The Manor House: Original Fiction
Author: Bitterfig
Title: The Manor House
Fandom: Original
Summary: The Manor House was a huge mansion located out in the desert. Originally intended as a summer retreat for a very wealthy family it had long since fallen into disuse. After the occupation, the owner of the house offered it to resistance leaders to use as a sort of secret base…
Beta Reader: Fedink
Word Count: 3300
Rating: R
Warnings: Language. Implied and attempted rape. Children in sexual situation. Violence.
Author’s Note: The lyrics to “Miss Otis Regrets” are by Cole Porter.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Any illegal acts taking place within that fiction are NOT condoned by the author. Depictions of any questionable, illegal, or potentially illegal activity in said fiction does not mean that I condone, promote, support, participate in, or approve of said activity. I grasp the distinction between fiction and reality and trust that readers will do the same. I do not profit from the fan fiction I write, and all rights to the characters remain firmly in the hands of their creator
The Manor House
I was only nine years old when the invasion occurred. I can just barely remember the weeks of bombings, followed by the occupation, the tanks in the streets, soldiers at every corner, midnight searches of houses, resistance fighters strung up on the fence of the courthouse…
It was a dangerous time but my mother, Hilde, had always been fearless. From the beginning she allied herself with the resistance. I know that to many this makes her a hero, but as you will see there was a great deal more to it than that. If I learned nothing else during the six years of the occupation it was that the world is infinitely more complex than it seems.
The summer I turned eleven, I went to the Manor House for the first time along with my mother and my eight year old sister Alma.
The Manor House was a huge mansion located out in the desert. Originally intended as a summer retreat for a very wealthy family it had long since fallen into disuse. After the occupation, the owner of the house offered it to resistance leaders to use as a sort of secret base. Isolated as it was, the Manor House was ideal for this, however to minimize detection (and simply because the resistance lacked the resources) no improvements could be made on the house which was a tumbling down horror.
In the Manor House windows were broken and ceilings collapsed. The vast marble swimming pool was thick with scum and algae. Mold grew on the walls and the rooms were strewn with the droppings of the wild animals that made their home there. This was where my family would make our home.
Along with my family, the Manor House was occupied by commanding officers in the resistance army and a number of men and women who like my mother were specialists in various fields, lending their expertise to the cause. I was somewhat baffled by this arrangement. I couldn’t see how biologists, chemists, or a psychiatrist like Hilde would be any use in a war.
The majority of the soldiers, anyone below the rank of Sergeant, camped out in the desert. Our mother had strictly forbidden Alma and I to have anything to do with them. However at first Hilde spent much of her time sequestered in her makeshift laboratory deep in the bowels of the Manor House, giving Alma and I ample time to explore at our leisure.
Looking back it was probably extremely dangerous for two little girls to be creeping about a camp of armed soldiers prepared for battle but Alma and I were, in our way, fearless as our mother. Spying on the soldiers became our favorite pastime.
When the soldiers were around the house they were very disciplined and polite. They went about their duties with mechanical efficiency looking neither right nor left. When they did interact with their superiors or the specialists they used as few words as possible, usually only a “yes, sir” or a “no, ma’am.” They were very different when they were by themselves in the desert drilling. No less efficient, they were loud and coarse. They used words I had never heard but which I sensed contained a crude and violent sexuality.
Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker.
When we were in bed at night Alma and I would whisper these words to each other, treasuring the pieces of adultness we had somehow found ourselves in possession of.
“Motherfucker, asshole, twat, faggot.”
Sometimes, Alma and I would sneak about to the soldier’s tents and watch them when they were at their leisure. Here, all the discipline fell away. Hanging around the tents they hardly seemed different than the boys my own age I had known in school. They joked and roughhoused with each other. They complained about the food and the lack of girls, they had contests to see who could pee furthest, longest, with the greatest accuracy.
Peeing seemed to be a great source of delight to the soldiers and it was through peeing that Alma and I would first make contact with Gideon, who would become our soldier.
One day we were hiding behind some of the scrubby desert bushes. As the soldiers marched by one of them slipped behind the bushes and began to pee. Then he spotted us but instead of chasing us away or even being embarrassed he only winked playfully in our direction as he continued to relieve himself. Several weeks later we spoke to him for the first time. He told us that his name was Gideon. He said he liked to be around little girls and that we were always welcome to talk to him and promised he wouldn’t tell Hilde about our visits to the soldier’s camp.
