So we talked about Marcus’ encounter, but I quickly realized that while he was trying to appear helpful, he was fishing for something else–information about Bernard’s case. He allegedly didn’t recall much of anything from the night he’d been assaulted, but he’d drop a hint, and then ask if something similar had happened to Bernard as well. When I’d try and get him back on the subject of his own case, he’d twist it back around, quizzing me about Bernard, and the evidence from the case, and whether I had found anything else about the Bruiser during the investigation–and if I had any leads on where Bernard had disappeared to. I didn’t have any leads of course, and I wasn’t about to tell this stranger any details from the case. When it became clear that we were stonewalling each other, he got agitated, and then angry, grabbed the photos he’d brought, accused me of not being interested in justice, and stormed out of the precinct, leaving me more confused than anything.
All I knew now, was that this…this case was big. The biggest thing I’d ever dealt with, by far, and Marcus was right about one thing–Bernard knew more than he was letting on. In fact, it was now quite likely he knew the man who had kept him down there all week, given his extracurricular activities. But if it was a scene gone wrong, why not say so? And how on earth did this even begin to explain how he had…changed? In any case, I had a lead, and so I started hunting down some of Bernard’s associates in the BDSM community, to see if any of them could help me figure out who had done this to him, or where he might have gone. No one was really interested in talking to me, and I didn’t get much in the few days I had before the next 911 call came in, the same voice as before, directing us to an old, abandoned warehouse down by the docks.
The search, however, turned up nothing at first. The building wasn’t being used for anything at the moment, and was just vacant–the docks still hadn’t fully recovered from the last recession, like a lot of the city, and so that wasn’t surprising. The caller hadn’t given us any details regarding who we were looking for, or where they might be, but it turned out that there wasn’t anything inside the building at all. Instead, we got a radio call that one of the cops, an older veteran by the name of Jules, had been searching the perimeter of the building, when he heard an odd sound coming from several supposedly empty shipping containers in the yard beside the building. It was metal on metal, a rhythmic clanking of some sort, and it wasn’t long before we’d identified the container, broken the lock on it, and when we flung open the doors…it was the smell that I remember the most.
You know how a locker room can smell, when it doesn’t get cleaned often enough? It was like that, and yet, somehow a hundred times stronger. The only light in the shipping container was a bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling, and inside the cramped space was one man working out with a collection of weight machines and free weights. Even when we opened the door, he didn’t stop–from where he was, he just seemed like this…monstrous shadow in the darkness, moving back and forth, eyes zoned out in the middle distance, completely uninterested in us.
I want to say that it was the cramped space that smelled the worst, but it was actually him. We tried to get close to him, tried to tell him that he could stop, but none of us could handle the sheer…force of it, and we’d retreat back, eyes watering, coughing and hacking. In the end, it was Jules who managed to get close enough to touch him, and it was like he woke from a dream at the touch, and he stopped drawing the weights up, and looked around at us, confused by who we were, and what we were doing in there with him.
I started asking him questions, asking him who had locked him in here, how long he’d been in here, but he just stared back at me like nothing I was saying made any sense. I backed up a bit and just asked him his name. That one he thought about for a couple of moments, trying to get something to come up from the depths of his mind, but he just shook his head, a thick mane of hair spraying all of the officers around him with little beads of sweat. “I don’ know, I don’ know! I just…Master said to keep working out, so I…I have to keep going…”
There it was again: Master. Something stirred in me, when I heard him say it, the same thing that had stirred in me when I’d listened to how Bernard had talked about his rapist, both during the interviews, and during that broadcast. It was a zealotry. It wasn’t a name, or a title–the way they said it, it was like they were naming a god. I don’t know if it was the smell finally getting to me, or if it was the horror of it–I left the shipping container, went around the corner, and vomited.
Getting him to come with us was the next challenge. He refused to leave the container–Master had told him to keep exercising, and so, he was going to keep at it, for as long as he could, until Master came back and told him what to do next. We tried to remove him by force, but the scent of him was so strong, no one could get close enough to lay a hand on him–without even dealing with the fact that he was…huge. Seven feet tall was my guess, and packed with more muscle than I could really ever remember seeing on a man before. His hair and beard were grown long–years long, though I knew there was no way he could have been inside here for years (I had to believe there was no way he could have been in there for years, at least) and and his cock…even on his tall frame, the thing was monstrous, and nearly always half erect.
Bracken's Corner 