Chapter 11: The Workbench Begins
He unshackled her from the bed. Her body was a collection of protesting wounds, stiff from days in one position. She stumbled when her feet hit the floor, but he caught her, his grip impersonal, like handling a piece of lumber. He didn’t comment on the stench or the filth matted on her skin and hair. It was irrelevant now.
He led her, naked and shuffling, out of the bedroom and into the main workshop. The morning light through high, grimy windows sliced through the dust motes, illuminating the strange menagerie of his craft. A chair with legs that looked suspiciously like spread thighs. A cabinet whose doors were carved with explicit, interconnected figures. And in the center of the room, dominating the space, was The Workbench.
It was not a bench for repair. It was an altar. Thick, oiled oak, eight feet long and four feet wide, stained dark from use. It stood on heavy iron legs, bolted to the floorboards. Along its sides were arrays of clamps, articulated arms ending in leather cuffs, and a series of wicked-looking bronze nozzles on flexible hoses. Above it hung a complex mobile of polished lenses and dark glass orbs, currently dormant. The air around it hummed with a sub-audible frequency that made her teeth ache.
“This is your monastery,” Voo said, his hand on the small of her back, guiding her forward. “Your training ground. It reads the electrical noise of your thoughts. The lewd ones, the specific frequencies of depravity, it will reward.”
He tapped one of the bronze nozzles. “Nutrient slurry. Water. It will administer them rectally. Your mouth is for other things now.”
He pointed to the mobile above. “When your thoughts hit the correct pitch, the correct… vividness, it will make them real. Not hallucination. Tactile. Kinetic. It will fuck you with the phantoms your own mind creates.”
He turned her to face him, his predatory gaze holding hers. “If your mind wanders into silence, or sentiment, or anything clean, the bench will respond. It will not shock you. The cattle prod was a primer. This…” He ran a hand along the cool oak. “This will saturate every nerve ending you have with the maximum amount of pain a human nervous system can register without total synaptic collapse. You will not be able to think at all. You will just be pain. Until you think the right thoughts again.”
He saw the comprehension dawning in her sunken eyes, the primal terror. He smiled, a thin, sharp thing. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? You will sculpt your own hell with your imagination. I’m just providing the tools. Up.”
He helped her onto the bench. The oak was cold against her back. He began securing her with methodical precision. Leather cuffs at wrists and ankles, connected to rails that allowed some adjustment but no escape. A wider restraint across her forehead. He positioned her legs wide, knees bent, exposing everything. He took a final hose, thicker than the others, its nozzle a smooth, bulbous shape, and carefully, almost tenderly, worked it into her ass. She felt it slide deep, a cold, impersonal invasion.
“The feed tube,” he said. He connected the other ends of the hoses to a series of pumps and translucent tanks mounted on a rack beside the bench. One held a beige sludge. The other, clear water.
He stepped back, surveying his handiwork. She was pinned, spread, penetrated, a specimen ready for dissection. He walked to a wall panel and threw a series of heavy switches.
The mobile above her began to glow with a soft, internal amethyst light. The lenses focused. The hum in the air deepened, vibrating in her marrow. A warmth emanated from the nozzle in her ass, and a slow, relentless trickle of warm nutrient paste began to flow into her bowels. It was a grotesque, full feeling. Being fed like a baby, but through the wrong hole.
“Begin,” Voo said, and walked to the other side of the workshop. He picked up a chisel and a block of walnut, beginning to carve, giving her his back.
She was alone with the machine.
For a moment, there was only the hum, the awful, gradual filling of her gut, and the paralyzing fear. A clean thought burst through: This is madness. I need to get out.
The bench reacted instantly.
It was not a shock. It was an universe of agony. It was every bone breaking at once, every tooth exploding, her skin being flayed by a million white-hot wires, her eyeballs melting, her cunt and clit turned into cores of supernovae. There was no location. It was totality. She could not scream because her concept of a mouth had ceased to exist. She was a sentient fragment of pure, undiluted suffering.
It stopped.
She was back on the bench, gasping, tears and slick pouring from her. The echo of the pain lived in every cell, a ghost of absolute annihilation.
“Think, cunt,” Voo called from across the room, not looking up from his carving. The chisel tocked against the wood.
She scrambled. She vomited a fantasy from the bedroom, the one about the line of men. She pictured them, their rough hands, their smell. She tried to feel it.
Nothing happened. No reward. No pain. Just the hum and the filling.
The machine was discerning. It required nuance. Specificity. Vivid emotional texture. She couldn’t just recall; she had to create.
She closed her eyes. She imagined the first man wasn’t a man, but Voo, wearing a stranger’s face. He didn’t just fuck her. He leaned down and spit into her open mouth as he pumped into her. She focused on the wet heat of the spit, the contempt in the eyes, the way her own throat worked to swallow it as she was being jarred by his thrusts.
The bronze nozzle near her cunt whirred. A smooth, cold, perfectly shaped phantom cock, shimmering with faint purple light, materialized between her spread legs. It was not fully real, not entirely matter, but it had weight and texture. It pressed against her opening, then slid inside, a perfect mimicry of the sensation she was imagining. It matched the rhythm of her fantasy, pounding into her, the sensation uncanny and absolute. A moan tore from her throat—part horror, part euphoric relief. It was working.
