Chapter 2 - Chapter Two

The next day as dawn broke, Mabel mounted her new husband’s scrawny old mule. She had wrapped the few possessions she owned in a small bundle and tied it on behind her. Galen took the reins and led her away from the only home she had ever known. They left the little village of Fanny-on-Poke behind, and crossed the rickety bridge over the Deep Gash. From there they traveled south along well-worn paths for two days. They slept wrapped together in an old blanket underneath the stars. At last they arrived at the little cottage snuggled under the eaves of the Dark Wood. 

Fanny-on-Poke had not been far from the fabled forest. An old, winding path led from behind the tanner’s sheds through some low hills and from there to the very doorstep of the Dark Wood itself. Once, as a child, Mabel and her playmates had followed the path until they came to the edge of it. They had teased each other, daring each other to enter. At last Mabel had boasted she would go in, and then Hildred said she would too. 

Hand-in-hand, the two girls walked hesitantly into the forest. Behind them they could hear their friends calling, “Further, further, we can still see you!” Hildred had been squeezing Mabel’s hand so tightly that it hurt. But in fact, Mabel saw nothing particularly alarming: only tall trees illuminated by the occasional shaft of sunlight breaking through the leafy canopy. Birds chittered and called to each other above them.

Suddenly, they had heard the loud crack of a twig snapping behind them. Hildred shrieked and both girls whirled around to see what was behind them. But it was only one of the village boys. He had crept in after them to give them a scare. Hildred charged at the boy, crying out that she was going to beat him black and blue, and he fled in terror. Mabel laughed as her sister chased the boy out of the woods. 

After a moment, she was suddenly aware she was now alone under the eaves of the Dark Wood. The birds had gone quiet. Feeling uneasy, Mabel made up her mind to go back. But first she took one last look around. That was when she spotted something: a woman—dressed in white and wearing a white flower in her hair—standing among the trees. She was looking right at Mabel. Mabel’s heart stopped. She was sure the woman had not been there a moment before. Mabel turned and ran as fast as she could. Right before she reached the edge of the Dark Wood, she glanced behind her. There was no sign of the woman. 

Mabel did not tell the other children what she had seen. Nor did she go back to the forest.

But here in her new home, Mabel had only to look out the rear window of the cottage to see the mighty gray trunks of the Dark Wood looming up.  The branches shaded her turnip patch. 

Her first night in the cottage she woke in the dark with a start. She sat bolt upright in the little cot she shared with Galen. For a moment, she did not know where she was. Then she remembered she was far from her childhood home. She was all alone in a strange bed under a strange roof with her new husband. Why have I awakened? she wondered. Then she heard it: lonely howls coming from the dark depths of the Dark Wood. A chill like ice water ran down her spine.

“What’s the matter, sweet?” murmured her husband sleepily.

“Galen,” she whispered, “There are wolves out there!”

“Mm,” said Galen. “Safe here. Sleep.” He patted her bare hip absently.

“Safe?” asked Mabel. Her bare breasts pimpled with goosebumps, and her nipples were stiff with cold and fear. Every shape silhouetted by the dim moonlight seemed ominous. “I’m frightened by the Dark Wood, Galen.” She plucked urgently at his shoulder. “Aren’t you?”

Her husband sat up and yawned hugely. “Do not be foolish, my sweet,” he said, “I’ve lived my entire life within a stone’s throw of the forest. I go into it every day to gather dead wood. We have nothing to fear.”

“So it is all stories?” asked Mabel.

“No,” admitted Galen. “Not just stories. Sometimes people see things. And I’ve known people who… disappeared… into the forest. But they did not follow the rules. I always follow the rules.”

“What rules?” she asked.

Galen yawned again. “First rule,” he said, “Do not go into the forest after dusk. Second rule: when you’re in the forest, stay on the path. Third rule: if you see shapes or movement in the wood, look away.”

“That is it?” asked Mabel, doubtfully. “We simply do those things and we are safe?”

