but shatters the silence and plunges you back from dream to nightmare.
‘Robyn?’ You turn willing with every ounce of your strength to see your lover but see only a black shape that might be a bear or a wolf but your mind tells you isn’t either of these things.
You are on your feet in an instant, running again for all you are worth all thoughts that this is a dream forgotten in the terror of what you have just seen. In the brief glimpse in the darkness you saw or, thought you saw, slavering jaws with ragged teeth, glowering eyes, a long snout.
The creature growls.
It must have been a wolf.
But you know it wasn’t and even if it was, you are naked and your arms are bound.
You crash through the forest now, your footsteps as loud now as your pounding heart. There is no track here, no soft loam; sticks and stones jab at your feet and branches whip at your breasts and your belly and your thighs and brambles rake across your skin.
Robyn likes to whip you, when your are bound, using the knotted leather cords of a whip. She especially likes to target your breasts and your buttocks but sometimes flagellates your thighs and the soles of your feet. You do not enjoy it; in fact you often cry out as the blows land, the knotted cords stinging and leaving marks on you; yet you submit to it for the pleasure she seems to draw from it and for the pleasure she gives you afterwards as she kisses the wounds she has inflicted and then presses her tongue between your legs making everything better again.
Sometimes you feel she is training you.
Despite driving your body through this pain you can feel the beast closing in on you, hear the pad of its paws, the click as its claws catch stone, the sound of its breathing; feel its breath, smell its animal scent and the metallic tinge of blood.
You know it is about to spring.
‘Robyn.’ You scream her name in despair.
And then you are falling.
The ground has dropped away beneath you and you are tumbling, bouncing helplessly unable to use your arms to stop yourself. You roll over and over down a steep slope until you find yourself lying on your back at the bottom of a steep gully. The breath has been knocked from your body and, although you try, you cannot regain it. It is as if your chest and your lungs no longer work.
You lie in your back racked with pain looking up at the canopy of the trees above and the stars in the blackness beyond certain you are dying.
At first you think your neck must be broken and, even if you were not bound you would still be unable to move and so the beast will come down in to the gully following your scent and crouch over you and you will feel its hot breath on your face and be able to do nothings as it begins to tear the flesh from your dying body.
You want to scream but find your terror is so great the sound catches in your throat.
But the beast does not come and you are not dead and the pain in every part of you tells you that your body is still in tact other than bruises and torn skin and so you struggle to your feet, tossing your matted hair, wet with leaf mould, from your eyes as you look around for a means of escape.
With your arms bound, you cannot climb back up the steep sides of the gully and must go along it. You are frightened now imprisoned in this nightmare or this reality; you are still not sure which but the choice of nightmare offers hope, a hope that you will soon wake.
Though a few moments ago you were hot from the exertion of running, your body is coated in sweat and dirt and this deep in the forest, in this frost hollow, the air is chill. It is late fall, the end of October; Halloween; the night when the riders, when the veil between worlds becomes thin and creatures from other places walk the earth. This is all nonsense, you know but here, now, it could almost be true. You shiver with a mix of cold and fear and your teeth begin to chatter as every sound and flicker of shadow injects a new spike of adrenaline into a body already throbbing with fear.
You recall that you have been lost here once before. Too young to remember it, your parents often reminded you of the time you wandered into the Devils’ Course and triggered a search for you that took many hours. Your father had been so angry. It was fall and it was thought you had run in to kick up the colourful carpet of leaves that coat the floor of the forest every year. You were found curled up asleep among the roots of an oak tree, bedded down in a pile of leaves. You do not recall any of what happened but do recall the scolding you received and the dire warnings never to venture among the trees again.
You also recall the punishments you received for lying.