Gideon would change dramatically as time passed. When we first saw him, he was tall and lanky but months of training would build him up bigger and bigger. By the time I was thirteen and Sammus had become our tutor Gideon was a giant, his hugely muscled arms easily as big around as my waist. He was our window into the world of the soldiers. He would help us hide places where we could listen to them undetected and find out all sorts of things about them, about what went on around the base and about the war.
Alma and I adored Gideon, we felt entirely at ease in his presence to the point where we could sit on his knee and say our special words to each other as if we were alone in bed.
Gideon was our special secret. We met him often by the outside walls of the Manor House where the overgrown remains of the garden hid us from prying eyes.
We had been at the manor house for over a year when a strange little man named Sammus became our tutor.
Alma and I were not told where he came from or anything about him but from the beginning we sensed that something about him was off. Sammus was an adult, yet he had the round, unformed face of a baby and the scrawny body of a young boy. He was a man, but there was something prissy and feminine about the way he spoke and moved. He showed a fussy concern for my sister and me that no male ought to have displayed.
It wasn’t just Sammus either; it was the way the people around us reacted to him. The adults around the Manor House didn’t chat with him. They didn’t ask him how he was doing or gossip or complain about the filth we lived in. They looked away when he went by and spoke quietly to each other when they knew we were out of earshot. Sometimes they spoke too soon and we would overhear a bit of what was said.
“Sammus seems to be holding up.”
“He must be particularly susceptible.”
“Hilde does good work.”
“Still, I wouldn’t trust him with my children…”
The fact that adults treated Sammus like this endeared him to Alma and me. Like us he was beneath the notice of grown-ups but also somehow problematic, a cause for concern.
Sammus rarely took us outside of the Manor House but when he did, we got quite a different reaction from the soldiers of the rank and file. They reacted to Sammus with open hostility, shouting at him, calling him a son of a bitch, an occupier and a faker.
I was confused, so I asked Gideon about it.
“You girls shouldn’t have nothing to do with that guy,” he told us. “He’s dangerous. He’s a solider, like me, but part of the occupation. ‘stead of shooting him they let your mother go to work on him, she’s got him hypnotized. He don’t know where he is or who he is anymore.”
I felt very bad for Sammus and I said so.
“It’s a messed up situation,” Gideon agreed. “I almost feel sorry for the guy even though he’s one of them. He’d be better off dead; at least his soul would be his own.”
Gideon didn’t know a lot about what went on in the Manor House, but I spent most of my time there and gradually began to learn more and more about Sammus from the talk of the specialists and officers.
First of all, Sammus wasn’t the only prisoner of the occupying army kept in the Manor House, he was however my mother’s prize specimen. She had been able to completely subdue his actual memories and personality. As Gideon said, Sammus didn’t know who or where he was any more. He had no understanding that he was in enemy hands. He believed he had been hired as our tutor and that the Manor House was the luxurious mansion it had been years before. He also believed that he was a young woman. Alma and I giggled when we learned this-it explained so much about Sammus’ bearing-but other things I discovered were much more distressing.
One afternoon as we hid on the staircase by the pool Alma and I overheard a behavioral specialist who worked with our mother talking to a brash Lieutenant who was just back from the front. From their conversation I learned for the first time that our mother was fucking Sammus.
“That’s just wrong,” the Lieutenant said loud enough for it to carry over the entire vast pool area. “She hypnotized him so he doesn’t know what’s what and now she’s fucking him? That’s gotta be against some law.”
“Everything that goes on here is against ‘some law’,” the behaviorist said coldly. “We need Hilde, the resistance needs her. If she wants to sleep with her headcases, let her. She’s making a major contribution to the cause.”
“Shit,” the Lieutenant said. “Shit. I’m not sure which is worse. Her fucking him or her letting him look after her kids like she does. What if he remembers who he is? He could kill those little girls.”
“Hilde has confidence in her work. We’ve sent prisoners she’s worked on back into the occupying army, her creations are seamless.”
“It’s craziness I tell you, bat-shit craziness.”
“Maybe so but the future of our country might just hinge on this craziness.”
What I had heard made me proud and confused all at once. My mother was a very important person. My mother might also be a very bad person, but hadn’t I always known that? She had always had a selfish recklessness, a certain disregard for Alma and I. While I was alarmed by what I heard I did not doubt any of it. The behaviorist and the Lieutenant knew my mother as well as I did.
