Torture the Masochist

 

Billy Mudge and Sidney Croft are small time thieves, working together, making a modestly dishonest living. Billy is in charge since he is slightly more intelligent, but that’s not saying much. Sid is by nature a follower. They’ve managed to stay out of prison for the last couple of years, more through luck than guile. Tonight they are about to break into a large townhouse, in a quiet suburban street. They’ve been watching it for several days and have concluded that the owner is away. This is not in fact true, as they are about to find out. 

They also have no idea the owner of the house is Larry Root, once a very successful producer of pornographic films, now a bitter recluse. He’s not making money any more because the one lucrative commercial porn market has been destroyed by the creation  of You Tube, and the general preference these days for clips of home made porn. Men once had to cough up a credit card to jerk off to erotica, but now it’s all free. Poor Larry is proud of his films, which he believes were very artistic and not at all misogynistic because the women were always paid twice as much as the men, but sadly he’s not able to finance them any more. He lives alone and is approaching sixty, still not married, though no one quite knows why. 

So in the middle of a very dark, cold and misty night, Billy and Sid, dressed in black, with thick black knitted balaclavas over their heads, leave their van parked up the road, and walk back to Larry’s house. 

Sid carries a large empty black canvass bag. They climb over a wall and make their way to the rear of the house. They find a window, smash a small pane of glass, and manage to get into the basement. Billy switches on his torch. The basement if filled with tools and broken furniture. Sid finds his torch doesn’t work, so they start to look along the dusty shelves for batteries, without success. Meanwhile sitting upstairs in his office, dressed in a long cotton bathrobe, is Larry. He would have heard the sound of glass breaking, but he’s completely absorbed by the porn he’s watching porn on his computer.

Billy and Sid creep up the stairs to the main hall. They look into various rooms. One of them is a s & m dungeon, complete with steel racks, a steel bed, steel cages and tables around the side, piled with thick steel cuffs, coils of rope and chains. The walls are painted dark red, and the floor is black rubber. 

‘Fuck me,’ whispers Sid as his torchlight falls on a table of enormous black rubber dildos, Billy says nothing. They start to creep up a grand staircase, leading up to the upper floors. At the top of the stairs they see the light from a half-closed door, and from behind it, the faint sound of men having noisy sex. 

‘Let’s go’ says Sid. 

‘No,’ says Billy. He creeps towards the door, pushes it gently open and sees Larry  sitting at his desk. Returning to to Sid he whispers, . 

‘OK. I have a plan. You stay here.’ 

Billy slips silently back down the stairs, taking the torch with him. Sid remains crouching on the top step, in the darkness, wishing he wasn’t there. The house is already giving him the creeps. He makes a silent yawn. He’s tired. He doesn’t want to be a crook. He’s twenty five. He want to be a chef but there’s no work. He looks at his phone. A text message from his girlfriend. 

‘Where TF are you?’

He tuts. Puts the phone away. A few minutes later Billy returns with a large kitchen knife and a box of long black cable ties. He hands the box to Sid and then pulls out a battery from his pocket.

‘Found this.’

Billy replaces the battery and his torch lights up once more. He leaves the old battery on the stairs, something he will regret later. 

Sid says, ‘Follow me.’  He creeps slowly back to the office, till he’s standing right behind Larry. He grips his arm around Larry’s neck and flashes the knife. 

‘Just keep quiet, do what you’re told and you won’t get hurt, OK?’

Larry manages to nod his head, obediently. 

Billy turns to Sid. 

‘Tie his hands behind his back. Then tie his ankles together.’ 

Billy turns to Larry and is about to tell him to put his arms behind his back, when he realises that Larry has already done it. 

‘That’s right. Just do what we say and keep quiet.’

Sid clasps Larry’s wrists together with one cable tie and then shuffles round on his knees in front of Larry, to zip up the second tie. When Larry is secured he’s dropped back into his office chair. 

On the computer screen in front of him, the hard core gay s & m video continues to play. Sid glances at it and sees two young men tied together, having their buttocks beaten with a cricket bat. He’s shocked. Never seen anything like that before. Billy turns to switch off the computer but then notices Larry’s leather wallet sitting right beside it. He picks it up, looks inside, pulls out a wad of cash and slips it into his pocket. He pulls out two credit cards, drops them onto the desk, turns to Sid, hands him the knife. 

‘Ok. You need to get the pin codes out of him.’

‘Eh? How?’

‘I don’t know. Use your imagination. Cut his ear off or something. I’m going to go though the house. You’ve got ten minutes, and then we get out of here.’

Billy leaves. 

Sid steps over to Larry. He’s completely unprepared, and a man not used much to violence either, so he’s not sure how he’s going to do this. Larry watches him for a second and whispers,

‘OK. Listen. Open the bottom right drawer of the desk. You’ll see a pack of clear plastic bags. Get one out and tie it over my head with one of those cable ties. Then I’ll tell you the pin codes.’ 

Billy is shocked. He doesn’t know what to say. 

Larry starts to plead softly. 

‘It turns me on. It’s true. I promise you. Do it. Suffocate me. I love it. I won’t make a noise. Let me struggle for a minute, and then I’ll tell you the pin-codes.’ 

