Dulcie’s Induction

Photo-story from Janus 103 featuring the lovely Vida Garman

Did it happen? Sometimes, in the dark early hours, Dulcie found herself wondering. For now, six weeks afterwards, what she had been called upon to undergo on that unforgettable afternoon was etched into her mind like the memory of a vivid dream, stark and harsh, yet magical too.

Several times since then she had retraced her steps to the location where the events had taken place, but that seemingly phantom vault and its mysterious visitants could not be found. Yet her life had undoubtedly changed for the better since her appearance before the two mysterious members of the Induction Board. The premium bonds win, the unexpected upgrading at work, strange confluences of change in her job and private life — all suggested that some occult force had been set to work in her favour.

She wears white training kit as if for gym at school, is running hard across an echoey indoor vastness towards two shadowy seated figures. ‘At the double, girl!’ roars the track-suited operative, whose harsh voice galvanises her to swifter motion. Her feet, in tatty trainers, sprint, drawing her ever closer to the cold-gazing men. As if to heighten the bizarreness and unreality, they have the appearance of scarecrows, sinister and inanimate, yet she feels their power-filled eyes peer into her senses like laser rays across the narrowing space. She has been told she must not look directly into the faces of these men in their strange disguise — to do so would be like staring into the sun.

‘Before one can be everything, it is necessary to be nothing.’ At the time she met Kurt Grant in the trendy West End wine bar, Dulcie would have dismissed that remark as being overly abstruse, the sort of thing spoken by mystical weirdos who smoked pot and sang mantras. She was a practical young woman, adept at high finance and in a well-paid job, yet the wider opportunities had constantly eluded her. Strangely, for so attractive a girl, she had not regarded the handsome Kurt as a potential lover on a chat-up sortie.

He was in banking. Monumentally successful, dauntingly self-confident, yet with some indefinable force which marked him out from other men. Despite his obvious physical appeal, it was Dulcie’s mind he stimulated rather than her body. After two hours of compulsive talking, followed by a meal out and several phone calls, Kurt had continued to retain his slightly mystical air, as if mere romance and the pursuit of physical gratification were for less enlightened mortals than he.

And then he had told her of The Order.

After running across the enormous empty space she stands in front of the two scarecrowish men, panting, cold with fright yet warmed by the aura of knowledge and authority which radiates from the silent watchers. Dulcie finds herself daunted, wobbly-legged, wanting to beg: ‘Please like me, love me, I am tiny and alone and yearn to belong, to learn, to grow…’ Don’t dare to look into their faces, but bow, girl, humbly, deeply.

‘There are resources beyond the immediate and obvious ones, which can be tapped by the initiated,’ Kurt had said. ‘Chance can be predisposed to favour those who let it flow their way.’ Mumbo jumbo? Dulcie was fascinated. What powers might she not be able to access if only she could be admitted to the secret Order?

After considerable difficulty, for The Order was an arcane and exclusive society, Kurt managed to arrange for Dulcie to appear before an Induction Board. ‘Not the full six members,’ he explained. ‘That would constitute a far more committed review of your full admission. On this first occasion there will only be two, who will assess your bearing at the initial submission to see if you are fit to be considered further.’

Submission?

‘A token yielding, a reduction of the proud and confident to the meek and humble.’

‘Never!’ she had snorted, eyes flashing and chin lifting…

‘Bow low, girl. Bow!’

She is here again, inside the dream which is not a dream. As instructed by Kurt, Dulcie has changed into clothes suitable for physical training. She is bowing, hands clasped behind her supple back, and the men to whom she makes this obeisance are dressed in rumpled clothes, a hat, a beret, guises which she has been told are utterly at variance with their normal appearance.

‘Stand tall! Turn around! Come here — at the double!’ The operative in the grey tracksuit is scarcely recognisable as Kurt. He towers, voice loud and reverberating off the dank walls, brutish, instilling panic and soul-deep thrills into her graceful form as she springs to his bidding. ‘Hup-hup-hup! Get those knees up HIGHER, you idle female!’