When I began to spy on Hilde, I knew what I would find. It took me several weeks but I did find it, after all there was only a makeshift plywood partition with a crooked hinged door separating her bedroom from where Alma and I slept. I heard and I saw her with Sammus and soon I understood what they did if not why.
Of course I told Gideon. He was very interested in hearing about my mother’s nocturnal adventures with the hypnotized enemy solider and never grew impatient as Alma and I went on and on about the things we had discovered. Some of them we even demonstrated for Gideon, on each other or on him. I remember straddling his heavily muscled thigh, bouncing up and down to show him how Hilde rode her toy. At times like this we all had to be careful not to giggle too loudly and give away our hiding place.
Without Gideon to warn us to keep quiet, it didn’t take Hilde long to catch us spying on her. One night we were peeping through a crack in the door when she got off Sammus and languidly strolled over, pushing the door open to reveal Alma and I.
“So now you know,” she said with one of her cruel smiles. “That makes things easier.”
After that, Hilde made no effort to hide her relationship (such as it was) with Sammus either from us or from anyone else around the Manor House. Quite publicly she would kiss and caress Sammus. During those odd times when Hilde wasn’t working and Sammus wasn’t watching us we would see them sitting beside the murky pool, our mother snuggled up against him.
“A lot of the boys doesn’t like what your mother’s doing,” Gideon told us. “I’ve heard them saying that a beautiful woman like that ought to be with one of us, not an enemy.”
I heard grumbling criticism of Hilde’s behavior everywhere. She seemed to be reaching the limits of how far she could go. Most outspoken was the Lieutenant.
“It’s like she’s cut off his dick and is using it to pleasure herself right in front of us all,” he said with undisguised contempt for anyone to hear. “I don’t want to see that kind of shit… and in front of those kids too. It ain’t decent.” Whenever he spoke like this there were murmurs of agreement.
Hilde however was unconcerned.
Since we’d arrived at the Manor House she had been reprogramming prisoners, sending them back to the occupying army as ticking time bombs. Her time bombs began going off right on schedule, making a devastating impact on the enemy. Suddenly Hilde could do no wrong, the hostility towards her evaporated. If she wanted to spend her precious moments of leisure lounging around on top of a brainwashed prisoner so be it. Even the Lieutenant seemed to have made his peace with her.
Morality can be a flexible thing, particularly in times of war.
Alma and I learned from our mother that we ought to be able to do as we pleased. We also learned how to control Sammus.
She had a fur piece she had worn before we came to the desert. Sometimes when no one was about she would take it out, stroke the fur against Sammus’ cheek and sing -
“Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
She is sorry to be delayed,
but last evening down in Lover's Lane she strayed, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.”
As she sang his eyes would glaze over and she would whisper in his ear what she wanted him to do, who and where he was.
Alma and I had no fur pieces but we were able to improvise. In one of the unused rooms of the Manor House we found a dead squirrel. With a pair of shears, we cut off its tail and the next time we tired of our lessons I rubbed it against our tutor’s cheek while together Alma and I sang.
“When she woke up and found that her dream of love was gone, madam,
She ran to the man who had led her so far astray,
And from under her velvet gown,
She drew a gun and shot her lover down, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.”
It worked as well for us as it had for Hilde. Sammus’ eyes went dead and he would do as we said. Most often we had him take us outside so that we could have secret meetings with our Gideon. He was very impressed by the way we’d been able to take control of Sammus and pleased that we were able to spend more time with him.
As a game, Alma and I would try to hypnotize Gideon. We’d often seen Hilde do it. She could put almost anyone into a trance so deep she would stick pins in them and they wouldn’t even notice. Alma and I weren’t quite so good. Whenever we thought we had put Gideon under he would suddenly grin and pounce on us, tickling us all over. We had to be careful to silence our laughs and shrieks or the patrolling soldiers nearby would have heard.
Each time we visited Gideon, each time he tickled us things went a little further. One day his hand would graze my thigh. The next day it would linger there. The next day he would stroke my leg before he let me up… each day a little further. At the time, I thought nothing of it. It was affection, something my sister and I were eager for and Gideon was so natural and friendly neither of us ever resisted or asked him to stop.
I can’t even say for certain that I wanted him to stop.
Each time, things went a little further but everyday Alma and I went to him, our vacant-eyed tutor in tow.
