It wasn't the first time that I had been thrilled by the sound of his voice. There was, nevertheless, something special about it now. ii.

The sky was dark and clear and the moon's silver light crystalline around them. iii.

He put his arm around me, guided me off the sidewalk and pressed me to him as he leaned against a tree.

He gazed into my eyes with a warm smile like a flame dancing in his; he told me he wanted to make me his possession. His baritone was like music. I followed his voice. He wanted me to give myself to him, to surrender to him. He kissed me. He wanted me, he said, taking my hand in his warm, strong smooth palm, to allow him to become my owner, my master, to shape me according to his will.

I rushed with an intensity I had never before experienced. I felt the power of his body against mine. I was breathing deeply, and there was a fluttering nervous pulse at the very bottom of my breath that I kept returning to and running away from. I was frightened by the intensity of my connection with him. I embraced him with desperate strength.

I said yes.

I couldn't resist you if I wanted to. I felt like worshipping him.

I feel like worshipping you, I said unable to prevent myself from saying such a strange thing.

I know, he said. I want you to worship me. He smiled and kissed me gently on the lips and I realized that it had already happened.

I was transformed. A burden of weights split and slid off me and my body and soul felt free of an aching bondage that had enchained me since my childhood.

I belonged to him and suddenly I was entirely comfortable in myself. Pain was gone and everything was joy because it all revolved around him. He wanted me. I became his. All I wanted was to worship him.

He pulled his black t-shirt over his head. His chest was a golden darkness in the moonlight.

Lick my nipples, he said. Adore me.

I closed my eyes and felt the hard point of his nipple against my tongue. iv

In a dream that night the devil came looking like him and took me in his embrace. The air filled with "Stormy Weather" and we danced. His chest was bare and he wore black tights, pirate's boots, a white shirt open down his chest. Around his neck was a wide gold choker. He wore a mask like the Lone Ranger's. I was bare-chested with pierced nipples, black tights, and a black velvet cloak.

He kissed me; I came; he disappeared. I woke. The clock in the unfamiliar house ticked loudly. He slept silently next to me. A shadow of moonlight fell on the opposite wall lighting a picture of Charlie Chaplin as he appears at the end of "City Lights," holding a flower in his mouth and confessing the joy of being ^� just by the way life dances in his eyes.

I got up and walked around the bed to the other side and knelt down beside him and bent down and softly blew kisses onto his sleeping chest until I felt his powerful hand take me by the hair and caress my scalp and bring my head to his lips and kiss me with a breath full of summer sleep.

The warmth filled every cell of my body and my mind reeled. I felt like I was breathing myself inside out. I knelt beside his feet and with kisses and long strokes of the tongue began to worship them. v.

We began a period of training. Sometimes it frightened me. I was surrendering everything to this man. Was he the devil, demanding to be worshipped, this man who exercised so much power over me? More than anything I wanted to submit to him, to belong to him and live the life that he wished me to, set out for me, in fact.

Yet I trembled with fear at fully surrendering to him. There was something about him that was beyond me, a force greater than I could ever command but that commanded me. Everything might go, suddenly, unexpectedly, from enthralling pleasure to catastrophic danger, from a sense of having everything to a feeling of total loss. vi.

I was breathing easily and deeply, blissfully still feeling the master's cock up my ass, although he had taken it out hours ago. I stood by the grand window. I looked out at the lawn that sloped down to Champlain Bay. I watched the evening fall. I zoned out in that immensity -- imploding entirely into myself, feeling the entirety of beauty in the knot of that little bud of my ass-hole which had bloomed into the Master's flower. I kept that flower. I preserved it. I kept it fresh in the vase of myself. I showed with a smile of submissive obedience and by my physically obvious desire to take him inside me, that I was always available to him.

I am incandescent since he has begun to pay attention to me.

That sentence revolved in my mind like an inescapable melody. vii.

The moment the collar was locked around my neck, my cock turned to wood.

He pulled me up to my feet by my collar and I stood naked in front of him and with a hard-on as he examined my body with the cold eye of an appraiser and the hot eye of a man haunted by unsatisfied desire.

I stood in awe of him as he looked into my eyes, yes, and whispered. You belong to me. I can do whatever I like with you. I own you. I am your master. You are my slave. You will adore, obey, and worship me.

I said, yes, Master.

My whole body was rigid, not only my cock. I had become my cock.

Look into my eyes.

You can see them in your mind. You can feel them penetrating to the center of you.

Only gaze into my eyes, let your eyes become more and more unfocused as you gaze into my eyes.

At the center of your mind. I am at the center of your mind.

Gaze into the center of your mind and see my eyes there and know that my eyes are your eyes. As I see things that is how you will see them.

Gaze into my eyes. Feel my presence invading you. Feel yourself surrender as your resistance crumbles and you feel proudly how submission is your strongest desire. You rejoice that you are able to yield yourself entirely to me. The spirit of devotion fills you. You live to adore me.

I live to adore you. viii.

Shortly after that his kiss turned into a whip. Everything about me had to be scourged, and as I discarded parts of myself so that I might conform myself to the work of worshipping him I began to wonder if those parts were really so contemptible.

