Bed of Crimson Joy

by Bark, Jasper

  “It has everything to do with Bethany’s disappearance.” Peter drained the last of the brandy from the glass. He seemed to be weighing up how much to tell them.

  “You have to tell us,” said Rose. “It’s important.”

  Peter sighed and handed Stanley his glass for a refill. “The bed, I’ve seen it before, that is, before I moved here. Bethany and I are lawyers, used to be lawyers. We worked for a firm that specialised in probate and estate management. That’s where we met actually. It was against company rules to get involved with other staff, plus Bethany was already married, which made it even more complicated, but we were the best at what we did, so they let it slide.

  “Our clients were old and rich, and mainly came to us through personal recommendation. We had one client, though, who was a little eccentric. He was a recluse called Archibald Trelawney. He had a huge personal fortune and a vast property portfolio. When word got out that he was looking to expand his legal team, Bethany and I did everything we could to get an introduction.

  “He never left his home, some crumbling, gothic pile in the middle of his country estate, so that’s where we went to meet him. We were carefully vetted before we got an introduction, so I have to admit, we were curious and a little excited to finally meet the elusive Mr Trelawney.

  “A shame then that he made our flesh crawl. We were shown into this little back room on the ground floor, where he seemed to spend all his time. A poky little space filled with books, lining the walls and sittting in huge piles everywhere. He had a mansion with four wings and acres of land around it, yet he hardly ever left this one room. You could tell by the smell.

  “He had these horrid little eyes, sunken into a wizened head. They made you feel dirty just by looking at you. He was well spoken and obviously educated, but he had a way of speaking that made everything he said sound lewd and inappropriate. He smiled the minute he saw us, it was a predator’s smile, made you feel someone had rammed an ice pick in your guts.

  “We had a pretty slick Powerpoint presentation all prepared, but he wasn’t the least bit interested. It turned out he had a proposal all of his own. He didn’t beat about the bush or anything, he just came straight out with it. He asked how we’d like to inherit his whole estate, money and all. We thought he was joking, obviously. So we laughed it off and tried to steer him back to employing our company.

  “Turns out he was being deadly serious. He wasn’t looking for lawyers, he was looking for a couple – the right couple, and he liked what he saw in us. He offered to make us sole benefactors. With one single stipulation, we had to do something in return. Something quite unorthodox…”

  Peter stopped, shook his head in revulsion and got to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve said too much already.” Stanley also stood, to block Peter from leaving.

  “Wait,” Stanley said. “You can’t stop there. You haven’t told us anything. This is important.”

  “Look, I’ve taken up too much of your time. I shouldn’t have come here in the first place, you don’t know where Bethany is. I need to get as far away as possible.”

  Stanley moved in front of the door. “Don’t leave please, we need to know what the stipulation was.”

  “No you don’t, you really don’t. But I do need to leave. I have some post of yours by the way, the post man delivered it to us by accident. I’ll drop it off before I go.”

  Rose pulled herself off the sofa and put her hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Peter, look at me, please. You know something about that bed, about Bethany’s disappearance and…” Rose rubbed her stomach. “And about what’s happened to me. Stanley’s right, this is important to all of us. We won’t judge you, we might even be able to help you, but we can’t do anything unless we know the whole truth. Please, come and sit down, Stanley will get more brandy.”

  Peter seemed to waver. Rose motioned for Stanley to refill his glass and took advantage of his indecision, to steer him back to the sofa. Peter accepted the fresh glass of brandy and stared straight ahead of him. “You were going to tell us about the unorthodox stipulation…” Rose prompted.

  Peter sighed. “Where do I start? I mean, I’m a man of the world and everything. Some of my richer clients have had some… interesting tastes, but this turned out to be… well… I mean we thought at first it was just a harmless peccadillo.

