Balfor and Terry 5

Nearby, animated by the waves was the body of Nils, his second in command, who had been on bridge duty when the "Bren" went down.

He had started to bloat.

Balfor peered sadly out at he horizon, but there were no ships. He would have to start a fire soon somehow to try and get their attention, though his experience of these waters told him that mariners who see fires on islands mostly assume some Polynesians are doing their cooking.

Scattering the riotously colorful blue and orange crabs that had gathered underneath the corpse, he felt in Nils' pockets and found a plastic cigarette lighter and a very nice Swiss pocketknife. Four hundred and fifty plastic Australian dollars and a tiny zip lock bag containing five tabs of acid had survived in his money belt.

Luck was with him. Good old Nils! thought Balfor. He had a fondness for acid heads and had tripped with Nils on several occasions. He grieved for him, but leapt for joy to know that the lighter, although probably useless for starting fires to attract ships, at least meant he would be able to cook his fish. Unlike Terry he had no love of sushi, though he had expected to develop a taste for it considering his year in Japan teaching English, learning Japanese and studying Zen Buddhism.

The taste of raw fish reminded him of the taste of raw cunt, and though he had been in love with a girl, and had fought mightily hard for it once upon a time, he had never managed to develop a liking for that either.

Things are what they are, he thought blankly.

The pocket knife of course would come in handy for all sorts of things, and if Terry was lucky he might share the acid.

He went and caught several fish in the natural rock pool fish trap that Terry had shown him the day before and threaded them on a stick to carry back to the cave. Catching them was very easy, all you had to do was splash around in the rock pool, stirring them up until they were exhausted to death. Fishing merely had to coincide with the low tide. He admired Terry greatly for thinking of this trick.

Ah my little genius eunuch slave, he thought, realizing that he was falling in love. The feeling had become unfamiliar to him. He had not been in love since Dino the jewel encrusted piano ornament and that had been over ten years ago.

Dino had been seventeen when Freddy got his hands on him.

He was from a middle class Italian family and had planned to study medicine, but he had a nose for cocaine and so had wound up working the local drug scene to pay for his habit. According to Dino, Freddy had simply planted a lot of cocaine in Dino's apartment and then claimed it had disappeared from the trunk of his limousine.

Simple and effective.

It had not taken Dino long to realize that his innocence counted for nothing.

Freddy's henchmen knew what was happening but were too scared of Freddy to protest on Dino's behalf and besides that they were from the peasant class and resented Dino for his privileged background, which since he was still a teen, with a teen's inexperience, he had not been canny enough to play down.

His dark coloring, exquisite Italian good looks, perfect body and bulging crotch also meant that he turned the heads of young women wherever he went. The men resented him for that as well.

He had so much to lose, it was inevitable that he would catch Freddy's eye.

And so he found himself in the dungeon at Calle Rosario, naked in Freddy's little antiseptic smelling "hospital" chained to a bed with no sheet covering him, catheterized and with a heavy cloth bag over his head secured around his neck.

He'd heard the rumors of course, but had always thought that they were just stories, too extreme to be true. This rigmarole was probably just a ploy to scare him.

He struggled of course to try and get free, but his wrists were held in thick leather cuffs, padlocked to heavy chains. The weight of them dragged his extremities to the edges of the bed. Though he couldn't see through the bag, he had worked out that they were secured to bolts in the floor, because tugging on them produced no vibrations of the bed.

Still, his youthful optimism would not allow him to consider his current predicament anything but a sick practical joke.

Besides, it was inconceivable that anything like this could happen to him. His father was a Lawyer. He knew people. He would get him out somehow.

Maybe Freddy wanted to fuck him, but if so why hadn't it happened already?

Freddy sensed Dino's denial, and decided to play out his gradual realization as long as possible.

He let Dino stew in the dungeon for three days. Carmen was instructed to feed him through a zipper in the bag, douche and bathe him, but not to talk.

When she reported that Dino's youthful yet already big and bony hands had begun to tremor with fear, Freddy breezed into Dino's room and nipped off one of his little toes with a pair of bolt cutters.

