The Grenier Ascension - Pt 1b

Vicky sat across the desk from Dr Niella Collins, fidgeting with her glasses.  Niella waited for her to start, knowing her dreams could be hard for her to talk about.
"It was like a dungeon," she said at last.  "Mediaeval or something."
Niella nodded.  "Go on," she said in a soft tone.
"I think there were people around, but I could only make out this one guy.  The one nearest me.  No wait, there was another girl there too."
"Was she doing anything?" Niella asked.  Keep the questions as neutral as possible; don't steer the patient.
"She was tied up, like me.  Sitting on a wooden beam."
"And you?"
"I was tied to a rack or something.  The guy was standing over me."

   ****

He was dressed in dark silk, clothes from centuries ago; but the leer on his face was the same as Vicky had seen on men all her life.  He turned the wheel, tightening the rack another notch.  The ropes pulled at her wrists and ankles, scraping her skin raw and stretching her joints; not enough to hurt, but enough to drive home her helplessness in this place, whatever it was.

He laid his other hand over her naked breast, rolling her hardened nipple between his fingers.  "I do believe you like this, girl," he said.
Vicky looked away, twisting her head as if she could bury her face beneath her hair.  She didn't want him to read the truth in her eyes; the truth that every touch on her body aroused her, even this captivity.  Though it was pointless to try; he could read it in her nipples, the sheen of sweat on her skin... and she knew it was only a matter of time before he would discover the growing wetness between her legs.

As if in answer to the thought, he released the wheel and her breast, turning his attention to her mound; he ran his fingers up her mound, circled her pelvis, before caressing her bud and labia.
Well, that was the truth, and now he couldn't miss it.
"Ah, I was right," he said.  "I'll have to see what I can do about that."  He tightened the wheel another notch; this time the pressure did hurt, forcing a stifled moan out of Vicky's mouth.  But the pain only fed her arousal, and its accompanying mix of lust and shame.

He was opening his clothes, climbing onto the rack, onto her.  Vicky tilted her head back; she couldn't deny him her body, but she could deny him her face, the confirmation of her pleasure at this violation.  As he entered her, her eyes focussed on the other girl, trapped in her own torturous bondage.
But between them... on the floor between Vicky and the other girl was a circle drawn in red, marked with letters she couldn't make out, between the dim light and the way her body jerked in time to her captor's thrusts.

   ****

Niella took a deep breath as Vicky finished her account.  "Have you talked to anyone else about this dream?" she asked.
"No," Vicky said.  "It's embarassing.  Even talking about it with you.  I couldn't face anyone else."
She seemed honest enough about that.  "You've got no cause to be embarassed," Niella said; "none of us choose our dreams.  But it's probably better to keep it that way anyway."
"Sure."

After Vicky had gone, Niella went to her filing cabinet and collected another case file.  She opened it and set it next to Vicky's, comparing them; two patients, in different wards, had dreamed on successive nights of being held prisoner and abused in a dungeon.  It shouldn't mean anything:  Vicky was a voluntary patient undergoing treatment for hypersexuality, while Lexi was being treated for severe depressive ideation; in their own ways both of them were predisposed to that kind of dream, especially with their waking lives spent in an environment where they were confined.  But the dreams had far too many specific points of similarity for her to write them off as coincidendce.  It wouldn't be the first time patients had been abused in the hospital; unless of course, uncovering one instance of abuse had left her prone to imagining another.  Niella sighed.  She'd have to look into it; she'd have no peace of mind if she didn't.

Broaching the subject with Carling went about as badly as Niella had feared.  "This is a preposterous allegation, Dr Collins.  These dreams are nothing but coincidence."
"I don't think so, Dr Carling," she replied.  "There are too many specific commonalities, even down to Vicky describing another captive figure alongside her."
"Then they've been discussing their dreams and confabulated a common framework."
"There's no way they could have been in contact with each other.  Lexi has been under suicide watch until very recently, while Vicky is all but an outpatient.  Any contact has been via a third party.  A third party who has kept their interactions with both patients secret."
"As I said, Dr Collins, preposterous."
"You might want to consider the last thing I was right about in this office," Niella said; the look on Carling's face told her at once it had been the wrong thing to say.
"It is true, you did do us a great favour in the unfortunate business of Dr Shaw.  But that does not require me to indulge your every fancy.  Consider that this may simply be overreaction to your own trauma, coupled with quite the usual kind of dream for a nymphomaniac patient to exhibit, particularly in an institutional environment."
"Doct-"
"Now get out, before I find a bed for you."