He is bathed in a pool of light, and she feels as if she is alone on a huge stage, aware of the watching eyes behind her. Already she feels naked, exposed. The operative — for, to Dulcie, it is no longer really Kurt — is standing, hands on hips, in front of her, face twisted in an impatience bordering on scorn.

‘Stand to attention! NOW! Hands to your side, feet together, legs straight! DO IT.’

Flustered, Dulcie responds. ‘Back up, head up! Come on, what’s the matter with you?’ The normally confident and stoic young woman feels tears sting her eyes, blinks them away. Helplessly she struggles with a sense of rapidly diminishing self-worth. She seems to have no will any more, here in this chill place with its echoes, cold-gazing eyes and brutal commands.

‘You-will-remain-at-attention, hands-to-your-sides. About-TURN!’

Dulcie swivels with alacrity, dragging her body into a hundred-and-eighty degree turn. She feels her heart pounding. ‘Stand still!’ The more she tries to control her swaying body, the less control she seems to have over it. His dominant presence cows her, his powerful body close as touching. ‘Stand upright, girl!’ roars the voice of this stranger, and she all but topples.

She stands there, re-experiencing the dread of utter inadequacy as the operative inspects her. While, in the gloom beyond the pool of light, she is aware of the unwinking gazes of the two seated men. What if she is dismissed at first showing? Dulcie craves to be admitted into their arcane circle of ancient knowledge, but clearly this will not be easy.

She quails as Kurt’s eyes rake her trembling figure. He looms close behind her, and she freezes as his hands reach round and nudge beneath her unsupported breasts. Not lasciviously, but in reprobation. ‘Next time — if there is a next time,’ he growls, ‘you will wear a support here. Do you understand?’

‘Y-yes,’ she finds herself whimpering.

‘Yes WHAT?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He tugs disdainfully at the T-shirt she has seen fit to wear. ‘You were specifically instructed to wear a PT vest, were you not?’

‘Yes.’ Almost a whisper.

‘WERE YOU NOT?’

‘Y-yes, sir!’ says Dulcie, more loudly. This is really too terrible, and those members of the Board are still watching, silently watching. Perhaps this awfulness will soon be over — surely by now she had been humiliated enough?

He has stooped in front of her, peering and pulling at her white cotton shorts. ‘Too long in the leg,’ he snaps. ‘Too baggy. Was not skin-tight specifically requested?’ Well, yes it was, but Dulcie had had no intention of putting on a peepshow for…

‘And creased. Look at them! These shorts are a disgrace, and so are you for wearing them! How can you expect to be worthy of acceptance when you don’t even take the trouble to dress correctly for your induction? Look at these socks! Sloppy, slovenly!’ His voices rises with genuine anger. ‘And you were instructed to wear plimsolls, girl — not these!’

He grips the offending shoe, lifting her leg. ‘Everything about your turn-out is incorrect!’ He drags off the offending shoe and hurls it into the gloom. ‘Go and fetch it — FETCH!’ he yells, as at a dog. ‘Hop, girl. HOP!’

Dulcie lifts her unshod foot and hops away.

The lone shoe slapping loudly with each hop on the cold concrete floor is almost deafening in its aural solitude.

Her progress is surprisingly strenuous. Her left knee aches, and in the chilly air she feels a dampness on her brow.

From one pool of light, into the darkness, then back into the glare of the second pool causes her to blink rapidly before she sees the shoe.

Stooping to retrieve it, she feels the shorts stretch more tightly. Skin-tight.

‘Bring it here, girl. BRING! Hop! Hop! HOP!’

By the time Dulcie arrives back with it she is panting. Right foot raised, she hands the shoe to him. Already now she has undergone more insult and abasement than she has experienced in years. Tears are not far. Then she freezes, seeing the leather thing gripped in his hand.

