Ladies of the Lake Ch. 03

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End of Aunts' Tale, and Rick is asked to do the undoable.
5.1k words
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Part 3 of the 4 part series

Updated 10/31/2022
Created 10/11/2010
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julybear7
julybear7
2,076 Followers

This follows directly the last scene of Part 2. if you haven't read the first two parts, this won't mean much to you. there are some (I hope) good sex scenes, but if that is what you want, other writers are better. In this chapter, Rick hears the end of the Aunt's tale, and discovers his relationship and purpose, when he is asked to do the unmentionable. enjoy. jb7

*

They settled there, camping out that year. The lake did its magic, and while it was cool some nights, there was no snow, although both the north and south ends of the valley were snow blocked. Game was plentiful, as were edible roots and fruits. By the next summer, Peggy was with child. Judah had built a cabin, and set out claim markers all along the peaks lining their small paradise. That fall, a military garrison was established where the trail exited the southern end of their valley, on the bank of the river curling around the peaks creating the valley's western wall.

Judah filed his claim with the commander of the troops, as the only government representative in the area. He pointed out his cabin, as evidence he had improved the land, and contracted to sell harvested aspen logs to the Army to build a garrison. The commander accepted and recorded Judah's claim as legitimate.

Travelers found their way to the valley. They were not happy to learn Judah had claim to the whole valley, nor that the claim had been approved by the Army. They also did not like that Judah had built on the only suitable ground by the lake. He had taken the only site not invaded by the aspen.

As long as the root structure of the trees was not disturbed, the trees, cut to the ground, would have saplings two feet tall within three years. If the roots were dug out, a lengthy process, it would take five years for the trees to reappear, but reappear they would. No one could explain why Judah's lot stayed clear.

Judah made a deal with the settlers, and set up a system of long term land leases, initially based on the earning power of the lessee, and laying out the boundaries of the village, thereby limiting the growth of the village. He also hired some of the men to build and operate a lumber mill, to supply lumber to the village, the fort, and the community which sprang up around it.

Peggy grew large early, and Judah was worried. He took her to the doctor at the fort, who confirmed there was more than one baby, maybe three. The old trader was ecstatic, three sons, all at once. He knew immediately he wanted Patrick and Robert as names for his sons, but could not decide between Steven and Michael. When he asked Peggy, she just laughed, and asked, "What if they're all girls?" Judah wouldn't even consider the possibility.

When the girls were born, Stevie, the youngest, was a surprise. Judah was, simply put, as happy as if they had been sons. Four daughters to spoil, four little princesses.

The birth took a lot out of Peggy. Judah hired a woman from the village as a wet nurse to help Peggy feed them. When she had recovered her strength, and the babies had been weaned, the woman stayed on to help with the house work.

With the demands for building supplies from the fort and surrounding territory, the Village was thriving. A carting company, for both short and long haul freighting, was started by a newcomer, Caleb Younger. He was a tall, comely, well built lad, who had no problem attracting the fair sex. The problem was, he became obsessed with Peggy after seeing her shopping in the village one day when the girls were about seven. He knew who she was, who her husband was, but wanted her for himself.

All the attraction and obsession was on his side. Peggy was as much in love with Judah as she was on the day they left the Indian village. If she spoke to Caleb, it was to tell him as much, and to ask him to leave her alone. But the poor man was besotted with her. Asking him to leave her be was as much as asking him to stop breathing.

One Saturday, Judah and Peggy were in the village shopping, for the girls' eighth birthday, and had separated for some individual errands. Caleb was driving his wagon through the main street when he saw Peggy. He stopped and jumped down in front of her. Grasping her by the shoulders, he implored her to go away from Judah, with him. At that moment, Judah returned, and seeing what was occurring, seized Caleb's whip from his wagon and laid it across the teamster's back, eliciting a horrible scream of pain.

"You steal my money with your outrageous freight charges, now you try to steal my wife!" Three more times the whip found Caleb's back before passers-by stopped Judah. "Get out of this valley," he ordered Caleb. "The next time I see you on my land, I'll shoot you like a rabid dog." That night, in the new bed Judah had built in their bedroom, Peggy was got with child again, against the advice of doctors and midwives.

