The light of the red candles flickered as he glanced nervously around the gloomy dungeon. Piled against every wall were festively decorated boxes – some large, some small and some medium-sized. He was tempted to investigate, but heard bolts being drawn back, and the creak of the dungeon door as it opened. He hurriedly fell to his knees and kept his eyes fixed to the floor in front of him, although he could hear the sound of her heels as she walked across the stone floor. He became aware of her standing over him.
‘You may look’, she said.
He raised his gaze to see her before him, clad in black heels and stockings and a long, close-fitting leather coat.
‘We are going to play a Christmas game’, she announced. ‘I will give you two chances. I will ask two questions, and if you get either one wrong, I will select a Christmas present to open. It is only fair to warn you: I do not think you will enjoy my Christmas present choices.’
He felt the familiar trickle of sweat in his hairline and the churning of his stomach
‘I understand, Mistress’, he said.
‘Good’, she said. ‘Then here is your first question. According to the Christmas carol, what did my true love send to me on the sixth day of Christmas?’
He frantically rehearsed the Christmas carol in his mind.
‘It was the partridge, Mistress!’ he cried. ‘The partridge in the pear tree’.
She sighed. ‘And yet you claim to love me. You are wrong. It was 6 geese a-laying.’
She walked across the room, and opened one of the medium-sized boxes. Inside, a coiled leather whip lay glistening in the candle-light. She strolled over until she stood above him, and began to whip him, each stroke landing in almost perfect parallel to the preceding stroke, His cries filled the air of the dungeon. After 10 strokes, she began again, this time criss-crossing her blows so that each one landed on already welted flesh. His cries grew louder as he sought to sink down into the stone floor to escape the pain. And then, as suddenly as it had started, the whipping was over.
‘Time for your second question’, she said. ‘How many ghosts visit Scrooge in Dickens’s story ‘A Christmas Carol’?
He almost laughed with relief and, somewhere inside, felt a smug satisfaction that he could outwit his Mistress and avoid more punishment.
‘Three!’, he said. ‘The Ghost of past, present and future!’
He kept his gaze fixed downwards in case she noticed the rebellious glint in his eyes.
‘Wrong’ she said.
He was about to cry out in protest, but some inner submissive sense held his tongue quiet.
‘There were 4’, she said. ‘The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come …. And the ghost of Jacob Marley.’
He moaned as the realisation set in, and watched forlornly as she strode across the dungeon to the piles of presents. He watched her select the smallest box in the room, and inwardly heaved a sigh of relief. But after she tore the wrapping paper away, and opened the box that was revealed, he felt the fear rise in his throat as he watched the dim candle-light flicker on the cold steel of the pin-wheel device the box contained. Every fibre of his being told him to scuttle across the floor away from his Mistress as she advanced, the harsh metal of the implement barely warmed by the candle light. But his training kept him fixed. Slowly, she rolled the pin wheel across his chest and back, along his inner thighs, against the soles of his feet. Soon enough, the dungeon once again echoed to his cries of pain. Eventually, she stopped.
‘You know, in all this excitement I almost forgot’, she said. ‘We have all week to play with the rest of these presents’ – he flinched as she gestured at the piles of packages stacked around the dungeon – ‘but we must not forget your stocking fillers’.
She slowly unbuttoned the leather coat and slid it from her shoulders. She stood before him in high heels, black stockings, and black leather basque, her weight on one leg, her other stretched languorously before her. She slowly trailed a red finger nail up the outside of her leg as she watched him.
‘Do you like your stocking fillers?’ she asked.
His eyes travelled up from the spike heels, across her nylon-clad ankles and calves, to the full swell of her thighs, and stopped at the sensual divide between the lacy pattern of her stocking tops and her smooth creamy skin. He swallowed nervously.
‘Yes Mistress. I love my stocking fillers. You are the most beautiful woman in the world.’
He gazed up into her eyes as she smiled her secret smile down at him. Holding out her hand, she slowly led him to the bedroom and whispered: ‘Then a Merry Christmas to us all, and God bless us everyone.’