Kurt tosses the shoe contemptuously to the floor. ‘Pick it up.’ Voice quiet, cold, unopposable. Dulcie hesitates, biting her lip. ‘Pick up the shoe and put it back on. Now…’

Dulcie turns, stooping to pick it up. As her shorts tighten across her bottom a concussive force strikes it. The burning blast makes her gasp and jerk upright, eyes wide with shock. ‘Shoe on! Put it on!’ As Dulcie struggles to do so, bottom smarting, he roars into her ear, ‘Perhaps that will liven you up a bit! You will now be taught a lesson in humility and obedience! Running on the spot, BEGIN!’

Dulcie feels her bottom tingling as she begins to do as bidden, feeling the heat rise to her face. `Knees up, up, UP!’ She springs her feet higher, breasts bouncing uncomfortably — she should have worn a bra. Breath hisses through her teeth.

Dulcie wants to stop. Yet the eyes of the shadowy watchers seem suddenly everywhere, as if they have the power to fly, to view her from every conceivable position, to peer into her mind and soul. ‘Get those knees up — higher!’

‘Bend over!’ a harsh voice is shouting. ‘Touch your toes. Down, down, I want to see those shorts tight!’

Dulcie arches her body over till her fingertips tap at her toes, feeling her shorts cling like cottony membrane to the cheeks of her bottom, the seam sinking embarrassingly deeply into the cleft.

Whapp! The paddle lands again, hard and hot. Her bottom jerks, flashfire sears through her seat. Then she is upright, again, moving. Her buttocks sizzle and swell. His roaring voice possesses her, his own knees jerk up, up, up, as he demonstrates.

‘Up-up-up-UP!’ She pants harder, yet energy comes in waves to her legs. There is energy in the room, permeating the air. Her shorts cling, slacken, cling, slacken; eyes icily knowing watch her humiliation from the shadows, weirdly alight.

‘Bend over! Touch your toes. Nice and tight — good…’

Whack! The leather lashes down, driving heat and hurt deep into her bottom. Dulcie cannot know how tauntingly tempting her buttocks look as they jut to receive their punishment, legs straining backwards to hold the posture.

‘Now…’ His arms akimbo, feet astride. ‘Take those shorts down.’

‘Wh-’

‘Take them down, girl!’

Dulcie’s back is to the observers. Can she bear this ultimate debasement? She senses a quickening of their otherwise inscrutable attention as she pushes the shorts down her legs, revealing the fact that she is wearing backless panties.

‘Bend over!’

Her bottom is glaringly bare. This time it feels different as she leans from the waist, legs straight and braced back, fingers straining downwards. The rarefied watchers are still, after all, men. She does not see how raptly they stare at her magnificently full and rounded bottom, submissively bent for punishment.

The operative takes up position. With his left hand he plucks the back of the T-shirt clear of the target area, lines up the paddle on the plushly generous curves of those beautiful buttocks, and swipes strongly in.

Dulcie feels her bottom-flesh flatten at the impact, hears the explosive clap echo and re-echo at the heavy burning bite. She remains bent over, cool air playing on her back, buttocks and legs.

She tenses, swaying, and grunts as her bottom ignites again, and again, and then again as the leather sings and hisses, sings and hisses, kissing hard and hot and smarting against the heavenly pads of flesh.

Of course she does not see her bottom as ‘heavenly’. But there are those in that vast subterranean arena who do. It is this subliminal knowledge — that her yielded buttocks are objects of appreciation to those icily-watching eyes — which helps Dulcie maintain the appalling indignity of her posture as she humbly submits to an increasingly vigorous chastisement.

Thwack! Clap! Thwop! Thwack! As her bottom repeatedly bounces and burns, a detached part of her mind finds a strange fascination in the variety of impactual noises the leather makes as its speeding blade collides with her rear.

She cannot see how her buttocks judder and jounce at each stroke, flatten, spring back into shape, wobble and quiver, shiver and shake, make male hearts quicken as the watchers watch! She feels only the hot spurts of pain at each hefty impact — a level of pain which becomes intolerable, so that she wants to scream out ‘Please, no more!’

And then, as if magicked by a wand rather than the slab of heavy leather, the threshold is breached and she is through into a place where continuing impacts of fire and ice are now not only bearable but curiously welcome, and she finds that her bottom is pushing itself out for more.

