Trembling With Fear 09/12/21

 

The Mystery of the Apples by Harris Coverley

Father died when I was ten, so for another decade it was just me and mother. On the outside, she seemed little upset about his death, but I believe she forced her despair deep into herself, which must have been why, as the years passed, she became more and more unbearable to live with.

Living without a maid or other servant in a large house could be taxing on a boy set up to do the chores. No floor was ever clean enough, no corner devoid enough of dust. Towards the end of my adolescence she began to grow even wilder in her demands and disinclinations. I peeled an orange the “wrong way”…I walked across the landing “too loudly” in the middle of the day…the scribble of my pen on paper in my bedroom, so well away from hers, disturbed her greatly too. Her pronouncements on the issues of the day became ever more deranged and perplexing as well. Even after I reached the age of majority I was not allowed to have my own radio in my own room, and I had to sit in the living room with her rambling over the broadcast. All of her pain had twisted outwards, into me and my will, and she did not care. She was a living poltergeist, with a body and a mouth and many hungers.

A few days after I had turned twenty, I finally lost my self-possession during an incident involving the larder, and I struck her down in the kitchen. As she fought back she scratched the right of my face beneath the jawline, drawing blood. After I was finished, I wiped my face clean, and dragged her out to the garden shed, where I parted her into manageable segments. I then dug a hole in the centre of the back garden and deposited her remains into it, before taking three apples from the fruit bowl and placing them upon the flesh, covering it all with soil.

The house is isolated in the middle of the shire; our nearest neighbour is barely visible. I wrote to the few relatives mother still kept in contact with and told them that she had gone abroad for convalescence from a serious case of influenza, intending to travel through the Mediterranean, and then onto the Caribbean and Peru. Three months later I wrote to them to say that mother had died while in Haiti, and that local ordinance had demanded that she was buried immediately—there would be no funeral in England. This was all accepted mournfully but without hassle.

I was at last free! The family portfolio of estates, inherited from my great-grandparents, granted me a good income to upkeep the maintenance of the secluded house, and I could follow my passion—the composition of poetry—without impediment from any soul.

Twelve years passed. I produced book after book at my own leisure, gaining quite a reputation as a practitioner of formal verse. I received people few and far between, although I did frequently travel for inspiration. In the meantime, one apple’s seed beat the others, and a sapling rose out of the ground and grew into a young tree. By a late summer evening it had borne fruit, and, while taking a walk around the grounds, I snapped one from a branch and rubbed it on my shirt. The apple had a hard crunch, and was pleasantly sweet, but within a moment, to my horror, I found that the scar below my jawline had begun to bleed after being but dry skin for the past dozen years! I rushed back into the house and wiped it clean as I had done all that time ago—and the fresh laceration was gone as fast as it had materialised.

I avoided any produce from the tree after that, and was bitter about having to clear the dropped rotting fruit away at summer’s end. I would have had the tree removed, if doing so might not have revealed my act of matricide.

More time passed, and one early spring I received an unexpected letter from my mother’s sister, my aunt Nell, informing me that a distant cousin of mine, Elaine, had lost both of her parents to the bombing during the War, and that she needed a permanent place to live. She was also an admirer of my poetry, as were her school friends. I wanted to say no, still enjoying my solitude, but I ultimately decided that some company for a spell would do me no harm.

I never intended for her to stay more than a few months, but when she arrived in her coat and hat, that long blonde hair flowing like golden water at the side of the perfectly white skin of her face, her eyes pools of deepest and most majestic ocean, all of her not yet nineteen, I knew that I had to keep her and make her mine.

I took my time with my seduction, slowly and subtly, not wanting to make my desires too obvious. She was so innocent, so free of any malice towards or ill opinion of anybody or anything. Within a year she was devoted to me, and we were married in London. We celebrated with a voyage to Sicily and returned to our country home where I could begin work on a new epic, one which would place me upon a higher stratum in the literary world. Given that I had turned down all opportunities to teach, such an idea leaving me off-colour, only through grander and bolder work could I hope to leave my legacy.

Elaine settled gracefully into the role of housewife—cooking, cleaning, managing the garden, and freeing me fully of any duties that would distract me from my work. Little did I know this would come to ruin our utopia…

A month after we had returned, Elaine presented me with a wonderful meal of roasted lamb, for which I praised her. She accepted my approbation, and brought me dessert: a slice of apple pie. Served with cream, I took a bite and found it pleasingly sweet, but as I masticated I realised the terrible origin of the filing. I felt my jawline: the scar was bleeding.

“Where did you get the apples from?” I demanded, dabbing at the blood with my napkin.

“Why, from the tree in the garden,” she replied, bemused. “Darling, you’re bleeding! Let me get—”

  I slammed my fist on the table.

“Never, never, never, never use apples from that tree, for anything! Do you understand?! NEVER!”

She was completely mystified, but she agreed to obey my command, even though she clearly did not believe my explanation that the apples of that particular tree were, for some obscure reason, mildly poisonous.

As the months wore on however, I began to grow suspicious. Her blonde hair, once as rich as sunlight, began to turn darker, a sickly, mousy brown. Her face lost its heart-shaped fullness, as her middle began to distend, even though she ate no more than she used to. Her hands grew veiny, her walk stilted. Strangest of all, these varied new qualities reminded me of someone I once knew…

Her personality as well as her body began to change. Nothing I did was right. She demanded my help with the housework, interrupting my writing. Very soon I had a list of tasks which left me too tired to create. And of everything I undertook: the way I ate was a problem, my gait was a problem, my positioning of objects was a problem, the way I pronounced words—Me! The great poet!—was a problem…life with her became unbearable, and continues to be so.

It was but a few nights ago, lying beside her snoring and wheezing in bed, her supposedly a girl of barely twenty, when I solved the mystery, becoming nauseated in my discovery. Her commitment to abstain from the demonic fruit of that accursed tree must have been a lie. She had betrayed me; her love was nothing.

With the mystery solved, the true problem became clear—but what of the solution?

It is to be dealt with straight away, and, in purely aesthetic terms, the garden could use a second apple tree not that far from the first, even if for me it means much more rotting fruit to dispose of in future…