Dino heard a crunch but at first did not associate it with his own body. Time stood still, and then shunted forward. Pain flooded up to the surface of Dino's consciousness, blossoming over his foot like a cluster bomb full of venomous insects. He couldn't get his breath. Once he had, he screamed and cried a whole lot of words in his native Italian that Freddy didn't understand and didn't need to.

Freddy unfastened Dino's head bag and removed it, then stood smiling, holding toe and cutters, for Dino's viewing convenience exactly as if he were selling him a pair of cufflinks.

While Dino bled, remaining toes curling and uncurling involuntarily, struggling uselessly against his bonds, keening hoarsely because his scream had been so loud, Freddy sat on the edge of his bed twiddling the toe in his fingers, a quizzical look on his face to indicate that he was puzzling about what to do next. Suddenly he popped the severed toe into Dino's left nostril, lopped off the small toe on his other foot to the sound of renewed screaming and popped that in the other nostril. Dino had two toes growing out of his nose.

Freddy began to laugh. Toes! Nose! he laughed. A nose full of toes! I am an English poet!

It was the insane sound of Freddy's laughter that convinced Dino the rumors were completely true and that he really was going to lose absolutely everything that could be cut off and eaten without killing a man.

Diabolical light seemed to fill the room. A light made of shadows. He cried out to God to save him, appealing to all the saints he had ever believed in, His lungs burst with the effort of his pleading and screaming. He felt that all the mountains in the world must surely be shaking with the power of his anguished bellowing voice, but his bonds held, and no one came to save him.

He spent the rest of the day gibbering, and occasionally shrieking with pain, eyes bulging and twitching like the eyes in the freshly severed head of a cow in an abattoir as Freddy unhurriedly tattooed a design of his own device on the pink and tender soles of Dino's feet.

And yet through all this, Dino was clever enough to be careful not to snort out his severed toes, knowing that it would spoil Freddy's comic effect.

Freddy had devised special clamps to hold the feet of his victims completely rigid as he worked the needle over them. He sometimes spent the whole day working on one foot.

After what had seemed an epoch of pain for Dino, Eventually Freddy put down his needle, wiped off the blood for the last time and proudly photographed his handiwork.

He removed the toes from Dino's nose and stuck a hypodermic in his arm. Freddy had learned the hard way that men too often don't survive the shock of having limb after limb amputated without anaesthetic. So he alternated, one limb with aneasthetic, the next without.

When Carmen allowed his drug fog to lift, Dino felt and then saw that his left leg was missing.

As the realisation of his predicament became once more solid and present, an abject apprehension of horror gathered and threatened to consume and disembody him. He refused to give in to it. He breathed deeply. He became apparently calm.

There was a very incongruous cut glass vase of mixed flowers on his night stand.

Nurse Carmen, hung with uncountable crucifixes, came to feed him.

His collusion in Freddy's toes-nose joke, and dozens of other carefully played little intimacies cultivated a fondness for him in Freddy that saved his ears and nipples, and when it came time for him to lose his penis, Freddy liked him enough to experiment with taking out the corpus cavernosum and implanting it instead in his perineum with the flattened glans hard up against his anal sphincter. This was why Dino, almost alone among Freddy's creations, could still occasionally have an orgasm when someone was kind enough to stimulate him for the considerable time it took.

Freddy like all well self disciplined people liked to save the best for last, and the best was the penis.

When the cock of who ever he was torturing finally found itself poking out all on it's own with no balls or legs to keep it company, Freddy would have Carmen don a rubber glove, and masturbate the prisoner slowly, while Freddy flicked him with a riding crop, intoning a repetitious spiel about how this was the last time he would orgasm, (Flick) and what a pity it was that the man had betrayed his fellow criminals, (Flick) incurring the wrath of their overlord, (Flick) and now had to be punished as he had known he would be if he were caught. (Harder flick with petulant flourish). This was so much more fun than just shooting them down at the wharves, Freddy often thought during these sessions.

Depending on how handsome and macho the man was, Carmen sometimes got visibly excited doing this, and occasionally Freddy would leave at this point, allowing her to privately mount the poor man, draping her great billowing breasts over his neck to give him his last fuck, just to make the loss of the last remnant of his manhood all the more sweetly tinged with a more vaginal sort of sadness. If Carmen reported that they had been pleasingly tearful and aroused while she did this, Freddy might postpone the penectomy for a couple of days and let her do it again just to give them false hope of maybe one, just one more last time after that.

