by Percy Quirk
“I dabble,” he admitted, modestly.
“Will we hear some of your music, Mr. Haylock!?” I exclaimed. “I would love to hear it. If you are as good as my husband tells me you are, it must be wonderful.”
William and Mr. Haylock looked at each other cryptically and smiled between themselves.
“I’m sure you’ll hear some of Sergeant Haylock’s music very soon,” William said to me, taking my arm. “It may not be to your taste, perhaps, but we will see.”
“Oh, don’t be so rude, William,” I scolded him, but to my surprise they both laughed.
“Let’s have a go at this game,” William said, after we bid farewell to the Sergeant. He pointed to a stall where you had to throw rubber balls into the mouth of a painted clown, for which you could win a lamb joint, a bouquet of lavender, or a teddy bear.
Mr. Heffer was managing the stall and, on seeing me with my husband, called loudly to me.
“Mrs. Evans!” he called. “You should definitely have a go! Show us how it’s done!”
Then he turned to the small crowd and ushered for them to let me through.
“Three balls for you,” he said, handing me a small seaside bucket with the balls inside.
“Thank you, Reverend Heffer,” I said.
“Reverend Jones,” he corrected me, looking sheepish and reddening like his wife. “My name is Jones.”
I was puzzled. He was certainly Mrs. Heffer’s husband, as I had seen them together on several occasions, so it seemed odd that they should not have the same surname. I did not know what to make of it, but at that moment I had more important things to worry about. I looked back over my shoulder at William, who gave me a little nod to continue.
I won a bouquet of lavender, which William took from me as I was heading back to work on the cake stall. I had some misgivings as I walked back, puzzled by the looks exchanged between William and Sergenat Haylock. I was half sure that a similar look had passed between William and Reverend Heffer, or Jones, or whatever his name was. In spite of these things, however, my mind was primarily occupied by Mr. Creasey and the rough, exquisite violation that I could expect later that day when I met him at the barn.
Lady Creasey looked up as I arrived, and smiled.
“Good to see you, Mrs. Evans,” she said. “At last I can drop some of my load onto your willing shoulders.”
Of course you can, I thought, having one particular load in mind.
Chapter Seven
♦♦♦♦
The Fat Lady Sings
We are drawing close to the moment when the full extent of what had been happening at Creasey House became known to me, but first there was the penultimate indignity that I was forced to endure. I had been a betrayer and I was betrayed. Looking back it seems only natural and right that this is what would happen, and in many ways is what should have happened. In my defence, should you feel the need to judge, I would only say that life is a complex thing and that love, or lust, is life at its most intense.
I went to the back of the barn as Mr. Creasey had instructed, every nerve ending in my body anticipating his firm, cruel touch. I arrived at three o’clock as I had been told to do and waited as patiently as I was able, worrying my rosary in a way that I am sure many of you will think is blasphemous. I was not praying with them and, if I was, my prayers were for something entirely at odds with their purpose. There was nothing spiritual in me at that moment; I was all animal.
I waited a further five, then ten, minutes. I could not bring myself to leave and nor could I bring myself to rebuke Mr. Creasey, even in my thoughts. I felt that he would see inside my mind and it would displease him. I waited five more minutes and, just I was about to slouch dejectedly off to my husband, like the rough beast I was, I heard the sound of talking from inside the barn. I would have paid no mind to it but the timbre of the male voice, deep and gravelly, could only have been Mr. Creasey, and he was talking with a woman.
I pressed my eye to a gap in the wooden walls of the barn and saw straight away that it was Mrs. Heffer.
“I must say, Mrs. Heffer, that you have excelled yourself over the last few years,” Mr. Creasey was saying.
Mrs. Heffer, to my dismay, curtseyed and said:
“Thank you, my lord and master.”
“Do you remember when you came here at first?” he continued. “A skinny whip of a lass from Brighton, ready to turn away from her less than savoury past and embrace a new life with a man of the cloth. Such fine intentions, wouldn’t you say, Mrs. Heffer?”
“Yes, my lord and master.”
“But we saved you from that, didn’t we Mrs. Heffer? We fed you up and gave you a new name and now look at you, my own little bovine beauty. Are you grateful, Mrs. Heffer?”
“Yes, my lord and master.”
“I know you are, Mrs. Heffer, and so is Mr. Jones no doubt. And that is why I have chosen this special day to give you a reward. What do you say to that, Mrs. Heffer?”
“Thank you, my lord and master.”
She dropped heavily to her knees in front of him and pressed her lips gently against the patent leather of his right shoe, and then repeated the same gesture with his left shoe. Inside her summer dress her corpulent body heaved with sexual energy. You could see the outward dents of her large nipples pressing against the cotton, and she bobbed restlessly in her kneeling position. I was horrified but found myself unable to speak or to leave, in fact powerless to do anything except watch what would unfold.
“You may stand and lift up your dress,” Mr. Creasey said to her. She did so and I could see that she wore no under garments as well as no brassiere. She wore only stockings beneath her dress. She held the hem patiently above her waist, her mouth slightly open, panting, a sheen of sweat glistening upon her bright red cheeks. Her thick thighs bulged at the tops of her stockings like a cake with too much icing.