“Yes,” grumbled Galen. “Now go to sleep.”

“But I’m still frightened,” pouted Mabel. She bit her lower lip and looked at her husband. “Won’t you stay awake for a bit and comfort me?” Mabel cupped one of her ripe breasts with her hand and gave it a little bounce. She spread her legs. With her other hand she hooked a finger into the fleshy folds of her of cunny. 

Galen looked at his wife. The pale moonlight outlined the sensual curves of her nubile body. He was quite sleepy, but he couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward and took the proffered tit into his mouth. He ran his tongue around the wide, peach-blossom areola and then sucked on her long nipple.

“Ooh,” said Mabel. She took Galen’s limp dick in her hand. “My sweet,” she said, giving it a squeeze, “I wish for you to fuck me.”
Galen spat her tit out of his mouth. “Do not say that,” he snapped. “You sound like a common whore.”

“Mmm, yes, I am a whore, honey,” she cooed. “I’m a whore for your cock.”

Suddenly Galen was fully upright next to her. He grabbed her by the hips and shoved her off the bed and onto her knees. He pressed her head down so her face was against the rough floor of the cottage. “If you’re a whore,” he said, “then I shall fuck you like a whore gets fucked.” He pulled her arms back behind her and held them tightly by the wrist. 

Galen shoved his cock deep into her sensitive pussy. It surprised Mabel to find her husband was now fully erect. A white hot bolt of pain shot through her loins. She was dry and tight, not yet prepared to receive her fully engorged husband. She cried out, “Galen, slow down! That hurts!”

“Shut up, you fucking whore,” shouted Galen. “Don’t you like this? Don’t you like having your furrow ploughed like a dirty cunt whore?” Galen pulled his cock out of her. He spat in his hand and rubbed the saliva into her hole. Then he mounted her once more. Mabel gasped as he fucked her relentlessly.

Mabel decided she had better make the best of the situation. There was something deliciously sexy about her husband having complete control over her. Being reduced to a sex object, a warm body for him to spend his seed in, turned her on. Mabel’s pussy flooded with moisture and heat. She began to respond to her husband’s invading prick, bucking her hips against him and moaning. She moaned as his testicles slapped against her as he rammed home his cock over and over. She cried out, “Yes!” every time he called her a whore. She felt a wave of pleasure building inside her. It was about to sweep her away.

Suddenly, Galen pulled out of her and spurted his hot semen all over her arched back and round buttocks. Spent, he collapsed gasping onto the bed. Mabel sat up (slowly, for she was now quite tender) and climbed onto the bed with him. Her husband wrapped his arms around her and he kissed her tenderly for a few moments. After that he immediately fell asleep. Mabel stayed awake for a while afterward, staring up at the ceiling.

Over the days and weeks that followed, Mabel found their sex falling into a similar pattern. Galen did not like it when Mabel tried to initiate sex. He did not like to talk about sex. He might go for days with no apparent interest in her body, even though she frequently tried to tease him. She would flash him a tit or let her skirts ‘accidentally’ ride up over her hips when she bent over. She wanted to make it clear to him that she was young, nubile, and his for the taking. But he seemed disinterested in her and irritated by her advances. 

Galen also did not like it when Mabel used words like ‘fucking’ or said she was his slut or his whore; although that did not stop him from screaming such words at her as he ravished her in the middle of the night. This was when they would usually have sex. Galen would wake her in the darkness with a raging hard on. He would fuck her relentlessly, pounding her cunt as though it was a filthy thing that deserved to be punished. Often he would pin her limbs down or pull her hair while he did this. After he came, there would always be a short window of tenderness that Galen never showed Mabel otherwise. He would kiss her tenderly and caress her face until he fell asleep.

Mabel did not mind being fucked so roughly, not really, even though she was always sore the following day. As for the cruel things Galen said to her when he took her like that, They are merely his fantasies, she thought. He does not really think I’m a whore. That is only sex talk. People say crazy things when they fuck.