She is gasping, her bottom ablaze, still stooped tightly over, clinging to that other world she has briefly entered.

‘Stand up!’ the operative is shouting. ‘Turn round and face the Members of the Board who are assessing you today!’

Dulcie does so, standing proudly, refocusing her senses. Her bottom smarts and smoulders as she looks across at the seated watchers.

‘You will now remove that ridiculous top!’ Dulcie flinches at the scorn in his voice, lifting the loose garment up her body and over her head, stretching high, baring her breasts to the gaze of her assessors.

If physical magnificence were an indication of spiritual potential, Dulcie would assuredly, at that moment of full exposure, have become an angel and flown to Heaven. The watching eyes actually blink, gleam brighter in the dimness. For here is beauty of a kind few men are granted the privilege of seeing. Beauties as lovely in their way as that glorious bottom, burning hot and blotchy from its lusty pounding. It is strange to her how she can see herself now as a man would see her, and feel a very special kind of excitement in this sexually charged perception of her own, familiar body. It is strange just as all of this experience has been not only strange but life-enhancing, changing her forever. The real wonder is that Dulcie feels a connection with their minds as positively as if she has plugged into a cosmic circuitry.

The operative is turning her, displaying her naked buttocks to the men once more. ‘Stand up straight, hands behind neck!’

Dulcie does so, the shame and embarrassment of her humiliating abasement transcended to joyous giving. Kurt beholds the rich, ripe bottom-globes, and sighs. Now unbent, the full and lovely weight of this young woman’s buttocks, blessed by perfect roundness, hang like luscious fruits, as suitable for worship as for walloping. But his task this day is not to worship.

He swings the paddle in, watching it collide with a meaty thwack, knowing its burning sting will now be somewhat muted for the recipient, enjoying the violent ripplings the fleshy hummocks make.

He hears her gasp, sees her wince. He will not be able later, any more than she, to recollect how many times he swings the pliant paddle against that wondrously bobbing bottom as Dulcie stands up proud, head haughty-high as the blasts to her unstretched rear continue in regular, medium-heavy strokes.

He paces them so that her buttocks are never allowed to settle to complete stillness after each echoey thwap, but remain in constant movement, each soft globe smeared flat with impact or nudged to delicious wobbly dancing.

In the musty gloom the two Members of the Induction Board absorb every exquisite crack and thwack and sigh and gasp, rasping breath and little pleas, pleas unheeded by the doughty wielder of the leather, whose arm swings steadily to and fro, to and fro, punctuated by the detonations of connection and correction with a female bottom fashioned surely for the sheer delight of the male beholder.

At last the staccato sounds of leather-on-flesh cease in the echoing vault. It is, indeed, as if in a dream that Dulcie, propelled by a final slap against her bottom and responding to the operative’s order, sprints across the emptiness to stand before the powerful men she hopes will be her Masters.

She is acutely aware of the sheen of perspiration drawing their attention to her naked, heaving breasts.

‘Thank you for this opportunity you have given me,’ she says in a humble voice, low and clear, still not daring to look directly at them. ‘I apologise for my shortcomings, and truly hope that I have atoned sufficiently for them…’

She turns her burning bottom full upon them, and then, galvanised by the operative’s last command, is running, hard, harder, into a blackness that engulfs her.

----//----

Did it happen? Oh yes, it happened. Dulcie has remained amazed by the retrospective elation the remembrance of that afternoon brought, when she bared her bottom to strangers and was so thoroughly chastised before their intense gazes by a man not her lover. Sometimes, in the dark early hours, she is transported vividly back to that vast and eerie space and the memory is so profoundly sexual that she is forced to seek relief. It is the only way that she can come to terms with what happened to her there.

She would never afterwards be the same, and had no wish to be. Now she waited, waited, waited in obsessive anticipation, for the summons to the second rite of initiation — this time in front of all six Members of the Induction Board. Terrified and excited in equal measure.

‘Next time,’ Kurt told her, ‘it will last much longer and be far more severe. Do you really feel ready to face it?’

‘Oh, yes…’