One day Gideon was tickling me. I was under the bulk of his huge body and the skirt of my dress was up around my waist. Alma gasped when he pulled my panties off but fell silent when he shushed her. He told me that he would be careful not to hurt me but when he put his finger inside me I would have screamed if he hadn’t put his hand over my mouth. There would have been more, he would have done to me the thing we’d seen our mother do to Sammus so many times but suddenly there was a loud noise and Gideon’s huge body seemed to have been picked up and slammed away from me.
I pulled down my dress. Only then did I look up and see Sammus standing there. Gideon’s gun was in his shaking hand. Something was different about him, that unformed look about his face was gone and his eyes seemed to glow in the desert sun. Something about those eyes told me that for the first time in the almost two years I’d known him he was himself. Not Hilde’s toy, not our tutor, not a prisoner of war but a solider.
And he knew. He knew everything, remembered everything. All those days of believing he was our governess, all those nights with Hilde, I could almost feel the air rippling with motion as everything passed before those eyes.
I wasn’t at all surprised when he put the smoking gun to his temple.
“Don’t,” I said. Alma was screaming and crying. Several resistance soldiers had appeared from the nearby camp, their weapons drawn.
“Stand down,” one of them screamed at Sammus. “Drop your weapon, move away from those girls…”
Sammus pulled the trigger. My mother’s toy, her choice specimen, splattered his well-washed brains over the walls of the Manor House.
Someone cheered.
Alma and I never told the truth about what happened. We never told what Gideon had tried to do or how Sammus had saved me. It was easier to pretend that Sammus had somehow broken his programming and seized Gideon’s weapon. It was easier to pretend that Gideon had died defending us and that Sammus was the villain. Easier for the adults, easier for Alma and I-we had loved Gideon after all. He had been our soldier, our special secret whereas Sammus had never been anything to us but our mother’s puppet.
After Gideon and Sammus’ deaths, Alma and I were sent away from the Manor House to a girl’s school. Hilde continued her work, the war raged on.
When I was sixteen years old the occupation ended. What had been the resistance became the army and the Manor House was abandoned for legitimate bases. Two years later the war ended. That was twenty years ago.
After the war, Hilde returned to private practice. She was well respected for her involvement in the resistance. Whatever questionable things she may have done were forgiven because she had the grace to be on the winning side.
Title: The Manor House
Fandom: Original
Summary: The Manor House was a huge mansion located out in the desert. Originally intended as a summer retreat for a very wealthy family it had long since fallen into disuse. After the occupation, the owner of the house offered it to resistance leaders to use as a sort of secret base…
Beta Reader: Fedink
Word Count: 3300
Rating: R
Warnings: Language. Implied and attempted rape. Children in sexual situation. Violence.
Author’s Note: The lyrics to “Miss Otis Regrets” are by Cole Porter.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Any illegal acts taking place within that fiction are NOT condoned by the author. Depictions of any questionable, illegal, or potentially illegal activity in said fiction does not mean that I condone, promote, support, participate in, or approve of said activity. I grasp the distinction between fiction and reality and trust that readers will do the same. I do not profit from the fan fiction I write, and all rights to the characters remain firmly in the hands of their creator
The Manor House
I was only nine years old when the invasion occurred. I can just barely remember the weeks of bombings, followed by the occupation, the tanks in the streets, soldiers at every corner, midnight searches of houses, resistance fighters strung up on the fence of the courthouse…
It was a dangerous time but my mother, Hilde, had always been fearless. From the beginning she allied herself with the resistance. I know that to many this makes her a hero, but as you will see there was a great deal more to it than that. If I learned nothing else during the six years of the occupation it was that the world is infinitely more complex than it seems.
The summer I turned eleven, I went to the Manor House for the first time along with my mother and my eight year old sister Alma.
The Manor House was a huge mansion located out in the desert. Originally intended as a summer retreat for a very wealthy family it had long since fallen into disuse. After the occupation, the owner of the house offered it to resistance leaders to use as a sort of secret base. Isolated as it was, the Manor House was ideal for this, however to minimize detection (and simply because the resistance lacked the resources) no improvements could be made on the house which was a tumbling down horror.
In the Manor House windows were broken and ceilings collapsed. The vast marble swimming pool was thick with scum and algae. Mold grew on the walls and the rooms were strewn with the droppings of the wild animals that made their home there. This was where my family would make our home.