But Mabel also believed there were other ways of fucking. They didn’t always have to have rough, dominating sex in the middle of the night. She had glimpsed many different ways that the people in Fanny-on-Poke ‘made love’ (this was the term Galen preferred she use; when he was not brutally pounding her in the dark, at any rate). She had heard reports of still other methods, even more exotic, from her friends. But Galen, it seemed, had no interest in spicing up their sex life. As the months went by, she gave up trying to persuade him.

Mabel’s new life was hard in other ways, too. Galen had hardly any money before she married him, but now he had less. The harvest that year had been poor, and there was precious little coin to go around. Folks were saving what little they had. They were gathering their own firewood when they could. Demand for the woodcutter’s services was slow. 

But Galen was unconcerned. “Do not fret,” he said. “Winter is coming on, and folk will need firewood and lots of it. It is the busiest season for a woodcutter. We shall be all right.”

And as the chilly hand of winter began to grip the land, it seemed to Mabel that her husband spoke true. From dawn until dusk he was now chopping dry branches to supply hungry hearths (though he always left the forest before it was full dark). Mabel helped Galen bind up bundles of firewood, and carry the bundles to their destinations. She enjoyed working side-by-side with her husband.

But the days were shortening quickly. Once snow blanketed the forest, it would be difficult to find any dry wood that would burn, Galen told her. He chopped and bundled wood like a madman, working through every last minute of daylight. 

One cold morning the sky was heavy with the promise of snow. Folk all around reckoned it would snow the next day, if not that night. All day long Galen was in the Dark Wood, swinging his axe till his calloused hands were raw and bleeding. As twilight came on, he was still at it, hacking away in the night-shadows beneath the twisted branches. 

Mabel felt anxious. Her husband had never stayed in the forest so late. He was not far away. She could hear the steady thwack of his axe falling. “Galen,” she called. “It is almost dark! Come home!”

“Only a few more minutes!” he called back. Mabel waited behind the cottage, rubbing her arms with cold and anxiety. 

It was at that moment that disaster struck. The axe sounded with a thump instead of a thwack and Mabel heard her husband scream. She ran into the forest toward the sound, but was met by her husband running the opposite way. 

“What is it?” she cried. “Something in the woods?”

“No,” wheezed Galen. She gasped when she saw he was bleeding freely from a deep gash in his right arm. “My axe head flew off the handle, bounced off the tree and struck me in the arm. Go for the old medicine woman. Now. Run!”

Mabel ran, following the old dirt road to the cottage of the crone who saw to the aches and pains of the local peasants. The woman showed surprising spunk when she heard what had happened, and the two of them ran back to the cottage as quickly as they could. They found Galen had already tied up his arm with a piece of cloth. The medicine woman unknotted the tourniquet and probed the wound with her sharp fingers while he winced with pain. 

“Tis a deep one, right enough,” she said. “You’re lucky you did not lose the arm, boy. I shall pack it with herbs and stitch it up with my needle and thread.” Galen whimpered. The medicine woman ignored him. “Dearie, you must change his bandage every candle until the bleeding stops. Then we wait.”

“Wait for what?” asked Mabel.

“Why, to see if the rot sets in, girl,” the old woman said. “Better pray to the saints you do not need me back here in a day or two to saw this arm off.”
Time passed, and winter arrived in earnest. Howling winds piled snowdrifts against their little cottage. Galen’s arm, it seemed, would not need to come off. It did not turn black or begin to stink, as the old woman had warned them it might. But it did not seem to be in any hurry to heal either. Even after the wound had closed, the arm was painful and exceedingly stiff. Galen could barely lift a ladleful of soup with the arm, let alone swing an axe with it. For Mabel, a new worry set in.

