Jon Reskind - The abducted wife

Some moments later the light appeared again through a stand of trees at the far end of the valley. She felt a chill race over her body as she worked up the courage to approach whoever was camped out there in the darkness.

Jane Brighton stared across the starlit meadow towards the square of light shrouded partially by some trees. As she grew closer, she made out the form of a shack and two outbuildings that must have belonged to a backwoods farmer. She trembled at the sound of her own footsteps on the damp soil, but steeled herself as she approached the main building. The light shown from one oblong window and reflected on a muddy yard giving out from the front of the house. The building was obviously old and had been left uncared for many years: paint peeled from the clapboards and the back windows were boarded up or broken. The place had a sinister quality that made her uneasy, and Jane viewed the scene carefully before stepping up to the window. To the left of the house stood a stone structure that might have passed for a broken-down privy or a tool shack, and farther behind she could make out the form of a cistern standing like an obscure pedestal in the half-darkness.

As she moved across the yard she found a large barrel set against a tree; a slant of light cutting through the low-hanging branches exposed a pile of apples. She reached in and seized one, devouring it almost immediately. Then she grabbed another and munched into it, feeling her ravishing hunger partially satisfied.

She could feel the cooling darkness gather protectively around her body, and she lay back against a large tree trunk, relaxing for a moment. Dark trees, a pitch black canopy of leaves over her head; it reminded her somehow of the childhood horror stories of being lost she and her girlfriends had told each other at summer camp. Only this was real and she was here to confront the confounding reality of being alone and still hungry in the Appalachian Mountains. She sighed heavily to herself when she thought of the husband she had to return to and the anger he would vent on her when she reappeared at the lodge tomorrow morning. Assuming that she would.

She filled the side pockets to her dress with apples, then turned and faced into the forest. He would never believe her story of losing her way on that back trail they had traveled so many times, and if he finally came to understand her plight she knew he would condemn her for her foolishness in stalking away from him. After all, she had been lost for two full days. The frigid wife, Miss Jane Prude, got what was coming to her, she thought sardonically to herself.

She inched up slowly to the shack and peered in the window. Sitting only a few inches from the dusty pane was a red-haired man of enormous size holding a bottle of liquor in his hand, and seated at a table surrounding him were three other men dressed in blue-denims passing another bottle to each other. The man at one end of the table was rather nice looking; he was about medium height with bright alert eyes and long sandy hair – the complete opposite of the repulsive creature at the other side, who had a kind of idiot-like stare and whose long skinny arms kept on scratching a pink, heavily pock-marked face. A short fat nondescript looking man sat at the head of the table, his hands folded impassively in front of him. Jane stood transfixed and watched for several minutes as the men drank and talked. She was too frightened to follow what they were saying, and she debated indecisively whether she should knock or leave. The men were obviously getting drunk and she found herself pulling away from the grim picture she still watched through the window.

"Eeeeeeeh!" a high-pitched voice came through the darkness.

Jane stopped suddenly in her tracks as she heard what sounded like loud female laughter coming from the shack. It had startled her and she spun quickly around to face the same yellow-lit oblong light that she had turned away from a moment earlier. As before, the heads of the four men sitting round the table were illuminated as though they were on a stage. There was no visible change in the scene, and the large man laughed before retilting the bottle to his lips.

"Heeeeey," the sound rang out of the cabin again.

My God, this time she was sure of it – it had been a female voice! She peered back at the shack, then quickly retraced her steps across the yard.

She stood before the window again, pressing her cheek against the shingling of the house and averting her face away from the light. A sudden guffaw broke the silence and she leaned cautiously forward. Looking in the window once more she saw the four men bent over in laughter, their faces beet red and their hands gripping their sides. In the center of the room stood the woman she had heard earlier. She was certainly attractive, Jane thought, but there was also something cheap and almost lewd about her appearance. She stood a bit taller than Jane with a long smoothly curving figure, barely covered by a kind of tightly fitting black dress that she had heard prostitutes often wear. Her sensuous lips were covered with bright lipstick that accentuated high-pitched cheekbones and black sparkling eyes.

The young woman swayed her rounded tightly clad buttocks salaciously in front of the four men, and the men responded in raucous laughter, clapping their hands appreciatively in their drunkenness. Then the large man leered at the woman when she fluttered a hand lewdly towards the man's groin. Jane averted her gaze, suddenly aware of what was going on and the mistake she had made in returning to the cabin.

"Hey Peggy, Goddamn, you stop that," the short fat man said. "I gotta put up with enough of that back in town."

Jane's gaze shot abruptly to the short fat man and she watched him rise suddenly from the table and move around the group to a chair in the corner of the room. He was very drunk and when he jerked up from the table, his chair tilted back on two legs and practically tipped over. He swayed across the room and plopped down the chair with a disgusted look on his face. "Goddamn stupid whore," he mumbled incoherently. "She wants to give it away for nothing."

To Jane's complete amazement, the girl laughed. She turned towards the table, and slowly grinding her hips, began undoing the top buttons to the front of her dress. She moved with a smooth easy movement and Jane sensed instinctively she was a professional dancer. With a brazen sassiness, she turned her back to the fellow in the chair and approached the three men still at the table, gradually undoing the front of her dress until a wide creamy strip of flesh was apparent to her waistline. Lewd grins spread over the faces of the men at the table and, to Jane's further shock, the girl smiled confidently back almost as though she were pleased by the obscene glances the men were casting at her.

"Go on, Peggy. Just show them tits," the large red-haired man spoke for the first time. He had a strong assurance in his voice and Jane realized he must be the leader of the uncouth group of friends. Peggy obliged by slowly pulling the opened dress behind her shoulders until the large creamy orbs of her breasts popped suddenly out and were clearly exposed to the light through the sheer transparency of her flesh-covered bra.

"Now that's what I call a real piece of meat," the enormous man laughed. "Man, I'd like to suck them titties, whaddya think, Sam, ol' man?"

"Josh, you ain't goin' to suck nothin'," Sam answered uselessly from the corner. "Peggy's my woman."

"I think they'd be downright tasty," Josh ignored him, running his finger slowly over a thick bushy mustache.

Jane knew she was foolish to remain pinned to the window where she might be discovered at any moment, but her curiosity had gotten the better of her. In all her life, she had never seen a performance like the one going on in front of her, with the girl obscenely swinging her hips and slowly exposing the white firm mounds of her breasts to the friends of her own boyfriend, and she watched half in shock and partly out of aroused interest in the forbidden and unknown as the young woman resumed her lewdly provocative performance.