Along with my family, the Manor House was occupied by commanding officers in the resistance army and a number of men and women who like my mother were specialists in various fields, lending their expertise to the cause. I was somewhat baffled by this arrangement. I couldn’t see how biologists, chemists, or a psychiatrist like Hilde would be any use in a war.
The majority of the soldiers, anyone below the rank of Sergeant, camped out in the desert. Our mother had strictly forbidden Alma and I to have anything to do with them. However at first Hilde spent much of her time sequestered in her makeshift laboratory deep in the bowels of the Manor House, giving Alma and I ample time to explore at our leisure.
Looking back it was probably extremely dangerous for two little girls to be creeping about a camp of armed soldiers prepared for battle but Alma and I were, in our way, fearless as our mother. Spying on the soldiers became our favorite pastime.
When the soldiers were around the house they were very disciplined and polite. They went about their duties with mechanical efficiency looking neither right nor left. When they did interact with their superiors or the specialists they used as few words as possible, usually only a “yes, sir” or a “no, ma’am.” They were very different when they were by themselves in the desert drilling. No less efficient, they were loud and coarse. They used words I had never heard but which I sensed contained a crude and violent sexuality.
Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker.
When we were in bed at night Alma and I would whisper these words to each other, treasuring the pieces of adultness we had somehow found ourselves in possession of.
“Motherfucker, asshole, twat, faggot.”
Sometimes, Alma and I would sneak about to the soldier’s tents and watch them when they were at their leisure. Here, all the discipline fell away. Hanging around the tents they hardly seemed different than the boys my own age I had known in school. They joked and roughhoused with each other. They complained about the food and the lack of girls, they had contests to see who could pee furthest, longest, with the greatest accuracy.
Peeing seemed to be a great source of delight to the soldiers and it was through peeing that Alma and I would first make contact with Gideon, who would become our soldier.
One day we were hiding behind some of the scrubby desert bushes. As the soldiers marched by one of them slipped behind the bushes and began to pee. Then he spotted us but instead of chasing us away or even being embarrassed he only winked playfully in our direction as he continued to relieve himself. Several weeks later we spoke to him for the first time. He told us that his name was Gideon. He said he liked to be around little girls and that we were always welcome to talk to him and promised he wouldn’t tell Hilde about our visits to the soldier’s camp.
Gideon would change dramatically as time passed. When we first saw him, he was tall and lanky but months of training would build him up bigger and bigger. By the time I was thirteen and Sammus had become our tutor Gideon was a giant, his hugely muscled arms easily as big around as my waist. He was our window into the world of the soldiers. He would help us hide places where we could listen to them undetected and find out all sorts of things about them, about what went on around the base and about the war.
Alma and I adored Gideon, we felt entirely at ease in his presence to the point where we could sit on his knee and say our special words to each other as if we were alone in bed.
Gideon was our special secret. We met him often by the outside walls of the Manor House where the overgrown remains of the garden hid us from prying eyes.
We had been at the manor house for over a year when a strange little man named Sammus became our tutor.
Alma and I were not told where he came from or anything about him but from the beginning we sensed that something about him was off. Sammus was an adult, yet he had the round, unformed face of a baby and the scrawny body of a young boy. He was a man, but there was something prissy and feminine about the way he spoke and moved. He showed a fussy concern for my sister and me that no male ought to have displayed.
It wasn’t just Sammus either; it was the way the people around us reacted to him. The adults around the Manor House didn’t chat with him. They didn’t ask him how he was doing or gossip or complain about the filth we lived in. They looked away when he went by and spoke quietly to each other when they knew we were out of earshot. Sometimes they spoke too soon and we would overhear a bit of what was said.
“Sammus seems to be holding up.”
“He must be particularly susceptible.”
“Hilde does good work.”
“Still, I wouldn’t trust him with my children…”
The fact that adults treated Sammus like this endeared him to Alma and me. Like us he was beneath the notice of grown-ups but also somehow problematic, a cause for concern.
Sammus rarely took us outside of the Manor House but when he did, we got quite a different reaction from the soldiers of the rank and file. They reacted to Sammus with open hostility, shouting at him, calling him a son of a bitch, an occupier and a faker.
I was confused, so I asked Gideon about it.
“You girls shouldn’t have nothing to do with that guy,” he told us. “He’s dangerous. He’s a solider, like me, but part of the occupation. ‘stead of shooting him they let your mother go to work on him, she’s got him hypnotized. He don’t know where he is or who he is anymore.”
I felt very bad for Sammus and I said so.