On clear winter days it had been Galen’s custom to work on clearing the field for next spring, or to go into the forest to search for dry wood. Now this kind of manual labor was impossible for him. Mabel did what she could in the field and the cottage, but she could not chop wood. She found after only one brief experiment with the axe that she was more likely to damage herself than the tree.

Galen vacillated between moodiness, impatience, despondence, and rage. He constantly reproached himself. “I was a damned fool to remain in the forest after dark,” he said. “Bad luck has come upon me.”

Mabel shook her head. “You told me not to stay in the forest after dark because of what lives in there, not because of bad luck,” she said.

“It’s all the same, isn’t it?” snapped Galen.

“I should say it is bad luck to chop wood in the dark, haunted forest or no,” she snapped back.

In normal times such a heated exchange might have resulted in Mabel finding herself on her knees in the middle of the night while Galen impaled her with his relentless cock, but this time it did not. Galen’s arm hurt him too much for such activity. They did not fuck, nor did they ‘make love’.

Mabel became desperately horny. One afternoon, after Galen had been laying on the bed in a surly mood all day, she grabbed her cloak and escaped the confines of their cottage. She set off into the woods with no particular direction in mind. She simply needed to get away. After she had walked for a few minutes, she found herself in a small clearing. There was no one around, no one on the nearby path, not a sound but wind and the cry of distant birds. 

Mabel leaned back against a tree and hiked up her skirts. With her right hand she rubbed her plump vulva. There was a thrill of danger about exposing herself out here. What if someone came upon her? What if they were watching her now, leaning against a tree with her skirt above her waist, legs apart and hips thrust forward, shamelessly touching herself?

She found this idea was surprisingly sexy. She began to fantasize about it: 

A dark figure walks out of the woods. It is a man, dark-haired and strong. He looks at me. I’m horny and I want to see what he will do. I do not cover myself. I do not stop. I am lewdly rubbing my cunt, right in front of him. The strange man smiles. He walks up to me. The next thing I know he is kissing me roughly. I cannot help myself. I kiss back. He pushes my hand out of the way and reaches down between my legs himself. I let him, even though I know it’s wrong. I let this strange man stick three large, rough fingers into me like a common whore.

Mabel spread herself wide and delved into her snatch with her own fingers. Back in Fanny-on-Poke, one of her girlfriends had once told her she liked to use one finger for this. But Mabel found three was best. Perhaps that did make her a whore. She didn’t care at that moment. She was wet. In fact, she was practically gushing. Wetness was running down the inside of her thighs. 

She returned to her fantasy of the stranger in the wood:

I pull the man’s thick furs open. Underneath he is naked. His body is very hairy. His manhood stiffens and swells when I touch it. He grabs me roughly by my bottom and lifts me. I wrap my arms and legs around his powerful torso. We kiss again, deeper this time, open mouth to open mouth, tongue against tongue. I feel his swollen tip against my little twat. He lowers me onto his erect shaft. His iron grip pulls my ass cheeks apart. Then he impales me on his fat cock. He holds me tight with strong arms, bouncing me up and down on his pole. I bury my face in his hairy chest. I lick his nipples. I surrender my body to him completely.

Mabel was now frigging herself furiously with both hands. Waves of sensation were wracking her body. She bit back a cry.

At last it was over. Mabel leaned against the tree, panting. It occurred to her that she had just fantasized about being fucked by a man who was definitely not her husband. She had pleasured herself openly in the forest. Shame burned in her cheeks. How wantonly she was behaving! If Galen knew… She did not know what her husband would have thought.

Something caught her eye through the trees. Quickly she covered herself and rearranged her skirts. Was someone out here? After a moment she realized it was sunlight reflecting off something. She stood up and walked through the snow toward it. There, not far away, she came upon a frozen pond. It was an almost perfect oval. A small waterfall fed into it, although it was now totally iced over. 

“Oh, how lovely!” she exclaimed. She imagined in the spring it would be breathtaking, a nice, secret place for a refreshing bath. She made a note of the spot and vowed to return.