“Turn around and bend over,” Mr. Creasey said, and of course she did so. Her enormous breasts now hung down in front of her and I could see from my position that her pubic hair had been completely shaven. Mr. Creasey stepped into view, his flies open and his enormous cock straining forward towards the bending woman’s wet, swollen lips. He pushed himself inside of her in one rough thrust and Mrs. Heffer, with a groan of primal pleasure, was sent forward onto her knees again, her dress up her back and her rump offered up like two wide, white moons of flesh. Mr. Creasey came down with her, thrusting and growling, grabbing her hair with one hand and the other circling around her body to play with her swinging breasts.
I could endure it no longer. Stronger than the arousal that I could not help but feel as I watched them copulate so roughly, both of them taking such immense pleasure in the act, was the sense of abandonment, of betrayal, of my own stupidity. My brain would not let me comprehend it. As I started to turn away, eyes blindly searching in front of me for some salvation, for some way of believing that Mr. Creasey felt about me as I did about him, I heard Mr. Creasey demanding in his sex-choked voice:
“Say thank you in your real voice, Daisy, there’s a good girl!”
I broke into a run, tripping and falling but always moving forwards, away from the sounds of Mr. Creasey’s laughter, the slap of his loins against Mrs. Heffer’s creamy, corpulent ass.
“Moooo,” Mrs. Heffer sang, breaking into a giggle. “Mooooohooohooo.”
I turned the corner of the barn and there was a skull staring at me — no it was Mrs. Christie, laughing unkindly — and then I fell forward toward the ground. The fall was long and slow, the blades of grass rising beside and above me like slender green towers, darkness only at their base, and into which I gladly swam.
Chapter Eight
♦♦♦♦
The Aria
When I woke, the very first thing that I was aware of was a broken heart, the second was Lady Creasey’s face smiling down at me, and the last was the unusual
setting in which I found myself. We were in the gallery of the church, above the congregation pews, directly facing the broad pipes of the church organ which were, thankfully, quiet. The noise in the upper gallery was unbearable when the organ was in full tilt, the musical notes of such extreme volume that they became almost indistinguishable and seemingly ran together. At such volumes it was impossible to hear the music, one had only the opportunity to feel it.
“How are you feeling, Mrs. Evans?” Lady Creasey asked me. “Mrs. Christie brought you to me. It seems like it may be time for some explanations, before things start getting exciting.”
I was lying on a wooden bench, broader than the pews below, with my head resting on a pillow. I was exhausted and confused. I kept picturing different acts that I had performed, or had been performed on me, over the last months. Interspersed with these, as if there was a film projecting into my head, was the sight of Mr. Creasey entering Mrs. Heffer — or I suppose I should say Mrs. Jones — at the barn, her shameless delight which so closely resembled my own, and the disturbing subtext of sustained cruelty that lay in the words exchanged between the two of them. I felt like something had shattered inside me, that some part of me, at full stretch for a sustained period, had now snapped. Perhaps this was not a broken heart, and only the aftermath of disillusionment; a breakdown of sorts, surely.
Lady Creasey fed me sugary tea. We weren’t alone in the gallery. In the background, busy with something out of sight, was the soldier I had seen with William at the Vicarage, then at the fete; the Soldier who wrote the music. Adam Haylock. He did not seem interested in us, however, and continued about his work.
“I owe you an explanation,” Lady Creasey said eventually, her wide green eyes projecting some kind of strange radiance; the afterglow of some great emotion perhaps, or the look of a child who unboxes her present on Christmas day to find that it is a full of faeries. It was with this look of sublime exultation on her face that she told me the full story of what was happening at Creasey House.
“Bertrand was not my first husband,” she began. “I knew him from childhood but it was his best friend, Adam Haylock, that I fell in love with and married. To tell the truth, I had never much cared for Bertrand Creasey whose manner, as I am sure you are by now aware, was not always befitting a man of his social standing. However, this was not particularly relevant then, as I was married and Bertrand was very much Adam’s friend, or a least I thought. Then came the war and the two of them went away to fight. Adam, being two years into his training as a Vicar, became a battalion Chaplain for the Royal Engineers.
“Adam did not return and it was Bertrand who arrived at my door one cool November day to inform me that Adam had died during intense fighting south of Arnheim. I did not know where Arnheim was, whether the battle had been won, or what type of death Adam had endured, only that he was gone and that I would have to live the rest of my life without him. I was destroyed and collapsed. Bertrand carried me through to the drawing room, much as you were carried here, and lay me down on the sofa to recover. It was while I was lying there that he told me Adam’s dying wish.
“He said that Adam had asked him to take care of me, to make sure that I was safe. He told me that Adam, in his last words, had told Bertrand that he was the only man whom he could bear to be with me. He had urged Bertrand to return and fill his place.”
Lady Creasey paused to present me with an awful sneer. For the first time since we had met her composure was breached and I saw in her face a look of extreme bitterness and hatred. She collected herself quickly, seeing my shock, and patted my hand.
