the caning clock

Haron of The Spanking Writers posted the other day about a customisable clock, where the numbers could be replaced by pictures of bottoms sporting a stripe for each hour.

Oddly enough, I've had a very similar fantasy for a long time now, although I don't think I've ever talked about it before. It's part of a series of fantasies in which I'm one of many naked slaves owned in a vast, dark castle. In various aspects of the fantasy I'm used as furniture, or simply locked into the walls, head in one room and bottom in another, to be used by anyone who passes by. Bizarre room decorations are quite a feature of this fantasy, particularly ones which immobilise helpless slaves in such a way that their bottoms are presented and exposed. One of my favourite ideas is to be caged in a wooden structure that bends me double, concealing every bit of me apart from my lifted, waiting bottom, rising out of the cool wood, helplessly available and completely depersonalised.

Most of the ideas are anatomically or practically impossible, and the force of the fantasy is always in being kept there for hours ... certainly far longer than anyone could comfortably go without drinking or relieving themselves. Although if you had the space and the carpentry skills you could act out snatches of the long, ritualised scenes in my head that would be tedious and impossible to enact in full. But they're there, cosily nestling in the shadowy stacks of my mind's library, as well-worn and oft-visited as the spanking scenes in my favourite erotic novels.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of this imaginary castle was an ancient decorative clock. It was established by an eccentric aristocrat in the castle's history, and the weight of tradition is such that no-one has ever thought to challenge this archaic custom, which is still carried out day and night. The ritual of the clock is Gormenghastian in its precision and antiquity. In the Longest Room, lined with portraits and cabinets containing dusty curios, two sets of twelve wooden benches are set up in a row, one on each side of the long hall. A naked girl bends over each one, waiting. To mark each hour a uniformed footman walks up to the line. He is carrying a long cane, in dark wood with a silver handle. With the effortless neatness of long practice, he smartly canes a waiting girl with the strokes of the hour. The first girl receives one stroke; an hour later the second receives two; etc. The cane is stained with age, and the strokes cut deep enough to mark; the welts have to be clear and visible. Anyone walking between the line of bottoms will be able to tell at a glance which hour of the day it is.

The girls are rotated, of course, between this duty and others; the row of bottoms each morning needs to be fresh and unmarked. Whether or not the girls assigned to the later hours of the night are chosen randomly, as punishment or as part of some great, complex rota, I don't know. I also know that no-one could wait all day like that. But I like the image of it. The idea of waiting. Of being 11pm, or 12pm, listening to the hours creep closer. Each slowly mounting set of cracks and yelps. The cries of the girls would become part of the everyday fabric of sound in the castle; one would listen out to the number of screams, when they rang out, to check the hour.

And there's a small part of me, as well, that knows this was only true in the olden days. Now, this wing of the castle has fallen into disuse. No-one enters it except the servants. But the old rituals are still carried out, reliable as clockwork. Just the footman and the waiting girls, performing customs as old as memory, with no witnesses but the spiders in the shadows. The rest of the castle has long forgotten them - but the clock keeps on faithfully striking the hour.