“It’s a messed up situation,” Gideon agreed. “I almost feel sorry for the guy even though he’s one of them. He’d be better off dead; at least his soul would be his own.”
Gideon didn’t know a lot about what went on in the Manor House, but I spent most of my time there and gradually began to learn more and more about Sammus from the talk of the specialists and officers.
First of all, Sammus wasn’t the only prisoner of the occupying army kept in the Manor House, he was however my mother’s prize specimen. She had been able to completely subdue his actual memories and personality. As Gideon said, Sammus didn’t know who or where he was any more. He had no understanding that he was in enemy hands. He believed he had been hired as our tutor and that the Manor House was the luxurious mansion it had been years before. He also believed that he was a young woman. Alma and I giggled when we learned this-it explained so much about Sammus’ bearing-but other things I discovered were much more distressing.
One afternoon as we hid on the staircase by the pool Alma and I overheard a behavioral specialist who worked with our mother talking to a brash Lieutenant who was just back from the front. From their conversation I learned for the first time that our mother was fucking Sammus.
“That’s just wrong,” the Lieutenant said loud enough for it to carry over the entire vast pool area. “She hypnotized him so he doesn’t know what’s what and now she’s fucking him? That’s gotta be against some law.”
“Everything that goes on here is against ‘some law’,” the behaviorist said coldly. “We need Hilde, the resistance needs her. If she wants to sleep with her headcases, let her. She’s making a major contribution to the cause.”
“Shit,” the Lieutenant said. “Shit. I’m not sure which is worse. Her fucking him or her letting him look after her kids like she does. What if he remembers who he is? He could kill those little girls.”
“Hilde has confidence in her work. We’ve sent prisoners she’s worked on back into the occupying army, her creations are seamless.”
“It’s craziness I tell you, bat-shit craziness.”
“Maybe so but the future of our country might just hinge on this craziness.”
What I had heard made me proud and confused all at once. My mother was a very important person. My mother might also be a very bad person, but hadn’t I always known that? She had always had a selfish recklessness, a certain disregard for Alma and I. While I was alarmed by what I heard I did not doubt any of it. The behaviorist and the Lieutenant knew my mother as well as I did.
When I began to spy on Hilde, I knew what I would find. It took me several weeks but I did find it, after all there was only a makeshift plywood partition with a crooked hinged door separating her bedroom from where Alma and I slept. I heard and I saw her with Sammus and soon I understood what they did if not why.
Of course I told Gideon. He was very interested in hearing about my mother’s nocturnal adventures with the hypnotized enemy solider and never grew impatient as Alma and I went on and on about the things we had discovered. Some of them we even demonstrated for Gideon, on each other or on him. I remember straddling his heavily muscled thigh, bouncing up and down to show him how Hilde rode her toy. At times like this we all had to be careful not to giggle too loudly and give away our hiding place.
Without Gideon to warn us to keep quiet, it didn’t take Hilde long to catch us spying on her. One night we were peeping through a crack in the door when she got off Sammus and languidly strolled over, pushing the door open to reveal Alma and I.
“So now you know,” she said with one of her cruel smiles. “That makes things easier.”
After that, Hilde made no effort to hide her relationship (such as it was) with Sammus either from us or from anyone else around the Manor House. Quite publicly she would kiss and caress Sammus. During those odd times when Hilde wasn’t working and Sammus wasn’t watching us we would see them sitting beside the murky pool, our mother snuggled up against him.
“A lot of the boys doesn’t like what your mother’s doing,” Gideon told us. “I’ve heard them saying that a beautiful woman like that ought to be with one of us, not an enemy.”
I heard grumbling criticism of Hilde’s behavior everywhere. She seemed to be reaching the limits of how far she could go. Most outspoken was the Lieutenant.
“It’s like she’s cut off his dick and is using it to pleasure herself right in front of us all,” he said with undisguised contempt for anyone to hear. “I don’t want to see that kind of shit… and in front of those kids too. It ain’t decent.” Whenever he spoke like this there were murmurs of agreement.
Hilde however was unconcerned.
Since we’d arrived at the Manor House she had been reprogramming prisoners, sending them back to the occupying army as ticking time bombs. Her time bombs began going off right on schedule, making a devastating impact on the enemy. Suddenly Hilde could do no wrong, the hostility towards her evaporated. If she wanted to spend her precious moments of leisure lounging around on top of a brainwashed prisoner so be it. Even the Lieutenant seemed to have made his peace with her.
