Chapter 5

Late that night, the snug rustic Hartley home in Oak Tree had an almost festive appearance from the outside, little blazes of light shooting out through the windows to brighten the clearing surrounding the structure. Inside, however, Diane Hartley paced around like a caged tigress, opening and closing doors as she manufactured one excuse after another to search through the rooms, reacting to some undefined fear that had lodged in her unsettled mind after the sun had set over the forest.

Having made what was probably her twentieth tour of the house since darkness had closed in around her, she sat down at the kitchen table still heaped with Bill's clothing that needed mending. She picked up the needle and thread from the floor where they had fallen when she had thought she heard some peculiar sound outside a few minutes before, and went back to work repairing a torn pocket on one of her husband's wool shirts.

It was silly to be so nervous, she admonished herself, for, after all, she had spent many evenings alone in their house and not been afraid. But that was before she knew that the dense woods out there harbored other creatures more menacing than the gentle deer and shy rabbits that occasionally she had seen there. She strained her ears for any sound from the kennels but the German Shepherds were evidently peacefully asleep and no other sound interrupted the woodland quietness.

She knotted and cut the thread she had been using, then tossed the mended shirt beside her on another chair. After several soundless moments had passed, she rose and walked back toward the living room. She winced slightly as she entered the room and glanced at the red velour couch on which Jack Green had crawled between her wide-spread legs and fucked her into submission that morning. A dull ache still throbbed in her bruised loins and she tried vainly not to think about the cause of it. The memory was impossible to evade, though, and she found herself realizing all over again that she had actually betrayed her own husband behind his back. She had allowed another man, a low class stranger, to seduce her and had actually responded to the debasing experience like some cheap whore whose existence depended upon the presence of a hard male penis between her legs. The slight soreness in her ravaged genitals was a small enough price to pay for the adulterous way that she had behaved that morning.

"Don't think about it, just don't think about it, or you're going to start crying again," she said aloud, finding comfort in the sound of a human voice, even her own, in the house. She had spent most of the afternoon weeping as she lay stretched out on the bed, reliving her shame and guilt over and over again, but not even that great flood of tears could soften the horrible memory of what she had done, had allowed to happen to her young body in the throes of her own desire.

Later that afternoon, she had dozed off, exhausted by her racking grief and by the intensely emotional and physical ordeal itself. When she had wakened, she had felt relieved at first, certain that it had all been nothing but a bad dream. She a risen from the bed, in which she had been cowering like a criminal for hours, and felt the tender soreness of her harshly-used breasts. Even the soft nylon nightgown that she had put on sent sharp pangs of pain running through the firm white mounds as the material rubbed against the raw, tooth-marked tips. And yet, worse than the pain, there was the awful knowledge that she, a formerly faithful young bride, had truly enjoyed the caretaker's fiendish rape of her succulent young body. There would never be any way that she could justify the wantonness that had over-powered her, had caused her to lurch and writhe toward her own vulgar fulfillment under her attacker's pounding body. Before today, she would never have believed that she could have behaved like such a common slut and now she could not help but be terrified as she wondered what was to become of her and her marriage after this. It was an ominous and frightening thing for her to face by herself and as dusk had fallen around the house, Diane had felt her fear building to unmanageable proportions. Irrational as it seemed, she was terrified that there might be someone outside the house, someone waiting for the right opportunity to slip inside and... and... well, she didn't know exactly what might happen, but she was no longer so self-assured that she could handle any difficult situation that confronted her.