The dismissal left Niella fuming.  Not least because she'd already raised every one of Carling's objections in her own mind.  Maybe she was jumping at shadows.  Maybe she was overreacting; the thought became a stream of memories:  Dr Shaw's pet orderlies grabbing her, tying her, hitting her, stripping her, penetrating her... maybe Carling was right, much as she hated to admit it.  Mentally she tried to shift gears, but her mind stubbornly returned to Vicky and Lexi; to believe Carling was to put them at risk.  She opened the two sets of case notes again, thinking back to Lexi's interview of the previous day.

Lexi had been curled tight on her chair, eyes downcast, voice flat and quiet as she related her account.  "I was being punished.  In a dungeon or something."
"Punished for what?" Niella had asked.
"I don't know.  Being me?  He just said I deserved it."
"Can you tell me what else happened?"

   ****

Pain wasn't anything new to Lexi, but it was usually something she did to herself, to drown out the other pain she felt on the inside.
But this time the pain was forced on her.  Her arms were stretched above her, her wrists closed in steel cuffs; her body rested on the topmost corner of a wooden beam, while other chains held her legs tightly on either side of it.  The hard, rough surface of the wood stabbed into her vulnerable crotch, her lips, her clit, the delicate stretch of skin between them; she was sure she could feel the slickness of blood, but she couldn't bend forward to check.
All she could do was get her hands round the chains on her wrists and pull herself up a little; the release of pressure was a moment of fresh agony for her tortured mound, but after that, relief.  But the effort was a strain on her fingers, while the cuffs on her ankles cut painfully into her skin as her legs stretched against them.  Eventually it was that pain that grew too much, and she let her weight settle back onto the beam.

Some of the time her captor just stood and watched her suffer.  Other times he stepped closer, running his hands over her thighs, ass, belly, breasts, while she was powerless to even flinch away from him.  A few times he gripped her hips, pulling her downward; either to break her moments of relief, or hurt her lips all the more.
"Why are you doing this to me?" she'd asked him the first time she'd had this dream.
"You were given to me," he'd said.  "To sate my need."

The second dream was different; the torture was the same, and her captor's sadism, and the red-painted circle on the floor next to her.  But this time she wasn't alone in her captivity; across from her was another girl, bound to a table, or... a rack, Lexi realised.
Their eyes met for a second before Lexi felt her tormentor's hands on her thighs; he forced her body down onto the sharp wooden edge, making her scream.  By the time she recovered her bearings, the other girl was lost in her own ordeal.

"Who are you?" Lexi asked her captor this time.
"I was the Count Grenier," he said.  "But I will be more."  His hand found her breast, gripping tightly, painfully; his other hand was on her ass, pulling her body toward him.  Lexi whimpered as her crotch dragged over the rough wood, and her chains stretched the joints in her arms and legs; all the agonies she'd suffered at once.  "Everything you are exists to serve me now."
Then his face was somehow level with hers, his hand twisted in her hair instead of on her breast as he kissed her.

   ****

"I had the dream again," Lexi said.  The girl looked exhausted, dark circles forming under her eyes.
"Was it the same?" Niella asked.
"No.  Someone else was there."
"Who?" Niella asked, keeping any edge out of her voice.
"Another girl.  She was being tortured like me."
"How?" This time Niella couldn't keep her voice even, but Lexi didn't appear to notice.
"I think it was a rack."
"Can you describe her?"
"Small.  Long red hair."

Someone who looked like Vicky, Niella thought.  For a moment she wondered if this was some kind of elaborate con being played on her.  But to what possible end?  "Was anything else different?" she asked.
"He told me his name.  Count Grenier."
Vicky hadn't mentioned anything like that, which was a decided relief at this point.  "Maybe this is a good sign," she said, trying to be the therapist again.
"What?"
"By picturing another girl in your dream, maybe some part of you is beginning to accept that this kind of thing isn't something you deserve just for being you."
"Maybe."

Lexi's interview was mercifully the last before lunch.  Niella made her way to the rehabilitation ward in search of Sonny; he'd helped her, no saved her, before.  Now it seemed like he was only one she could go to with the new worries weighing her down.  He was eating alone in the staff cafeteria; Niella sat down opposite him without waiting for an invitation.
"Doc," he said.  "Is everything all right?"
"No," she replied.  She proceded to lay everything out.  Her patients' dreams and their ever increasing points of commonality, her suspicions that they were being abused in some fashion, perhaps chosen because their specific diagnoses made them easy to dismiss, even the name Count Grenier.

To her surprise, it was the last that struck Sonny the most.  "Did you say Grenier?"
"Yes.  Does that mean something to you?"
"I... I have a friend called Wendy.  She just came to me with a problem too.  I think you should meet her."