Until six weeks ago, Pat would have thought anything was better than hospital work. In fact, when she’d been hired as a private live-in nurse down South, she’d thought it ideal: generous pay, easy hours to let her pursue her further education, and no rent. The recruitment agency could tell her little about her patient/employer Alastair Darragh; what little she’d picked up since did not extend far past the observations that he was a cantankerous recluse who’d driven away previous nurses, an expert in occult studies, and was older than God - but with more money. His Georgian manor was nestled in the heart of the Wicklow Mountains, miles from anywhere, let alone a pub or club. It was more museum than home, littered with ugly voodoo masks and obscene paintings collected from around the world, half of the rooms kept constantly locked, and a blanket ban on nearly everything that might provide Pat with some pleasure: liquor, TVs, radios. And apart from Darragh and Pat, it housed only the housekeeper and gardener. The housekeeper, a dour middle-aged spinster named Niamh, barely spoke two words to Pat in six weeks. The gardener, Brendan, was all mouth, and hands to match. In other circumstances, his swaggering demeanour would have been enough to put off Pat. Here, however, claustrophobic, bored and angry, she needed whatever small amusement and diversion he could provide. ‘Aah, lovely,’ he gasped, writhing beneath her parted thighs, lifting his buttocks slightly to meet her, as he reached up to knead her breasts. ‘No, no, no,’ Pat scolded gently, grasping his wrists and pinning them back onto the mattress, glad for his lack of resistance at her nominal control. She enjoyed a man fondling her breasts, but it made her climax too quickly. ‘We’ve got all night, Tiger. Ladies first.’ ‘Jesus,’ he snarled, slamming his head back against the pillow. ‘You must have come a hundred times by now.’ ‘You wish, stud,’ she teased, grateful he wasn’t bright enough to see through her lie. He was a stunning piece of work, a rough diamond, with his dark, saturnine features, mop of truculent black hair, and a broad, hirsute bullet of a body, built to win rugby championships. As for his tackle, well… ‘Aah, lovely,’ she echoed him, letting another climax spark and flood within her, making her tighten reflexively around his erection. Maintaining a slow, steady rhythm, the mild squeak of the bedsprings the only sound between them now, she let the waves of pleasure pass through her like a shiver, before working her way towards another. Brendan’s own control had been admirable, and it had been an inexcusably long time since she last indulged in such a marathon bout of deep multiples - The buzzer sounded. Pat’s hands released Brendan’s wrists and pounded the mattress in bold frustration. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ Brendan was gasping, as if waking from a dream. ‘Fuck him, let me finish first.’ He started thrusting rapidly upwards, easily raising Pat up off the mattress with him. But she shook her head, the spell broken and not particularly caring for his needs. ‘You know what the old bastard’s like.’ With an involuntary moan she lifted herself up further, until Brendan slid out of her, and that execrable sense of emptiness, of incompleteness, returned. He reached for her, but she slid out of his grasp and padded over to her uniform. Brendan sat up, his erection pointing towards her like some divining rod. ‘They should have put that old fossil down when he passed 100.’ Forgoing her bra and knickers - it wasn’t as if the Old Man would know, would he? - she quickly pulled her tights up over her firm legs and hips, then donned the salmon pink uniform. ‘Is he really that old?’ ‘Are you kidding? They were calling him Old Man Darragh when my Da was a boy!’ The buzzer sounded again, more insistent, and Pat stepped into her shoes and checked out her reflection in the cheval mirror. Her honey blonde burr was short enough that it rarely needed much attention; her broad cheeks were flushed, but running to Darragh’s suite should cover that; her skin glistened with sweat, but that could be blamed on the summer heat. No lewd behaviour between the servants. What a crock of shit. Brendan was behind her, holding her by the waist and poking his erection between her cheeks. ‘We should kill him,’ he whispered. Pat nodded absently as the buzzer sounded yet again. ‘Fine. You come up with a foolproof plan, and I’ll consider it.’ She disentangled herself from his clutches, opened her door and fled down the darkened corridors. ‘Food! Food!’ ‘Yes, yes, Mr Darragh.’ Pat turned away to snarl to herself as she prepared his apple sauce. ‘Food, bitch!’ Pat bit back her initial reaction as she faced him again, easily believing that he might be well over a thousand years old, let alone a hundred. Darragh was a gaunt, wrinkled, long and sunken-faced, tombstone-toothed coatrack of a man, more stick insect than human-seeming, with lingering silver hair and an ant’s trail of liver spots collecting at his forehead and crawling down into the folds of his brocaded, burgundy dressing gown. Pat had bathed him on a regular basis, and now tried not to recall how he looked naked; it was difficult though, like trying not to stare at a road accident. She mustered up her most practised patronising tone as she waved the plastic spoon before him. ‘Here we go, Mr Darragh, lovely din dins.’ ‘Slut.’ Hunched forward in his wheelchair, he spasmed slightly as his jaw dropped to accept the first spoonful. It was a mercilessly slow procedure, punctuated with wiping his lips and chin as his verbal abuse continued between swallows. Until finally, ‘There you go, Mr Darragh, all done.’ ‘Fat ugly sow.’ He raised his head and fixed his twin black eyes at her, eyes sharp and aware; he knew what he was saying, at least part of the time. Pat had a hundred replies ready; six weeks of such harassment had eroded her spirit to the point that not even the pay made all of this worthwhile, and she had nightmares of spending the rest of her life in this place, helplessly serving this disgusting man. But when she spoke, it was with scant civility, as taut as a hangman’s rope. ‘You really should be more polite to your staff, Mister Darragh.’ The old man chuckled, narrowing his gaze as he made a pantomime show of sniffing the air. ‘I can smell you.’ More swiftly than Pat would have imagined, his hand shot down and up beneath the hem of her uniform, and his forefinger pressed between the lips of her sex, through the insubstantial material of her tights. She pulled back, too late, as he brought his forefinger up to the light; it glistened, from Pat’s own wetness. ‘Whore,’ was his verdict. Her hands balled into fists, her face boiling, Pat spun and left Darragh cackling into his lap like a witch over a cauldron, casting black spells. ‘Miserable old fucker! I hate his guts!’ Brendan sat in her bedroom chair, dressed once more in his jeans and shirt, casually smoking as he watched Pat pace her bedroom like a leopard in a cage. ‘Never would have guessed.’ ‘Do you know how often I’ve held back from throttling him?’ ‘Too often.’ ‘Bastard!’ She slammed her fist into the nearest wall, cursing again as she nursed her bruised knuckles. A little calmer now, she added, ‘I really could kill him.’ ‘I believe you. And we will.’ Pat had started pacing again, but now stopped in her tracks. ‘What?’ ‘You said earlier if I came up with a foolproof plan, you’d consider it. I’ve been working on one for days now. Interested?’ ‘Are you serious?’ His expression, deadly earnest, was his reply. ‘But we couldn’t -’ ‘Why not?’ The reasons were not so quickly or easily forthcoming to Pat. When she finally spoke, it was almost defiantly. ‘I’m not risking gaol just for revenge.’ ‘Neither am I. Darragh has a fortune in cash, stashed in his bedroom, that no one else knows about.’ ‘Then how do you know?’ Brendan winked at her. ‘You’ll see. Anyway, I examined it while you were bathing him one time, and started counting.’ His eyes lit up with the memory. ‘I stopped at a million - before I’d even gone through half of it.’ Pat’s mind quickly juggled the figures. ‘Two million punts?’ He nodded. ‘Undeclared, no doubt. You see, we can’t take any of the paintings or ornaments; they’re probably registered, and Niamh might open her mouth if anything like that went missing. But the money… ’ His words trailed away into a low, steady sound like laughter. Pat felt herself reeling. A million for her, almost more money than she could imagine. But still… ‘How could he -’ ‘Die? Heart attack.’ Pat nodded slowly. Yes, that would be the most believable way. ‘But wouldn’t suspicions be raised, with a nurse living here and all?’ Now Brendan’s smile blossomed into a grin. ‘They’ll be too embarrassed about the circumstances surrounding his heart giving out.’ Pat never frequented the linen closet near Darragh’s suite - that was Niamh’s zealously-guarded territory - nor, until tonight, had ever expected to do so. It smelled of warm, clean cotton and mothballs, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves flanking the closet’s narrow length added to Pat’s stomach-churning claustrophobia. ‘Brendan -’ He silenced her swiftly with a gesture, then took hold of a cardboard box sitting on an eye-level shelf, before reaching for the light switch. She blinked as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, then edged closer to Brendan as she heard him move the box aside, revealing a shaft of light behind - a hole in the closet wall? She felt him guide her towards the hole. She did, trying not to gasp at what she saw beyond. The bedroom was not Darragh’s; this was Spartan in the extreme: a bare mattress and boxspring, books and magazines at the floor beside it, naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the walls a bare, bold white but broken by faint, arcane scribblings, like some prehistoric cave, and the windows boarded up. And the Dolls. And not fragile porcelain miniatures, either: two dozen or more inflatable, life-size latex women of all shapes and colours. Some with moulded plastic hair, others with more realistic strands woven into the scalps. Some with come-hither smiles, others with parted, O-shaped lips, ready to accept whatever their master offered them. Some naked, others dressed in various costumes, some complete with pubic hair, others more basic, hairless models. They stood or slumped together in one corner, as if cowering there by some terrifying beast. Speak of the Devil… A door in the far corner opened, and Darragh wheeled himself in with vigour, muttering with unconcealed glee. Pat stepped back involuntarily, but Brendan leaned closer and whispered, ‘He can’t see us; the old bastard’s too nearsighted -’ ‘Where is that?’ she whispered back. ‘The room next to his bedroom. There’s another hole on the next wall, to look in there. That’s how I found out about the money cache.’ ‘But how can he- in his condition-’ Then she saw him rise from the chair, without difficulty. ‘He can walk,’ Pat hissed in disbelief. ‘All those times he had me lift him in and out of bed, the bath - that fucker -’ ‘Hush. Keep watching.’ She did. Darragh shucked off his robe and stood there, a naked stick insect nursing a steadily-growing erection with a no-longer-arthritic hand. As he did this, he mumbled to himself as he surveyed his latex harem, his discriminating gaze casting over each motionless, waiting figure. Then he selected one, a redhead in a frilly French maid’s outfit, grabbing and flinging it onto the bed, before pouncing unceremoniously on top of it. A moment’s clumsy fumbling, and Darragh seemed to find his target. Pat drew herself away from the peephole as her employer began thrusting away. Brendan took her place, chuckling. ‘That’s his favourite; did you notice how it looks like Niamh?’ ‘Is there a point to all this?’ ‘Yes - look again.’ ‘Must I? It’s not exactly a memory I want to take to bed with me tonight.’ ‘Do it.’ She did. Darragh had switched positions, and was now attacking his latex lover from behind. There was still power to his thrusts, complete with various obscenities muttered at random intervals. But with that came a laboured, almost ragged breathing; she could see the rivulets of sweat on his arms, back and buttocks. It was probably the most intensive activity Darragh ever had now, and definitely too intensive for a man of his age and condition. Beside her, Brendan hissed in her ear like a snake, gently fondling her breasts, though not enough to distract her too much from his words. ‘The Old Man’s really pushing his heart to the limit for a piece of inflated plastic.’ He gave her a squeeze, then held it, as if to brace her for his subsequent words. ‘What would happen if he was confronted with warm, solid flesh and blood?’ ‘You’re out of your fucking twisted mind!’ ‘Maybe, but hear me out -’ ‘I’m not putting that damn thing on!’ Brendan let her continue her pacing, waiting for her to run out of steam before holding up the wrinkled, patchwork latex bodysuit again. ‘You’re hurting my feelings, Pat. After all the work I’ve put into making it for you?’ ‘You fucking wear it, then!’ ‘‘I think my tackle might give the game away too soon,’ he noted dryly. Pat continued to glare at Brendan’s creation. ‘And you expect me to fool the Old Man with that obscene outfit?’ He moved closer, noting how she didn’t back away this time. ‘He’s nearsighted, he’s half-senile, and like all men, when he’s bursting to get his end away, he won’t stop to ask questions first.’ Pat’s face was still screwed up with disgust. ‘I probably won’t even fit into it, anyway.’ ‘I made it out of a couple of the Old Man’s punctured, discarded girlfriends; it should be big enough to accommodate your… generous frame.’ He laughed as he dodged a swing from her. ‘It’ll still be open in the back, and you’ll be able to breath through the false face.’ ‘And what about…?’ Pat, uncharacteristically lost for words, grabbed her crotch in mime. ‘Oh, that.’ He laughed again as he manoeuvred the outfit in his hands to show the crotch. ‘The artificial vagina is still intact, and can be fitted into your own, so you can squeeze him. These models also usually have an artificial rectum, but since your real back will be exposed anyway, I’m sure you can keep him occupied enough with your front end.’ ‘This’ll never work.’ With an exasperated sigh, Pat finally took hold of her intended outfit, fingering it; the feel, the smell of it, wasn’t as bad as she first imagined. She stared at its false face: hardened plastic compared with the rest of the body, it presented its owner with a rosy-cheeked cherub, its damask lips opened and waiting. Its eyes were removed, and only its blonde forelocks remained, though at least their colour approximated Pat’s own. ‘The way I have it worked out,’ Brendan continued, ‘As long as you don’t leave any bruises or marks on him, and set his body up with one of his girlfriends, there’s no reason why the authorities won’t think he hadn’t popped his clogs with her, instead of you.’ Pat was only half-listening. It was madness, sheer madness. So why hadn’t she thrown this monstrosity back in his face at the beginning? ‘And you really expect me to let that spindly old fucker plant his rod into me?’ Brendan reached up and cupped Pat’s face in his broad, strong hand. His voice was still low, as seductive as when he first made this proposition, but it was also serious. ‘I think that a million punts can buy a great many drinks to help you forget.’ He smiled as his own mind edified his words. ‘It can buy long, lazy days on a Caribbean beach, and long, hard nights in the best Ibiza clubs. It can buy Ferraris, and diamonds, and-’ ‘All right, all right,’ she conceded, as if convinced. And she knew she really was convinced, despite her childhood fears of damnation for sin, despite her ethics as a nurse to preserve life. She shook her head to dispel her lingering doubts, as she handed him back the outfit and began to strip off her clothes. Still, she had to add, ‘I still don’t think it’ll fit.’ But it did. It was a tight squeeze, like wearing Spandex, but it wasn’t completely claustrophobic, and at least the latex stretched in the appropriate places without tearing. Her breasts hung free through the openings where the plastic chest was once attached, and her hands fit into the mitten-like appendages. The eyeholes were adequate rather than ideal, and the open mouthpiece meant she’d have to duplicate its deep-throat gesture in order to pass any cursory examination. She felt the air on her back, where there was nothing to keep the outfit closed, and between her legs, which weren’t meant to stay closed anyway. Pat saw herself in the mirror. It was no different, she assured herself, than attending some bizarre - extremely bizarre - fancy dress party. With a million punt prize at the end for Best Costume and Performance. ‘I can’t believe I’m going through with this. Fucking a hideous old man to death.’ ‘For a million punts.’ ‘I want to see the money first.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘And I want you watching when I’m with him.’ ‘Kinky bitch.’ ‘In case he tries to attack me, or something.’ ‘Of course, pet.’ She sighed. Brendan appeared close behind her, turning her from the mirror to face him; his touch felt strange, without warmth, with her second skin separating them. ‘Think of it this way: what’s the worst that can happen?’ He kissed her plastic lips, inserting his tongue past them into her real mouth before she could answer. Timing was critical. Brendan said Darragh visited his latex harem at more or less the same times, but they waited until after Niamh had gone home for the evening. Then, minutes before Darragh’s evening visit, Brendan would distract him in the hallway, while Pat slipped through Darragh’s bedroom into his other room. He’d keep watching through the peepholes, Brendan had repeatedly assured her. Pat wasn’t entirely sure of that. She was sure she didn’t entirely trust Brendan, and that if the right opportunity arose, she’d fuck off with the full two million. She had her passport with her; she could be in Brazil by tomorrow evening; of course she’d miss her family and friends, but two million punts could easily salve her homesickness. The room was cold and eerie, and smelled of months of accumulated, desiccated sweat and other bodily fluids. In the corner, the dolls stared almost accusingly at her, the latest addition to the harem. Pat ignored them, too busy was she fighting the butterflies in her stomach, and the pee threatening to escape and run down her thighs. Think of it as a prank, she told herself, feeling as if her heart would burst through her second skin. She took her place among the dolls, just in time. Darragh wheeled himself in, as he did the last time she saw him in here. Then he rose, removed his dressing gown and began massaging his penis to full hardness. Pat felt herself trembling, as if she were here to give herself a heart attack, and fought to maintain control. He made his expected perusal of his latex lovers - then stopped in front of Pat. His black eyes narrowed into pinpoints, and he stopped playing with himself to lean closer, mumbling to himself. Then Pat took action. She rose from her slumped position against the wall, pushing aside the other dolls to approach him. Darragh gasped, his breath growing rapid, and he stepped back, though not quickly enough to prevent Pat from reaching up and holding him in place. He was shivering, too, and having that thought - that she could have such control over the old fucker, after all the misery he’d given her these last few weeks - bolstered Pat’s confidence immensely. Once sure he wouldn’t move away again, she reached down and grasped his erection, drawing back and forth on its length. Darragh still shook in place, his hand almost spasming as he reached up and touched Pat’s false face. Their eyes met - both sharing disbelief at what was now happening - and he parted his dry, cracked lips, as if to say something, though nothing escaped but a ragged moan. She knelt before him, holding back her disgust as she took his penis - long, thin and proud from a cluster of grey curls at its base, its tip flaring - into her mouth, her hot, wet tongue making him gasp. Unwilling to give him more than a taste of that - no pun intended - unwilling to prolong the experience any more than necessary, Pat manoeuvred him towards the bed, having him lie back fully; he was very co-operative, more so than at bath or feeding times, she noted to herself with grim humour. Then he gasped aloud again while Pat crawled on top of him, her breasts swinging free. Darragh reached for them with his mouth, but Pat forced him full onto his back again. Focusing on anything other than what she was doing, she held his penis with one hand as she parted her thighs, offering entry to the artificial vaginal passage, surprised and angry (very much so, under the circumstances) to find that, inside the suit, her sex was moist and engorged. She found the velvet hood of her clitoris, ignored its call to be touched; this wasn’t meant to be arousing, dammit! She slowly impaled herself onto him, enjoying the experience itself, if not the particulars surrounding it. Perhaps that was the key to surviving this, to forget why she was here, whom she was with, and just get on with the job at hand
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