He awoke with a start. Had he been having a bad dream? It seemed so real. He dreamed he had been wrapped up tightly in a sheet and carried away. Somewhere. He tried to think. It was all a blur, as if seen through a drug haze.
"No matter," he thought, "a warm shower will clear my head." Tensing his muscles, he stretched out his arms, only to find he couldn't move. "What the hell!" he said, trying to move his arms. As the cobwebs cleared from his brain, he discovered that he was strapped down to a table. There was a strap across his chest, one on each wrist, and one over each knee. The straps on his wrists and knees completely encircled them, and were attached to the tabletop by a metal cord. He was able to rotate his arms and legs, but if he pulled on them, the straps cut painfully into his flesh.
The strap across his chest was attached to the tabletop under his armpits. It was loose enough to allow him to breath, but cut into him when he tried to sit up, or flex his chest. He was still able to raise his head, not that it made any difference.
"This is not good," he murmured to himself, in a masterpiece of understatement.
He felt cold. As more cobwebs cleared away, he discovered he was nude. No, not nude, he was naked. Nude infers you have some control, and he had none. He was lying, strapped down, naked, on what appeared to be a table, his arms spread at a forty-five degree angle away from his body, towards his feet. His legs were spread at a thirty-degree angle. As far as he could tell, he was perfectly horizontal, and completely helpless.
By lifting his head, he was able to see his surroundings. There was precious little to see. There were candles burning all around him. Each one was roughly three feet away, encircling his body. Two at his feet, two at his knees, two at his hips, two at his elbows, two at his shoulders, one on each side of his head, and one beyond the top of his head.
"Thirteen candles," he thought, "someone has a sense of humor. Good thing I'm not superstitious."
Looking upward, he could see nothing, only flat black nothingness. The view to the sides was little better, revealing, through subtle differences in black, what appeared to be black velvet curtains.
There was no sound. It was so quiet, he could hear the blood rushing through his ears. No. Now that wasn't true. He could hear something. Tiny tapping sounds, like something small on a hard surface, just at the edge of audible. He concentrated so hard on listening, he almost missed the tickle at his feet and legs.
He jerked his leg away from whatever was there, then felt the same thing on the other leg. Something was moving along his leg. Now it had crawled up on his leg, and was moving toward his body.
Raising his head to see what it was turned out to be a bad idea. It was a cockroach. It was crawling up his thigh, then across his hip, and up to his ribs.
"Ugh!" He tried to shake it off. Even though the straps cut into his chest, he flexed his muscles, trying to shake it off. The cockroach stopped, wiggled its antennae, then scurried off his shoulder.
He relaxed with a sigh. It was too soon to relax, for there were two new cockroaches crawling on the inside of his left thigh. They moved up to his crotch, then over his dick, through the pubic hair, and up to his navel. Although it tickled, it was disgusting at the same time.
There was no use trying to shake them off, so he just turned his head to keep them off his face. He was able to feel more of them crawling along his side, and then up on his body. More and more of them crawled up on him. It seemed like he was covered with them, although there were fewer than twenty. He endured it for several minutes, until finally, the last one crawled off and away.
His respite lasted only a few moments. Soon he felt something different crawling on his belly. When he looked, he saw it was a spider. Not a small spider, this one was easily two and a half inches in leg span, while its body was at least an inch long. That may not sound very big, but a spider bigger than your nipple is a large spider.
"Eeeehhh!" was all he could say. He was not afraid of spiders normally, most of them were too small to be afraid of, but his disquiet of them was directly proportional to their size. This one caused him to shiver.
He shivered even harder when its big brother arrived and started to stroll up his right arm, and its even bigger sister thought his neck was a great place to hang out. Their smaller children and grandchildren, all scurrying across his legs and chest, soon joined these three. Thankfully, they stayed away from his face. All he could do was lie as still as possible and hope they would crawl off as soon as possible. There was nothing for them to eat on him, so they left after a minute or two.
Nothing new happened for five minutes. He spent that time shivering from the coolness of the room, and where he could still feel the spider tracks. His skin crawled and he wished he could rub himself where all the bugs had been.
He was surprised by the rats. They swarmed over him like a tide rolling in. Pain be damned, he jerked, and pulled, and wiggled trying to get them off of him. The straps cut into his skin, but he didn't notice. Every muscle in his body was tensed from his effort to get the disgusting rodents off.
"No! No! Get them off me!" he yelled. "Help! Help me! Somebody, please, get them off me."
This was a primal fear. He could no more help being terrified than he could help getting hungry or thirsty. Tears streamed from his wide-open eyes. His lips pulled back, his mouth open in fear. Images of being eaten alive paralyzed his mind. Sensory overload hit him and he fainted.
Sitting in his living room, talking with his male friends, he would have sworn that men don't faint. Sissy females fainted. Women passed out at the slightest provocation. But a real man would never faint, no matter what.
He was wrong.
