Beauty and the Beast

Warning! This is a story for the "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" event. There's a loving wife, but this is also a horror story. As the woman stroking her boyfriend's cock remarked, "It's grew some!"

*****

I visited my wife every Saint Paddy's Day, come rain or shine.

To visit her at Christmas would have been inappropriate. Christmas is a time for love, celebration, great joy and the giving and receiving of gifts. Besides, I was too busy with the rest of the family. Easter is a time of forgiveness and hope, so that was never going to happen. Her birthday was no longer a special day as far as I was concerned and it should not have been any different from every other day she spent at Surgeon's Hall. However an annual visit allowed me to confirm the surgeon was satisfied with her services and to remind her that the alternative was always a possibility. Visiting her on Saint Patrick's Day seemed appropriate. After all, the patron saint of Ireland reputedly got rid of snakes.

On the wild, wet and windy west coast of Ireland, spring has already announced its arrival by March 17 or it's just around the corner, which makes the five hour drive from Dublin to Surgeon's Hall much less challenging. It's the final section on those rough country roads in the remotest part of Donegal that can be difficult. The stinging cold Atlantic rain frequently blows in almost horizontally and parts of the road to Surgeon's Hall have been washed away a couple of times. It comes as a surprise to many that this weather-beaten northernmost part of the emerald isle is actually in the Republic and not part of British-occupied Northern Ireland.

I always stayed overnight at Surgeon's Hall. It's not that I ever liked the place. It's a forbidding looking, old grey fortress of a building, nothing like the mock French chateau it was intended to be. Streaked with traces of moss, it's far from any other human habitation and stuck on a dismal peninsula that's devoid of any remarkable features whatsoever. Tiny windows peer out over a barren, greenish brown, boggy marshland, which is all there is to see in every direction. There are no trees, nor any bushes of any kind. If you were to lose your way around there, you would be swallowed up by the bog. My wife was kept safe and secure in Surgeon's Hall and she was well aware the bog was out there if she were somehow able to free herself from her shackles and foolish enough to try to escape.

I didn't want to see my wife for any longer than absolutely necessary, but I was content to spend time with my erstwhile mentor, a world-famous surgeon with whom I had the privilege of working many years before I met Julie. He and I would reminisce about the ground-breaking surgical operations he had performed, where I had assisted. A man who acquired much of his skill on the battlefield, the surgeon was wary of people, but he appreciated my work as an anaesthetist. We learned to trust one another in the desperate straits of a field hospital and our deep respect for one another developed from there and continued in a civilian operating theatre. I think our relationship was as close to friendship as he would permit.

As far as I am aware, there were no other visitors to Surgeon's Hall. The surgeon drove his trusty Volvo to the somnolent old market town of Letterkenny to do his shopping for groceries and collect his post from the post office there. With fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants, there were still far too many people in Letterkenny for the surgeon's liking.

He was a recluse, but he had my wife for occasional company during the final years of his life. He could lock Julie in a basement room if he wanted to be alone, but she was available to do housework and take care of other needs whenever he required her. That seemed fair to me. She had to pay for her sins and for her keep, even if she spent long periods of time in isolation, deprived of natural sound and light.

Driving to Surgeon's Hall there was always plenty of time for me to reflect on the past and the decisions I had made that resulted in her involuntary incarceration.

The name of her lover is unimportant. He was a mature student in the Celtic Studies class that Julie taught at our local college. I don't think I would have been quite so angry if it had been a one night stand, a mistake of some sort, possibly due to a combination of too much wine and my temporary absence. But that's not the way it was at all.

My wife kept fit by jogging, or at least that's what she told me. Behind my back Julie must have been laughing at my gullibility. Most mornings and some evenings, while I looked after our three year old daughter, she donned her sports gear and ran a couple of blocks to his apartment to do some horizontal jogging. I was totally clueless until one Saturday morning, when Julie was out jogging yet again and our daughter told me about a nightmare she had while I was on late night duty at the hospital earlier that week.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, as the biblical saying goes, come great truths. It seems that my wife and her lover had become careless. He stayed a little too long that evening. When our daughter woke from a nightmare and ran crying to our bedroom, she found him with my wife. Already terrified by her nightmare, an encounter with a stranger in our bedroom made things worse.

