by Gareth Wiles
* * *
I came to the edge of the bank and looked around. There was no sight of anybody but myself and Miss Coombs’ corpse for miles around. In an instant I tipped the wheelbarrow forward and sent her on her way down into the river. She rolled quickly down the bank and hit the river with a splash, carried away by its speeding current. I had decided against cutting her up; partly through lack of energy, and partly through applied method. Were she to be found, her death could easily be explained as an accident. She could simply have come out here for a stroll and slipped. I would just report that she was missing, and wash my hands of the sorry affair. It was perfectly unavoidable, had she not acted in such a hysterical manner. Still, the past could not be unwritten and things were fixed as they were.
Troy looked down into the river, a little panicked, and started to struggle down the bank himself as Miss Coombs floated away. I called him back and he obeyed, returning with me to the house. I locked him in the study downstairs and went to check on Agatha. She must have come to life when I was out and struggled to get free as her wrists were very red and sore. Luckily she had not succeeded, and was now sleeping. She looked so happy to me, no stress registering on her features at all. One of her breasts was showing from beneath the blankets and her feet were protruding from the bottom. I stood there in silence and just watched her, so sorry for what had happened of late. None of it was in any way my fault, of course, but I was going to have to deal with all the problems. I just felt so distant from everything right now, as though I wasn’t really connected to the here and now. I had often felt this way, and decided it was not the done thing. To push these ideas to the back of my mind was the more ideal action, especially in these circumstances.
Agatha’s exposed breast was a sight to behold. I wished to hold it, seize it in a passionate embrace as our bodies became one. It reminded me how I had never had the benefit of my mother’s milk as a baby, and this made me even keener not to see Agatha suffer death. She would not leave me, she could not; with her hands bound to the bed up here she was mine and only mine, and nobody else but the dog would be here at the house now. Yes, poor Miss Coombs I thought, but that was in the past now. All things had to come to their end eventually, but Agatha and I had yet to begin.
* * *
That night, as I plotted my statement regarding Miss Coombs’ disappearance, I had the urge to sample some of Uncle Joe’s wine. I stumbled down into his cellar deep beneath the house with only a candle as my companion and found what I had hoped lay down here. A vast row of untouched bottles, inches deep in dust, lay in wait for my consumption. This was the first time I had ever been down here, but I knew my uncle had enjoyed his wine. Now it was my wine, just like his daughter was mine, and I picked up a bottle and dusted it down. It was thirty years old already, and I opened it there and then. Sitting down on a crate, I swigged straight from the bottle and before I knew it the contents were gone from it. Another bottle was sought out, and I repeated the process. It made me rather merry to begin with, as I thought upon all the good in the world. I thought about Troy and all the pleasure he had given me from a mere pup in the barn to this very evening as he did everything I told him to. As I continued to drink, however, I was reminded of the bad that had occurred over the years. Miss Coombs was gone from my mind during this remembrance, instead it was filled with all the beatings I had received first from my father and then from Uncle Joe. I smashed the empty wine bottle in anger, taking a large gulp from the nearly empty one in my hand. Something just wasn’t right about it, when I gave it a bit of thought, and I somehow felt I’d been wronged. This was perhaps the first real time I had reached these heightened emotions regarding the treatment I had received and I truly began to feel hatred towards the two men. I was nothing like them, I was better than them. Even Ffoulkes, my own non-blood brother from the factory, had turned on me and dealt out his own physical abuse. However, I was the one who was still here on God’s fair Earth and in control of my own destiny. I would rise up, literally, from the ashes of the old factory and rebuild it with renewed authority. I would show no weakness, no hint of compassion to those who tried to wrong me. Ffoulkes had taken me by surprise, but nobody else would be afforded the same leniency. For too long I had been my father’s son; weak-willed, complacent and nondescript. I was nothing like he. I was my own man, and would succeed where he had failed. Granted, his biggest failing was in dying, and I had almost been as foolish to allow this to happen to me during Ffoulkes’ assault in the factory. Nothing, and nobody, would be given a similar chance. Miss Coombs could have proven to be my downfall, but I had disposed of her; and Agatha, who lay upstairs in the house above, could potentially attempt unwarranted tomfoolery again. If only there was some way to save her from herself, and keep her with me as my own. She would come around to the life I’d provide for her eventually – it was just a matter of waiting patiently for that to happen. I looked around the cellar, swishing my candle from side to side to get a better look at the space around me. It was then, as my drunken head loped lazily from side to side, that I struck upon the perfect method in which to enact my wish – Agatha would come and live down here in the cellar. Away from harm’s way in the world beyond this closed environment, we could build the perfect life together. Fate had granted me continued existence in spite of life’s tough tribulations, and I was not going to throw it away in idiocy. At that very moment a very brief vision of something else flashed through my mind – something away from this time and place. I myself, and not Agatha, was hanging in a long line with many other men. Next I was alive again and manically stabbing at a man and slitting his throat. I was perplexed, incensed, at these apparitions attacking me.