Good advice, as it turned out. As the baby grew, Peggy lost strength. At four months into the pregnancy, she was confined to bed. Still she declined. About half way through the sixth month, the baby made it plain it wanted to be born. Neither he nor his mother survived.

Judah was devastated. He blamed himself, and could not bear it. He was gone from the valley even more frequently than he had been before, and for longer periods, sometimes as much as six months.

Peggy had been a good mother. She made certain the girls could read, and were schooled in their figures, able to add and subtract. She had encouraged Judah to bring them back books from his travels so they were aware of the outside world. She had women in from the village to teach them how to clean, to do laundry. She also encouraged them to exercise and to play, and taught them to ride.

When the girls started to look like young women, Judah noticed. He gathered them together on their fourteenth birthday. "You are becoming young women, and soon the men in the valley will be dogging you, wanting to join with you. As long as you are by the lake, no harm will come to you. If you must leave the lake, leave only in pairs. As long as there are two of you together, you will be safe from all harm. Always wait for me here, until I return."

"What if you don't return, Papa?"

"I"ll always return, lass. I may get sick, or hurt, but the only way this old earth will get shut of me is for someone in this valley to kill me, and that is unlikely to happen. If it does, then wait for the man to come who will love you like I do."

When they were seventeen, Bobbi and Stevie were in town together, shopping in the general store. Not paying attention to where the other was, they got separated. A group of four or five roughs saw Stevie and decided to have some fun, and maybe something more. Surrounding her, they hustled her from the store into a nearby alley.

Bobbi felt her panic and went looking for her. As soon as Stevie saw her at the open end of the alley, her sense of control returned. She and Bobbi focused their thoughts on the roughs, who were soon on their knees, retching their breakfasts, soiling and wetting themselves.

When the girls got back to the street, Bobbi turned and looked at the wretched creatures kneeling on the ground. She muttered something under her breath and thought of a twisting sac. With satisfaction, she saw the men double in pain and heard their hurting howls.

The girls, more intelligent than most of their age peers, were curious about their changing bodies and the urges they were feeling. They had observed animals mating and wondered about how that was done between man and woman. They discussed the process with their old wet nurse, who brought out a new born grandson to point out the differences between the sexes.

Their eighteenth birthday was approaching. Judah had written that he would be home and had a surprise for them. Patti was planning a surprise for him. She gathered her sisters and proposed that they get Papa drunk and the four of them take him to bed and satisfy their curiosity about men. The plan was met with cheers.

Judah appeared the day before their birthday, with four geldings. Two matched pairs, black and palomino, the same coloring as the girls. That night, they lingered over dinner, serving their father several glasses of wine. By midnight, he was quite far gone, and could not object when his girls took him to his bed and began to strip him.

Drunk as he was, when his four daughters appeared before him in their nude glory, he was erect in a second. When they approached him, he could not resist, due to both inebriation, and desire. He laid back on the bed he had built in the room and felt the girls hands exploring him, heard their delighted laughs and giggles, felt their breasts pressing against him, their gashes against his legs.

Then, he felt a hot dampness at the head of his male member, enclosing it, sliding down his staff, then an impediment, a lessening of pressure and a sudden increase and release. There was a yelp of pain, then stillness as the warmth engulfed his entire rod. In a minute there was a familiar sensation of movement up and down on him, which he attempted to facilitate. Soon he felt the movements become erratic, then, clamping on the head of his prick. Someone, it sounded like Patti was screaming and laughing all at the same time.

Then she was gone and there was another pussy attacking him. Before the sun came up, that morning of their eighteenth birthday, each of the four girls had sampled their father, who, surprisingly, did not experience a climax. A father and a gentleman, Judah did not punish the girls for his rape. In fact, he encouraged them to repeat it, with the variations that he be sober, and they do it one sister at a time. Over the next month, he enjoyed each daughter several times, and although he experienced a climax with them each time, he did not ejaculate.

