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Category: Erotica/Classic Erotica
Description: He married Mary Sue for her beauty, her sexual appetite and prowess, but when she inherited a small fortune, he gladly entered into an agreement with Mary Sue's mother to have his wife declared incompetent; to have himself appointed her legal guardian. The plan seemed foolproof. His sadistic college roommate, Rolfe Palmer, was a respected psychologist at a prestigious private school. Palmer, for a fee and the pleasure of Mary Sue's body, would professionally declare Mary Sue insane, have her confined in a secluded sanitarium which he would establish, and Mary Sue would become a mindless sex slave while her loving husband and mother enjoyed her fortune. It was all so simple, or was it? Perhaps they hadn't understood Mary Sue as well as they thought?
eBook Publisher: Renaissance E Books/Sizzler, 2004
eBookwise Release Date: October 2004

15 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [243 KB]
Words: 55411
Reading time: 158-221 min.

Chapter One

My wife and I kept the rendezvous with Rolfe Palmer in the lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in Paris. We were right on time. It was early September and Paris was never more beautiful. The old-fashioned elegance of the Imperial Ballroom in the ageless hotel where we were having champagne had not changed since my first memories of it.

Much time had passed. My last visit had been long before I married Mary Sue, whom I now referred to as my fourth disaster. On this occasion, she and I were celebrating our second anniversary and the trip to Europe was paid for by her mother. Actually, this whole affair was mother-in-law inspired and a bribe. Perhaps blackmail would be a better choice of word, but in one way, this trip was not the "gift" it was advertised to be within the family circle. It was, in fact, part of what might be termed a sinister collusion with Mary Sue's family hierarchy in which I found myself more and more involved.

As for Rolfe Palmer, my friend, he was 36 and a former Berlitz language teacher. He had earned his keep as a part-time freelance journalist and translator, and a sometimes private tutor in languages and mathematics. Now he was a respectable, responsible psychologist.

Rolfe was an old acquaintance. I met him casually in Paris years back in what we both nostalgically refer to as "the old days." We became close friends quickly, an omen of sorts. But in reality, a mere ten years had passed during this interval and we'd seen little of each other, but not intentionally. He'd married and divorced. I'd done it too, and had it undone three times. Now, with Mary Sue having put up with me and vice versa for two years, I was beginning to feel more or less confident that at long last I'd come to my senses and made the proper kind of decision. I was wrong.

At best, marriage is a messy quadrangle. I mean, the wife has her daydreams and most of these never quite come true. But her nightmares do. Of course, the husband has his dreams, but we speak hesitatingly about these. Next in line come the actual physical realities. It's been said the 'twain' shall never meet. It could be added that four angles seldom meet in any kind of successful grid. Such was our case--Mary Sue's and mine. This was the single reason for Rolfe Palmer entering the picture.

Currently he was the psychological consultant in an exclusive private school academy in Switzerland, about 90 minutes from the airport in Geneva. There was easy and frequent access to Paris. It was my thought that Rolfe might help me escape the bind into which I was being inexorably drawn much like an escaped prisoner being sucked to death in quicksand. I needed a way out desperately and I needed a conspirator at the same time. I knew I could trust Rolfe.

As for my German friend's credentials, recent letters described his final studies in Rome. He was awarded a European degree in clinical psychology, but specifically in testing.

The plot was to have my wife, Mary Sue, exposed to his legitimately approved testing apparatus and subsequently declared mentally incompetent to handle a legacy of considerable value--healthy half-yearly dividends, not to mention monthly allowances from a substantial trust fund bequeathed to Mary Sue by her dear departed father. As her husband, I would then assume responsibility for all financial transactions larger than a restaurant bill.

It should be mentioned that I did not intentionally marry Mary Sue for her money. Truly, her having any at all came as a genuine shock laced with pleasant surprise not unlike the feeling experienced when a railroad conductor skips over you as he punches the tickets. This marriage was not only a free ride, but as time passed, it became evident that I was also going to get paid handsomely for it.

Every man has his price and his poison. Whoever said that larceny wasn't the monopoly of common thieves was correct. Larceny flows as abundantly in the blood of the innocent who is undercharged in the supermarket and gets away with it, as it does through the veins of the embezzler.

And speaking of everybody having their price, I had qualified insights into Rolfe Palmer to which no man was privy. Robert Louis Stevenson conceived the awesome, terrifying character of Dr. Jekyll and his evil half, Mr. Hyde, but it was Rolfe Palmer who personified this bizarre duality in real life. The price he paid was stupendous.

The incredibly peculiar psychological confusion that was part and parcel of Rolfe's unique identity crisis could have made him eligible to be the main attraction at an exhibit of freaks in some human zoo. When the Mr. Hyde personality overkilled his psyche, I mean.

Schizophrenia characterized by a loss of contact with a particular environment is one thing. Rolfe Palmer, when his personal demons struck and he underwent moral disintegration, was quite another.

In Rolfe's case, the antidote he had to swallow to speed him back to the acceptable level of consciousness of any average functioning human being was attainable in any bar or liquor store. A drink! Essentially, when Rolfe was sober, he was dangerous! Drunk, he was happy-go-lucky, a charmer, witty, generous to a fault, even tender and solicitous. Someone's ingrown toenail could make Rolfe cringe, or even double up in pain empathetically when he was either tipsy or staggering drunk; but when he was sober, this same imaginary pain from the same ingrown toenail could make his senses reel as one convulsive frenzy of wild, sadistic pleasure after another washed over his trembling body.