* * *
Agatha screamed in terror and begged me to stop as I dragged her, hands and feet bound, down into the cellar. It was quite the struggle as she fought my weakened body, managing to bite my arm as we came to the bottom of the cellar steps. My head was pounding and my mind was not clear, so I lashed out at her and caught her across the face with my fist. This sent her to the floor and stopped her screams. Now she just moaned as I fumbled my way back up the steps to fetch the candle. When I came back down I could see her just lying there, her head resting on the broken wine bottle. Quickly I went to her, putting the candle aside and pulling her head up. I rested it on my knee and pressed my finger to her lips.
‘I am so sorry,’ I cried, real tears coming from my eyes. I was so upset to think I had struck my poor girl. ‘What must you think of me?’ She did not reply as I stroked her hair and studied the cuts the broken bottle had made to her cheek. ‘Now we are the same,’ I remarked, a burning sensation pulsing from my own scarred face. ‘I will heal you, just like you healed me.’
Again I went up the steps into the house, filling the bucket I’d drowned Miss Coombs in with water and taking it down to Agatha with a cloth. Gently I cleaned the blood from her cheek.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she suddenly asked me, sounding quite forlorn.
‘It is for your own good, Agatha. You cannot be allowed to die by your own hand.’
‘There is nothing left for me here, my life is unbearable.’
‘No more will it be so,’ I spoke with increasing happiness as I took hold of her head with both my hands. ‘I love you Agatha, and we will lead the most wonderful life together.’
‘I don’t want that,’ she spat back, appearing to me, only briefly, as rather ugly. It must have been how the candlelight flickered in the slight breeze coming down the steps, and because of this I wanted to seal her in to stop what it was making me see. Her face remained creased and contorted in such an unsatisfactory countenance that I moved away from her briefly. ‘You are drunk, you have no right to bind me like this,’ she continued with her misplaced venom.
‘You have no choice.’
‘Where is Miss Coombs?’ she demanded.
‘Gone to get ointment for your sore neck.’
Now I moved back to her, running my finger along the mark lef
t by the rope on her neck. I was perhaps a little nervous, my hand shaking as I gently touched her flesh. She looked up at me leaning over her, taking in her naked body with my heavy eyes. They felt weighted, yes, as though some fiend had stuck hooks in them and were trying with all their might to hoist them from their sockets. I rubbed hard at them as Agatha coughed.
‘You are not well, Darren,’ she strained through her coughing. ‘You have come over all queer.’
‘You have driven me thus,’ said I to her silly talk. ‘Had you not got caught up in that noose then we would not be where we are now.’
‘Had you left me there, we would not be where we are now,’ was her adamant rebuttal as she gritted her teeth at me.
She had looked so beautiful up there, hanging from the noose in Nature’s unsheathed outfit, that leaving her there could have delivered a level of visceral pleasure to me. But, I wanted her alive so badly that she just had to come down. Down she most certainly had come, further down at this very moment than she ever had been before in her entire life. The cellar was not the most comfortable of places, but it was still a part of the house and this was the house we were to make our life together in. There was no escaping that now.
‘I would not wish any harm to come to you,’ I whispered softly to her, leaning closer in to her soft and bountiful lips. ‘I am sorry that I struck you, but you were acting out of turn.’ I touched her cut cheek and she winced. ‘I love you, Agatha.’ My hand instinctively came to rest on her breast, the same one I had looked at earlier whilst she slept. It was my first proper touch of it, and I did not move my hand from its initial resting place at first. It felt rougher than it looked, and less firm than I had expected. I kissed her and felt her try to pull back, but there was no space to pull back into. She was now shivering. ‘Are you cold?’ I asked her, undoing the buttons on my shirt with my spare hand as the other remained on her breast. When my shirt was fully open, I took my hand away from her to remove it, thinking at first to lay it down upon her body. But, had I done that her body would then be hidden from view. I did not want that at all and, as I looked down at her looking up at my exposed chest, I felt she did not want that either.
* * *
It had been near nine months now, and Agatha was heavily pregnant. I was doing my best to keep her comfortable down in the cellar, and in some ways it was quite homely down there. The damp smell had not ceased, and I couldn’t stay down there myself for too long at a time. Agatha had always had somewhat of a sickly chest, and I suppose the conditions in the cellar did not help this. But, there she had to remain; it had gone on too long now to just undo and go back to the way things had been. I still kept her hands bound, replacing the irritating rope with chain. She no longer complained about her hands, she just sort of lay there in a daze on the bed I had brought down for us. She no longer pulled away when I came to her either, because she knew she could not get away. It was no use resisting me, and in a way I felt we were making progress. We had certainly grown closer, and I knew this was in some part due to the fact I was the only person she saw now. She relied on me for everything, and did her best not to upset me anymore. I had been rather difficult, shall we say, during the first few weeks of her being down there, but I had mellowed with time and she had accepted her situation. However, the added factor of pregnancy had created an altogether greater level of challenge to our prolonged affair.
