Before I continue with the narrative: a short re-cap, and what I felt—but wasn’t really able to articulate—about Holly and Adela at the time, after the first five hours.

I had seen my English teacher, with my own eyes, shrink and grow larger by her own power. With equal terror and amazement, I had also seen her commit acts of outrageous cruelty against another human being, though she seemed to derive no sexual pleasure at all from her cruelty, and therefore her acts were not in the strict sense acts of a sadist. No, in her own eyes she was dispensing just punishment on a man who had wronged her—as far as I could tell, she suffered no twinges or pangs of conscience in breaking down her husband to a pale and muttering, shrunken subhuman who worshiped her—body and mind, life and soul. No, Holly was like a Megaera, the ancient Fury whose vengeance on adulterous and uncaring husbands was all too just. I didn’t agree with her unforgiving and unforgetting kind of justice—so primitive and hideous—but I think that I’ve come to understand it, and I’m now certain that, if Ms. Holly was anything (teacher, wife, Goddess, or maybe Fury), she was not sadistic.

But I realized that Holly had been wrong to tell me one thing: she should not have let slip that her daughter, Adela, possessed powers similar to her own. Apart from this oversight—if it was an oversight (and I had my doubts about that, as everything else)—I wondered, idly, about her characterization of Adela, which was suspect. I was expected to believe that Adela had imprisoned ‘countless’ men, and dispatched many of her pets through mistreatment or just plain indifference. She was a cruel, or negligent, mistress—that was her mother’s take on her. But maybe none of this was true: didn’t Ms. Holly have her reasons to scare me away from her daughter, Adela, and bind me closer, enslave me, to herself? Even after the events of our first day together, it was difficult for me to fully trust and resign myself to my new mistress.

Adela was a kind girl with long dark hair who kept to herself. In Chemistry, we completed math problems together, shared homework, dissected or vivisected the same animals, and read from the same textbook. Hell, if we split the same lunches and stopped at the same lockers, little would have changed. She seemed to be friendly toward me—compared to the other students, I mean—but there was an unbridgeable distance between us, which provoked and deterred me from making any serious attempts to get closer to her. But could this girl own miniature slaves, minions, and worshipers, and was she capable of mistreating these human beings, even murdering them? (In my mind’s eye, I saw the five men she owned ‘presently’, and a hundred others crushed and devoured, used as foot-slaves and masturbatory aids, butt-plugs and spices for her food—a chilling prospect, but probably an impossible one.)

I had entered a new foreign country and world, whose practices and customs were distinctly different from, though in some respects mirrored by, our own. Adela might have been the girl described by her mother (in any case, I doubted that most teenage girls would have possessed the moral equipment and experience needed in order to look with an equal, fair, and sane eye on both a 3” and 5’8” man—in almost every case, the first would be the one with hills to climb). But maybe not. I wanted to know the truth.

During those first hours, the only truth was the scent of my teacher’s nylon stockings. It was a scent so intense that every conscious thought was immediately blacked out and forgotten (I would not have thought it possible that a woman’s foot, or her used hosiery, could smell so strongly). I was in her purse, and several faint beams of sunlight shone through the gaps at the opening, between the clasps. I made out dimly, through the soiled toe-section of the mesh, some of her cosmetics, swabs, crackers, used tissues, dimes, a wristwatch, and a grubby handkerchief. In the beginning I found the air inside the stocking very difficult and unpleasant to breathe in. Over time, the potency of her foot odor—bitterly strong and eye-burning enough, at first, to draw tears—began to relent, and eventually I failed to notice it at all, except when I pressed my face hard against the material to get a better look around.

From the very beginning, I planned my escape. When the world had stopped shaking, and I began to hear other sounds on the background, the sounds of the classroom—the sounds of bells, talking, laughing, announcements, the pledge, Ms. Holly, and finally Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (“Her chariot is an empty hazelnut…her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film…”)—then I began to search for a way out. The shabby and unwashed stockings had been worn maybe dozens of times, and I didn’t look long before I found long runs, holes, and tears in the nylon casing. Ripping through one of these, I soon pulled myself out of confinement, and groped around for a foothold in the chaos of her purse.