Sid thinks for a moment. It seems strange but a solution nonetheless. So he opens the drawer, takes out the roll of clear plastic bags. They are thicker, more shiny and smooth than any he’s seen before.  He tears one off the roll, opens it up and pulls it over Larry’s head. Larry closes his eyes at once and lets out a low pitched moan of intense satisfaction. Sid takes a cable tie and while he is tying it around Larry’s neck, Larry says, 

‘Tighter! It has to be air tight…….OK. that’s enough!’

Larry sits back and starts to writhe in his chair. His bathrobe drops open at the front and a huge erection is revealed. Poor Sid is shocked again, and doesn’t know where to look. He glances at the screen but what he sees is worse, so he looks to the ground. This is all very new to him. 

‘Have you got a pen and pencil?’ says Larry. 

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you the codes.’

Sid hasn’t thought about that. 

‘There’s paper and pen on the desk.’ 

Sid turns and gathers picks up the pen. Larry is now beginning to breathe more heavily. The bag is steaming up. 

‘Ok The visa is 4536….’

Sid writes. 

‘And the second….’

Sid waits. He watches Larry, writhing, moaning, the plastic expanding and contracting around his face. Sid is strangely fascinated and horrified at the same time. 

‘Oh yes, oh fuck, this is so fucking good…’ moans Larry. 

He seems to pass out for a moment, then lifts is head. His cock bounces about in front of him more stiffly. 

‘And the other is 3990…’

Sid writes down the code. 

Billy returns. Sid turns nervously. He tries to stand casually in front of Larry because he knows that the sight of Larry’s erect cock might be misinterpreted. But Billy sees. 

‘What the fuck is going on?’

‘I got the codes.’ 

Sid holds out the sheet of paper. 

Billy takes it. Looks at the numbers. Points at one of them.

‘Is that a nine?’

Sid checks. 

‘Yeah. Now can we get out of here? This is all getting a bit fucking weird for me.’

‘You stay. I’ll go see if these work. I’ll call you when I’m back. You meet me at the car.’ 

Billy looks over at Larry. 

‘Just don’t actually kill him, OK?’ 

Larry stops struggling for a moment and calls out.

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. Tons of air in these bags.’

Billy looks at Sid. Sid shrugs his shoulders. 

Billys turns to go. Sid calls out. 

‘Aren’t we taking the laptop?’

Billy turns. The gay s&m porn scene is moving to a climax.

‘Fuck, that. We got enough,’ says Billy and then he leaves, carrying the black bag, filled with loot. 

Sid turns back to Larry, who is now writhing in the chair more desperately than before, pulling at the ties around his wrist, shaking his head to keep the shiny clear plastic away from his mouth. Sid goes over to take off the bag, but Larry pulls his head back.

‘No, leave it on. Just for a bit longer. Please. I’m going to shoot in a minute.’

Sid is a bit exasperated. Larry tries to comfort him.

‘It’s ok… I do this….all this time….by myself.…’ he says, now struggling to find the breath to speak. He looks up to Sid and adds,  

‘Listen… I have a gold watch… Worth well over a thousand pounds…. You want it? 

I’ll tell you, if you jerk off now, in front of me, I’ll tell you where I keep it.’

‘You what!’ says Sid, horrified.  

‘It’s over there….in that cupboard… in a silver box. You can have the box as well if you want.’ 

Sid goes over, looks in the cupboard, pulls out the silver box and inside well, there it is, a shiny fat gold watch. Sid steps back to Larry and Larry says. 

‘Ok, so go on. Just do it now. Don’t you feel just a little bit horny? I want to feel your jizz splashing over me. Go on, jerk off while I suffocate…’

Sid is now dizzy with confusion. He does feel strangely horny, but he doesn’t understand why. He reaches down but just as he is about to unzip his fly, Larry lets out a loud moan and starts to ejaculate profusely. Sid has to quickly step out of the way. Spunk shoots out in gushing waves onto the computer screen, on which coincidentally the young actors strapped to the wooden bench are now also being suffocated with plastic bags. Sid is overwhelmed. He just wants to run away. 

His mobile rings. It’s Billy.

‘OK. The pin codes are good. Get out of there as quick as you can.’ 

Sid turns back to Larry, who is starting to fade. His head has sagged down onto his chest and he’s hardly moving at all.  Sid steps over and tears off the plastic bag. Larry suddenly come to and gasps for air. His chest is heaving. His face is covered with sweat. For a moment he cannot speak. Finally he looks up. He is exhausted, but smiling. 

‘Thank you,’ he says ‘Thank you. That was incredible…’

Sid picks up the gold watch. Puts it in his pocket. As he leaves, Larry calls him back. 

‘One other thing… I’ve got the keys to the house next door. They’re downstairs, on the kitchen table. The owners are away for a week…. One of them plays an electric guitar very loud. If you guys could go in and nick that as well, I’d be incredibly grateful. It’s so fucking noisy it’s driving me crazy.’

Sid blinks, thinks for a moment, nods, turns and leaves the office. One the way out he steps on the battery and slips. He tumbles all the way down the stairs, splits his lip and blood splashes onto the carpet. He doesn’t care. He just wants it all to be over. 

Daniel Guy