When finally it came time to deal with Dino's cock, Freddy's righteous speech about how Dino had betrayed his fellow criminals rang irksomely hollow because everyone in the room knew it wasn't true. Freddy banged on with it anyway. It occurred to Carmen that the absence of his customary riding crop was an interesting indication of residual guilt and contrition.

Carmen pumped away but could not get Dino aroused, and Dino knew if he didn't think fast he would not get his last orgasm. Freddy had not bothered to tell him he was planning anything other than a simple penectomy for him.

It annoyed Freddy that his anomalous genuine fondness for Dino was interfering with his plans to ruin him utterly as was the custom, and it would have diminished Freddy's fun too much if Dino were aware that he had hope of future orgasms.

Dino had to be honest and admit to always having desired men. He would need a man to masturbate him, otherwise Carmen would be just wasting her energy.

"Maricon eh?" said Freddy. "Well you are lucky today. I just happen to know a nice maricon with lots of machismo. A man who is certain to be up to the task for you." He had almost said "machisma" but then remembered he was talking about Balfor.

For a horrible moment, Dino thought Freddy might mean himself. But as it turned out Freddy rarely did anything directly sexual with his ornaments until they were complete. The sight of a penis other than his own during sex revolted him. He would get his vicarious, visceral pleasure torturing his unfinished hospital patients and then go and relieve the tension upstairs with one of his extremely neatly "shaved" specimens.

He had experimented with giving some of the torsos vaginas, and had had some good results, keeping the surgical pockets open and enlarging them with a succession of permanent stainless steel dildos held in place with bejeweled leather body harnesses. But it was a lot of trouble to go to on a torso who would probably find itself in the kennel before long and what was the point when you could just douche an arse hole. Although he was mostly heterosexual, Freddy had always preferred anal because it felt better than a cunt, and sex was more about power for him anyway, as long as it was his own power.

Freddy had the worst kind of cock. Long, thin, bent to the right - hard as wood most of the time, and cruel looking with a pointed head, scarred on one side from a botched circumcision. It was impossible to fuck an arse hole comfortably with a cock like Freddy's, and that was fine by him. He loved that he could make anal very painful and uncomfortable for his torsos. He liked to line up all the ornaments on a bed, his favorite one facing up, (This was always Dino once he had been finished) and poke them sharply at random until he came. As long as a man had lost his penis, he was as good as a woman as far as Freddy was concerned. His torsos were certainly less troublesome than his ex wives, that was for sure.

After Dino had waited for an hour, Balfor had been summoned and briefed and now stood in Freddy's hospital, surveying with amusement the human remainder that Dino had become. Just a head and torso with a cock, the balls were gone already, two still slightly livid scars on his empty bag of a scrotum betraying the site of their removal. Dino's cock still had a raw looking band from a very tight, meticulously neat circumcision.

The catheter had been removed earlier to allow for Carmen's failed hand job.

Dino's foreskin, which Freddy had tattooed painstakingly with tiny interlocking semi abstract images of horses and dogs, wound up tanned, threaded onto and glued to the curved handle of a thick walking stick which Freddy liked to take out with him, caressing the ornate skin as he walked the streets. Inside his shoes as he walked sockless, inlaid and bonded to a removable inner sole would be the tanned soles of Dino's feet, tattooed with the same horse and dog design. Freddy liked things to match.

Being fond of Dino, Freddy wanted to keep his parts in intimate use, rather than merely put him with the other trophies of mostly oafish peasant skin framed on the wall, and so the palms of Dino's hands became two functional but rather messy looking drink coasters in the music room, the thin shriveled fingers which had to stay on because the design strayed right down to their tips, frayed from the edges of the coasters, curling around the glass of liquor they held like the frail petals of dead cactus flowers. The torsos all knew what they were of course, and tended to spend an unhealthy amount of time staring at them mournfully. But not Dino. With his characteristic relentless stoicism, he feigned disinterest in his own lost hands.

