Steel World Inc. Chapter Eighteen

 

There was a second level to the basement area, with bare brick walls and a cement floor that could be hosed down, for I saw drainage channels on the sides of the room that flowed into a gutter and steel grille. The first thing I noticed though was the lower temperature. If there was any heating down here, it was minimal. The lighting was harsh strip lighting in the corridors, and bare light bulbs in the concrete and brick kennel pens. This offered a stark contrast between harsh bright light and shadows wherever you stood. 

 

I saw several men who were working in the capacity of guards and handlers. To a man they looked dangerous – the sort of men you avoided speaking to, or coming to the attention of, in back street pubs. The sort of men who would ask you, “are you looking at my bird?” as an invitation to a fight, or perhaps would skip the preliminary threats and simply hit you in the face with a beer glass as they walked by.

 

The man working in the kennel pen had a close shaved head, blue jeans and a dark charcoal jumper with light grey edging on the waist band and the sleeves at the wrist. He seemed to me to be the kind of man who never smiled. 

 

I felt very much out of my depth, and I was glad I was in the company of Karl Magnus, because Karl Magnus didn’t look at all scared by them.

 

The underground passageway led to a large room containing a number of steel cages, each one approximately four feet high. Some were empty, but others contained women. The women were all naked, wearing steel collars about their throats, and they were mostly hysterical or numb with shock. 

 

I recognised some of these women.

 

My eyes met those of the lovely blonde haired Miss Esme Hamilton. When I had last seen her she had been wearing a tight white tunic and was serving drinks upstairs at the party. She had been acutely embarrassed at the revealing nature of her outfit, and had been teased mercilessly by two girls who worked on the second floor of my office building – Miss Sally Albright and Miss Katrina Pursing. But now, to my shock, Esme was caged, kneeling, unable to stand, with her slim wrists locked helplessly behind her back in steel restraints – slim, beautiful steel bracelets, designed to hold women. The man in the room gazed down at her, expressionless, as she pleaded with him. 

 

“Quite a sight, boy, isn’t it?” said Frick as he walked into the cement and brick underground room. “They all lost tonight. They all gained a steel collar.”

 

I scanned the women’s faces quickly, seeking out Miss Kissy Ryde, but there was no sign of her. If she had spun the wheel again, it seems she had been successful.  I was relieved, both for the sake of Miss Kissy Ryde, and for James, my friend.

 

This was no longer a consensual party. This was something far more sinister and real. None of these girls had consented to this. They had thought they would simply be suffering the humiliation of parading around the party floor in a scandalously short and revealing slave tunic for a few hours. 

 

“Simon!” The lovely Miss Esme Hamilton saw and recognised me. Instantly there was the sign of hope in the expression on her face. She stretched forward in her cage, as far as the steel bracelets might allow, for they were attached to a cage ring, similar to the one that Lady Penelope Grantham had been chained to. “Help me, please! Help me!”

 

The man with the shaven head now turned slowly and regarded me. There was no sense of welcome as he regarded me.  

 

“He’s with me,” snarled Frick, making it clear I was to be respected.

 

The shaven headed man nodded and walked to a bucket of cold standing water. He filled some wooden bowls with the water and slid them one at a time into the cages. If the naked girls wanted, needed, water, they could drink by bending their heads down like animals and lap it up with their tongues.

 

“Miss Hamilton!” I said.

 

“Mr Rogers!” she cried as she struggled in her steel bracelets. She looked terrified.

 

“Be strong, Miss Hamilton! Do as they say.”

 

On the way down to the sub-basement I had asked Mr Frick about the girl he had alluded to earlier – Fleur. It was an unusual name, no doubt French in origin, meaning ‘flower’. 

