She adjusted the covers and for a moment I caught a shadowy glimpse of her mountainous buttocks upside down as it were above my head, then her hands came back between her spread legs and caught hold of my head. And she began to pull. She began to drag me through the narrow gap between her thighs. I thought she was going to pull my head off.
This may seem funny to read, but it was not at all funny at the time. I was terrified, and suddenly in some pain. My shoulders snagged against the backs of her legs, I was suffocating. I pushed my body up and along following my neck and head, using a scrabbling sort of motion with my feet, and then had the sense to twist on to my side so my shoulders could follow my head. I squeezed one hand through that narrow but soft quivering gap, beneath her private parts, and for a moment I could feel the hair, moist, wet even, and breathing honeyed, soured odours, as it rubbed along my cheek and neck.
All this time she was moaning and groaning, puffing and panting. Of course I can see now what she was doing, but I had no idea at the time, no idea at all that she was simulating child-birth.
With my head and shoulders through she straightened somewhat and the covers fell even more away. She got her hands in my armpits, and pushing her knees apart, with one last enormous sigh, pulled me through as far as my waist, leaving only my pelvis and legs still in the gap beneath her. She now had me sitting, with her arms round my back in a huge bear-hug, her bottom spread on either side of my thighs and my face buried in her stomach beneath her breasts so I still had to struggle for breath through all that flesh, and for a moment we stayed like that, and she rocked us both a little from side to side. Her groans and moans had now become cooing sighs which I could hear rumble purringly deep in her chest. By now I was terrified. I cannot say how terrified I was.
With her feet on the floor at the end of the bed she now lifted herself and with one more heave had me free enough to haul my legs out and on to her lap. Gathering her great wrinkled, floppy, vein-laced breast in one hand she thrust a plate-like nipple into my face. Some primaeval if forgotten urge made me suck. There was, of course, no milk, but there was comfort in the floppy saltiness of it which presently hardened a little between my teeth. She pressed my still snorting nose into it with one ham of a hand while the other ran over my head, down my neck and fondled, and squeezed my ribs until I felt they would crack.
And for a moment, perhaps even for a minute or two or more, my fear fell away and I felt warm, happy, secure..
Then, the sow that eats its farrow, she began to strangle me.
She retrieved my belt and with one hand threaded a noose through the buckle. She slipped it over my head, gave the end a twist or two to get a good grip on it, while with the other arm she wrapped me in a bear-hug which pinned my arms to my sides. Then she tightened the noose, slowly.
The first effect was to impede the flow of blood to and from my head and the second was to make me terribly aware of my prick. Until then the experience had not been for me an overtly sexual one. Now it very definitely was. The tumescence felt like a great throbbing hard… I don’t know, cucumber or something. And then, as the darkness filled my head, and my lungs at last began to feel they’d burst, something gave and I let myself go in an orgasm the like of which I had never experienced until then. Or since. And with it everything fell apart. Her arms dropped from the killing embrace and I felt, beneath all the fat, how her muscles suddenly tautened into a terrible convulsion. They relaxed as swiftly as they had tensed and a great gout of warm liquid splashed over my head and shoulders before she toppled backwards, taking me with her.
Somehow I knew — from the smell, the iron taste of it, the viscosity, that she was drenching me in blood, her own blood, and that if only I could loosen the belt I might live.
I tried to struggle but she did too, and I could see now the hilt of what had been my SS dagger, which now belonged to James, protruding from her neck. But though the blood was pulsing up around it she still had strength and will and was ready to fight on, but at that moment a dark shadow seemed to flit across the room and there was James himself. He plucked the knife from her neck before she could and rammed it again and again into her neck and breasts until the flow of blood ceased to throb, became a sluggish stream, and stopped.
At last I loosened the belt. Or James did. I can’t remember which. I sat up and looked down and across her. She was on her back, half propped up on all those heavy covers and eiderdowns, her arms still twitching convulsively in front of her tortured, fear-filled face, the fingers groping towards the dagger which was again stuck in the crimson tide that flowed across her chest and into the wide valley between her breasts, which were now flopped outwards. For a moment she stared at the two of us, first one then the other, her small blue eyes baleful, filled with hate. Then she pulled in one last huge breath, let it out and blood bubbled with it from her mouth. She gave a long shudder which ended on a croaking sigh, her legs flopped apart and she was gone, as dead as the pigs whose throats she cut each autumn, whose fat she rendered down and whose joints she carved, baked, cured and pickled.
Later the post mortem report said that one only of the many wounds had killed her. The upward thrust of the dagger, whether thrown from close to or administered with a stab, had neatly passed between the central column of oesophagus and wind pipe and the sinew to the side, finding and severing the carotid artery, draining the blood from her brain.
James loosened the belt and I managed at last to get to my feet. He handed me a large threadbare towel and I began to wipe myself. The big ginger tom appeared from under the bed and began to rub up against Fat Mary’s shin. The door, which James had only managed to pull to behind him, flew open and a flurry of icy snow whirled round the room, hissed on the range. Tom disappeared under the bed again.
‘We’d better get back to school,’ said James. He pulled the knife out of Fat Mary’s throat, wiped it on a sheet. I suppose he’s still got it. If he’s still around. It all happened fifty years ago, half a century.
‘You should wash up as well as you can so no blood gets on your clothes,’ he went on. ‘There’s no reason for anyone to know we were here.’
He was right. It was two days before she was found — the first to call was a gamekeeper drawn by the lowing of cows that had not been milked and the bellows of a sow that had not been fed and whose litter was, by then, too big to eat.
Julian Rathbone published his first book in 1967 and says he has lost count of those published in the intervening two decades, although it is of the order of twenty-five novels, mostly thrillers with a broadly political/green or social slant. There are also some literary/historical works (two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize), a handful of short stories, scripts for German television movies and some poetry; but until now, no horror fiction. His most recent novels, Intimacy and Blame Hitler, are both published by Gollancz. ‘“Fat Mary”,’ Rathbone says, ‘started life as the black episode in an erotic picaresque novel that really got no further than the planning stage before being ditched. Reworking the basic idea (a sort of Hansel and Gretel) I realized I was tapping some half-remembered fantasy from boarding school days, back in the 1950s. Fantasy, but with a germ of fact in there somewhere too? At all events, I have welcomed the chance horror brings of breaking out of a too narrowly naturalistic approach to fiction writing. Having also recently concluded forty years of over-indulgence in booze, I was relieved to find whilst writing “Fat Mary” that the Muse does not necessarily need priming with alcohol before delivering the goods.’