Dorothy pushed his hand away while pulling his face into another kiss. At the same time she was attempting to keep the infuriated organ trapped between her thighs. It was a feat of extraordinary coordination, requiring a certain twist of the pelvis that Stanley mistook for passion.
Finally, with a wriggle, Dorothy managed discreetly to remove the penis while retaining her composure. “I just have to go to the bathroom,” she said, stepping over the puzzled Stanley, carefully hiding the irate penis in her sleeve. Stanley leaned back. There was mystery to this woman, he surmised, and Lord knows he was ripe for a little mystery.
The mysterious woman stood in the bathroom, flour smeared across her very expensive nylon tights. She had plunged the penis into a sinkful of warm water and it lay there now, luxuriating in her distress. Furious, Dorothy had a sudden impulse to flush it down the toilet—but what would the authorities say? They’d probably trace the organ back to her and accuse her of dismembering a man. She was near to tears. There was only one thing left to do. On her way through the kitchen she stopped by the fridge and threw the errant body part into the freezer.
“Are you okay?” Stanley murmured. He was standing in shadow by the kitchen doorway, his hair disheveled, shirt loosened to display his copious chest hair, hips thrust forward, totally aware that he looked irresistible. Dorothy jumped, then covered her fright with a studied languidness.
“Fine, I was just checking if I had any ice cream, you know, to go with the quince tart.” She hoped that he wouldn’t notice the flour marks on her velvet dress.
“I don’t want any dessert. I want you.” The words were meant to sound seductive but they came out in an awkward squeak. In an attempt to conceal his unexpected nervousness, Stanley buried his face in her hair. Immediately a loud rattling started up from the freezer. For one hideous second he wasn’t sure whether the rattling was the sound of his heart or was actually external. Before he had a chance to make up his mind, Dorothy was hustling him upstairs to the bedroom, desperate to get him away from the freezer. She propelled him up the narrow wooden staircase, clasping his buttocks in front of her like an ascending beacon.
Stanley, taking her cue, delightedly assumed that lust had got the better of caution. When they reached the bedroom the two of them tumbled to the floor. Velvet and corduroy entangled in a steam of perfume and cheap cologne. It promised to be a very English coupling.
Suddenly sobered by the very real weight of Dorothy’s flesh, Stanley sat up and began to unzip her dress with disturbingly professional ease. Dorothy felt him encircle her and lift her breasts out of her dress. He pulled slowly at her nipples. She stiffened immediately. It is this, she thought, this feeling of being encompassed, of being embraced, that I have missed so much. It was a sensation that a mere six and a half inches, however adventurous, could never hope to achieve.
Surrendering herself, Dorothy swung around and kissed Stanley, her fingers plucking at his shirt. She ran them through his chest hair and across the groomed abdominal muscles toward his groin. He groaned and arched up, making it easier for her to unzip and release him. Stanley’s penis sprang out in its full grandeur. It was the part of him that he was most proud of; he was a well-endowed individual. Dorothy’s eyes widened in wonder. He was at least eight inches, she estimated. After all, she had recently developed an expertise in these matters. Running her fingers across the soft skin, she brought him to her lips and was amazed at the difference, both in texture and scent.
Somewhere above her Stanley was groaning. The experience was doubly pleasurable for he had never assumed that this rather dowdy archivist would be a good lover, never mind an imaginative one. As he watched her head bob up and down he decided that he would definitely ask her to marry him. He was nearly forty, and, if he was brutally honest with himself, he couldn’t remember any other woman showing this much enthusiasm for at least a year.
He was close to orgasm. Time to give her some pleasure, he surmised, especially if she was to be Mrs. Huntington. He pulled her up to his mouth, then traversed the whole length of her body with his tongue, finishing by sucking her toes—a nifty little trick he’d learned from a Korean au pair girl. He then moved farther up, parting her gently with his fingers. Stanley always felt that cunnilingus was the mark of the evolved male. Besides, it made them remember you, even if it was only one night. It was therefore with immense satisfaction that, somewhere above him, he heard Dorothy scream with pleasure.