  “He was going to let us inherit everything, so long as we agreed to… to… I can’t believe I’m telling you this. So long as we agreed to have sex, in a special bed, in his house, while he was in the room with us. We weren’t even sure he was serious when he first put it to us. I mean we’d come there to win his business. We didn’t expect to be offered the whole estate if we put on some private sex show for the old pervert.

  “We asked for a bit of time to think it over, but the old bastard put the hard sell on us, saying we’d have to give him an answer straight away. Well, what would you have done? I mean he was offering us more money than we could spend in several lifetimes. Naturally we agreed.

  “But it didn’t stop there, the paperwork we had to sign was incredible. I mean, this was our area of specialty but even we were overwhelmed by it and, because of the nature of the transaction, we couldn’t employ anyone to negotiate on our behalf, or help us with the more esoteric parts. A huge part of it was in Latin, which I’m not great on. The problem was, a lot of it dealt with laws that we weren’t familiar with, some weren’t even laws of the earthly realm, that is to say they… no, I’m not making much sense.

  “Anyway, back to the… erm, act we had to commit. We had to do all these strange exercises for about a month leading up to it. We’d be picked up and driven to the estate and some strange people would instruct us to do some very odd things. They’d give us these hideous herbal concoctions to drink as well, it was all very bizarre.

  “Then one night we were taken to this bed chamber on the second floor of the mansion. It had magical symbols, drawn on the floorboards in ash and daubed on the walls in blood. The room was filled with erotic art, statues and paintings, most of it was unspeakably obscene. We nearly bolted when we saw it, in spite of all the cash at stake.

  “In the centre of the room was the bed. That’s where we were supposed to… perform. It wasn’t… it’s actually not as easy as… I mean I don’t normally have any trouble. I’ve never fancied anyone like I fancy Bethany, but it was different with him in the room.

  “When the old goat saw that I was… I was having trouble, he… No, no I can’t tell you…”

  Rose put her hand on Peter’s shoulder. “This is important, I told you we won’t judge, but every little detail might be pertinent.”

  Peter drained his glass. “He put something up… look you have to understand that I’m not into any of the funny stuff. I’m not gay, or kinky, okay? But he… put something up my behind. A little muslin bag filled with exotic spices. Felt like my arse was on fire, excuse my French, but I don’t think I’ve ever been harder. I didn’t have any problem after that and, well, you both know what the bed can do to you.

  “When we finished, we heard this weird hissing noise, like someone wheezing or gasping for breath. It was just at the point that I climaxed actually. We looked over at Trelawney and he was slumped over in his chair, dead. A thin trickle of dark green fluid ran from the corner of his mouth. He’d poisoned himself.

  “Can’t say we were sorry to see the back of the old goat. I mean everything was ours now, or so we thought. The first thing we did was get rid of all the old books and the obscene art, not to mention the furniture and furnishings. We could have sold some of it I suppose, it was all antique, some of the books and the statues were worth quite a bit I’m told, but we were already fabulously wealthy so we didn’t need the extra money. Beside I never really went in for antiques. Most importantly though, we got rid of that monstrous bed, or at least we thought we had.

  “Then all these notaries started crawling out of the woodwork, especially when Bethany discovered she was pregnant, which kind
of surprised us. Bethany had been told she couldn’t have children. It was one of the reasons her first marriage broke down, her husband was desperate for kids.

  “There were all these clauses in the paperwork we signed, that we either hadn’t seen, or hadn’t understood. Most of them were to do with the care and provision for any children we might have in the first year of our inheritance. So naturally the first thing we did was lawyer up ourselves, inasmuch as we could, given the paperwork we’d signed, which forbade challenging the terms and conditions of the will under pain of forfeit.

  “We also got some Latin scholars to translate the passages we couldn’t follow. There was a lot of references to anaeternae ultionis clause, meaning eternal, or unending, vengeance which, if invoked, would result in us being punished over and over and over again. Though it didn’t specify how this would be done from a legal perspective, so we weren’t too bothered about that.

