Dark Terrors 3 (34 page)

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The weather turned chill, the leaves turned and dropped, and I shivered on the edge of the yew forest whenever I was allowed out and sometimes when I was not, filled with despair because I knew that even if I caught a glimpse of her, I stood no chance at all of seeing her undressed. I came on my own now, though once or twice I fancied James was maybe behind me in the woods. In school we saw even less of each other than before - with the new school year timetables had been changed, and hierarchies redrawn following the summer end-of-term exams. He was now in the Remove, would be sixteen before he took School Certificate and did woodwork instead of Latin. I had sold or bartered my SS dagger in the way boys do, but I had heard that it had passed on two or three more times and that James now owned it.

But none of this was important. What kept me awake at nights and patrolling those fences even when the frosts came and the pond below froze was the obsession, the overwhelming desire to see Fat Mary naked again, and . . . And what? I hardly dared imagine. Yet believe it or not it was not until December, late December, just three days before Minster Hill broke up, that I remembered that day in July, how we had seen her let herself in with a big iron key taken from a high ledge in the porch. It was a Saturday morning again, first light and that cold greyness in the high sash windows that told you it had snowed in the night even before you looked out. I lay there on my back with my eyes open listening to the grumbles of my companions as they too woke up, and then their exclamations of delight as they saw the snow, and all I could say to myself, over and over again was - ‘I can get in, I can get in whenever I want.’

* * * *

My footsteps squeaked in the bright cold snow as I tramped up her track, between the fences. The only other marks were the tyre treads from where she had driven out. The sun was no more than a red disc in a mauve-grey sky. Everything was still and silent but for the sound of my footsteps and breathing. Not even the rooks cackled above the beech trees, nor did the rooster call from Fat Mary’s yard. It had been a heavy fall, covering the patch of sprouts to the left of her door so they looked like dwarfs or munchkins. It lay thick on the thatch of her roof though a thin wisp of white smoke rose from the one stove-pipe chimney. Icicles hung by the wall and from the eaves of her outbuildings. I was cold, desperately cold - a raincoat, a jacket and shoes instead of sandals, were the only concessions to winter that we were allowed. We even remained in short trousers. Of course, clothes rationing was still in force.

Inside the porch I reached up to the ledge that ran along the side just where the plank roof met the trellis sides and yes, there it was. Suddenly I realized that part of me had hoped all along that it would not be there. You know how they say ‘his heart was in his mouth’? Mine was. And my knees had turned to jelly. Almost I hoped the key, black, six inches long, would not work, or jam, or something. But no, it turned, quite smoothly, no problem. And yes, the door did creak, indeed, resisted for a moment before its corner squealed across stone flags.

The first thing that hit me was the warmth, and the second was the smell. The first was welcome. I was not so sure about the second. It was a heavy concoction of different things, though predominant at first was pork fat, sour, heavy, insistent. It seemed to be in everything. Indeed on almost all the surfaces there was a hazy greasy slime, yellowish in colour, that seemed to be the essence of cooked or rendered pig. But it was undercut by other odours - baking, cooked greens, hot
metal, tom cat, all almost as bad, but lavender, stored apples, and warm old age as well, breathed out from the ancient dark furniture. There was no electricity of course, but Fat Mary had left an oil lamp on the large kitchen table - turned low, but to eyes coming out of the encroaching winter gloom, bright enough.

The one room was divided by a beam in the ceiling with heavy brown velvet curtains hanging from it, left three-quarters open. The first room was kitchen and living-room combined. Against the end wall beneath the stove-pipe a full kitchen range whose fire glowed behind the ventilation flues in its door was set back in a big alcove that once must have been a fireplace, with another huge black old beam as its mantle. The tick of its ancient clock was marked by a cut-out boat set in the dial in which stood a cowled Death. His scythe swung back and forth with each double tick-tock.

On either side of the range there were cupboards and shelves, and more shelves along the back wall, with a dresser too. Impossible to take in all that I could see, but what stood out were huge greasy jars containing bottled or pickled pig trotters, and, in the largest, a pig’s head - boned so it looked like a deflated football. Yet it had eyelashes, and sight seemed to gleam through the dark slits between its lids.

Backing away I found myself in the bedroom which was almost filled by the hugest bed I had ever seen, together with a massive wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a full length mirror on a swivel, its glass clouded and blackened where the silvering had dropped away. But it was the bed that I could not take my eyes off. It must have been six feet by six feet at least, piled with blankets, old eiderdowns and grey sheets with a heap of pillows and bolsters against the wall at the far end. Above it, clinging to the rough-cast wall beneath a ceiling of planks, swathes of blackened cobwebs hung like the tied-back drapes of a Princess’s bed.

I did, still do, suffer from severe arachnophobia.

At that moment I heard the noise of her motor.

She knew I was there of course - first the footprints in the
snow, going one way only, then of course the door, closed as I had left it, yes, but with the big key still in the key-hole. I heard the door slam, the meow of the cat, the crunch of her galoshes in the snow. And suddenly I was faced with a question which had loomed like a thundercloud on the horizon, but which I had refused to face, ever since I had left the school buildings: What was I there for? Why had I come? To see her. To see her with no clothes on, as I had seen her in the summer . . . And?

There was only one place to go. I dived on to the bed and burrowed my way in like a worm burrowing into sand, in amongst those heavy quilts, damp but warm sheets, mountainous bolsters. At this point I should say I was small for my age and very thin and I fancy that before she was properly in I was invisible. I could hear her moving about, putting down bags and so forth, and presently I lifted a corner of the foetid mound I was under and managed to peep out.