 

“Two years ago, Fleur was my daughter’s college flatmate in Heidelberg, where Chelsea studied the Classics. I never really thought much of Fleur – being European she wasn’t a ‘New Feminist’ the way a proper young lady should be, and I suspect she probably was a bad influence on my precious daughter, but then that might well be true of any French girl from a moderately wealthy European family. The Europeans, especially the French, have a long history of idle decadence that isn’t appropriate for females. But obviously Chelsea needed to have friends in Heidelberg, and the two of them got along tolerably well until there was a disagreement over the propriety of Chelsea submitting for solo credit a project that Fleur had barely assisted on. Quite obviously the main body of work had been Chelsea’s, but this Fleur  girl seemed adamant that she deserved an equal credit. The French can be like that. They never got over the loss of their dominance in western Europe, and they spend their time now trying to ride on the coattails of their betters. Chelsea had already sent me some photographs of Fleur in the past, but now she sent some very candid snaps of the girl along with a plea for help.”

 

“Candid snaps?”

 

“Candid snaps. Fleur in her underwear, and not much of it. Girls of that age are quite comfortable around one another when they are flat mates. Anyway, I reached out to the German families, out of common courtesy, and sent a man over to deal with the matter. Within 72 hours, Fleur was in the state of Montana, at the Lazy F – the ranch I mentioned. My Great Grandfather acquired it in the 1890s. It was the time of the spring roundup, when the finished steers were sent off to the stockyards - all organic, humanely reared, and highly priced - and the new calves were prepared. The excess bull calves were castrated, all the calves were vaccinated, ear-tagged, and branded with the ranches brand: the Lazy F. After the calves had been branded, the hysterical, naked Fleur was dragged to the fire, and the iron applied to her thigh, in the same way and much the same place as the calves.”

 

Good God…

 

“The calves were bawling, of course, and so was red-haired Fleur. Salve was applied and she slept under the stars curled up in a blanket. Almost idyllic, except for the being stripped and branded part. I fitted her with a green plated collar made by USA Restraints that looked good with her hair. The next day, after work was done, the cowboys played girl catch with her, roping her from their cow ponies. I left for some spring skiing in the Rockies. Six weeks later, tanned all over from the sun, and trained by begging to be admitted to one of the cowboy’s blankets each night to avoid the still chill evenings, Fleur was returned to my mansion in Pittsburgh, where she has a personal kennel to this day.”

 

None of this was a game. Mr Frick was deadly serious. 

 

“What did your daughter say?”

 

“Oh, she sees Fleur from time to time, when she comes home to the house in Pittsburgh. But the relationship between the two girls is very different now.” Frick regarded me, gauging my reaction to his story. I smiled and nodded, as if I understood, but deep down I wanted to get well away from here and these men. 

 

“Emily selected these girls personally from the ones taken tonight,” said Magnus as he walked along the row of cages with his hands clasped behind his back. “She hopes they will meet with your approval. You can take your pick from the others, if any of these fail to please you, but I promise you Emily has picked out the best ones.”

 

Miss Madison was now a slave, just like these girls, but Magnus made no reference to the fact. Selecting these girls for shipment to the Lazy F ranch had been one of her last duties as a Free Woman, it seems. Would she now be housed in one of these cages? Would she be given garments, or would she sleep naked? I could see there were shelves to one side that had cheap, rough, cattle blankets, folded in neat piles. Presumably these would be given to girls who remained in those cages overnight, but these girls would be leaving in just an hour, to be sent by van to an airfield somewhere. It all seemed unbelievable, the stuff of garish pulp fiction. These men were modern day slavers, and it was obviously a worldwide and very sophisticated operation. And to my horror I seemed now to be a part of it. For I knew too much to simply back away. Obviously, I knew too much. Magnus was going to offer me a managerial job, but that would bring me into this circle with full knowledge of what was being done. I would be complicit in enslaving women. 

 

If that worried me, then something else worried me even more. Inside my trousers I was hard again. The fact is, I was helplessly aroused by the sight of these women, collared, naked, and caged. I was incredibly aroused by the thought that I could now be in control of them, have power over them, if I wished; I could command them, I could even… own them?

 

Why did that arouse me? I should be angry, furious, at the sight of Miss Esme Hamilton, begging in a steel cage. But the knowledge that I could this very minute, with Mr Frick’s permission, have her taken from the cage, place on her knees, and order her to give me oral sex, was mind blowing. 