When we first realised she was pregnant, Agatha’s first reaction was an uncontrollable hysteria. This was quickly replaced with an overriding desire that we be wed in the local chapel. I agreed at first, but I could never let go of that fear she would either try to harm herself again or worse – accuse me of some ill treatment towards her. I could not cope with such lies, especially as I above all others knew what actual ill treatment entailed. What I had done for Agatha was love and affection, not some kind of cruel torture. Gradually, as the months unfolded, I believe she began to agree with me. She certainly gave up on the idea of leaving here. Now, here I was ready to deliver our baby into the world and become a father myself. I would not repeat the mistakes of the past. I had had time to think about all the things that had happened to me in the past whilst I was recovering from the fire, and I could see that a lot of mistakes had been made by those around me. Luckily I was educated enough to realise I could break the cycle of abuse by acting differently. My child was soon to be born into the world, and I would be the perfect father. Agatha, too, could possibly rise up from her stupor once she saw me with our child and come to accept everything. As soon as I could be sure of her true acceptance, she would join child and me upstairs in the house again.
Miss Coombs was never mentioned now, and her body had never been found. At first, I had a few visits from various folks in the village expressing their concern regarding her departure; some even wished to speak to Agatha. Eventually they stopped asking, and seemed to see in me a rather pitiful figure whose luck had not been good. I rather enjoyed their pity, for it aided in my masking of the truth. I had never been a liar, but I could not afford to hang for Miss Coombs’ benefit. Agatha needed me – she truly needed me – and now that child was soon upon us I was needed twice over. I thought about Miss Coombs often, of course, and how unfortunate her accidental demise had been. However, had she remained in the house I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do as I had done with Agatha. I had free reign to do as I wished, and it was rather fulfilling.
As the hours got closer to the birth, Agatha got steadily more confused and withdrawn. When I did sleep, all that played in my mind was that dream where I had witnessed my own birth, and the ultimate death of my mother. The big upright box was in prominence, looming as a shadow over my life. Now I stood at the foot of a real bed, my love lying bound on it with her legs spread apart. I could see the child’s head and froze still, the sudden realisation of what I had done to Agatha filling my conscience. She must have thought me monstrous to attempt suicide in the first place, and all I had done was continue to fuel that ill feeling by keeping her captive down here and trying to build a relationship. There was no going back now, and I rallied myself out of that wasteful mindset in order to deliver my child.
‘Push,’ I called out to her as I bent down to support the head. Agatha was not responding. ‘Our child is coming, Agatha, you must make an effort.’ She turned her head and looked up at me. I looked down at her and smiled. Her lips moved, but I heard no words. ‘Push!’ I called again. Her lips moved some more, but still no words could be heard. I leant over and pressed my ear towards them. No more did they move, but she gave an almighty push and I swept in to secure the newborn in my arms. There was one final gasp from Agatha before she fell silent, and I looked at her still face. I knew she had died, and it was all Miss Coombs’ fault. Damn her!
I untied Agatha’s dead hands and placed our son in them.
* * *
The next few days were wrought with difficulties as I dealt with my son alone. I felt Adam was a good name, and that was that. There was nobody to disagree with me or suggest other potential names. Towards the end of that first week there came a terrible smell from the door leading into the cellar. I hadn’t been down there since coming up with Adam in my arms that first time after his birth, and Agatha would not be looking herself at all by now. I remembered how her brother, who’d tossed himself under the cart, had looked just hours afterwards and, although Agatha had not been mangled facially, the smell was a clear indication of the unfortunate processes now going on. Still, the smell became that much more intense within mere hours and there needed to be something done to stop it. I placed Adam safely in the cot I had made him with my own hands upstairs whilst his mother carried him in the cellar, and gingerly opened the door to go down there.
I did not dare to think what would meet my eyes as I progressed slowly down each step, clutching nervously onto a flickering candle. There was some small part of me that wanted to see an empty bed, an indication that Agatha hadn’t in fact died but had manufactured a false demise i
n order to escape my clutches. But, no, there her rotting remains lay; her legs still spread apart and her arms positioned as though cradling a newborn. My vile actions came crashing down on me, a self-opinion growing that I was clearly deranged on so many levels. But, things had truly just escalated with one event after another. Was I to blame Miss Coombs, Ffoulkes, Uncle Joe, my father? Perhaps it was time to take the blame myself. After all, I had allowed things to unfold in this increasingly ill manner. Nevertheless, the end product of my actions was the baby Adam, and I was certainly not going to allow him to turn into somebody as damaged as me. I would be the perfect father and do right by the boy. Once and for all, the cycle would be broken and he would grow up into a fine man. He and I had everything we needed to make this happen: a house, the newly rebuilt factory. Admittedly, there was no mother, but I was long overdue a new housemaid.
* * *
‘Please, call me Emily,’ was the first thing the petite young thing had said to me upon responding to my call for a housemaid. She was so, so wondrously perfect that I quite forgot about Agatha within a matter of seconds and set my sights on her. To say I fell head over heels in love would be a crass understatement, for my deep feelings for her knew no limits. After a fortnight in the house I had asked her hand in marriage and she had, surprisingly, accepted. She was the daughter of a poor woman, and her father was dead. Her mother came to live with us, and all three of us reared dear Adam together. We were quickly married and in a flash added siblings for my firstborn. All had come good in my life in the end, and I had done well in spite of my early challenges.