“At first he did not push the matter and merely cared for me,” she continued. “I forgot about my dislike for him and was filled with gratitude. This, combined with my love for my husband and what I was assured was his dying wish, I consented to marry Bertrand Creasey when he proposed to me in the Autumn of the following year. I did not want another man except Adam, and the war seemed to have changed Bertrand into a gentleman whom I could at least care for, and be a wife to, even if I did not love him. The very first night of our marriage changed all of that irreversibly.
“I was taken in my wedding gown to the master bedroom and, where I had expected tenderness and perhaps the gentle love-making of two familiar friends, I was greeted by something very different. I was tied to the bed, face down in the pillows, and…. Creasey….”
She turned her head away from me, looking towards the soldier, still fixing something near to the organ pipes. He seemed not to have heard and instead started whistling to himself, some jolly army tune. At the same time I could hear the main door to the church open and close, and the voices of two or more men. It was impossible to distinguish who they were or what they were saying because of the quiet tones and the echo of the church. I started to sit up but Lady Creasey kept her hand on my shoulder and eased me gently back down.
“I’m nearly finished, dear,” she assured me, so I stayed where I was and listened.
“After that night Mr. Creasey found my door always locked and a revolver always in my handbag. We continued to live in the same house, and I had no wish to inform the local people of my situation. The shame for me personally, as well as the legacy of my dead husband’s name, would not allow it. I lived in married celibacy and a kind of unhappy dread. It became apparent to me that Creasey, in spite of his horrific failings, was in love with me. It was just that his sexuality, his mind, were perverse and corrupt. He equated sex with cruelty so I, seeing the possibilities inherent within his mental flaw, endeavoured to treat him as cruelly as I knew how. I had protected my money and restricted him to an allowance. I humiliated him in front of the servants, and kept him out of my bedroom. Gradually his love, as I suspected it might, turned to a kind of worship.
“However, his appetites did not go unsatisfied. Unknown to me at the time he began to exert an oppressive influence over a Vicar’s wife from one of the parishes we support. By the time I learned of his actions it was quite advanced and the woman, when I confronted her, bizarrely did not wish the relationship to end. I tried to understand the woman but eventually felt only contempt for her. You have met Mrs. Christie, no doubt? Well, it was that stupid woman who began everything.
“But still, as a pragmatist I realised that, as long as Creasey could find an outlet for his deviant lusts, I would be much safer in the manor house. If I denied him, it would only be a matter of time before his desires would be uncontrollable. In short, we came to an arrangement regarding the wives of the local Vicars.”
I hated her again. I hated the suggestion that Mr. Creasey was really in love with her, and that he was only with me by her consent. Even worse, she seemed to be suggesting that I was nothing more than a way to keep his basest instincts in check, something less than an animal offered to appease his animal needs. This was only what Mr. Creasey himself had suggested, of course, but to hear it from her was unbearable. Still, I felt there was more and I needed her to finish. I could hear slow, shuffling footsteps on the stairs to the upper gallery, as if a group of men were carrying something heavy.
“I am sorry that you have been through this dear,” she said to me. “But it does not have to continue for much longer. The story has a happy ending, you see.”
She was smiling again, with that same look of delight that I had noticed earlier.
“Adam was not dead, you see,” she announced triumphantly. “He was a prisoner of war and he’s come back to me. Which means that Bertrand Creasey was never my husband, and that he lied to me about Adam’s death and his final wish. So you can sit up Mrs. Evans, if you want. The men are bringing Creasey up now. It is time to set the record straight!”
“No!” I shouted, and sat bolt upright.
At the top of the stairs I could see my husband, Mr. Jones, and the other Vicars all carrying a large hessian sack on their shoulders. There were feet sticking out of the open end of the sack, and the man inside was struggling in vain
to free himself.
At the same time Sergeant Haylock finished what he was doing and pulled down an enormous dust sheet. Behind it, in the same copper and gold finish of the organ pipes, were two large-as-life statues of figures that I immediately recognised from my days in Sunday school: the golden calf, and the whore of Babylon. Each had been crafted to sit atop the pipes of the organ so that the sound would pass through them, which was unusual but not unsettling. What terrified me was that both appeared to be hollow, with holes where the eyes and mouth of each would be, as if they had been created deliberately to hold, separately, two people.
The men dropped the sack onto the floor, clearly relieved to be free of the weight, and there was an exclamation of pain and anger from inside.
I looked back at the two statues, wondering as to their purpose. Presumably the first would be Mr. Creasey, but who was to be contained within the second?
It was at that moment, lost in those thoughts, that I heard Adam Haylock speak for the first time.
“Alright Creasey?” he called in a jocular tone of voice. “Bloody good to see you, old chap.”
Chapter Nine
♦♦♦♦
The Finale
Sergeant Haylock, a mischievous look in his good eye, flipped a clasp on the side of the calf statue and it swung open. You could see that inside there was all kind of machinery and sophistication, and all of it, so it seemed, powered by the air that would be forced through the organ pipes. There were needles and blades and cogs with flat, blunt sides. Such an array of unpleasant looking devices were there that it was impossible to distinguish what each one did. To my increasing dismay and revulsion, it was also clear that there was the space for a man inside the calf, his face pushed into the head and the rest of his body into the broad corpus of the statue.