It must have taken Julie a lot of time, patience and persuasion to convince our daughter the stranger meant no harm. Although the little one was frightened, she was too young to understand what was happening, so she eventually accepted the explanation and reassurance that the strange man was her mother's special friend. Julie told her not to tell me anything about mummy's special friend, because I would be very upset.

Thankfully, children are unpredictable. That Saturday morning my daughter and I just happened to be talking about how children must be brave when they go to hospital. Despite my wife's scheming, our daughter decided to tell me how brave she had been when she had the nightmare and got scared even more by the strange man. She knew she wasn't supposed to tell me about mummy's special friend, but she couldn't pass up the chance to tell me about how brave she had been.

I was stunned by her revelation, but I wasn't sure whether her story was simply the result of an overactive imagination. The first thing I did was to praise my daughter for her bravery, which is exactly what she wanted, and we agreed not to tell my wife that I knew anything about the nightmare and the stranger.

When something terrible happens it takes a lot to keep calm and carry on. If you've ever witnessed trauma surgery, either on the battlefield or in the hospital operating theatre, you will know how important it is to concentrate on the task in hand. Difficult decisions have to be made, often about who dies and who survives.

My first instinct was to confront Julie and demand an explanation, but I kept myself in check. After all, I wasn't certain that my daughter's version of what happened was true. An accusation based on a child's story would likely result in outright denial and a great deal of indignation and anger on the part of my wife. Besides which, I didn't want my daughter to have to deal with any consequences of spilling the beans.

Dublin is a gossipy city. Even back then, before social media became such a huge phenomenon, the city was rife with stories about who was doing what with whom, where and when. The Irish love a good story, so it didn't take a private investigator more than a week or so to confirm my worst fears. My wife's lover had been bragging about bedding the beautiful flame-haired yummy mummy lecturer who was married to a doctor. Everyone on the college campus seemed to know about the affair and it had given them something juicy to gossip about.

My wife had a duty of care and should have avoided becoming romantically involved with one of her students, but it wasn't as if she was interacting with him in a professional carer's role, like a doctor or a social worker. Neither was he a youngster. He was in his early thirties, taking classes part-time while he worked at a call centre. Not much of a career, but the PI told me the man was a loner, a Latin American on a student visa, who had bummed around all his adult life, always allegedly about to get a dream job of some sort. In other words, he was a loser, with no real friends.

According to reliable sources, my wife and her student had first got together not long after the start of the academic year in late September. Their sordid little affair had been going on for the best part of half a year. Everyone in our social circle knew about it, but they all turned a blind eye. For various reasons they took the view that it was none of their business. No one really cared one way or another. Many of them thought it was no big deal if my wife was getting a bit of strange on the side and some had even heard talk she was planning to run off with her lover. No one said anything to me. I don't blame them. I hate to admit it, but in their shoes I'm not sure I would have had the courage to be the bearer of bad news either.

I suppose I should have known better than to trust her.

Julie had moved to Dublin from Liverpool, which is only a short hop across the Irish Sea, but she had little contact with her family back there. From brief conversations with her friends and relatives at our wedding reception, I became aware there had been a rift of some sort. Julie's older sister had clearly been glad to see the back of her. "I didn't have to worry about her stealing my boyfriends anymore when she left for Dublin," she said. Her thin veneer of a smile was not reflected in her eyes as she glanced across the room at Julie. I also noticed she kept a close eye on her man that evening.

Julie's parents were definitely not my cup of tea. Their attitude was 'take' rather than 'give'. Her father was quite brazen about having been unemployed for years, claiming disability benefit payments for a fictitious bad back while working for cash as a casual labourer and window cleaner. He didn't care about Liverpool's reputation and even joked that the reason the audiences screamed so loudly at the early Beatles concerts was due to the shock of seeing four scousers working for a living.