  “What did worry us were our legal imperatives under thererum tanta novitas clause. This specified our roles in a magical ceremony that we had no idea we were taking part in. A ceremony to incarnate a grown man inside the womb of a barren woman, so he’d grow to manhood with all the knowledge and memories of his former life.

  “Bethany was pretty freaked out, I can tell you. She didn’t like the idea of being pregnant in the first place, she was only three months gone but she looked more like six or seven. It wasn’t helping our marriage any either. Then, when she found out about this, it sent her over the edge.

  “I mean neither of us believed it was real, not at first. But she knew that something wasn’t right with her condition. She said she could feel him growing within her like a tumour, sucking the life out of her. She thought it was like a form of unending rape, having that creepy old goat deep inside her. She even became convinced she could hear his thoughts, goading her and laughing at her from inside her own womb.

  “It was driving her mad so we had to do something about it. If that was Trelawney growing inside her, we certainly didn’t want to raise him after he was born. Can you imagine that? A little toddler running around with the mind and memories of an evil old man, calling you ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. Looking into a tiny infant’s eyes and seeing that malevolent old fossil staring out of them. I can’t think of anything worse.

  “We made discreet enquiries about terminating the pregnancy. No one wanted to help us at first, they thought Bethany was too late in her term, because of how big she was. Eventually we found a clinic with questionable ethics and a liking for six figure fees. When it was over we told the solicitors that Bethany had miscarried.

  “Unfortunately they followed the money trail to the clinic and exposed our little lie. We lost the whole estate. We’d gone back on our deal and as such we’d forfeited our right to the inheritance. We had to do it though, after the way that bastard had played us. At least we foiled his little plan.”

  Rose was suddenly reminded of the line from Stanley’s poem: ‘Her womb was an instrument of revenge.’

  “What did you do then?” Stanley asked.

  Peter coughed. “Sorry my throat’s dry from talking so much. Don’t suppose I could ask for a glass of water?” Rose fetched it this time. Peter smiled his thanks and drank it down. “Well we had to move out. There was a fight about what we owned, the possessions we’d brought to the mansion, the things we bought while we were there. That took a while to resolve. We’d salted a little of the money away where it couldn’t be found, so we were okay financially. We moved here to stay under the radar. Then we tried to put everything behind us. We thought we’d succeeded until that wretched bed suddenly turned up.”

  “What are we going to do?” said Rose. She wasn’t quite certain what to make of Peter’s incredible confession. Part of her wondered how much of it was fantasy and self-delusion? A fantastical tale invented by someone close to breaking point, in order to cover up a more prosaic case of fraud and embezzlement. Another part of her was reluctantly accepting the truth of it, and how it accounted for all the strange little events that had befallen her.

  “I’m going to get as far away as possible from that bed. Then I’m going to find Bethany.” He got up from the sofa and made his way out of the room. Stanley didn’t attempt to stop him this time. Peter stopped in the doorway, turned to Rose and pointed at her stomach. “You’d be wise to get rid of that as soon as possible.”

  Stanley followed Peter to the front door and saw him out. Rose stood in the living room with her hands round her swollen belly. It wasn’t until Peter’s parting comment that she’d even begun to consider there was a life growing inside her.

  VI

  Rose didn’t sleep at all that night. She didn’t sleep much these days as it was. Sleep was like an old friend with whom she’d once been close, but had now drifted apart. She only spent a few hours in its company most nights.

  Stanley, on the other hand, had become much better acquainted with sleep. He went to bed much earlier, got up later and was always dozing off in the afternoon. He’d also developed a dreadful snore which disturbed Rose’s light sleep.

  Tonight, she was trying to process everything Peter had said. The implications were too much to take in all at once. She had to let them slowly creep up on her, one at a time, so she could mull each one over and process how she felt.

  Rose stared at her huge belly in the dim light of the bedside lamp. She couldn’t help stroking it in a proprietary fashion. If Peter was telling the truth, and she suspected he was, then there was something wholly unnatural inside her. The simple fact that she was pregnant, more than a decade after going through the menopause, pointed to how unnatural it was. It had never crossed her mind, or her doctor’s, that all the symptoms might add up to this.