The warnings were well founded. There have always been rumours of strange happenings in the forest that go beyond demonic riders and Halloween horror stories of ghosts and ghouls; pagan rituals were once conducted here, the Klan met, a witch was burnt. Martha Walbridge is the most recent young woman to vanish among the trees never to be seen again. Most people in the town avoid this place which is why Robyn brings you here for your night time trysts. She laughed at the tales you told her of the forest. You mocked them too but fear of the place is ingrained in the town and, even for her, you were reluctant at first to enter the trees although before tonight, nothing untoward has befallen you.
You have come to trust her to keep you safe even while you are here naked and bound.
And the forest is, after all, where you met Robyn. You saw her at the roadside while driving home, glimpsed in headlamps as you sped past. You were not sure if you had really seen anything but your braked sharply, the car slewing to the side on the wet road and nearly skidding into the ditch that ran beside the road. You backed up and there she was, hunched over. You thought she’d been attacked or perhaps hit by another car but when she stood she seemed uninjured. Then you saw she was dressed strangely and gathered she’d been to a fancy dress party. It was Halloween. She said little and you guessed she must be drunk or had taken something. It was a cold night with a mix of drizzle and fog hanging in the air and you couldn’t leave her and, oddly, she reminded you of someone. You helped her into the car beside you and drove her to your home, warmed her by the fire, gave her food and a hot drink.
Then you took her to your bed.
You hadn’t meant to, of course. It is a sin for a woman to lie with another woman. Your parents told you this when you were young, emphasising it almost as much as the need to stay away from the forest as they took you to the town’s little white wooden church every Sunday where the preacher, old and bearded, frightened you with his words and warned of the Devil coming for sinners. Your young mind linked this to the riders in the forest and as your parents frequently told you that you were a sinner, you feared the riders would one day come for you. Thus, despite your inward desire to rebel you had heeded one commandment, to stay away from the forest, its veracity seeming to be confirmed when your childhood friend Martha had disappeared, apparently after entering the forest with a strange girl. Despite a search, her body was never found.
That was seven years ago and, the wagging tongues told you, she was not the first.
You recall that had happened at Halloween too.
You had cried for days when she went and hidden the real cause of the extent of your grief.
A flicker of shadow stops you in your tracks and you fear it is the not-wolf creature coming back for you. Is it prowling along the top of the gully waiting for you to emerge? You crouch, ducking beneath a tree trunk, tortured and twisted, stunted this low below the canopy that grows almost horizontally from the earth at the side of the gully as if hiding here; earth and stones cascade down around you as your foot slips and you nearly fall again. Then, suddenly, you are confronted by a vision that almost makes you cry out; a wild woman seems to spring from the earth at your feet, wide eyed, hair tousled, her face distorted, body caked in mud. You think of Martha and for just a moment believe you have found her body, unearthed it in the gully from where it had been buried all these years.
Visions of worms and maggots and a grinning skull fill your mind and you recoil in horror.
Then you realise this is a reflection of yourself in a dark pool.
You have blood and dirt smeared across your face; there is a cut on your forehead and your right cheek is bruised and swollen.
You have never been pretty and this vision brings it home. ‘Lumpen’ was the word your parents used when they described you.
You had few friends as a child and with the loss of Martha you were always lonely. Your parents told you this was why you made up the girl who lured you into the forest; the imaginary friend you were punished for lying about. You had told them that she would come back for you, that she had taken you to her home and one day would come back for you and take you there to live with her and you would be happy there. Your parents laughed and told you that a lumpen girl like you would always be alone and that they were the only ones who would ever care for you.
Growing up, Martha had been your only friend and when she was taken you had nobody; and nothing of her other than memories. The last time you saw her was in the pool at the edge of the forest. It had been the year after you had left school. She had not known that you were there and had stripped naked before bathed in the pool and when she emerged, she had laid on the bank and played with herself. It had been a week before she disappeared. You had vowed to tell her what you had seen and how you had felt but before you could she had been taken.
‘Taken’ was the word the preacher had used in the memorial service in the little white wooden church before he had preached again against sin and suggested her death was no accident but the Devil’s work; punishment for a sin that was so heinous that none could speak its name.