Balfor wondered whether he would be cruel enough to mention to Dino that he and Freddy had dined on the two balls (One each) from Dino's now shrunken scrotum. They'd eaten them fried and thinly sliced with mashed potato, chives and snow peas about two and a half weeks earlier. In fact he and Freddy had dined on nothing but roast Dino and vegetables since he cut off the first leg four days after Dino arrived.

Dino squirmed on the bed with embarrassment because of his nakedness in front of a man he had seen but never spoken with. Balfor had always intrigued him, he was not a strikingly handsome man, but by no measure was he ugly or even plain. Even in his mid twenties he was huge and dark and had an awesome sexual presence. He dressed mostly in natural fibres, and chose clothes that gave him old fashioned look, even though most of them were cash and carry. He carried himself with effortless confidence, and seemed never to rush. He was a man one could not help but regard with his due awe and respect.

Balfor, arms folded, watched the obvious embarrassment of the freshly made squirming torso on the bed and liked it. Gradually Dino calmed down. They stared at each other, they both knew why Balfor was there.

"Do you have phantom limbs?" Asked Balfor as if he had dropped it in the middle of a conversation - "Some of the other torso's talk about their phantom limbs."

"Only once" said Dino, horrified to hear himself described that way so casually, but gathering his wits - "It felt like my left leg was curled up under my chin, but I looked down and there was nothing there. I knew there wouldn't be."

"Weird."

"You're telling me."

"You used to deal in the Northern Suburbs didn't you. I saw you a couple of times. I heard stories that you were a clit teaser."

"I never teased a clit in my life, and by the way Mr Freidrichs framed me."

"I don't doubt it. The more they have to lose the better he likes it, and you sure had a lot to lose. You could have been a pin up. He's been happier and more excited carving up and eating you for the past five months than I've ever seen him."

"I was a pin up." Dino spoke over him proudly, voice almost disintegrating as he tried to control his grief and indignation. "I had my photos in a magazine when I was sixteen, modeling Calvin Klein! - Jeans and underwear. I had to go to New York for that shoot and if they hadn't got me hooked on cocaine there would have been more work... They said I was the best. I was very big for my age. (Meaning his cock.) There were pictures of me on the trams and buses. Even here in Colon!"

"So there were," Said Balfor, having known this all along. At dinner one night Freddy had shown him the magazine and some private photos that the quite famous photographer had persuaded Dino to submit to. Nudes of course, done in the best possible taste. The most arousing of these showed Dino sitting beautifully tan and naked in the bubbles of a large white, perfectly clean bath, holding his cock in both hands and peering down at it proudly, subtle beads of probably fake semen on his fine abdominals to tell that he had just masturbated. A hint of his magnificent thigh appeared out of the bubbles like a whale coming up for air. The advanced development of his muscles and cock made him look a lot more mature than his then sixteen years.

Freddy had acquired those prints at considerable effort and cost. Balfor had mused during the dinner, - leafing through them, noticing Dino's gorgeous thighs and biceps, how nice it was that genetics could get it so right, and how delicious and tender those bovine young muscles were as he chewed on them and looked at them in the magazine at the same time.

"There's something tickling inside my nose, I need a tissue. could you call Nurse Carmen?"

"No need." Balfor got a tissue and held it to Dino's nose while he blew.

"Thanks. - Mr Friedrichs is going to take my - " Dino couldn't finish, but he glanced down to where his big neatly circumcised meat nestled in its bed of pubic hair.

Balfor thought it was cute how after everything he'd been through, Dino was still embarrassed to say the name of what he had between his legs. He really must have had a delicate upbringing. Maybe that's what class was, - the ability to go through absolutely any kind of hell with your dignity intact.

"Of course he's going to take it." Said Balfor, "What do think all this has been building up for? Removing that nice tool of yours is going to be his Christmas!"

"Why don't you do something about him?" Whispered Dino conspiratorially, but not very hopefully.

"'Cause I'm almost as bad as he is." Whispered Balfor back to him, smiling." And what's more I like living here. I even like the food."

"I don't believe it." Said Dino, " I like you. you're nice. I wish I knew you were gay before this happened. I would have..."

