Joseph stood at the threshold of the dark dungeon, hands in his pockets and a cold expression on his face. So this was it! This was the day when everything would change.
There are moments in a man's life when you have to choose between fight and flight. It takes only one split second to make a difference and, most of the time, you don't realize what happened until you're already in the thick of it. This was not the case for him, a calculating soul that never made anything happen without overthinking it first. He imagined where possible scenario, weighed the effect of every decision, and ultimately concluded the best course of action. It was Pure Reasoning led to an extreme, a characteristic that often maddened those dear to him.
Joseph could live with it. In fact, the older he got the more he realized he could live with a lot of things he thought impossible at first. If evil got in his way, evil had to be stopped, pure and simple. All things considered, what he was about to do was logical and necessary. Mistress Erin had to die.
Not familiar with the world of underground S&M and ill-advised hypnosis practices associated with it, Joseph had never heard of her until the day his younger brother Matt came to him, covered in bloody lashes, with no memory of what he had done in the past forty-eight hours. The last thing he recalled was seeing this mysterious woman in her castle of iniquity and then blacking out after having a glass of water. No consent, no negotiation, just a never-ending barrage of pain waiting for him. He was in terrible shape and in desperate need of medical attention, which he was fortunate enough to get just in time. While his body would eventually heal, doubts remained about his frail state of mind, doubts that Joseph no longer had.
Tracking down the bitch hadn't been easy but, luckily he was a man with many connections and those had plenty of their own. A Franklin here, a Franklin there, and he was put on the right track, somewhere on the edge of town on a rainy night that was ideal for his intentions. "It will help wash the blood away," he thought.
Joseph took a deep breath and descended a flight of irregular stairs into the mouth of the abyss. The walls around him were covered in fluorescent graffiti depicting all manners of barbaric rituals no human eye should be allowed to see. As he continued down a long, winding hallway, the chromatic assault grew increasingly obscener, more than enough to make his stomach turn. Joseph gripped the pistol he had been concealing in the right inner pocket of his jacket and concluded right away it would not be enough. He finally reached a worn-out door at the end of the corridor and noticed it was partially open. He was expected.
He pushed the door gently aside and peeked in, seeing a modern recreation of a Medieval torture chamber coexisting side by side with a sterile chamber straight out of a low-budget sci-fi movie. Racks of leather and wood implements were scattered across the large room with no apparent order to their disposition. All the lights inside oscillated between an oppressive shade of red and an eerie shade of blue. It was all too quiet even though he could hear the screams of everyone that had been there recently, hammering his mind.
Joseph walked inside, and the door closed behind him. No mechanism was visible to the naked eye, but he was sure there was one. No matter - he had already anticipated such a possibility, anyway. He drew the gun out and removed the safety, eyes fixed on the imaginary dividing line between old and new, hoping to see something or someone there.
Something whirred to his right and his prayers were answered. A busty, yet elegant woman, clad in fiery red PVC and sporting a long curly wig of the same color emerged from an adjacent door he had failed to notice the first time. The black thigh-high boots exhibited a single red vertical line from the bottom to the top. She held a black cigarette holder in one hand and a nine-tail whip in the other. Her fake nails were sharp and intimidating like knives that could cut through a man's jugular with little effort. Too many layers of make-up on her oval face made it impossible to determine her true age although, if he were to hazard a guess, he would put it somewhere between the late forties and early fifties. Dark gray eyes that no doubt had witnessed more horrors than he could count turned his way, challenging him to a duel of wits. "Mistress Erin" was a predator through and through, and the predator wanted to play.
"I was wondering when you'd get here," she smirked. "It took a while."