You had bowed your head to hide your shame.
Over the intervening years, estranged from your father and your mother now in care with early onset dementia, your loneliness and the need to survive has forged a confidence that you lacked when subject to that brutal repression of your youth; that upbringing that had crushed your adventurous spirit.
Robyn was not the instigator but was the catalyst.
At first you could not believe that this woman could love you with her pretty, elfin face and her stylish pixie cut, those strangely alluring eyes, that small neat body with its pale skin, those little pert breasts. Had your parents seen her, they would have labelled her as ‘weird’, even you might have used ‘alternative’ with her unusual clothes that you saw later were not some Halloween costume but those she customarily wore and those little silver piercings in her nipples. Yet, she smiled at you, and touched you and looked at you with those huge eyes that are almost silver and made love to you with an urgency and a skill of which you could never have dreamed.
She filled a void in your life, rekindling your spirit and you strove to please her; you started to think of your appearance, nervous at first you began to see the beauty that hid within your body, realising that a woman of six feet with rounded curves was not an object for ridicule but or desire; finally found the time to join a gym, you bought new clothes, began to study and read; took pride in yourself.
It wasn’t just the sex though that played its part. Talking to her took you back to those adventurous days of your childhood before your spirits had been crushed. Your sense of adventure was rekindled, She seemed to covet you as much as you did her, her need more voracious it seemed than yours. At first, her skill far exceeded yours but you learnt from her, learnt how to please her, learnt how a girl could pleasure another with fingers and tongue, with soft words and with the grinding of bodies.
It was her suggestion that you go to the forest. Not bound the first time. It was four days before Christmas, the winter solstice. She made a fire and spread the long black cloak for you to lay on and the two of you stripped and made love, your body scorched from the fire on one side and chill on the other but so full of heat and lust that you barely noticed.
Afterwards, she wrapped you in the cloak and sat beside you, seemingly not noticing the cold.
She looked even more beautiful then, her eyes shining in the dancing firelight, the flames illuminating her pale flesh, glinting off the silver bars in her nipples as if she was indeed some strange being, a dryad perhaps, of the forest.
The next night was the first time she bound you. Stretching you on the bed, binding your wrists and ankles with leather thongs and clambering onto you, straddling you, kissing you and then running those cool, teasing fingers over your skin.
‘You can’t escape me now,’ she’d said.
And she was right, until that moment, you had denied yourself the entirety of the pleasure she brought, always fearing that each encounter would be the last, somehow not letting her give you that final ounce of pleasure as if somehow you did not deserve it. But this time you were bound and could do nothing to stop her; and she continued even when you screamed and squirmed and begged her to stop or to give you an orgasm. She had responded by gagging you and continued her teasing until you thought you might die of pleasure if you were not allowed to cum.
And when you came you broke the frame of the bed as you struggled so that it collapsed beneath you and when you had recovered, you both lay there laughing.
Surely the Robyn you know and love cannot have abandoned you here.
She would never do such a thing. This must be a dream. No, a nightmare.
Stricken, you stand and call out. ‘Robyn!’
Your cry echoes through the trees and the forest is suddenly plunged into silence. Where before there had been sounds in the night, there is nothing save the rushing of blood in your ears. The cry of night birds and the chirrup of insects are gone and you are alone and naked and lost in the Devil’s Course.
You hear it again, the hunt, the hounds, the horns, the hoofbeats. They echo off the trees and seem to be all around you.
You look around in panic.
It is so cold, your breath steams, your body shakes, the visceral fear tells you this is no mere nightmare. The terror is too real. You look left and right, as if testing the air like a frightened animal. The steep side of the gully is an impossible barrier for a woman who is unable to use her hands.
You are trapped like an animal.
You turn and run; downhill this time.
If this was a dream you could wake up; could find some way to communicate with Robyn who is lying beside you.
