Closed ... the dimming of the light (part 28)

... the dimming of the light (part 28)
… the dimming of the light… (Part 28)

Peter Hunter


… my growing certainty that the Colonel had murdered my husband… a theory supported by his sudden increase sexual innuendos towards me… something a woman of my age had no difficulty in detecting… only added to my loathing towards him and the increased sleeplessness I'd been experiencing…
… since my darling's death…
… and the fact that I had momentarily considered eating some of my beloved's body added more to my hatred… although eating my husband could also be construed as an act of love and worship…
… aided by the fact that I could not get Sharon's Wicca incantation out of my mind… the one she had chanted aloud as the burning boat finally slid under the water of our lake;

I step into the light of the Goddess, into her arms and into her protection…
… her light is my shield and Her embrace is my armour…
She walks with me in my footsteps…
She is above and below me…
… to the East and the West of me…
Before and behind me…
… within and around me…

… round and round… always pounding within my head… my husband hadn't been in any way religious… I am not religious and if I had been - current events would have driven it out of me…
… but Sharon, also not religious in any formal sense… but she had an ancient empathy with the old religion - not with any conventional god… but in the spirits of the earth, the water and the sky - and it did not seem inappropriate that she quietly voiced what she did…
… in her soft Somerset accent…
I cried silently as I continued stroking the arrowhead on the stone… yes… yes it was tribal, primitive, but no law now existed to stop me, no punishment existed…
… only an ancient lust for revenge… and the sooner it was done the better…

* * *
'… You do that really well…' my comment was as much a greeting as an observation. 'How are you Sally…? I had not seen my neighbour since long before my husband's death. She lived about three hundred yards to the south… her cottage separated by a four and a half foot high hedge.
Carefully stroking another cut under the animal's skin, she turned towards me, 'Fresh meat… my son caught him in a snare over by Carter's Wood this morning…' the headless and gutted Roebuck was suspended by a rope around its hind legs, dripping blood… hanging from a limb from Sally's cider apple tree…
… she again slid the short knife downward with her right hand… and with her left she parted another strip of hair covered skin from the animal's carcass.
We talked for a while as she continued skinning the deer. I asked how she was managing…
… being a woman of about forty with a fifteen year old son?
'Difficult, very hard… as I am sure you are… particularly now you have lost your man…' we continued to swap our experiences, '… it must be much the same as it was in the early middle ages…' she observed, our only heat the wood fire in the living room. We sleep there, on the floor, huddled together to keep warm. It's the only way… Like two dogs… and that's not the only thing…
… because I don't think we will last much longer there seems no reason at all for any restraint…'
With what she implied slowly dawning on me; 'You mean you are being ****ed by your fifteen year old son?' I had a mental vision of the two of them locked together on the mat in front of a dying fire…
… who could blame them… a short, small comfort… the only pleasure left in their world…
'Why not she said…
… why not enjoy ourselves in what little time is left?'


* * *


Soon, a gentle dusk would descend, that soft mauve blanket which settled over he water… the splashy chorus of the water birds and the collective calls of home-flying rooks…
… the all too familiar sounds and sights of our small ρá†ch settling for the night…
Although the Colonel had spent much of his time in his house next door, instead of the more efficient practice of staying with Chris, Sharon and me - I had watched him carefully…
… having just seen him leave the building to walk down to the lake…
After stringing the hunting bow I tried to draw it to the full length of the shaft tipped with the broad-head I had earlier sharpened…
… I could not draw the entire twenty-nine inches… I would have to make do with less than the bow's full power…
as I approached the Colonel he looked up at me with a mixture of surprise and apprehension…
… by the time his eyes registered, in the dimming light… the bow in my hands… I had drawn the string back to my right ear…
I released it at the close range of no more than fifteen feet…
…and he didn't die instantly… it took twenty minutes of hoped-for agony from the extensive tissue damage from the broad-head…
… that had completely penetrated the front of his torso and protruded obscenely out of his back…
his blood pumping from the exit wound…
… the goose feathered fletching almost buried in his stomach…
excruciatingly painful I hoped…
… but eventually it was the loss of blood that did it…


(To be continued…)
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Credits to respectful owner (Y)