She had already turned up the wick of the lamp and lit a couple of candles too. She had her back to me, was in front of a wall mirror to the side of the range, drawing a long hat pin out of her hat and hair. As she lifted the hat off her head her hair tumbled down to the shoulders of her rubberized mackintosh. She set hat and pin to one side on a dresser then filled a kettle from a tall jug, enamelled iron, the enamel chipped, and set it on the hob.

‘I know you’re there,’ she said. Of course she did. ‘In the bed are you? I’ll be with you presently.’ And slowly, deliberately, she began to undress.

First the rubberized mackintosh, then a long tartan scarf. Next the tweed jacket, then a moth-damaged woolly that had once been purple. She released the bottom of her blouse from the skirt band, undid the buttons, shrugged out of it. I could now see her massive freckled shoulders criss-crossed with straps and some of her back above a voluminous slip or petticoat. Reaching behind those sausage-like fingers neatly unhooked and unbuttoned (no zips) the fastenings of her skirt. She stepped out of it, then shrugged and pushed at the straps
of the slip (which was made of some shiny material, satin perhaps, though stained and grubby) and stepped out of that. She was now clad only in a flesh coloured corset, bloomers, and thick stockings whose tops disappeared beneath the bloomers.

The kettle boiled, she reached up for a tin caddy, made tea. She poured out two mugfuls, topped them up with condensed milk from an already opened tin, and added a good slurp of brown cooking brandy to each. She carried them towards the bed and put them down on the chest of drawers then, with one swift movement pulled back the covers and looked down at me.

‘You might,’ she said, ‘have taken your shoes off.’

I was shivering, not with cold but fright.

‘Here. Drink this.’

It should have been foul, but it was very sweet. The brandy fumes made my head swim even before I tasted it.

‘Drink it all’

I did as I was told.

‘Take your clothes off.’

I removed the coats and shoes, then she pushed me on to my back. Her fingers danced like elephants over my shirt and trouser buttons. Finally she unthreaded my belt and put it to one side.

‘What a thin little shrimp you are!’

Did she mean all of me or just my not fully mature prick?

And that was all she said. From then on she just grunted or sighed as she pushed me about, got me into the positions she wanted, so she could play out what I soon realized was her fantasy, not mine.

When I was naked, and clutching my genitals out of terrible embarrassment, she pulled me into the middle of the bed, turned me on to my back with my head in the middle of the bed but facing into the room, then heaped the heavy odoriferous covers over me so I was in a heavy black cave of damp warmth. A moment or two later she crawled in at the far end and I could feel her burrowing over me, on hands and knees,
her hands on either side of my body moving up towards my head, her knees following her hands. She too was naked now and I could feel the huge softness of her flesh, her great swinging breasts, the floppy folds of her stomach, then the rich farmy odours of her lower parts as they all travelled up over me in the dark until my head was between her knees and then her shins.

She adjusted the covers and for a moment I caught a shadowy glimpse of her mountainous buttocks upside down as it were above my head, then her hands came back between her spread legs and caught hold of my head. And she began to pull. She began to drag me through the narrow gap between her thighs. I thought she was going to pull my head off.

This may seem funny to read, but it was not at all funny at the time. I was terrified, and suddenly in some pain. My shoulders snagged against the backs of her legs, I was suffocating. I pushed my body up and along following my neck and head, using a scrabbling sort of motion with my feet, and then had the sense to twist on to my side so my shoulders could follow my head. I squeezed one hand through that narrow but soft quivering gap, beneath her private parts, and for a moment I could feel the hair, moist, wet even, and breathing honeyed, soured odours, as it rubbed along my cheek and neck.

All this time she was moaning and groaning, puffing and panting. Of course I can see now what she was doing, but I had no idea at the time, no idea at all that she was simulating child-birth.

With my head and shoulders through she straightened somewhat and the covers fell even more away. She got her hands in my armpits, and pushing her knees apart, with one last enormous sigh, pulled me through as far as my waist, leaving only my pelvis and legs still in the gap beneath her. She now had me sitting, with her arms round my back in a huge bear-hug, her bottom spread on either side of my thighs and my face buried in her stomach beneath her breasts so I still had to struggle for breath through all that flesh, and for a
moment we stayed like that, and she rocked us both a little from side to side. Her groans and moans had now become cooing sighs which I could hear rumble purringly deep in her chest. By now I was terrified. I cannot say how terrified I was.

With her feet on the floor at the end of the bed she now lifted herself and with one more heave had me free enough to haul my legs out and on to her lap. Gathering her great wrinkled, floppy, vein-laced breast in one hand she thrust a plate-like nipple into my face. Some primaeval if forgotten urge made me suck. There was, of course, no milk, but there was comfort in the floppy saltiness of it which presently hardened a little between my teeth. She pressed my still snorting nose into it with one ham of a hand while the other ran over my head, down my neck and fondled, and squeezed my ribs until I felt they would crack.

And for a moment, perhaps even for a minute or two or more, my fear fell away and I felt warm, happy, secure .. .

Then, the sow that eats its farrow, she began to strangle me.

She retrieved my belt and with one hand threaded a noose through the buckle. She slipped it over my head, gave the end a twist or two to get a good grip on it, while with the other arm she wrapped me in a bear-hug which pinned my arms to my sides. Then she tightened the noose, slowly.