Julie's mother was a mean-hearted bitch of a woman. All her conversation seemed to be about how she deserved more out of life. Her ambition was to win the national lottery, which she clearly thought would be in the near future. In the meantime she festooned herself in cheap and chunky costume jewellery and bitched about various female celebrities. Somehow, she didn't seem to realise there was a difference between her 'bling' and the 'bling' worn by multi-millionaire popstars. She had never worked in her life, but she made money from running party events at home to sell over-priced plastic food containers, perfume, make-up, lingerie, sex toys and anything else for a fast buck. She had even charged Julie for board and lodging after she turned eighteen.

I met Julie's family when we got married and I immediately recognised them for what they were. Faced with a bunch of greedy, grasping, selfish parasites, I was still naive and foolish enough to think that Julie was an exception to the rule. I gave her my love and I trusted her. When the I found out she had betrayed me, the scales fell from my eyes and it finally dawned on me that she was just as incredibly self-centred as the rest of her family and had little time for her husband and daughter. The truth was that Julie was the centre of Julie's universe.

In addition to the frequent episodes of horizontal jogging at her lover's place, the PI told me they were getting together at our house once a week. Every Wednesday was a non-working day for my wife. She dropped our daughter off at my parents' house a few miles away and then returned home for lunch and some afternoon delight with her Latin lover. The story she gave me was that she needed time to herself on Wednesdays to do assessments of her students' assignments and to prepare teaching materials. She even had me pick up our daughter on my way home.

Now I understood the real reason why there was always an opened bottle of white wine in the fridge when I got home on Wednesdays. It simply wasn't true that she had a glass or two as a reward for her hard work. Instead, the wine presumably provided refreshment for the lovers before or after a lengthy session of fucking.

Apart from the PI, no one was aware I had found out about my wife's affair. Everyone seemed to think I was clueless. They knew me as the nice man who was a doctor at the big hospital and occasionally liked a beer in the pub, but spent most of his free time doing the usual family activities. They knew the nice doctor's wife was a part-time lecturer at the local college and almost everyone knew she was cuckolding her husband by screwing one of her students.

I felt angry, humiliated and insulted. In the space of a few days I lost all the love I had for my wife and I grew to hate and despise her. She was nothing other than a nasty slut who preferred fucking a loser to spending time with her husband and daughter. She had disrespected me so much that I felt like killing her and her boyfriend.

To get away from her I took a couple of days off work and went to visit my former colleague, a Swedish surgeon who had recently retired and moved to Donegal. A man of considerable intellect, his hobby was the literature of existentialism and he was fascinated by the absurdity of the human condition. Writers like Camus, Sartre and Kafka were his heroes. Well over six feet tall, he was an imposing figure in his preferred attire of a white surgical smock and functional black trousers, but it was his face that immediately caught your gaze.

The surgeon avoided contact with other people, not only because he considered everyone else to be intellectual pygmies by comparison, but he wanted to avoid causing unnecessary alarm. Sadly, the surgeon's face could only be described as terrifying. He had been badly burned in a childhood accident involving an unsupervised experiment with sulphuric acid. Despite the terrible damage to his facial features, there was nothing wrong with his sight or any of his other senses. Nevertheless, he made Frankenstein's monster look handsome. On the plus side, although his melted features scared the crap out of his colleagues, that shockingly dreadful face instantly commanded their respect and obedience.

Throughout his adult life, the surgeon took little to do with humanity outside his chosen professional arena. Following his retirement, he elected to almost totally sever his connections with the outside world. There were very few exceptions and I was proud to be one of them.

It was the surgeon who offered me a solution to my woes.

"If you are finished with her, may I have her?" he asked.

This was a man who was a hero in my eyes, a horribly flawed hero with a pained and suffering soul, who had locked himself away from humanity with scant reward for a lifetime of service. Who was I to deny him what I no longer desired?

