Jamie Priest found butchering his wife surprisingly easy. He had anticipated a great amount of trouble, but it never came to that. A few weeks prior to the murder, he had watched that old Hitchcock film in which two people struggle to kill someone and the whole scene is about how difficult it supposedly is to extinguish someone’s life. What a load of nonsense that was! Jamie’s missus had departed this life with just three strokes of a hefty spade.

“I’ve got a job for you, Jamie! I want you to fix that damned kitchen window!” Isabel cried. She cast her accusatory eye at her husband. “It’s all draughty and shrieky and I’m cold every time I’m cooking.”

“I’ve told you, I’ll do it in the spring,” Jamie said curtly. “Right now that’s the coldest wind I ever felt coming down the valley and I’m not inclined to want to stand out there replacing windows while it freezes my bones.”

“It’s freezing my bones and I’m stood inside!” Isabel protested. “The food’s practically getting cold while it’s cooking.”

“All you’ve got to do is tape some plastic sheeting over the glass,” Jamie said.

“I wish you’d get up and fix the barn roof as well,” Isabel started up again the minute they sat down to eat. “There’s a loose board up there and you damn well know it. All night long I hear it banging and thumping! I can’t sleep for all that wretched noise!”

“In the spring,” Jamie insisted. “If I go up there tomorrow that wind will blow me off and then where would your handyman be, eh?” He ladled some gravy onto the beef with much gusto. The food was piping hot, for Christ’s sake!

“Handyman?” Isabel smirked. “You’re handy when it comes to cramming food into your mouth and not much besides. I’ve lost count of the number of things that need fixing round here. How long has that back bedroom been leaking? How long has the porch window been broken? How long…”

“How long have you been harping at me to make your world perfect?” Jamie interjected. “A bloody long time.”

Isabel shut up and glared at him across the table. Distantly, Jamie heard a familiar repetitive thump-thump from the direction of the barn. He winced inwardly. But damn and blast that wind was cold!

They ate the meal in silence.

The weekend passed slowly, and the atmosphere inside the house was no warmer than that offered by the elements outside. Jamie attempted to read his novel and Isabel poked noisily about the kitchen, huffing and sighing as audibly as the unending Northern wind that battered the walls.

“Damn it Jamie I swear this window’s about to blow in!” she shrieked at one point.

Jamie ignored her. But he wasn’t getting much reading done and in the early afternoon he donned coat and boots and wandered outside. Keeping to the side so as to go unnoticed by that malcontent wife of his, he studied the kitchen window. It wasn’t a reassuring sight. The frame was cracked and split and clearly rotten and some of the surrounding brickwork had cracked somewhat as well. The whole thing needed replacing.

“Shit,” Jamie muttered. He strolled across the frozen ground toward the barn, the wind blasting in his face, and stared up at the barn. Thump thump thump. He pivoted on his heels, scanning his surroundings. The farm buildings crouched against the wind amid their modest fifteen acres, the fields cracked and bare. Further away the sides of the valley rose steeply. Valleys were generally sheltered places, Jamie mused, but when the wind came in from the north, this particular rift in the earth transformed into a wind tunnel. One day, it would blast his entire smallholding into the sea.

Still, he thought suddenly, and perhaps not for the first time, it was a likely scenario for a murder. Remote, unfriendly, seldom visited.

Jamie went into the bar and stood gazing up toward the roof some seventy feet above, hands thrust into his pockets, his thoughts circling gently.

When he returned inside, there was much commotion from the first floor. He climbed resignedly up the stairs to find Isabel shunting furniture around in the spare bedroom. She had made up the bed and somehow succeeded in dragging her wardrobe in from the master bedroom. There were clothes and jewelry strewn in her wake. She gathered them up and tossed them on the spare bed.

“Nice and quiet in here,” she said. “That loose board’s on the other side of the house. So until you repair those tiles, here I stay!”

Jamie studied her unruly hair and reddened features, the trace of spittle decorating the side of her mouth, and shook his head slowly. But worse was to come. Three days later Isabel deliberately broke the kitchen window. At the end of a forty-minute sermon about procrastination during which she recited Jamie’s litany of crimes ad nauseum, Isabel simply picked up her largest frying pan and flung it through the glass, which shattered obligingly. Every shard dropped from the frame and half the frame itself came away and listed across the gap. The wind coursed in and rattled everything loose.

“Now how bloody cold is it?” Isabel cursed.

Several objects of china fell from a high shelf and shattered.

“See? The place is just falling down!” she added. “Just like our marriage! And it’s all your fault because you’re nothing but a lazy, careless man!”

