Dr Gerald Rochelle
I confess!
CHAPTER 1
Maria looked up at the ornate ceiling of the entrance to the church to see the carving again. The woman was naked and suspended by a rope around her waist. Her long hair hung in swirls over her face and her arms reached down at full stretch as she clung desperately to her ankles. Behind her, a naked masked man wielded a cane and was bringing it down hard onto the woman's taut buttocks.
There was also a carving of another woman, blindfolded and tied by her wrists to a post, being beaten by three naked men: one with a chain, one a rope and another with a long knotted whip. Yet another depicted a woman, spread-eagled on her back and manacled to the floor by her wrists and ankles. She was being fucked while two other men forced their cocks deep into her mouth. The last woman in the series, the most realistic and therefore her favourite, clothing in tatters, hung suspended by a rope around her neck, and was being beaten across her buttocks and breasts as dogs snarled menacingly around her feet.
Maria had gazed up at these same carvings as a young girl. She had wondered what it would be like to be whipped and chained, and how it would feel to be beaten, fucked and humiliated. Often she had leant against the wall of the entrance, gazing up as she lifted her school skirt and slid her fingers down the front of her white panties. She had dribbled from the corner of her mouth as she slowly inserted her fingers between the pink folds of her young cunt, and gasped with anxiety and joy as strange shivers of excitement coursed jerkily through her limbs.
Maria had been brought up a strict Catholic, and had been used to confessing as a young girl, but it had been years since she had come here to pour out her sins.
She stopped just inside the heavy oak doors, and for a few moments stood in the silence. She stared down towards the dimly lit altar. Candles flickered on the white cloth that draped it and the gold candlesticks stood up glistening with darkly etched veins mysteriously entwined around them.
She jumped as the door closed behind her with a low thud. She must be even more tensed up than she had expected.
The metal-capped heels of her shiny black shoes clicked on the stone floor as she walked over to the small wooden confession box that was built into the wall behind some towering grey columns. She paused at the closed door and peered through the lattice-work front; she could just make out the dark figure that crouched like retribution inside. Without hesitation, and falling into the old habit, she reached up and drew back the heavy red curtain that hung in velvety folds from a brass rail fixed between the side of the box and the wall.
She paused for a few seconds, just to let her eyes get used to the dim light inside, then, bending slightly, she pushed behind the dark shroud of the smooth curtain.
There was a narrow seat fixed to the side of the booth and below that, raised only a few inches from the floor, an even narrower shelf for penitents to kneel on. She knelt down as she had always done before, but the hard wood hurt her knees so she got up again and slithered onto the little seat. It was cold and she shivered. She turned her shoulders towards the grill in the side of the confession box and, as if sensitive to her presence, it slid back.
She looked through the open grill and saw the white teeth of Father Thomas, it was as if no time at all had passed since she had last crouched trembling there.