Stanley played both her orifices with his fingers; feeling her contract, he was determined to bring her to a second climax. He gave her a moment to catch her breath then hoisted himself over her. She lay there, gazing at him, her eyes great glistening pools of blue-black lust. Resting on one arm, he gathered up one impressive breast and filled his mouth with the erect nipple, nipping her gently, orchestrating his caresses until she was swollen to his touch. Then, when he could feel her moistening, he hauled himself up and rested the tip of his large cock at the very edges of her nether lips. Dorothy thought she might die from pleasure or scream again with delicious anticipation, so badly did she want him. He maneuvered both her legs over his shoulders and, with a cheeky smile, entered her so slowly she could feel every inch of him.
“This is for England,” Stanley said softly.
“And this is for Wales,” Dorothy replied in Welsh, throwing him on his back to ride him like the true witch she suspected she might be.
Meanwhile, downstairs, something burst out of the freezer.
Afterward they both lay sprawled across the bed, thoroughly satiated. Dorothy, every cell in her body released, fell asleep immediately while Stanley lay there lulled by the comforting sound of her soft snore. His body felt astonishingly relaxed. There was something wonderfully wholesome about making love to Dorothy. Maybe it was just the satisfaction of the kill after a long hunt. Maybe it was love. Stanley oscillated between these two meditations as he slid into a dreaming half-sleep.
He dreamed that they were at their wedding. Dorothy, in a long silk wedding dress, floated above him as they proceeded down the aisle. The way her black hair snaked around her head was disturbingly pagan. He could see himself walking beside her, two feet below, clutching at her hand, which hovered tantalizingly above his own. The stone church looked medieval: wooden beams crossed the ceiling while colored light filtered in from the oval stained-glass windows.
Stanley glanced sideways at the congregation. He was shocked to see that it consisted of farm animals. A pig sat in the front row wearing a cassock. It seemed to be laughing at him. Behind the pig sat a donkey, sober in a doublet and hose, while beside him a goat in a jerkin was doubled over in amusement. Absorbed in the dream, Stanley failed to hear the bedroom door creak open.
The floating bride and now fearful bridegroom continued moving down the aisle. The preacher, standing at the altar, had his back to them so Stanley couldn’t see his face. Inexplicably panicked about the protocol of arriving at the altar with a floating bride, Stanley tried to pull Dorothy down but she remained out of reach. A great sense of failure at not being a proper bridegroom filled him. He wanted to run but found that his feet were strangely frozen to the floor.
Just at that moment, outside the dream, he felt what must be Dorothy’s hand gently stroking his arm, trying to wake him up. Struggling in sleep he couldn’t respond. The caresses continued, the touch felt velvety and oddly familiar. He wasn’t sure whether it was her fingers or the heel of her hand. The massage traveled farther up his chest, toward his neck and face. Stanley desperately wanted to reach out, to wake up and touch her, but he just couldn’t shake off his drowsiness.
In the dream he started to run toward the altar, yelling, “Preacher!,” but the sound kept coming out as “Peach!” Stanley felt increasingly inadequate. It was a very unpleasant sensation. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t worthy to be Dorothy’s husband. He peered up at the roof; to his horror Dorothy had disappeared. Terrified he swung back to the altar.
The preacher slow
ly turned around. From under the hood the craggy face of an old man peered blindly at him with goat’s eyes. Stanley screamed, waking himself from the nightmare. At that point the penis, which had been stealthily and silently working its way up his body, leaped into Stanley’s open mouth.
The academic’s eyes widened in absolute horror as he recognized the shape and taste of the disembodied organ. Gagging, he tried to grasp the member that was writhing and pounding its vengeful way deeper into his throat. Now blue in the face, Stanley desperately pulled at the testicles bouncing against his chin. The organ would not budge.
The last thing Stanley felt was the contraction of his lungs as he struggled to catch a last gasp of air. Still Dorothy snored on. Even the flailing of Stanley’s arms in his death throes failed to wake her.
It was a glorious morning. Dorothy felt the sun on her face before she even opened her eyes. Images from last night’s lovemaking flooded her body so sweetly that for one moment she feared she had imagined the whole thing.
