Drusilla

by F.E.Campbell

1

Prelude

For those within, there comes a time of day that has no name. It is the dying afternoon, telling of twilight and the threat of night, mourning the hours of the sun. A time of melancholy.

Drusilla was familiar with it. She had always supposed it to be the hour in which Claude Debussy had been inspired to compose his ‘Afternoon of a Fawn’: that tinkling lament for the lost felicity of the day and a satyr promise of eroticism beneath the moon. Its mood weighed heavily upon her solitude.

She welcomed it as sympathetic to her condition. Most of her day was past, but Bryce’s return was still distant enough that she could savour her mastery of the pain and the panic; especially the panic! There had been times... ! Since none of what she was enduring made sense, it was as well to achieve a perspective from which it could be dispassionately viewed.

It was primarily physical. Its sexuality was still something to explore. A physical imposition to invoke responses in the mind—or would it be the spirit! Cynically she supposed she could erase both words and substitute the heart. The poor human heart got blamed for everything. Its function was to pump blood, but people made it a repository for all their guilts. She recalled Bryce’s words: “A change of heart... ”

The pain was an ally. It was not severe, no throbbing. agonies. But its constancy proclaimed purpose. It belonged. It countered boredom. Increasingly it was giving her a sense of accomplishment. Virtue! Drusilla supposed this a discovery. Interwoven in her day had been wry glimpses of absurdity. Suburban basements lack character. Their atmosphere is domestic. From where she stood she could observe the washer and dryer against one wall and the shelves holding the jars of pickles and preserves at the other. If she strained her neck enough there would be Bryce’s work bench and his treasured tools. He had mentioned them:

“I can make some of the stuff we’ll need... ” But the basement was cool in the heat of summer. In addition, it possessed a facility.

The post.

Drusilla was tied to the post with neat competence.

Bryce had taken a lot of time in the binding of his wife. She had helped by standing limply passive, her naked back against the wood. They had discussed her nakedness with the same polite detachment they had employed after the initial heated resentments had been set aside and they had begun their postulation of the impossible. Bryce had suggested it diffidently. With a willingness she found suspect within herself, Drusilla had agreed.

Nudity had added a quality of deliciousness to the mixtures of Drusilla’s captivity. It had provoked awareness. It had also enabled Bryce’s rope to sink intimately in her flesh and hold her doubly secure. After the first panics had passed she had ceased to struggle for release. The rope and her skin had found an affinity against which she could not prevail. In the first few hours of fruitless rebellion against her bonds she had repeated again and again a shocked admission: “No way... ! No way... !”