After what seemed like hours, I stumbled upon what I was hunting for: the salt crackers. With my nails, I tore open the wrapping and attacked the food ravenously. I was close to finishing one cracker, when high above me the crack of yellow light in the sky began to part. Before I saw her face, I saw the red nail polish on Holly’s long fingers. She slipped her hand inside the purse and grazed her fingers lightly over the nylon stocking. She felt that I was missing, and then, pushing her blond hair back behind her ears, gazed long inside.

There was no hope for me, and after a couple very tense seconds, her fingers brushed over the crackers and found me. She pulled back, stared for a moment, and then quickly shut the purse, enclosing me again in darkness.

This was ominous, even on a full stomach. Why couldn’t I have waited two more hours—why did I risk it all for a single meal? I knew I was no longer on her good side. Just before she clapped the purse shut, there was a look on her face that said everything: “You will be punished for this—not now, but soon.” Naturally, to cut my losses, I staggered and tripped all the back to her stocking and pulled myself inside. There I stayed for the next two hours, until the light re-entered the dark place, and Ms. Holly’s soft and terrifying hand reached down into the stocking and wrapped around me in a sweaty fist. I heard muffled talking for a few seconds, and then I saw light again.

But it was not the light I was expecting. It was a tunnel of white cotton down which I fell and tumbled and tossed for an eternity. At the bottom I opened my eyes, and when I was greeted by a suffocating smell that made me gag, and which I identified—correctly—as unwashed feet, I knew where I was, though not why, or whose. I was in a sock, probably a long knee-high, which goes with a Mary Jane-style shoe.

And I wasn’t alone. There was another man here, who seemed dead until I prodded him with my finger. He was as gaunt and pallid as a ghost, covered in a sticky film of sweat and apparently unable to move anything but his eyelids. His legs were disfigured, as though broken long ago in twenty different places. His eyes were glazed over, and his chest trembled as it heaved up and down with his respiration. Goddamn, goddamn! What the hell was this! I said, inwardly. But then, from far above, I heard my name.

“Martin!” I looked up. “Martin, my mother said that I get to have you for the afternoon, because you’ve been bad. So you have to be punished a little this afternoon, and sit in the corner. This was my idea, by the way—it wasn’t hers. So if you’re uncomfortable just tell me, and I’ll make you a little bigger.” It was Adela, but it couldn’t be. Yet there was her face, and she was saying these words.

“There’s someone here! He's hurt!” I called up. 
“What?” She looked confused for a moment, then brightened. “Oh, that’s no one, just ignore him. I don’t remember where Mom found him. He was robbing a store or shot a cat somewhere. Rich?” The man’s eyelids fluttered briefly, and he almost turned his head. “Yes, Rich. Don’t worry about him.”
A combination of anger, bile, and pity began to rise up out of my stomach. “I’ll take care of you,” she said, as though reciting a fact, “because you’re Mom’s. Because you’re going with me in my shoes, you’re gonna want to get under my toes, where I’ll be sure not to crush you. It’s only until four, and after the first hour it gets easier. That’s what Mom tells me.”

I had no time to do what she asked, or even to open my mouth to speak. Adela pulled her sock over her toes, painted a deep shade of blue, and then over her wide, meaty foot, which overwhelmed me immediately. Outside of the sock, her fingers molded and nudged me into the groove under her toes, while what was left of Rich’s corpselike body she shrank down until it was able to fit within a wrinkle under her sole. I saw this happen, before the darkness came again, and my senses were filled and overbrimmed with her pungent scent.

But Adela was right. This didn’t last long. In the blackness, I soon lost track of time, and in the long, quiet, and largely sedentary class periods, during which Adela was learning something—maybe Chemistry or Physics or French—in the world inside her shoe, sweaty and dark, I continued to survive. This was not the Adela of my dreams, of (probably) anyone’s dreams, and I began to long for, to yearn for, the sight of a saner, quieter, or more compassionate face. The only face that came to mind—and it filled every corner of my mind—was the face of Ms. Holly. I needed answers, because I was miserable, and because Adela (of this I was very, very sure) would never help me.