She reached out and felt for Stanley. Her hand hit the top of a cold and clammy thigh.
Stanley’s body lay across the sheets. His eyes were rolled back in their sockets. White foam and spittle covered the lower half of his face. His jaw was stretched open in a hideous grimace and his lips were wrapped around a gnarled old root, most of which was plunged down into his throat. Dorothy recognized the mandrake immediately.
“Miss Owen, you have a visitor.”
The prison officer, a stout cheerful woman in her late fifties, waited patiently as the penitentiary’s newest inmate tidied herself up. She was a demure spinster-type, the officer had noted, polite and well spoken. Not your usual murderess. She looked more closely at the inmate: midthirties, not exactly a beauty but she had something enchanting about her. Never mind that there were rumors about her being a witch. As far as the officer was concerned, if all witches were this nice she’d trade in the rest of the nasty-minded inmates and start a coven.
Dorothy allowed herself to be led to the visitors’ reception area. Prison food and lack of exercise had made her simultaneously both thin and flabby, yet she still carried herself with resolve. She saw herself as having surrendered to fate but not resigned to it. She found this an oddly comforting thought, but it had still been a horrific six months since Stanley’s death.
One of her troubles had been finding a lawyer who believed her account of his death and was prepared to create a plausible defense. In the end she’d settled for a retired judge who had a fascination for the occult. His defense had been rambling and practically incomprehensible. In contrast, the prosecution had selected a glamorous female lawyer who kept using catchphrases like hysteria, sexual psychosis, and projection. The alluring prosecutor caught the imagination of the jury, the press, and the public, portraying Dorothy as an obsessive determined to both seduce and destroy a man higher in status than herself, who would most likely abandon her eventually. Obsessives had been celebrated that year in popular psychology and the media leaped on the case with ill-concealed joy. Dorothy was labeled “The Root Murderess” and all kinds of lewd hypotheses on the sexual foreplay that preceded the murder appeared in the newspapers.
The prosecution won easily. Dorothy got a life sentence.
“Probably end up being twenty years if you’re a good girl, then you can sell the story, get it optioned for a movie, and become a millionairess,” her lawyer told her cheerfully, slipping her the card of his publisher as he left.
Dorothy had discovered that there was a monastic aspect to prison life that suited her. She found that by imagining she was incarcerated in some medieval castle she was able to deal with the vicious hierarchy among her fellow inmates. She even had a room with a view, a sweeping panorama of Dartmoor’s bleak landscape. It was here, sitting on the bench in her cell, that she found she had all the time in the world to contemplate her previous life.
They arrived at the screened-off visitors’ section and the prison officer sat her down. A few minutes later a tall dark-haired woman, immaculately dressed in a tailored suit, appeared. She sat down opposite with silent poise and reached toward Dorothy, picked up her hand, and began stroking it. Dorothy was too stunned to react.
“You don’t recognize me but I was at your great-aunt’s funeral.”
Her accent jolted Dorothy’s memory. She had been Winifred’s one friend, the enigmatic stranger who had claimed that her great-aunt had been one of the ancient ones, a follower of Arianrhod, the goddess of time and karma. Dorothy pulled her hand away sharply. “What do you want?” It was hard to keep the resentment out of her voice.
“The mandrake root, do you still have it?” the woman whispered conspiratorially. The prison officer, standing beside the door, pretended not to hear.
“They confiscated it as evidence, then returned it later. It’s stored in a safety deposit box at the Abbey National Bank in Tunbridge Wells.”
“Good. I think both your aunt and I owe you an explanation.” Her voice was mesmeric. Dorothy felt as if she was being hypnotized into listening.
“I am also an Owen; in fact, your second cousin once removed. Like yourself and Winifred, I have never married. Most of us don’t, preferring to take the mandrake as husband instead. This tradition has gone back for hundreds of years. It all began with the hanging of Llewelyn the Fierce.”
Dorothy shuddered, struggling with a suffocating sense of history being cyclical. “The same Llewelyn that was hanged from the walls of Shrewsbury Castle?” she ventured, finally finding enough saliva to articulate.