  Bethany had described it as a tumour, a permanent rape. Peter had advised her to get rid of it as soon as possible. Rose didn’t feel like doing that just yet. She knew she ought to be appalled. If Peter was to be believed, she’d been used in the most awful way and had dragged Stanley into it too.

  But she didn’t feel violated at all. She had what she’d wanted her whole life, another life growing inside her. Rose couldn’t believe how quickly she’d come to accept this. It seemed a ridiculous thing to contemplate. Then again, she’d known something wasn’t right for a while, somewhere at the back of her mind she’d been preparing herself for this,. Given every other strange occurrence of late, it made a sort of twisted sense.

  Rose knew that it wasn’t right. She knew that soon she would have to rectify the situation. But right now she wanted to enjoy the feeling of being pregnant. Of nurturing another life inside her, of filling the aching hollowness that had screamed at the centre of her being for more than half her life. She liked feeling pregnant. Finally, after all these years, she got to know what it was like.

  Rose wondered how someone her age would even go about getting a termination. She supposed she would have to go to some seedy backstreet establishment, which wouldn’t be cheap.

  Rose weighed up the alternatives to abortion. Would it be possible to get an exorcist to chase Trelawney out of her foetus, if he was actually in there? How about after he was born, would it work better then? She’d read somewhere that a frontal lobotomy could erase unpleasant and troubling memories. Would that work? Could you erase the entire memory of a past life? Would it be possible to perform a lobotomy on a new born child?

  The more Rose considered it, the more desperate and brutal each of the alternatives seemed. There was no way she could commit any of them on a child she brought into the world. What were the risks attached to bringing a child to full term at her age? Surely there’d be complications. Given how quickly she was growing, she wondered if she’d even have to carry it for nine months.

  As the sky outside her bedroom window began to lighten, Rose began to cry silently. Tears spilling from her cheeks in condemnation of the sheer unfairness of her situation. Here she was with a child – or something like it – inside her, and she would have to kill it. There
, she’d said it. Kill it. That’s what she was contemplating after all.

  She’d brought this on herself. Her longing had drawn this old man into her and now she was expected to kill him. She laughed with a bitter irony. The emptiness that filled Rose made it so easy for people to get inside her. And when they did, something deep within her always died. Literally this time.

  Rose ran her hand over her stomach and something moved inside it. Despite everything she’d been thinking, Rose felt a huge burst of excitement. She rubbed the spot where she’d felt the movement, hoping to get more.

  That’s when she became aware of another consciousness, waiting on the outskirts of her own. One that was rooted to the strange life inside her. It was there at the very edges of her mind, she could sense it more than hear it, like trying to see something hovering in your peripheral vision.

  The strongest thing she sensed in this consciousness was need. A need for her, like none she’d ever felt before. Need that came in the form of a plea: please look after me, and love me and raise me. Was this what it meant to be a mother? To be needed this badly and this much.

  Beneath the need, other emotions festered, tainting the purity of the need for her. There was cunning, and an ability to manipulate, but there was also a definite sense of threat – you better had look after me.

  There was another kick inside her and Rose felt herself flush with pride for the clever little thing in her womb. The consciousness on the perimeter of her own almost seemed to form a thought, a little proto-thought: look what I can do Mummy.

  Yes my little darling, she thought, in reply. Show me.

  There was more movement, but this time it came with a sharp stab of pain. A pain that kept building until it was beyond agony. It knocked the breath of her, and Rose could only open her mouth in a silent wail of pain.

  The skin on her swollen belly began to stretch as something pushed against her from inside. The skin stretched further and she could clearly make out the fingers of a hand. Not a soft fleshy hand. The fingers were gnarled and seemed to be made out of twisted bone and there on the end of them, through the taut skin of her stomach, she could clearly see tiny claws.