“I break my back running this place all year round!” shouted Jamie. “I turn the fields, I plant the seeds, I reap the crops and I market the produce as well! I am this farm, Isabel, and all you have to do is manage the cooking! That’s all I ask! If a few little draughts bother you so much, maybe you should get up and fix them! After twelve months in the rain, wind and burning sun, a little draught doesn’t bother me!”

“Oh you’re a self-righteous bastard,” Isabel cursed. “And your dinner’s going to be stone-cold tonight, I promise you that!”

Forty eight hours of intense silence ensued. Isabel retired to her bedroom and knitted endlessly. She refused to cook anything, living on a supply of cheese and crackers that she had evidently stored for just such an occasion. She was like a malignant field mouse, stuffing her cheeks and refusing to come out of her bolthole. Jamie reckoned she had planned the whole melodramatic stunt for weeks, months even. With her petty silences and her accusatory eye, she controlled the house, the marriage, everything. He scanned the pages of his book without reading them and seethed. He even seethed in his sleep. On the evening of the third day, he cracked. The wind howled through the kitchen and whipped round the house. The place practically shook with the invasion. If for no other reason than to stop the farmhouse blowing away, Jamie knew he must act. He’d get that window seen to and then by God he would see to her!

He donned his trusty boots and warmest coat and left the house. Jumping into his sole roadworthy truck he headed into town. It was an uncomfortable, spine-jolting, headache-inducing ride across twenty miles of semi-ruinous road into the desolate little village of Hachen. Ten days past Christmas found the place littered with tattered Christmas trees sprouting above the grimy shop windows, broken strings of illuminations dangling hither and thither and frozen mud aplenty languishing in the gutters. Ignoring the grim-faced inhabitants, Jamie entered Gleeson’s Glass and purchased an appropriate-sized pane. He also availed himself of some half-decent timber and returned to his truck beneath a washed-out glowering sky. The journey back was no less pleasant and Jamie’s mood grew as dark as the night. Matters weren’t helped when he got back to the farm to find a jocular and unfamiliar fellow happily installing a new kitchen window while Isabel stood by fixing him coffee laced with whisky.

Jamie surveyed the scene without speaking. Isabel studied his blank expression for a moment, leaned across and glanced out of her brand new window. She saw Jamie’s truck out front loaded with glass and wood, and for a moment Jamie thought he saw a small smile play around her mouth. She returned to the stove.

“I wondered where you went,” she said.

Jamie left the wife and the handyman to it and went back out. He retired to the barn and considered his tools.

After the handyman left, all toned muscle and mild self-congratulation, Jamie remained in the barn where he knocked back a healthy gutful of his own brand of whisky. From his vantage point he could see Isabel’s brand new kitchen window, gleaming coolly in the light spilling out. When that light extinguished, a little after ten, he went back to the house. He found Isabel preening in the bathroom. His melodramatic slam of the door spun her around. In that moment he had her exactly where he wanted.

“I’ve come about the DIY,” he intoned, and drew another lungful ready to deliver his well-rehearsed sermon.

“Get out!” Isabel screamed. Her gaze burned with accusation. “Get out of my bathroom!”

Her vitriol took Jamie by surprise and he took a couple of involuntary steps backward. Isabel stepped past him, yanked open the door and marched out onto the landing. Toothpaste spilled from her lips as if she were foaming at the mouth. Then again, Jamie thought, maybe she really was foaming at the mouth.

“It’s my bathroom!” he retorted as he pursued her. “My bathroom, my house! I want you out!”

Isabel turned to face him and put her hands on her hips. My God, she’s mocking me, Jamie realized. The facetious cow! Fury erupted inside him and he made a sudden, unpremeditated dive for her. Isabel darted back, face lighting up as if about to laugh. But she tripped over her bathrobe, stumbled and plummeted down the stairs. She tumbled over and over and three quarters of the way down Jamie heard her neck break. She landed headfirst at the bottom.

Ten minutes later, following a brief vigil, Jamie went out to the barn and returned with a fork and spade. He dragged his wife’s body down to the basement, laid her out neatly beside the furnace and raised the spade high. So effective was that first blow that the fork proved unnecessary. It only took three jabs to sever Isabel’s head from her body. Inevitably a copious volume of blood spilled and rapidly swelled to form a pool some ten feet by eight. But he never would have believed that chopping up a fresh corpse using nothing more than a nondescript spade would have been so straightforward. Chop! Off came the right leg. Chop! Off came the left. Chop! Another chop! Off with the left leg. Two chops and a determined twist and off with the right.