"You can have her," I replied. "If you take her you would be doing me a great favour. To be frank, I have been wrestling with my need for revenge. This way, I could spare her life without losing face. If she has to serve a life sentence with you, I would be satisfied. If you are willing to have her, you can do what you like with her. As far as I'm concerned, she broke her vows. Apart from my need to salve my wounded pride by ensuring she is punished for her betrayal, she is no longer of any great concern to me. You and I have known each other for many years, whereas my wife has been a comparatively recent fixture in my life. In the circumstances it would please me if you could benefit from her availability to be of service to you."

The surgeon's nostrils flared in his melted nose. "Then it shall be so," he said. "Problems and opportunities go hand-in-hand. Hopefully your wife will understand her situation and she will choose wisely."

"How will you keep her under control?" I asked.

"My dear fellow," he responded, "you must know about Stockholm Syndrome."

"You mean when hostages side with their captors?"

His mouth creased into a semblance of a smile.

"Exactly. Nils Bejerot came up with the name. He was a medical professor and psychiatric consultant working with the Swedish police at the time of a botched bank robbery in Stockholm in 1973. The extent to which the hostages bonded emotionally with their captors was what fascinated Bejerot. One of the women who had been held hostage got engaged to one of the robbers and another set up a fund to help pay the fees for their defence lawyer."

"That's amazing! How the heck does it work?"

"Broadly speaking, it involves a combination of factors. Firstly there is a threat to the physical or psychological survival of the captive and the captive believes that the threat would be carried out. Then the captive is shown some small kindnesses by the captor and a bond develops between them. However it is important that the captive is isolated from perspectives other than those of the captor and that the captive accepts the inability to escape the situation."

"Are you sure it will work?"

"We can never be sure, but all of the factors will be present and I'm optimistic we will have an ideal opportunity to see if it works. If we succeed, all three of us will be happy, but if we fail, you may have to fall back on your original plan."

"Okay. Let's try to set it up, but you will have to let me know if there's a problem. I don't want her blood on your hands. Getting rid of her should be my responsibility."

Working as an anaesthetist, each day brings different challenges. It might be relieving pain on the labour ward, resuscitation of accident victims or a planned participation in an elective operation. Whatever the context, there is a wide range of anaesthetics with something for everyone. All that I needed to solve the problem of my wife and her lover was a small quantity of a couple of different types of anaesthetics and a suitable opportunity.

When I got back to Dublin I lost no time in making all the necessary preparations. I got the supplies I needed from the hospital and I arranged to take a couple more days off work the following week. I used our home computer and printer to prepare the farewell letter my wife would eventually sign, I made sure my car was fully fuelled and ready to go and I bought some twine and plastic cable ties.

The next Tuesday evening I opened a bottle of white wine and my wife and I drank a toast to one another. I liked to think of it as her valediction. I left the rest of the opened bottle of wine in the fridge. The next morning I pleased my wife by volunteering to take our daughter to my parents' house as part of the Wednesday routine. My parents were more than happy to agree to keep their granddaughter overnight. I told them I was planning a romantic surprise for my wife, which was very close to the truth.

I went to work as normal that day, making sure everyone knew I was there. I couldn't be absolutely sure my plan would work and I didn't want to return home until the outcome was certain one way or another. I went home at my usual time and there were no immediate signs of my wife when I got there. However the remains of a light lunch were on the kitchen table. There was an opened packet of smoked salmon with a few slices left, a couple of plates with lemon quarters, two empty glasses and an empty wine bottle.

I walked upstairs and found the two lovers in our bedroom, where I thought they'd be. The muscle relaxant and sedative I'd put in the rest of the white wine had kicked in and left them helpless. The bed was a mess where their bowels had voided, but they were unhurt and more or less semi-conscious. I gagged them with old socks and strips of cloth and bound them using the twine and cable ties. I didn't want them to suffocate, so I was particularly careful to make sure they could still breathe freely.