Dr Rochelle - I confess!

Maria looked up at the ornate ceiling of the entrance to the church to see the carving again. The woman was naked and suspended by a rope around her waist. Her long hair hung in swirls over her face and her arms reached down at full stretch as she clung desperately to her ankles. Behind her, a naked masked man wielded a cane and was bringing it down hard onto the woman's taut buttocks.

There was also a carving of another woman, blindfolded and tied by her wrists to a post, being beaten by three naked men: one with a chain, one a rope and another with a long knotted whip. Yet another depicted a woman, spread-eagled on her back and manacled to the floor by her wrists and ankles. She was being fucked while two other men forced their cocks deep into her mouth. The last woman in the series, the most realistic and therefore her favourite, clothing in tatters, hung suspended by a rope around her neck, and was being beaten across her buttocks and breasts as dogs snarled menacingly around her feet.

Maria had gazed up at these same carvings as a young girl. She had wondered what it would be like to be whipped and chained, and how it would feel to be beaten, fucked and humiliated. Often she had leant against the wall of the entrance, gazing up as she lifted her school skirt and slid her fingers down the front of her white panties. She had dribbled from the corner of her mouth as she slowly inserted her fingers between the pink folds of her young cunt, and gasped with anxiety and joy as strange shivers of excitement coursed jerkily through her limbs.

Maria had been brought up a strict Catholic, and had been used to confessing as a young girl, but it had been years since she had come here to pour out her sins.

She stopped just inside the heavy oak doors, and for a few moments stood in the silence. She stared down towards the dimly lit altar. Candles flickered on the white cloth that draped it and the gold candlesticks stood up glistening with darkly etched veins mysteriously entwined around them.

She jumped as the door closed behind her with a low thud. She must be even more tensed up than she had expected.

The metal-capped heels of her shiny black shoes clicked on the stone floor as she walked over to the small wooden confession box that was built into the wall behind some towering grey columns. She paused at the closed door and peered through the lattice-work front; she could just make out the dark figure that crouched like retribution inside. Without hesitation, and falling into the old habit, she reached up and drew back the heavy red curtain that hung in velvety folds from a brass rail fixed between the side of the box and the wall.

She paused for a few seconds, just to let her eyes get used to the dim light inside, then, bending slightly, she pushed behind the dark shroud of the smooth curtain.

There was a narrow seat fixed to the side of the booth and below that, raised only a few inches from the floor, an even narrower shelf for penitents to kneel on. She knelt down as she had always done before, but the hard wood hurt her knees so she got up again and slithered onto the little seat. It was cold and she shivered. She turned her shoulders towards the grill in the side of the confession box and, as if sensitive to her presence, it slid back.

She looked through the open grill and saw the white teeth of Father Thomas, it was as if no time at all had passed since she had last crouched trembling there.

He waited in silence. She felt sure that he recognised her even after all this time and a wave of embarrassment swept over her as she wondered where to start. She squirmed her bottom around on the narrow wooden seat, tightening the muscles of her buttocks and lifting the soft flesh inside her panties away from the cold wood. But it was no good, it only felt worse, so she eased the tension in her buttocks and felt her panties press down against the smooth surface of the seat.

Maria's thick black hair was cut to shoulder length and lay tousled around her pale face. She had full lips, bright blue eyes with long lashes, and was slim and very attractive, although, as people sometimes told her, she looked too vulnerable and could have made more of herself.

She had a small delicate frame and was not very tall, but she had shapely hips which curved out from her narrow waist. She had firm thighs and her compact calves led down to slender ankles. Her feet were narrow and her carefully filed toenails were painted with the same bright red varnish as her fingernails.

She had to wear a black suit for work and her skirt was quite short. The cold wood of the seat was pressed against the bare flesh of her smoothly curved thighs as they peeped out between the flattering tops of her fine, sheer stockings and the plain edge of her white panties. She wriggled her bottom again and nervously pulled her skirt down as far as she could, but she could only get the hem halfway down her slender thighs. She wore a white shirt which was open at the neck and her jacket was buttoned up tightly around her slim waist. Her small, firm breasts were secured snugly in the cups of a flimsy, embroidered bra. A small sewn flower just poked from the open neck of her well-ironed shirt as it nuzzled snugly between the curves of her cleavage.

Now she was sure that he recognised her, but still she could say nothing

She had not felt tongue-tied when she was a child; then there had been so many things she seemed to do wrong that she could hardly wait to pour them out. She would wait anxiously all week to do her confession on Friday. She would write down all her sins in a little notebook then read them out carefully, one by one, to the thoughtful, shadowy figure behind the fretwork panel.

"Oh Father, what must I do to put these things right?" she would beg as she sat forward eagerly on this same hard seat with her hands clasped tightly between her legs. "I feel so dirty, so sinful, so horrible! What must I do? Oh Father, how can I be punished?"

Father Thomas would listen quietly, occasionally drawing his long fingers down his thin moustache and tugging at his pointed beard. Every now and again, when she looked through the grill, she would catch sight of his flashing white teeth and staring eyes and imagine that he was a wolf. Sometimes, she pretended that she was Red Riding Hood and that he was going to eat her and that she did not care if he did, as long as she could tell him how bad she was before he sank his pointed teeth into her neck. She tingled all over at the thought of that first bite and tingled more as she felt herself wanting to bleed for him and be sucked dry as he gnawed and slobbered at her throat.

Sometimes, as she leant forward to pour out her secrets, she thought she saw him staring at her budding breasts. It caused a dark terror to well up inside her and she trembled with fear. But it was not a fear that she wanted to run away from; it was a fear that seemed to delight and beguile her, it was a fear that she wanted more of and it forced her to lean even closer to the lattice-work grill.

In a way, she sincerely believed that she tried not to be sinful. But how could she confess if she did nothing wrong? The two things went hand-in-hand, she did not so much want to be sinful but she could not bear the idea of having nothing to confess. She wanted to be purified but she did not want to be pure, for if she was pure she would never be able to confess again. Her life was driven by this perverted desire to confess; driven by a need to be forgiven for being so sinful. Her badness was the means of acquiring purification, and as the act of purification was what she needed more than anything, she always needed to be bad.

Wrongdoing stalked her everywhere. By the time she was thirteen, her lists grew so long that sometimes, when she came out of the shadowy booth, she was sweating and exhausted.