“The very same, executed by the vile tyrant Lord Huntington. They left Llewelyn hanging there for three nights and three days. By the time Gwen Owen came to claim his body the crows had already picked out his beautiful black eyes.”
Dorothy’s blood ran cold. “Gwen Owen? Was she—”
“Llewelyn’s mistress—yes, child, she was. An extraordinary human being and a wondrous sorceress. When she came to that cold wall and stared upon the body of her only love she did not shed one tear. Instead she swore to avenge herself on all future generations of Huntingtons, even if it took centuries. She then bent down and looked for the patch of earth where poor Llewelyn must have spilled his seed as he died. The mandrake root was already growing at the foot of the gallows. Gwen cleared the soil around it and harvested it carefully, gently pulling the root away and placing it beside her breast. From that day onward Llewelyn’s mandrake root was handed down the Owen line. So you see, your mandrake root was just carrying out its destiny, taking revenge on a Huntington. Its actions were the culmination of the very reason for his existence. Gwen finally had her revenge.”
The woman paused and reached into her handbag for a peppermint.
Dorothy tried to control the tears welling up in her eyes. “A man died!”
In refusing the offered mint, Dorothy knocked the tin from the woman’s hand. Peppermints flew everywhere. The woman ignored them. Her face softened and she stroked Dorothy’s hand again.
“Winifred should have warned you. But she was just thinking of your happiness.” She peered down at Dorothy’s hand. “You have a profound future, your magic lies in the Word.”
“So how is all that information going to help me now?”
“It won’t, but write the story anyway. It’s time we Owens were immortalized.” She left with a swirl of her long skirt.
Dorothy watched her go. Behind her, framed by the barred window, a fleeting shadow flew past. Set against the gathering night sky, it might have been a wild black-maned man entangled in the arms of his laughing mistress; then again it might not.
Rainmaker
The tumbleweed twisted in the hot breeze as it rolled down Sandridge’s main street. It caught on the bleached stone steps of the church, then, as if disgruntled with the breaking of its flight, curled around a bent Coke can.
The tightly knit farming community was in its thirteenth month without rain and the wheat crop, visible beyond rusty barbed-wire fencing, was wit
hered and sparse.
The gas-station owner, a skeptical man in his midfifties, looked up from his caramel milkshake and out through the window of the diner. Across the street the thin-faced widow everyone knew as Gracie was already peeping out from behind her nylon curtains. They both watched as a brand new Ford Bronco, gleaming in the sun, turned into the main street. It was the first visitor the farming community had seen for months, and this was a town that distrusted strangers.
The Ford Bronco itself was unremarkable, except that it was pulling a 1960s Airstream trailer. The silver oblong with its curved corners shimmered like a forgotten prop from a sci-fi movie. But it was the design painted on the side that made it particularly bizarre: a gaudy rainbow arching up into a gray cloud from which a shower of rain fell in glistening blue dashes. The word Rainmaker stretched proudly above it in calligraphy of purple and gold.
Jacob Kidderminister pulled up outside the town hall. Same tedious routine, same flat-topped buildings, and same size place, he thought, reading the sign that proudly declared the population of Sandridge to be: Five Hundred Souls and Growing. Somebody had scrawled White between the words Hundred and Souls. Jacob shook his head in disgust. If there was one thing he detested more than drought it was racism. “Welcome to paradise,” he said to himself bitterly.
Just then a huge turkey vulture emerged out of a nearby tree and flapped its way lazily across the road to perch on the signpost. Hissing, it cocked its head toward him. Jacob wound down his car window. “Hello, Mr. Birdie,” he said.
The creature looked him straight in the eye, giving Jacob the uncanny feeling it was reading his mind. Suddenly it turned in the direction of a tree on the other side of the street. Jacob followed its gaze, to see dozens of starlings sitting silently on the branches staring back at him. Immediately the hairs on the back of his neck rose—he had never seen so many starlings during a drought. He had the strong impression the birds had been waiting for him. The turkey vulture flew off. With a great rustling of wings the starlings lifted from the tree en masse. In a plunging arc the bird of prey flew in the direction of the church, the starlings following in a tight swooping cloud, and all disappeared into the belfry.
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