Only, perhaps she is not beside you. Robyn goes out at night, you think to work but are not always sure. You asked her once, early on, what she did, where she went in the darkness, thinking that perhaps she was a nurse on the night shift in the emergency room of the local hospital or spent the hours of darkness watching over the cash register of a gas station.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she had asked evasively. ‘Are you scared I’m a witch?’
You thought it an odd comment but you had laughed and somehow had never got around to raising the question again. You realise, suddenly, that you no longer wonder where she goes and that there is so much you don’t know about her. With Robyn, it is all in the moment, all spontaneous like when you took her to your bed that first night.
These days she usually leaves you bound when she goes out. She tells you she likes to think of you waiting for her like this. She often uses the bondage sleeve you are currently wearing, or leaves you spread on the bed like you were the first time. You have a collection of bondage toys now, harnesses, cuffs, collars which she likes to strap and lock onto your body. Even when you are not tied to the bed, she will often fasten your collar to the bed so that you are a prisoner, waiting for her return and, now that you think about it, you cannot remember the last time you were not restrained when she left you at night or when you made love.
In fact, you realise, you spend your time in almost constant bondage.
This probably began at the spring equinox. Your first trip out bound and leashed. You were terrified and yet full of excitement as she led you into the forest wrapped in the long black cloak. You sat together to watch the sunrise through the trees. You made love afterwards, with your arms still sheathed. You were on your knees and Robyn stood above you gloriously naked like some pagan goddess or the dryad you had thought her before. It seemed somehow only fitting that you should be bound, that it was only right for you to worship her on your knees, not permitted to touch her with your hands but only to please her with your tongue.
You had almost hoped that someone would see you as you walked back in the chill of the early morning, leashed and with the taste of her in your mouth.
For a while then, you wanted to share her with others. Wanted to ‘come out’. You even suggested you go to the little white wooden church one Sunday. You were surprised by the force with which she refused. It is the only thing you have ever argued about. You did not persist. You had no real friends in the town to introduce her to anyway so there seemed little point in forcing the issue.
The only place you did go together was to the forest, doing this more frequently until it was almost every night that she did not go out on her own and slowly the fears ingrained into you through your childhood fell away and you no longer feared it.
At the summer solstice she brought four stakes and drove them into the ground then spread you naked at her feet between them, binding you in place with leather thongs. That was when she pierced you, placing little silver rings in your nipples. It was the first time she had hurt you but you bore the pain and loved her the more for it, excited that she had made you like her although her nipples bore simple studs and yours rings.
‘I bind you with them,’ she’d said. It was another odd phrase and seemed somehow deeper for her choice of verb but, when you had healed, she did bind you to the bed by your nipples. She sometimes led you around by them too.
That was when she introduced you to the whip.
The sight of the whip frightened you and it still does with its knotted leather blades that she likes to use on your breasts. You sometimes beg her not to but she whips you anyway. You often cry and when your screams become too loud she will gag you and continue to hurt you. You don’t know why she does this, for at all other times, she is so caring and even after whipping you she will make love to you so tenderly and give you more pleasure than you would once have thought possible.
You wonder then, if your current plight is an extension of her control over you. Does she wish to frighten you, abandoning you here in the Devil’s Course. Is she exploiting your need for her, using her power over you, dominating you.
She has certainly made your run through the woods before, your arms sheathed as they are now, leading you by your nipple rings.
That she has such control is oddly incongruous; you are six feet tall and broad shouldered, towering above her. If you chose you could easily overpower her though you have never tried. Perhaps that is why she likes to bind you and dominate you.
But she would not do this to you, abandon you here like this. She loves you and you love her.
This is a nightmare.
The hounds are closing in, you can hear them at the top of the gully, shadowing your movements, herding you like an animal. You can hear the shouts of the riders too in a language you don’t understand and you wonder, irrationally, if these are the ghostly horsemen of legend.
