his chance, av^td it was too late now for me to abort my plans for our u^nion on my terms.
^yhen he came round, he was strapped into a Judas chair. It- had taken me a few days to construct it, since I'd had t^y start from scratch. The Judas chair was one of my San (yimignano discoveries.
I'd only ever seen a couple of references to it in my books, none of which made it at all clear h^pw exactly it was constructed. But there in the museum, if^ey had their very own working model. I had taken a couple of photographs to augment the one in the museum catalogue, and equipped with those, I had worked out a practicable design on my computer.
It's not a machine that inquisitors have used much, though I can't quite see why. The San Gimignano museum p^its forward a theory which frankly seems absurd to me. C-^upled with some of the other descriptions on the cards, if^is daft theory convinces me that the cards have been to^-ritten by some blinkered, obsessive feminist. The theory gv^>es thus: it was OK to use implements of torture on u^omen such as vaginal pears that shredded the cervix and vagina, so-called 'Chastity' belts which ripped their labia to a bloody pulp, implements that chopped nipples as efficiently as a cigar cutter, because women were a separate sf^ecies from the inquisitors, and indeed were often creatures of the devil. On the other hand, so this demented tk^eory goes, torture instruments used on men tend not to^ be directed against their sexual organs, in spite of the tenderness of those areas, because wait for it the torturers felt subconsciously connected to their victims and therefore any mutilation inflicted on their cocks and balls were unthinkable.
Clearly, the caption writer in San Gimig- nano is far from all fait with the refinements of the Third Reich.
My Judas chair, even if I say so myself, is a masterpiece of the type. It consists of a square frame with a leg at each corner, with arm supports for the forearms and a thick plank up the back. Much like a primitive carving chair, except that there is no seat.
Instead, below the gap where the seat should be, there is a sharply barbed conical spike, attached to the chair legs at its base by a cross-brace of strong wooden struts. For the spike, I'd used one of the large cones that cotton yarn used to be wound round on industrial looms. You can pick them up in the souvenir shop of any outpost of the heritage industry. I'd covered it with a thin, flexible sheet of copper, and fastened thin strands of razor wire in a spiral round the outside. I'd added my own refinement to the example in the torture museum; my spike was wired up to the electrical supply via a rheostat, allowing me to apply electric shocks of varying intensity. The whole thing is bolted to the floor to prevent accidents.
While he'd still been unconscious, Paul had been held above the spike by a strong leather strap under his armpits, binding him to the back of the chair. I'd also strapped each ankle to one of the front legs of the chair. As soon as I unfastened the strap, he'd be thrown on his own resources, relying on the muscles in his calves and his shoulders to keep him from the savage spike, carefully sited immediately below his anus. Since the chair was so high that only his toes could reach the floor, I didn't expect him to hold out too long.
His eyes registered the same panic I'd already seen in Adam. But his situation was entirely of his own making.
"I had no idea, no idea," he gabbled. Tm sorry, I'm so sorry. You 'we got to let me make it up to you. just let me out of this thing, and I promise we can make a fresh start. "
I shook my head.
"Robert Maxwell got one thing right. He said trust is like virginity; you can only lose it once. You have a treacherous soul, Paul. How can I believe in you?"
His teeth began chattering, though not, I suspect, from cold.
"I made a mistake," he forced out.
"I know that. Everybody makes mistakes.
Please, all I ask is the chance to make it right. I can make it right, I promise. "
"Show me, then," I said.
"Show me you mean it. Show me you want me."
I stared at his shrivelled cock, dangling with his balls