This puzzled the girls. If he did not produce the man seed, how could he get his wife with child? He explained that he was a warlock, the male version of a witch, with certain powers, one being the ability to control his output of sperm. When he asked if any of the girls had noticed they had the power to influence people to do what they didn't want to do, or to influence events to their benefit, they all looked at each other and nodded.

He told them of his family, their escape from Salem, and the need to migrate west as the eastern colonies were settled, finally joining a tribe of Indians sympathetic to the colonists. During the second war with Britain, he told them, some British soldiers had shot both parents at point blank range just because they were Americans. He marked them, and had his revenge, then moved to the mountains and plains, living and trading with natives.

Several weeks after the girls' birthday, Judah was visiting the commandant at the fort when he saw a figure he thought he recognized. He asked a nearby trooper who the man was. The trooper identified him as the carter, Caleb Younger. Judah nearly lost his temper. As he slowly let his breath out, he rationalized that Younger had the right to be in the fort; it was outside the valley, outside his property. As he turned and walked away, Caleb saw him. Caleb's back burned in remembrance of the beating. He wondered, too, about Peggy. How was she?

Although his freight depot was next to the fort, his partner lived in the valley. When he returned to the depot, he asked Lonnie Duncan if he ever saw Mrs Cartoffel in the valley. When Lonnie told him what had happened so many years ago, Caleb felt as if his guts had been ripped open. In pain, in anger, he vaulted into his wagon and started down the road into the valley. Half way to the village, he overtook Judah.

Screaming imprecations at him, accusing him of murder, he cracked his whip, sending it around Judah's neck, then jerked it, pulling Judah from his horse and breaking his neck. He threw Judah's body into his wagon, vowing the man would never sleep next to his beloved Peggy. He made his way, unseen, to the southern end of the gold lake and threw the body of his hated rival into its waters, his whip still wrapped around the corpse's neck.

The girls became anxious when their father's horse returned without him and alerted the commandant at the fort, still the only representative of law in the area. The young captain was at the cottages two days later when his aide called from the lake shore. Floating, barely breaking the surface, about fifteen feet from shore, was a man's body. When it was pulled ashore, it was easily identified. So was the whip, with Caleb's initials burned into the handle, still around the corpse's neck.

The girls were aware of the story involving their mother and Caleb Younger. Seeing the monogram, and understanding the implication, they glanced at each other and a series of nods was exchanged.

Both of the men recalled seeing Caleb on the road to the village on their way to the lake. They headed back into the village, and went to the carter's village depot. As soon as the men left, the girls joined hands. At the depot, Lonnie said he thought Caleb was out in the workshop and directed the two men out back to the fairly new building.

When they got to the out building, they tried the door and found it locked. They knocked and got no response. The sergeant looked in a window near the door. The sight made him yell. He advised the captain to break the door down, which was quickly done. In the middle of the room, hanging from a beam twelve feet from the floor, Caleb Younger was hanging, naked, a whip around his neck, over the beam, wrapped around his legs, the handle shoved into his ass. The floor around him was clear. The closest bench, a good ten feet away.

While the captain examined the body, the sergeant examined the building. "Uhh, Captain?"

"Yes, Sergeant?"

"Have you looked at the windows and doors?"

"No, why?"

"Sir, they have all been locked from the inside."

"Hmm. Did we not see this man on the road this afternoon?"

"Yessir. About the doors..."

"Yes, sergeant, I heard you. This man has been dead at least eight hours. What do you know about these lash marks on his back?"

"Several years ago, Judah Cartoffel, the other dead man, caught this man trying to convince his wife to run off. Judah laid into him with his own whip."

"So, we have a corpse hanging in a manner we can't explain, in a locked room no one could have exited. A corpse we both saw a couple of hours ago as alive as either of us, but appearing to have died several hours ago. Well, you better cut him down. Here, use my saber."

The saber cut the hardened leather on the first strike, dropping the corpse to the floor. Because of the way the legs were wrapped, when the feet hit the floor, the legs folded and it appeared the body actually sat down on the floor, driving the whip handle completely inside. There was an accompanying keening sound from somewhere, as if some one was in pain.