 

But I knew it was wrong. I knew it was very wrong.

 

Of course, the glorious Miss Esme Hamilton wasn’t the only girl that I recognised. There, further down the line were the unmistakeable, yet naked, crouching figures of Miss Sally Albright and Miss Katrina Pursing. Oh, how they had treated and taunted Miss Hamilton as she served me in her collar. Now those two girls had collars of their own. Like Miss Hamilton, they knelt in their own four foot high kennel cages with their slender wrists tightly braceleted and chained to an iron ring. It seems their lust for designer shoes and a handbag had gone awry. 

 

“Why the game?” I asked Magnus. “Why the wheel of fortune? Why not just… take the ones you wanted?”

 

“We did,” said Magnus. “You don’t honestly think the wheel was fair, do you? It stopped at  the kef when we wanted it to stop at the kef.”

 

“But still, why the game? Why bother with it at all?”

 

“It amuses us to see the so-called Free Women of London risk their freedom for trivial glittering prizes. Any woman who would be prepared to serve in a collar and tunic for the chance to win some shoes is secretly a slave at heart. Those are the ones that bring the best price when suitably trained. Their potential is enormous.”  

 

Mr Frick walked slowly along the cages, inspecting each girl in turn, ordering her to look up at him, bare her breasts, or sit back and spread her legs wide open. They were all too terrified to disobey. One or two had visible whip marks, deep red in colour, on their thighs, buttocks or back. I was pleased to see that the delicate Miss Esme Hamilton had been intelligent enough to co-operate fully with the men who had taken control of her. She therefore had not been whipped. 

 

“Mr Rogers, she wept, looking up at me again. “Pleas help me! These men are going to…”

 

“Be strong, Miss Hamilton,” I said.

 

“You know this girl?” said Frick.

 

“I do. She works on my floor. She is a secretary there.”

 

Frick nodded. “You have probably looked at her during the day as she walks past in her skirt and heels. You’ve perhaps gone to the coffee machine at the same time she does, to accidentally bump into her and exchange a few pleasant words? You have spent hours thinking of the brief words you might say to her at that moment? You have hoped she will laugh pleasantly at your witty remarks, and delight in your flattering off the cuff compliments – innocent compliments, of course - and perhaps you might see her play with her hair as she listens to the words you have rehearsed. You hoped she would find you instantly interesting, and then think about you, herself, during the day, perhaps even smiling up at you, as you walk past her desk?”

 

All this was of course true. Frick knew the kind of man I was, had been, probably still was. I had difficulty relating to beautiful girls, especially in the office. James would simply had flirted with Miss Hamilton and asked her out, the way he had done with Kissy Ryde.

 

“It’s embarrassing, isn’t it?” said Frick with a laugh as he clapped me on the shoulder. “But all that’s behind you now. Take a good look at her. Feast your eyes. This is what you wanted: her undivided attention. And now she will do anything for you.”

 

“You’re taking her to the Lazy F?” I asked.

 

“She’s part of the hand-picked consignment. Your Emily Madison selected her personally.” Frick turned his attention to Magnus. “Perhaps this will be Emily’s cage tonight, once its vacant?”

 

“Perhaps,” said Magnus. 

 

I could hardly comprehend that Miss Madison might soon occupy this cage, once Miss Hamilton and the other girls were loaded into the van. There was a garage style door at the far end of the room that could be rolled up and opened. It no doubt led to a loading ramp that a van could drive down. The girls would be loaded here in this room and then driven up to the ground floor. No one in London would be any the wiser. 

 

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” said Frick. “I’m going to reject your secretary, and select one of the other girls that was collared tonight to take her place. She can stay here in London, and you can enjoy her at your leisure. Consider it my parting gift to you, boy. I’m sure Karl will give you free access to her?”

 

Karl nodded, and then looked at his watch. “Fine. And if our business is concluded, I really need to be going. Give my regards to the North American families, Willard.”

“I will.” He smiled as he nodded at Magnus. 