Jamie fired up the furnace with some fresh firewood and when it roared fit to burst the pipes, he began loading it up with his wife. Pretty soon the usually dank basement was warm and toasty.

The burning took the better part of twenty four hours, a period of time during which Jamie imbibed a considerable further quantity of homebrew. The arms went pretty quick but Isabel’s legs were evidently made of sterner stuff – strange considering she never went bloody anywhere – and sizzled for hours before allowing themselves to be consumed. Inevitably the torso proved most challenging and only when Jamie went out to the barn and retrieved fresh firewood did it finally relent. Once his wife’s guts were well and truly fried, her ribs appearing white and clean amid the bubbling morass, Jamie turned his attention to the head.

It was early the following morning and a cold Sun tinged the horizon orange-yellow as Jamie strode out to the top field, blood-dipped spade in one hand and Isabel’s head in the other. His wife’s face was peaceful - no trace of that infernal smile now – and her accusatory eyes were closed. The topsoil was frozen and rigid but it eventually yielded to Jamie’s determined thrusts. In all, shifting several feet of January earth proved harder than dismemberment he mused, as the thinnest of sweats broke out on his forehead. When he had a hole some three feet deep, he tossed in the head and rapidly filled it in. Then he went back to start the clean-up.

Spring came early that year. Jamie cleaned out the house, burned most of Isabel’s belongings and tended to his daily duties. He watched with satisfaction as the wheat in the top field sprouted rich and golden, basking in the warm sun, lightly ruffled by a mild Western wind. Some afternoons, he strode out there and stood for an hour or more, admiring the bounteous crop. He shed some weight as early summer came on, felt five years younger and considered himself guilt-free. By day, he felt as light as the warming breeze. But at night, his sleep grew restless, his dreams peculiar, and he took to locking the bedroom door. Nevertheless it was too warm to sleep entirely cooped up, and he resorted to leaving the window open. And the Western breeze blew in the window, skimming first across the wheat, stirring his hair, tickling his lughole.

“Jamie…” the wind whispered. “It’s soooo dark down here…”

He paid no attention to that soft, caressing whisper at first. When he did acknowledge its presence, it was merely to accept that it was the product of an over-active imagination, of living alone miles from civilization, of dwelling in a house filled with memories. For a week or more, he lay half-awake listening to those strange murmuring tones.

“It’s dark and cold in the ground, Jamie…dark and lonely…”

He did his best to ignore those insistent tones. Right now, Jamie mused in the small hours, loneliness feel great. No more nagging, no more bitching, just peace and quiet.

But the quiet began to take on a nagging quality of its own. When he wasn’t operating machinery or flicking channels on the TV, silence was all Jamie heard. It wasn’t so bad in the evening, when he relaxed and perused his books. However once night settled upon the land, and nested snugly against the eaves, the voice would come, not every night at first, just now and again but increasing in regularity until it was a regular midnight visitor.

“It’s nighttime all the time…I’ve got no one to talk to…but there are things moving down here, Jamie…and the slugs are eating my eyes.”

Jamie tossed and turned for the better part of a month, until he could no longer sleep. The voice wasn’t recognizably that of his wife, indeed it was so ethereal, so untraceable that it didn’t seem to belong to anyone. It didn’t come often during the night, sometimes only once but it became like Chinese torture as he lay awake waiting. And once it had come, he had no way of knowing whether it would visit again. So he lay prone, as stiff as old planking, until the dawn.

One night in early May he could take it no longer. These past few nights there had been an insistent pleading quality to this nocturnal visitor, the same few words repeated over for minutes at a time, deep within his inner ear. “Help me, Jamie…comfort me…comfort me…”

“All right, for Christ’s sake!” he cried eventually and sprang from bed to stand beside the window. It was three a.m., just an hour or two from first light. Jamie drew aside the thin curtain and stared out toward the top field. It lay not too far away, a patch of pallid silver. The night air was still, the wheat unmoving, frozen like frost. Jamie pulled on his trousers and trod purposefully downstairs.

It didn’t take long to exhume Isabel’s head, although four months in the ground hadn’t helped her looks. There was little flesh left – the warm spring earth had seen to that. Those accusatory eyes had rotten into their sockets and of that over-active mouth there was now little save earth-strewn jawbone. Jamie grasped the head in two hands and lifted it from its little grave. He turned it this way and that, like a hairdresser considering the appropriate style. It was nothing but a decaying skull. The voice hadn’t come from here. It was his own head that was surely to blame. Nevertheless, perhaps he should destroy her last remnants after all, rather than preserving them as a gleeful trophy. But the fact of the matter was that he enjoyed having Isabel’s head around. By God she was quiet now.