She held the fantasy, feeding it details. The taste of the spit. The sound of his balls slapping her. The phantom cock pistoned into her, a flawless feedback loop. The pain remained a memory.
But holding a single thought was impossible. Her mind, weakened, flickered. The phantom cock vanished. The pain returned, a two-second eternity of obliteration.
She reeled, sobbing. The feeding tube pumped its slurry into her clutching colon. She was being filled from both ends, one with pleasure, one with sustenance, both equally degrading.
She learned. She became a frenzied auteur of the obscene. She crafted scenarios with layers. She imagined being forced to lick a public toilet clean, then being fucked in that wet filth by a janitor with hooves for hands. The bench made her taste the chemical tang of the cleaner, feel the rough ceramic on her tongue, then feel the bizarre, hard pressure of the hoof-like appendages gripping her hips.
Days bled. The workshop lights went on and off. Voo worked, slept, ate in front of her. He would sometimes come over, watch the phantom manifestations fucking her, observe the tears on her face. He’d sometimes stroke her hair. Sometimes he’d slap her exhausted face to keep her mind generating. “More detail,” he’d whisper. “What does the fear smell like?”
She lived inside a revolving diorama of her own corruption. She fantasized about being a urinal in a barracks, used by dozens, the liquid hot and acrid. The bench made her feel the splash on her face, the terrifying warmth. She fantasized about being pregnant with something non-human, something with too many limbs that moved inside her, and the bench made her belly distend slightly, made her feel the squirm of something alien under her skin.
The pain became her editor. Any cliché thought, any half-hearted scenario, was met with that totalizing correction. It forced innovation into her depravity. She imagined historical figures violating her. She imagined inanimate objects gaining sentience to use her. She imagined her own internal organs being rearranged for sexual purpose.
The line between fantasy and reality dissolved. The phantom cocks, tongues, hands, and objects were more real than the slow drip of slurry into her bowels or the occasional piece of fruit Voo would eat at his desk. Her world was the purple-tinged sensations the machine spun from the thread of her thoughts.
After a week, she stopped trying to recall her old name. It was a symbol that triggered cataclysm. She was the cunt on the bench. That was all.
After two weeks, her fantasies required no effort. They were a constant, rolling stream, a river of filth she floated down. The machine’s manifestations became near-constant, a symphony of violation that played upon her body. She came, screaming, from phantom attentions, her orgasms just another form of fuel.
After three weeks, Voo changed the setting. He turned a dial on the wall panel. “Increase fidelity,” he muttered.
The next time her mind produced a fantasy—this one of being gang-raped by creatures made of shifting clay—the machine did more than create phantoms. A warm, viscous substance, smelling of earth and salt, splashed onto her belly and thighs as the clay-men in her mind finished. It was real. The machine had manifested not just sensation, but matter.
She cried out, shocked by the actual wetness.
Voo walked over, dipped his fingers in the strange cum, rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. “Good,” he said. “The mind makes the world. Your mind makes this world.” He smeared the substance across her lips. “Taste it.”
She did. It tasted of minerals and a coppery tang, exactly as she’d imagined.
The final week was a blur of real and unreal. She fantasized about drowning in cum, and the machine filled her mouth and nose with a warm, salty liquid, forcing her to swallow gasping breaths of it. She fantasized about being infested with phallic worms, and she felt them, wet and wriggling, inside her cunt and ass, a squirming, full feeling that made her buck against her restraints.
The pain sessions became rare. Her mind was a pristine engine of obscenity, humming in perfect sync with the machine. She thought of nothing else. There was nothing else to think of. Her past was a pale, forgotten ghost. Her body was a tool for the manifestation of her psyche. The feeding tube pumped, the water tube pumped, the phantom fuckery continued, and she existed in a state of perpetual, hormone-soaked, brainwashed arousal.
One morning, Voo didn’t turn on his lathe. He walked to the bench and stood over her. She looked up at him, her eyes clear, bright with a lurid hunger. A phantom tongue was lapping at her clit-stem, a product of a simple, steady fantasy about a dog. She didn’t stop the fantasy. She maintained it while looking at him, a testament to her control.
He watched the purple, shimmering tongue work. He saw the absolute focus in her face. He reached down and manually disconnected the feed tubes, capping them. He unclamped the leather restraints.
“The month is done,” he said.
She didn’t move. The phantom tongue faded. The sudden silence in her body and mind was terrifying. She waited for the pain. It didn’t come. Her mind, left to its own devices, immediately supplied a fresh fantasy: Voo pissing into her open mouth to christen her freedom.
He saw the shift in her eyes, the specific, eager depravity there. He smiled, a real smile this time, one of profound satisfaction. “Perfect,” he breathed.
He helped her sit up. Her body was weak, atrophied, but humming with a wired, filthy energy. She was clean now, the machine having kept her free of waste, her skin oddly pristine. But she felt permanently stained.
“Come,” he said, taking her hand. “The bench has done its work. Now we move to the next phase. Your training is complete. Your conditioning is absolute.” He led her toward the bedroom, not the bed, but toward a large, antique mirror that leaned against the wall. “Now,” he said, turning her to face her reflection, his hands on her shoulders, “you get to return to your old life.”