And I realized, they were not, and, precisely, that was why I was obliterating them, to acknowledge his strength. To give up a worthless life would hardly constitute a sacrifice, and without sacrifice there is no devotion. To choose service to him, to abandon my career in order to subordinate myself to him, allowing his wisdom and power dominance over my own considerable wisdom and strength, putting myself financially at his mercy, despite my wavering and resistance, despite my on-going attachment to the person I think I am and find it hard to stop being -- that would show his power.

I felt that power. And I knew it was irresistible. I trembled. ix.

Soon I realized, first with horror, but quickly horror fled, and then with something akin to physical joy, that I did not resent my master's use of discipline or begrudge him command of my every aspect. It was as he said it would be, the greatest good that ever had been bestowed on me, and I can say with no falseness of expression that I loved his chastisement as well as his caress and was as full of gratitude for the one as for the other.

The success of his training in subordination showed in the grace of my service.

We lived during this period in an apartment of half a dozen spacious, even luxurious rooms, on the newly extended slip of Manhattan that had been constructed on landfill and gazed from our windows out over the broad back of the Hudson River whose wavelets we saw sparkling with the reflection of both golden sunrays and silvery moonshine. x.

After the harsher aspects of discipline had ceased and the period of increased rituals began I found myself in a state of benumbed bliss I had never before experienced. I felt like there was a cock up my ass pressing against my prostate all the time. My breathing was a cycle that blew down from my skull to my ass-hole and then back up again coursing across my chest, up my neck and then out my nostril. My eyes were always just about to lose focus.

I had become entirely, mindlessly compliant. Each instance carried with it an explosive sensation like an orgasm shooting through my entire frame.

I ought not give the impression that I no longer was subject to chastisement, for that was not so. Discipline for wrong actions, inadvertent insubordination (deliberate insubordination was entirely beyond me), imperfect obedience, the Master's pleasure, or as an exercise in reinforcing in me the sense of my slavery always loomed as a possibility.

I would be, moreover, less than truthful if I did not admit that it was the very component of my fear of Him which assured me of the Master's mastery over me. It was with a mix of feelings which were ultimately inseparable, fear, love, admiration, awe, devotion, unquenchable desire to gaze at Him full of longing touch Him, taste Him, be consumed by Him and become Him that I approached Him in prayerful worship, lost in devotion.

Please do not think either that when I speak of becoming mindless I mean I became stupid or lost my cultural polish or unlearned everything I knew and became intellectually incompetent or became unable to respond emotionally to art, beauty, and nature, and became empty-headed, vacant, unresponsive, and uncreative.

That was far from reality. Certainly it would not be glory to the Master for that to have been his influence on me. Life's de-animation was not his goal. Being the Lord of life, being served by what was a life and might bring life to him as a gift to His glory was.

Mindless I was in so far as I could not speak of my mind, of the mind within me that governed me and my acts as mine. The mind in me that functioned like a mind had detached itself from me, become his, and been reinvested in me by His grace. xi.

I was collared, harnessed, and otherwise naked. A rug had been laid for me. I lay flat, but slowly raised my chest and my head, resting my weight on extended palms pressed in front of me upon the floor.

Master stood above me speaking to one of his guests and drinking champagne.

My hard cock was pressed against the hard floor. His bare feet were near my face. I bent my head and did not even think of restraining myself from covering them with worshipful kisses.

He continued his conversation without seeming to notice, but since he did not stop me nor move away, I continued to adore his feet, devouring them with kisses.

Until I felt his hand through my hair raise me a little. I undid the zipper of his trousers delicately with my teeth as I had been trained to do. Kneeling before him I took his cock and balls in my hand and fondled them, and then I took the crown of his cock to my lips and my worshipful kisses became more open-lipped until the Master's entire cock-head was in my mouth and I was swooning with love for him. xii.

Dark gray was the night sky. Dim amber light came through the windows. A late night autumnal stillness lingered. The place was far from home.

Inside, Paul knelt at Edmund's feet, weeping.

Harvey Nelson gently lifted him and took him to the couch and sat beside him.

Edith Nelson and their son Charles lifted the body from the bed and laid it in the oak coffin Gabriel Martin had brought up from his workshop and covered it with the lid.

The funeral was in the morning, not far down the road in a Pennsylvania graveyard.

Paul wanted to wear only his collar and no clothes to the funeral, but Edith insisted he wear clothing.

She held him fast and looked into his eyes, gently, with caring in her glance, but firmly too, like a mother who has begun weaning a child it would be pleasing and comfortable to let stay at her breast, but who believes that Purpose must go before Self. xiii.

I was his slave, Paul said to her after the funeral in a muted voice. Everything I was came from him. Now he is gone and I am no more. What am I if I have no one to worship and obey?

What was he if he needed to be worshipped and obeyed? xiv.

I was silent. She continued: What is he now?

Dead, I said, grimly.

No, she said. It does not work that way. Perhaps, in himself, he is dead. In you, no. In you he is what he always was.

What is that? I asked blank and mystified.

Looking hard at me, she held her silence for a beat.

Death's Messenger, she said. Death's Messenger. xv.

I knew something she did not, but I let her have the last word.