Morality can be a flexible thing, particularly in times of war.
Alma and I learned from our mother that we ought to be able to do as we pleased. We also learned how to control Sammus.
She had a fur piece she had worn before we came to the desert. Sometimes when no one was about she would take it out, stroke the fur against Sammus’ cheek and sing -
“Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
She is sorry to be delayed,
but last evening down in Lover's Lane she strayed, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.”
As she sang his eyes would glaze over and she would whisper in his ear what she wanted him to do, who and where he was.
Alma and I had no fur pieces but we were able to improvise. In one of the unused rooms of the Manor House we found a dead squirrel. With a pair of shears, we cut off its tail and the next time we tired of our lessons I rubbed it against our tutor’s cheek while together Alma and I sang.
“When she woke up and found that her dream of love was gone, madam,
She ran to the man who had led her so far astray,
And from under her velvet gown,
She drew a gun and shot her lover down, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.”
It worked as well for us as it had for Hilde. Sammus’ eyes went dead and he would do as we said. Most often we had him take us outside so that we could have secret meetings with our Gideon. He was very impressed by the way we’d been able to take control of Sammus and pleased that we were able to spend more time with him.
As a game, Alma and I would try to hypnotize Gideon. We’d often seen Hilde do it. She could put almost anyone into a trance so deep she would stick pins in them and they wouldn’t even notice. Alma and I weren’t quite so good. Whenever we thought we had put Gideon under he would suddenly grin and pounce on us, tickling us all over. We had to be careful to silence our laughs and shrieks or the patrolling soldiers nearby would have heard.
Each time we visited Gideon, each time he tickled us things went a little further. One day his hand would graze my thigh. The next day it would linger there. The next day he would stroke my leg before he let me up… each day a little further. At the time, I thought nothing of it. It was affection, something my sister and I were eager for and Gideon was so natural and friendly neither of us ever resisted or asked him to stop.
I can’t even say for certain that I wanted him to stop.
Each time, things went a little further but everyday Alma and I went to him, our vacant-eyed tutor in tow.
One day Gideon was tickling me. I was under the bulk of his huge body and the skirt of my dress was up around my waist. Alma gasped when he pulled my panties off but fell silent when he shushed her. He told me that he would be careful not to hurt me but when he put his finger inside me I would have screamed if he hadn’t put his hand over my mouth. There would have been more, he would have done to me the thing we’d seen our mother do to Sammus so many times but suddenly there was a loud noise and Gideon’s huge body seemed to have been picked up and slammed away from me.
I pulled down my dress. Only then did I look up and see Sammus standing there. Gideon’s gun was in his shaking hand. Something was different about him, that unformed look about his face was gone and his eyes seemed to glow in the desert sun. Something about those eyes told me that for the first time in the almost two years I’d known him he was himself. Not Hilde’s toy, not our tutor, not a prisoner of war but a solider.
And he knew. He knew everything, remembered everything. All those days of believing he was our governess, all those nights with Hilde, I could almost feel the air rippling with motion as everything passed before those eyes.
I wasn’t at all surprised when he put the smoking gun to his temple.
“Don’t,” I said. Alma was screaming and crying. Several resistance soldiers had appeared from the nearby camp, their weapons drawn.
“Stand down,” one of them screamed at Sammus. “Drop your weapon, move away from those girls…”
Sammus pulled the trigger. My mother’s toy, her choice specimen, splattered his well-washed brains over the walls of the Manor House.
Someone cheered.
Alma and I never told the truth about what happened. We never told what Gideon had tried to do or how Sammus had saved me. It was easier to pretend that Sammus had somehow broken his programming and seized Gideon’s weapon. It was easier to pretend that Gideon had died defending us and that Sammus was the villain. Easier for the adults, easier for Alma and I-we had loved Gideon after all. He had been our soldier, our special secret whereas Sammus had never been anything to us but our mother’s puppet.
After Gideon and Sammus’ deaths, Alma and I were sent away from the Manor House to a girl’s school. Hilde continued her work, the war raged on.
When I was sixteen years old the occupation ended. What had been the resistance became the army and the Manor House was abandoned for legitimate bases. Two years later the war ended. That was twenty years ago.
After the war, Hilde returned to private practice. She was well respected for her involvement in the resistance. Whatever questionable things she may have done were forgiven because she had the grace to be on the winning side.