Is it truly the Devil hunting your soul? Do they know that you are a sinner? Will you be the next to disappear?
It is seven years since Martha vanished.
The older records are somewhat vague but the disappearances do all seem to be in the fall and a few years apart. There are books about it in the town’s bookshop that talk of the ‘veil between worlds becoming thin’ once every seven years and of ghostly hunters, of spirits and maidens being taken to be thralls in the fairy kingdom. It is, of course, all nonsense to satisfy the steady stream of curious tourists that come to look at the place where all those young women have disappeared
You know you have little strength left to run and you know that naked and bound you cannot defend yourself. Your breath is ragged and your limbs heavy, you are tired, exhausted, and you feel hope slipping away. Then you see a gap in the side of the gully where there has been a rock fall and you think that, even bound, you might be able to climb it. It is on the opposite side of the valley from the dogs and the riders and hope rekindles that this is a means of escape.
Awkwardly you scramble up the fallen rocks, glancing over your shoulder as you reach the top to see the dogs running and turning in frustration, yapping and howling. You see the riders too, there must be a dozen of them; they are pale skinned and their hair is fair, almost silver; their clothes are old fashioned and you are reminded oddly of Robyn. One of the riders is a woman and, for a moment, you think it is Robyn. You are about to call out to her but then see that it is not her.
You turn to run and there she is.
Martha.
The girl who disappeared.
Or perhaps it is her ghost for she seems to shimmer like she is not really there, not truly part of this world.
Like you she is naked, her body as beautiful and firm as you remember it, unchanged from that day you saw her swimming in the pool on the edge of the forest and all the lost love you had for her rushes back; all the unspoken grief of losing her.
She opens her arms and you know she is going to embrace you.
You want it and yet fear pierces you, an irrational fear that she has indeed come back from another world beyond the veil to claim your soul and that you will die if those shimmering fingers touch you. However, although you want to run, your legs won’t obey you. By sheer effort of will you start to back away trying to ignore the despair in Martha’s face that you seem to be abandoning her but your fear makes you blind to anything including the drop into the gully behind you and once again you fall.
You can remember being asleep in a pile of leaves among the roots of an old tree. You can remember the light coming through the leaves catching on the golds and reds and browns and you can remember her face.
Robyn is there with you but you are not a child this time. You lie in Robyn’s arms as you did before but now your own arms are bound behind your back, sheathed in the leather restraint. Robyn strokes your breast just as she did your cheek all those years ago then she teases your right nipple, toying with the ring in a way that excites you just as her touch always excites you.
‘It won’t be long now.’ She says.
You look at her wanting to ask what she means but you realise you are gagged, a bar held between your teeth like the bit of a horse’s bridle.
It is the autumnal equinox and you are again in the forest. The two of you have run naked through the carpet of leaves kicking them up, Robyn leading you as you run by a leather thong tied through your nipple rings.
Then the image is gone and you are awake.
You lie on your side, curled up in a small cage of wooden stakes lashed together with leather thongs and you know they have caught you. You think that perhaps, if your arms were not bound you would be able to work at the knots to free yourself but you are still restrained, your arms sheathed behind your back.
It is day and instantly your fear leaves you even though you are still bound and are now caged.
Around you are tents and huts and beyond that, in all directions, the forest. The riders you saw before are there too and you think this must be their home. It is strange yet oddly familiar and in your minds eye you see it through the eyes of a child.
You are sure you have been here before.
Then, standing above you is Robyn. You see she is dressed like the other riders and another woman stands next to her, a woman with golden hair and silver eyes who could be Robyn’s sister. On a leash behind this other woman is Martha, the leash attached to rings like yours that pierce her nipples. She is naked and restrained in a sheath like the one you wear. She wears a harness too and is fastened to some sort of chariot as if she is the pony. She smiles at you around the gag that is in her mouth, a wooden bar fastened by something that resembles a horse’s bridle.
‘I told you I’d come back for you.’ Robyn says.