The whip, in sliding over the beam and coming to the floor, hit an oil lantern, sending oil and flames across the floor of the workshop. The workbenches and crates stacked in the building burst into flame with unnatural speed. Both men ran from the building with no thought for taking the corpse with them. In discussing the situation before help arrived to quell the flames, they decided to say nothing about the death, except that the man had committed suicide. Help was too late to save the building.

"During the period we were learning about sex from our father," Bobbi was saying, "he told us about his powers. We had all, individually, learned we each had some ability to influence people and events. Papa directed us to a trunk in his room. There were several old books he had inherited from his parents. Spells, incantations, recipes for potions. There really is one for toe of frog, eye of newt..."

"Bobbi, be serious!" Micki interrupted.

"Spoilsport," she grinned. "Generally, the men in the valley have left us alone, except for some brief periods when we each attempted marriage. It was hard to explain why we didn't age.

"Now and then, an occasional drunk, or brave high schooler who has something to prove, or a tramp will wander into the cottage area. We make sure they don't remember, and we entice them to stay until we are able to replenish our supply of man seed.

"But as time has gone on, we find we need more to maintain ourselves, and away from the lake's enchantment, we notice we age more and faster, so that it takes us longer to recover. Had you been here a few hours earlier, I'm afraid you would have been quite shocked to see me, more even than you were at the beginning of my tale.

"Do you believe me, Rick, or do you have any questions?" Her expression was one of seriousness, anxiousness, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes questioning.

He nodded, slowly, saying, "I can't believe it!"

"Which? You're nodding yes, saying no. What can't you believe?"

"You did say your father's name was Judah Cartoffel, and he was a trader with the Indian tribes in the 1840's?"

"Yes, our father and our teacher."

Rick shook his head slowly. "My father passed away a few years ago and my mother gave me the job of going through his papers to see what needed to be saved and what could be pitched. There was a letter from my great grandmother to my grandfather explaining, clarifying, the circumstances surrounding his birth.

"Family legend always said she had been attacked by an Indian. Her family, her father, four brothers and her, was one of ten families traveling across the Dakota Territory, around 1860. The train had stopped by a small river, large creek, for the day. While fetching water she had seen some berry bushes upstream. She got dinner started and went to pick some berries for dessert and to share.

"According to legend, as she was picking the berries, a lone brave attacked and raped her. In her letter, she says that was not true. She was picking berries along the creek bank. When she rounded the berry bush to where she could see the creek, she saw a naked white man emerging from the water.

"She admitted she had been with her father and her two older brothers, a matter of convenience, to meet the men's needs; this man, she said, had the largest member she had ever seen. When he saw her, he just motioned for her to come to him. She wrote that the pleasure from the coupling was so great she fainted and never came to until her brothers splashed her with some water. It must have been pretty obvious she had had sex.

"She let the Indian story be told out of embarrassment and an unexplainable desire to shield the man, who told her his name, Judah Cartoffel.

By the time the train reached the Oregon Territory, it was obvious she was pregnant. Other than her brothers, there weren't many marriageable men on the train. A man who lost his wife on the trip, Jamie Stuart, spoke to her father, and she moved into his wagon for the remainder of the trip, and her long life.

"What is even stranger...My mother's great great grandmother tells a similar story about a trader who visited her family's general store in the Missouri Territory in the early 1850's. The same name, Judah Cartoffel."

Bobbie looked at Stevie, the question plain on her face. "I don't know," Stevie said. "I didn't check the past, only the future, for possibilities. He registered over 90, practically certain."

"I get the definite impression," Rick interrupted, "that my being here isn't totally due to chance."

"Not totally," Patti replied. "It's complicated. Bobbi, you better explain. You're better at that sort of thing than any of us."

"Yeah, thanks," Bobbi answered, a touch of sarcasm in her voice. "First, Rick, you have to accept that we really are witches. Four very poor witches, to be sure, individually, but when we cooperate, we are one very powerful bewitching force. When Papa was killed, we reinforced the enchantment of the valley, and added a spell attracting single men passing by. Whenever any appeared, Stevie would cast the Tarot cards to see if their futures coincided with ours."

julybear7
julybear7
2,076 Followers
12