Since we are coming up to Hallowe'en, here's a bit from my short story Scratch, set in Colonial America some years after the Salem Witch Trials. Maarten Gansevoort and his wife Mercy have received a visit from The Devil himself, under the name Nicholas Scratch:
‘Now tell him, Mercy,’ said the stranger, ‘why you signed yourself to me.’ He withdrew his foot from her mouth, and the momentary gape of her lips was obscene, before she licked them. ‘Tell him.’
‘When I was young,’ she whispered, eyes once more downcast as if focused far away, ‘there was nothing but toil and fear. No frivolity, no indulgence, no joy. Even their God was dark and bitter, and I hungered for colour and delight. And some came to me and whispered that there was a master who would promise those things. So I went with them. I knew what I was doing. They debauched me and I was their willing whore. It was the first time in my life I was not a dull drab thing, not just a servant, not just a girl-child. And then he came to me.’
Maarten tugged at his plain linen collar, releasing some of the heat.
‘You see?’ the stranger asked his host pleasantly. ‘Such memories she has. And one of the few things I have in common with your kind, good people, is – let us say – nostalgia. A capacity to regret what has been lost. I miss my sweet Mercy. So with your permission, Goodman Gansevoort…’ He stood, setting his flagon aside.
‘What?’ said Maarten thickly, as the stranger held out his hand to Mercy, who placed her fingers in his.
‘I intend to make a cuckold of you, friend.’
He opened his mouth but no words came out.
‘We will retire to the bedchamber to spare your feelings, Goodman. Of course you will hear her scream her pleasure: I can hardly prevent that. She was always most vocal, I remember.’
Maarten gripped the table edge as if he would overturn it.
‘Maarten,’ said Mercy swiftly: ‘Be at peace. Please, my husband.’ For a moment her eyes focused warningly on him, pinning him to his seat, but then he seemed to slip her mind. Her gaze turned back to their guest and she led him away to the inner room, and the door closed.
Maarten Gansevoort was in agony. He felt as if his stomach was full of knots. The room with its blazing fire was suddenly too warm, so he stood and flung off his woollen jacket and paced about the floor. He went to find his flintlock musket, and even got so far as to reach for the lead, but his hands fumbled uselessly with the box and he gave up. He scratched at his sweating chest and rubbed angrily at his crotch, sickened to find a most disloyal tumescence which his immediately put down to anger. He could not believe he was permitting another man – or anything in man’s form – take his wife from under his nose like that, no matter that man’s status or puissance. He could not believe that she seemed so willing, when their marriage had been so warmly content. He could not bring himself to face the confession she’d made, though it rolled around the margins of his mind painfully. He put his head in his hands and groaned, tried to pray but recoiled from the words. How could he pray when he had let such a Guest into his house?
Without intending it, he suddenly found that he was holding his breath, listening. Nicholas Scratch had been right about Mercy’s tendency to cry out in the throes of rutting; often he’d had to stifle her noises with his hand or the corner of the quilt, lest she disturb the whole household. When she fornicated she did it without restraint: it was one of the things that made his blood burn for her.
Reaching a decision, Maarten Gansevoort slipped off his blunt-toed shoes and crept on stockinged feet toward the inner door. He knew every board in the house he’d built, and not one of them creaked under his weight. He reached the bedchamber door and crouched down. The handle was only a smooth dowel that ran through from one side of the sliding latch to the other, and hadn’t been pegged in place. With much hesitation and care, he pulled the stick clean out of the door, leaving a round hole to which he applied his eye.
He could see quite clearly. The chamber with its shuttered windows, lit by candlelight. The big bed that he had made himself for his first marriage, spread with the cream quilt that Mercy had brought as part of her trousseau. Mercy standing at the side of the bed, facing the door, the stranger’s bare arms about her from behind. He had evidently removed his clothes, though Maarten could see little of him. Mercy’s own clothes were in disarray, her bodice unlaced, her shift pulled down from her shoulders, her big freckled breasts bare and cupped in the stranger’s groping hands, her plump brown nipples being plucked and flicked and pinched. Her neck was twisted at an angle and there was a look on her face of such painful need that Maarten Gansevoort caught his breath. Her mouth formed a quivering ‘O’ as if she were moulding it about some virile member. She writhed her sumptuous hips, grinding her ass-cheeks into the stranger’s crotch, and covered his hands with her own as he mauled at her.
Nicholas Scratch licked at her white throat, chuckling, then turned her in his hands and pushed her to her knees. Suddenly his body was visible; the unblemished body of a muscular young man, perfect in every way. His stiff stood up rampantly erect from a nest of black curls, dark with blood against the paler skin of his thighs and belly. He took himself in hand and laid the other hand on Mercy’s head as if in blasphemous blessing. But all he was doing was pressing her lower. She put her face to the fat pouch of his scrotum and kissed it fervently.
Maarten Gansevoort loosed the drawstring of his breeches and slipped his hand inside his clothes, ashamed beyond words, yet aroused so much he could no longer wait. His own member was hot and sticky and as hard as smoked meat. He stroked himself, feeling his balls clench, feeling the length in his hand grow thicker and longer with every beat of his heart.
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