He just needed to ensure he didn’t fall prey to his own psyche…

So Jamie re-buried the head over in the potato field, which lay to the east, hidden from the farmhouse over a small rise. It was no further than the wheat field in terms of actual distance – but out of sight, Jamie reasoned, was out of mind.

He was proven right. For the rest of the spring and summer, Jamie’s sleep was sound and undisturbed.

In late Summer Jamie hired a couple of lads from Hachen to help bring in the crops. But he took care of the potato field himself. He reckoned he had no reason to worry, however, since he had re-planted Isabel’s skull in a far corner, practically in the ditch a good ten feet from the nearest potato plant. After all, the wife liked her sleep and God forbid he be the one to disturb her rest. Jamie ploughed up that field in an afternoon and nodded in satisfaction as the potatoes fetched up in the earth. It looked like a grand crop. Maybe enough profit, he smirked to himself, to hire someone to fix all those draughts and cracks…

He was roused from his dinner around five o’clock by a great cry from the barn. He was over there in seconds, fully expecting to find one of the hired hands holding a severed hand or something – those Hachen boys were about as accident-prone as they came. But when he entered the barn, and saw both lads gazing in terrified fascination at the pile of fresh potatoes on the left, a sudden dread gripped his solar plexus. Jamie approached slowly, and as he neared the crop, the two boys backed up and bolted out of the door. Jamie ignored them. He reached out and picked up the nearest potato. From the top side, it appeared perfectly normal. But when he turned it over, an accusatory eye glared at him, wide-open, lidless, as clear blue as Isabel’s had been.

Jamie allowed the potato to fall back and grasped another. It too held an eye. They all held eyes, and when Jamie cut several potatoes in half they spurted human blood. The eyes didn’t move, and they couldn’t blink. They just stared, and continued to stare, hundreds of them.

Jamie threw up.

That was the end. He went out to the freshly ploughed field and dug up his wife’s head for the second and final time. By now it was just a skull, bereft of flesh. He held it at arm’s length, avoiding its sightless stare, and took it back into the house and down to the basement. He fired up the furnace good and proper and flung the skull deep inside. Jamie retrieved a beer from the fridge and sat on a rickety stool before the small iron door, and watched the skull resting in its bed of flame. The flames licked eagerly all around but of course could not destroy it. But Jamie waited until every last shred of flesh and hair was gone and the bone was as arid as the surface of the Moon. He knocked back several more beers as the evening progressed. Around half past ten, as the flames began to die back, he used a pair of tongs to retrieve the skull. He proceeded to smash it to smithereens and ultimately to dust with a sledgehammer, right there on the basement floor. And when there was nothing left but powder, he swept it up and flung it back into the furnace. He watched as it all went up the flue, and that put an end to it.

It rained heavily that night. It rained even as Jamie smashed up the skull, and it poured still heavier as he watched that fine white dust rise up the flue on a blast of fiery heat. Intent as he was on further sweeping the floor, closing up the furnace and retiring drunk to bed, Jamie was unaware of the rainwater sluicing down his roof, washing that dust on to the tiles the minute it escaped the chimney, fetching it down into the gutter and from there into the drains.

Jamie didn’t know anything about the drains until the following morning, when he rose from bed hung over and urinated at length into the toilet. His head ached, his kidneys ached and his mouth was dry, and his dismay was further exacerbated when he flushed the toilet and it backed up practically to overflowing.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

He dressed absently and wandered downstairs, and discovered a black viscous fluid bubbling up from the sink plughole. It smelled bad. What the hell was it? Poking his nose out of the back door, he found much the same rising from the grids. It stank even worse out here. There was no way he could leave it. Jamie got a spade, a hose connected to the mains and a torch, and prised up the inspection hatch in the back yard. Curiously, the main sewer beneath the property seemed relatively unaffected. A mere trickle of the oily substance ran in the bottom. Jamie knelt down and stuck his head into the sewer, shining the torch left and right. He saw nothing to his right. To his left he saw a skinny forearm reaching out of the pipe toward him, a wasted grinning face and a pair of accusatory eyes that glowed with a yellow tinge, their gaze fixed unerringly upon him.

“I’ve got a job for you, Jamie!” said Isabel in a grating, twisting voice not too far removed from the norm. The arm grasped Jamie by the throat and snatched him into the sewer. “And this one won’t wait!”