 

“Simon, take this.” Magnus produced a plastic card. It looked like the sort of card that might open electronic doors. “You can stay as long as you like, or come back tonight to put the secretary to use. The card allows you basic access to the house at a low level, and allows you to make reasonable requests for things.”

 

“Things?”

 

“A car for example. Wave this card and a car and driver will take you back home. Whatever you want, need, within reason. If the men say no, then you know it’s not reasonable. I’ll explain more when I’m back from Amsterdam. Enjoy your time with…” he gazed at Esme.

 

“Miss Hamilton,” I said.

 

“Yes, her.”

 

And then he was gone. 

 

“Open the cage and remove the girl,” said Frick. The shaven headed man did as he was ordered, opening the front of the kennel pen and unlocking Miss Hamilton’s wrists from the iron ring set into the back of the cage. He lifted her to her feet, as she was unsteady after kneeling for so long, and he clipped a leash to her collar. The end of the leash was given to me.

 

“Enjoy,” said Frick. 

 

I held Miss Esme Hamilton’s leash! What a feeling that is to hold the leash of a collared slave, especially one as beautiful as Miss Hamilton.

 

“Kneel for the moment,” I said to her. As she did so, I added, mostly to impress Frick, “in nadu.”

 

She gasped. How was it that I could demand such a thing of her! But she did as she was told. She had of course seen other girls, girls less compliant than herself, girls less intelligent than herself, those girls she had seen whipped for their refusal to follow a simple order. I suspected those girls, with their red whip marks across their thighs, buttocks and back, those girls now swiftly jumped and obeyed whenever they heard a command from a man. The whip probably does that to a girl.

 

But how wrong it is to whip women. How very wrong. 

 

“I saw you pocket the key to Emily’s collar earlier on,” remarked Frick. He extended his hand. “Give it to me.”

I did as he said. Did he think I was planning on stealing Miss Madison? I hoped not. I hadn’t known she was going to be made a slave when I pocketed the key for safe keeping. I just didn’t want Miss Madison to have it. 

 

Frick nodded. “And now Simon, as I have done you a favour, you can do something for me.”

“Of course, Mr Frick.”

 

“Go and fetch Emily. Bring her here.”

 

“You intend caging her?” I suggested. I recalled Magnus saying as much.

 

“Not quite. She’s my choice of substitute for the secretary. I’m taking Emily as part of the consignment.”

 

“But… does Mr Magnus know this?” I had the distinct feeling that Magnus wouldn’t approve, had he still been here.

 

“My arrangement with Karl was that I could substitute another girl who was enslaved tonight, if any of the girls in the consignment didn’t meet my satisfaction. I believe Emily was enslaved tonight.”

 

“I don’t think, I mean, I don’t mean to question you, Sir, but…”

 

“Then don’t,” said Frick. There was a narrowing of his eyes.

 

“It’s just that, Mr Magnus probably didn’t know that Miss Madison would be enslaved today when he said that, and he probably wouldn’t have intended her to be available for…”

 

“A word of warning, boy. I rather like you. But it’s in your own interests that my opinion of you doesn’t change.”

 

“Mr Magnus isn’t going to be happy, Sir.”

 

“I don’t care if Mr Magnus is happy. Mr Magnus has grown soft. He’s an embarrassment. All that talk of making allowances for the way Earth women are. Women are either Free Women or natural slaves. We treat them accordingly. There are no ‘allowances’. He should know that. He’s fallen in love with a natural slave, and it’s shameful and affecting his judgement. He was a great man once. I’m doing him a favour by taking the source of his infatuation away. Besides which, I have wanted the Madison woman in my collar for almost a year now. Her arrogance at assuming she can hold a position of authority that should be the privilege of a man is more than enough for me to want to brand her by hand at the Lazy F.”

 

He was going to… brand Miss Madison at his ranch with a hot iron… 

 

“And don’t worry, boy. I’ll square things with Karl when he’s back from Amsterdam. I will make it clear you were simply obeying orders, and I will also make it clear that you now have the protection of the North American families. We are in ascendence and Magnus knows that. Nothing will happen to you.” He paused for a moment. “Provided you bring me that delicious slave, Emily, and you do so now.”