This is but a hasty, superficial description of the dramatic personality changes over which his private devils dwelled and raged. Ironically, this occurred only when he was so hung over from days and nights of heavy boozing ... when the delirium tremens hovered like famished desert vultures waiting for their prey's last heartbeat.

To gain sobriety, Rolfe suffered the tortures of the proverbial damned--excruciating stomach discomfort, intestinal and muscular pain with insane tingling in his extremities. His finger joints would go numb, his gums ached, even bled, his eyes seemed to swell, he couldn't sleep or eat until the hideous effects of the alcohol poisoning diminished.

This took time. The misery was his alone and it drove him into a seclusion populated with demons and creatures grotesquely deformed and resembling science fiction characters from strange and distant planets. The garden variety of pink elephants or crawling pit vipers on the wallpaper would have been a welcome relief.

There was no swift cure, nor any temporary relief from his torment, from the extreme punishment he seemed willing to inflict masochistically upon himself. No tranquilizer worked, no drug could pacify or appease, no narcotic, no anesthetic; nothing could even soothe or dull the misery, or control the agonizing convulsions that almost crucified him--until he exiled himself in another environment where he was able to force his brain to adopt what he calls the world of his sex-puppets and nymph-like marionettes, themselves writhing in pain he inflicted.

I was intimate with his unorthodox therapy, his bizarre methods and, of course, with the accompanying results that mysteriously restored his physical balance. At the same time, they invested him with such a capacity for inflicting pain and promoting abject humiliation that, were he rewarded in hell for his wrathful revenge against imaginary enemies, the chief devil himself would impale Rolfe Palmer on a white-hot poker before drawing and quartering him.

So much for a spontaneous qualification of the contradictions this man presented. There are a miscellany of trifles involved in what could be called the pathology of Rolfe's abnormality. They will flower as this tale continues. But it must be made clear that no psychiatrist, no alienist, no mental healer or insulin or electrotherapy or shock therapy held even a ray of hope for Rolfe's conversion. His pulse and his very soul throbbed with the need for pain-memory that was ineffably sweet to him. Were he scourged on a spiked rack or burned at the stake when the Hyde-like confusion overwhelmed him, his indifference, his disdain would be incredulous ... to any but myself.

In the back of my mind the enigma that Rolfe Palmer represents ceased to puzzle me when I learned he'd completed his studies and succeeded in obtaining his certificate, and with it an attractive situation with the private academy in Geneva. When I learned this exclusive school catered to the sons and especially the young daughters of the social elite--for only the very rich could afford the tuition and the numerous costly extras--I gained yet another insight into Rolfe's exclusiveness. He wrote to me periodically after we'd reestablished contact. This was well before the planned anniversary trip with my wife.

Many of these letters--some were brief notes or picture postcards--spoke of his being able to gain a working control over his "difficulties," as he called the sharp aberrations at which I've hinted. This was encouraging in two ways: one, I had no desire to hear of Rolfe being discovered, chased and hunted down, destroyed like the monster Dr. Frankenstein created; and two, I saw a chink of light under the door in terms of my dealing with Mary Sue and her family. Rolfe is no dummy. On the contrary, his brilliance in language, math, cryptography, Scrabble and chess, to name a few areas in which my admiration for his skill and cunning is supreme, never ceases to astonish and even excite me. I have mentioned the "old days." During that time, his stories and anecdotes about depravity, perverse and debauched activities in which he played a prominent role, all carefully knit and unhurried in the telling, invariably disturbed both my sleeping and waking hours.

There was a third matter, related to money. I noticed a theme weaving in and out of his correspondence. If he could amass some extra money, he felt he would be able to get a better grasp on his situation, which he insisted was deteriorating as he grew older and his tolerance for rum decreased. That is to say, he had, at long last, disciplined himself. This was after many heroic attempts to moderate his intake had failed miserably.

These disciplinary methods were twofold. Rolfe was able to curb his depravities, his often reckless, licentious and invariably savage sadomasochistic sexual activities. To accomplish this, he forced himself onto a "maintenance" diet of rum and whatever mixer he used. This was much like an individual supplementing his daily intake of food with maintenance vitamins. He discovered he could "keep the glow on," manage to eat two or three reasonably nourishing meals a day, and thus thwart the dreaded insomnia that he tried unsuccessfully to kill with more and more rum. There is nothing novel about this vicious cycle.

"Money to buy what I need like a grave robber who supplies corpses to young interns," he wrote as an analogy, "would enable me to pacify the terror and appease the demons..."

Another letter in his fine handwriting announced he had leased a small villa several miles distant from the Swiss school. It was secluded, protected by a medieval forest, ideal as a monastic retreat. Plumbing was intact; there was plenty of space, castle-like walls, oak throughout, a private man-made pond, an emergency generator for electric power, and a horse barn. He also described a fireplace in which he said one "could roast a baby elephant..."

Mary Sue and I flew to Paris shortly after receiving Rolfe's invitation.