The Unexpected Occurrence of Thaddeus Hobble (9 page)

At this moment I thought that, were I to have to leave the house to deal with Miss Coombs, I would be leaving Agatha alone. She may well come about during my absence and again attempt to inflict harm upon herself. I didn't want this – I didn't want this at all. I went back into her bedroom and, using the same rope she'd used to hang herself, tied her hands together and to the headboard of the bed. That way, she would be safe. She could not do harm to herself and, in doing so, do harm to me. She, above all others, was the person I least wished to lose in my life.

* * *

Miss Coombs' fat corpse was in the wheelbarrow. How I had managed to get her in it I do not know, but I had and in a way I was proud of my achievement. I remembered, one Christmas as a small boy when my father was still amongst us, sitting on her knee during a family visit to Uncle Joe's. That each Christmas was marred by my father's constant reminders of it being this time of year I killed my mother during birth, was but a small price to pay for being able to secure some small female contact. In fact, Miss Coombs was the first woman who touched me and let me touch her. Father always told me to stay in the outhouse when his lady callers came around, and so I was never to experience any physicality with them. Miss Coombs was, then, perhaps the closest I ever got to having a mother. She was no mother to me, of course, but in her own small way she had indirectly acted in that role in some minute way. There I sat, as a young boy upon her knee, for all the world thinking I had struck gold for but a fleeting moment. Little did I know that, a few years later, I would be puzzling over whether or not to cut those same legs off in an attempt to dispose of her body. These things do happen, however, and certainly to me.

* * *

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 left 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.