The Unexpected Occurrence of Thaddeus Hobble by Gareth Wiles Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Why are you doing this?’ she suddenly asked me, sounding quite forlorn.
    â€˜It is for your own good, Agatha. You cannot be allowed to die by your own hand.’
    â€˜There is nothing left for me here, my life is unbearable.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You have no choice.’
    â€˜Where is Miss Coombs?’ she demanded.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You are not well, Darren,’ she strained through her coughing. ‘You have come over all queer.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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