High Country Horror

Helsa cleared her throat. “What did?”

“Can’t you guess, my dear? What did we like to do more than anything else? What couldn’t I get enough of?”

“God, no.”

“God, yes,” James Chatterly said. “It started with Felicity. She was a little tart, that one. We were fooling around behind your back. When you went shopping she’d come over. It went on for over a year, until one day she came to me and said it had to stop.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Helsa said.

Her husband ignored her. “I didn’t want it to. I liked making love to her. I liked it so much I was in a funk for weeks until it occurred to me how I could go on having her any hour of the day or night for as long as I cared to.”

“No, no, no,” Helsa said.

James turned to Fargo. “I used to hunt, you see. One day I came across the mesa and decided to explore. That’s when I found the cave. I remembered it when I had my brainstorm. It was perfect.”

Helsa bowed her head and tears flowed. She cried quietly, with only an occasional sniffle, as her husband went on.

“I couldn’t just disappear. Folks would have been suspicious. So I cut my arm and left blood on my saddle to give the idea I had been killed. I had another horse no one knew about, one I’d bought from a man passing through Haven, and I went off to the cave and spent the next several months satisfying myself with Felicity.” He paused. “Then a peculiar thing happened.”

“You lost interest in her,” Fargo guessed.

“How did you know?” James Chatterly nodded. “Maybe it was just that it was me and her and no one else for days and weeks on end. I wanted someone new. So I got rid of her and snuck close to town and helped myself to a new woman.”

Helsa choked down a sob. “How could you?” she forlornly asked.

“Now, now,” James said.

“How could you?” Helsa practically screamed. “All those years we were together, I wasn’t good enough for you? You secretly hankered after other women?”

“After younger ones, yes. After women who were like you were when we first met.”

“Oh, James.”

“Don’t.”

“What you did was wrong.”

“I saw it as setting myself free to do as I’d always longed to do. I could make love any hour of the day or night in any way I wanted and there was nothing they could do.” James chuckled. “For me it was heaven and then some.”

“Those poor girls,” Helsa said.

“Yes. Those girls. With their young, ripe bodies. With their lips and their breasts. I couldn’t get enough. I’d run my hands over their silky skin for hours at a time. I did more than make love to those girls. I worshipped them.”

“And chopped them up when you were tired of them,” Fargo mentioned.

“What?” Helsa said.

James Chatterly shrugged. “I had to dispose of the bodies somehow and the ground was too hard to dig graves. So I took my ax and gave them forty whacks and threw them in that pit I found.”

“You didn’t,” Helsa declared.

“It was no different from breaking the neck of a chicken or putting down a dying dog.”

Helsa’s moist eyes mirrored her horror. “To think I once loved you. To think I once thought you were the best man who ever lived.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

Grasping a knitting needle, Helsa started to rise out of the rocking chair but sat back down.

Fargo asked James Chatterly, “What are you doing here?”

“That’s your doing.”

“Mine?”

“I took a shot at you in the woods and tried to drop you at the pit but you got away. You tracked me down. You brought the posse to the cave and I was forced to run. Now I must go somewhere else and start all over again. But first I wanted to see my wife again.” James smiled at Helsa. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

“You vile, despicable brute.”

“No name-calling, if you please. It’s most unbecoming.”

“You’re insane. Stark raving insane.”

James Chatterly sighed. “I didn’t expect you would understand. You have always lived your life by what others do and not by what you want to do.”

“Listen to yourself,” Helsa said. “Standing there so calmly and talking as if we were discussing the weather when we are talking about rape and murder.”

“Don’t forget the beating and the whipping,” James said with a smirk. “I am fond of that part.”

“God help you.”

“That’s another thing I’ve learned,” James said. “All those years I lived in fear of something that isn’t.” He laughed and looked at each of them and squared his shoulders. “I reckon that’s about all there is worth saying. Time to finish this and be on my way.”

“Surely you’re not going to harm me?” Helsa said.

“Surely I am.”

“But why? What did I ever do but love you and care for you and feed you and nurse you when you were sick?”

“That you did,” James acknowledged. “You were as good a wife as a man ever had. You just weren’t ever enough of the other.”

“What other? The sex thing? Did I ever refuse you? Did I ever once kick you out of my bed?”

Fargo deliberately stayed quiet in the hope they would forget he was there. It seemed to be working. James was focused on Helsa and only on Helsa. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, and tensed.

“No, you did not,” James was telling her. “You were more willing than most wives. I’ll give you that. And at one time I did love you.”

“And I loved you,” Helsa said softly.

“But that’s the past and this is now. You know what I must do, don’t you, now that I have confided in you?”

Fargo was ready to spring. He would dive into the hall past the doorway.

Chatterly would shoot but the wall would shield him from the slugs. Or so he hoped. Then a hard object was jammed low against his back and a voice whispered behind his head.

“Not one twitch or I blow you to hell.”

Neither James nor Helsa had noticed. They were looking at each other. James was smiling. Helsa appeared shocked.

“You wouldn’t,” she said. “Not to me. Not to your own wife.”

“Female is female,” James replied. “You’re no different from any other. I will at least make it quick, out of respect for what we once had.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it, my dear. Life is nothing if not unpredictable. Look at me. Would you ever have imagined I would be as I am?”

The man behind Fargo stepped past Fargo into the parlor with his rifle trained on James Chatterly. “That’s enough gab out of you two. Drop that Spencer, mister, or die where you stand.”

“Harvey Stansfield!” Helsa blurted.

James possessed superb self-control. He stood stock-still and regarded the intruder with puzzlement. “Stansfield? I remember that name.”

“Who the hell are you?” Harve responded. “And drop that damn rifle now or I’ll shoot.”