"I wouldn't have been interested. I heard you were a spoiled little shit. The reason I'm interested now is because obviously you aren't a spoiled little shit any more."

"That's true. Mr Friedrichs has been very hard to take but I've learned a lot."

"Did Fred, I mean Mr Friedrichs tell you could have one last orgasm?"

"Yes. He said he would send a man for me. I'm glad that it's you."

"Thanks." Said Balfor. "I'm flattered."

Dino swallowed and raised his eyebrows unconsciously as Balfor began to undo the buttons of his shirt, clearly getting ready to strip and start the business at hand.

"I've never had sex!" Dino blurted out suddenly, sobbing. "I don't know what to do! This isn't just my last orgasm- it's my first time."

Balfor heard in the sound of the kid's utterly desolate voice that it was true. Dino must have avoided the girls because he was gay, and avoided the boys because he was in the closet.

"Shhh keep your voice down," Said Balfor, checking the hall. "If Freddy finds out you're a virgin he'll jump out of his skin with excitement and make you stay that way. He'll pin your big virgin cock up on the wall to boast about for the rest of time."

Dino was crying quietly with self pity. Big tears streamed down his stricken face.

"Well you shouldn't have your first time in a dump like this," said Balfor looking around at the depressing room, all steel and white paint, cruel surgical instruments in plain view - "I'm taking you upstairs."

He undid the buckles on the leather harness which kept Dino from trying to wriggle off the bed, and lifted him up like a sack of wheat, resting him on his shoulder, but supporting most of his weight on his bent arm.

They bumped into Carmen in the hall who demanded to know where they were going.

"I can' t do it in there." Said Balfor. "The stink of disinfectant turns me off. I'm taking him upstairs."

"Does Mr Friedrichs know?"

"No, why don't you go and tell him. I'd hate for him to think we'd eloped."

She laughed and waved them by.

They passed an ornate upstairs boudoir-like room with a piano. The windows were gigantic and hung with maroon velvet and exquisite Jacquard. Very briefly through the half open door Dino saw another torso eunuch for the first time, reclining on a plush sofa, listening to a recorded song that Dino did not recognize, but soon would because Freddy would make him learn it and sing it over and over again. It was "Thy Hand Belinda" from Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas."

Freddy had seen them pass and he appeared at the doorway of the music room. He watched them going down the west wing toward Balfor's quarters, and wondering what torture Balfor had in store for his newest creation, Freddy called after them suggestively "Why don't you keep him overnight Balfor, only don't make any scars on this one. No Cigars do you hear me! Oh and most of all don't let him forget that it's his-

-Last Time!"

Balfor realized that he had been shuffling his feet through a world of indifference since those days, not particularly caring if he lived or died. It was a good attitude to have though, considering his milieu.

He knew that this was only partly the effect of trauma on seeing the graves in the garden at Calle Rosario. He'd had a tendency for detachment from the earliest. It was what had attracted him to the discipline of Zen.

Still, the scent of frangipani or the sight of a frangipani tree were things he no longer enjoyed. The graves had been too shallow to contain the smell rising from them, mingling with the floral scent and the sharp, burnt smell from the house in a diabolically revolting way.

The thought that Dino was in there mingled with that smell drove him to seven months of heroin and drink. It was a miracle he had got it together to buy the "Bren."

He had not known until he had lost Dino that he had actually been in love, a thing he'd thought himself no longer susceptible to or even capable of.

It was annoying to be naked and therefore pocketless and have to carry everything in his hands. Clambering around the low headland again, day dreaming about the possibility of making pockets in the skin of a permanently naked slave to carry things for him, He returned to Nils' body, stripped him of the black leather Jacket that he was luckily wearing because of the storm's chill, and washed as much of the corpse smell out of it as he could further up the beach and then folded everything up in it to carry as a bundle back to the cave.

On the balcony of a penthouse overlooking the Avenida Nueva de Julio in Buenos Aires, Dino sat dressed in specially altered Armani, sipping Cointreau through a long straw, propped up in a chair surrounded by potted fuchsias and azaleas to watch the passers by far below on the widest street in the world. In a minute he would buzz Carmen to take him inside. He was thinking about Balfor again and would need the big dildo today.