Ms. Helm was waiting for me outside the train station at 17:25, as agreed. She was a rail thin lady with blonde hair and green eyes. In other words, an older version of Maya.
I dragged my suitcase across the cobblestone path and introduced myself like a proper gentleman, but before I could lean in for a hug, she quickly pinched my cheeks and studied me the way a horse breeder studies a mare. “You must be Mason. Look at you. Such a big, strapping lad.”
Dad’s parting words echoed clear as a bell at the forefront of my mind. Compliment your little girlfriend’s mother. Do it early and do it often.
I said, “I can see where Maya gets her good…”
Ms. Helm hacked up a milky fluid peppered with corn kernels and spat it into a napkin, which she folded into her pocket.
“…looks from.”
“You’re sweet. C’mon, follow me.”
At the far side of the parking bay, I hoisted my suitcase into the boot of a beat-up old car caked with dust. Inside, a smiling pig plushie dangled from the rear-view mirror.
“How far to the farm?” I asked.
“A ways,” she answered, vaguely.
Ms. Helm drove through a sleepy village, toward a bumpy country road. Each time she shifted gears her pointy elbow jabbed me in the gut.
As the two of us rattled around inside the cabin, she said, “Maya takes her nap around this time. When we get there, I’ll fix you something to eat, then later you two can meet face-to-face.”
“That’d be great.”
All throughout the journey the vehicle coughed, sputtered, and choked. Ms. Helm did too. She told me about life on a farm—about the endless disputes with her neighbours over land borders, and how the work drained her so much that she fell asleep at the kitchen table most nights.
“You know I think it’s really fantastic you do so much for Maya,” I said. “It can’t be easy balancing everything.”
“Thanks. It isn’t.”
Thirty minutes later, we arrived at a fairly isolated farmhouse. Next to it sat a sheltered animal pen. Beyond that, looming over the entire yard, stood a green structure kinda like a bomb shelter.
Nearby, a section of downed fence lay flat on its side. There were sheep scattered about the surrounding hills.
After climbing out of the car, Ms. Helm threw both hands. “That bloody fence collapsed again.” She contemplated this for a moment. “Okay, I’ll need your help fixing this tomorrow morning.”
As I followed her into the house, there was a sound from within the bomb shelter: a furious, metal clang. “Don’t worry about that,” she said, lacing her hand with mine to drag me inside. “The animals get a bit restless when they’re hungry.”
The hand holding didn’t strike me as odd, since I’d never had a girlfriend before. Hell, for all I knew mothers spooned their daughter’s boyfriends.
On our way to the kitchen, Ms. Helm folded up a squeaky wheelchair—Maya’s, most likely—blocking the hallway and crammed it into a nook beneath the stairs. There was a framed photo on the wall to my right, of a young Ms. Helm at some sort of pig show, proudly holding a blue ribbon.
In the kitchen, she told me to sit down then reached into the oven, pulled out a lamb shank, grabbed two knives from a drawer beneath the sink, and cut off slices with the grace of an expert butcher. She served the lamb braised in gravy, garnished with rosemary and onion, none of which masked the filthy taste. Pigswill would have gone down smoother.
Compliment the mother, compliment the mother. “I haven’t had a home-cooked meal this good in ages,” I said.
“Want seconds?” she asked.
“…Sure.”
“You’re just like Maya, she eats anything I put down in front of her too.”
“I thought Maya couldn’t digest solid foods?” I asked, confused.
“Right. Uh, I meant before the diagnosis.”
Ms. Helm opted for a cigarette rather than any food. That struck me as odd since her daughter had an immune deficiency ‘with complications’; you’d think she’d take better care of herself.
After forcing down that second helping, I said, “Should we tell Maya I’ve arrived?”
“About that, you’re gonna have to wait.”
“What? Why?”
Ms. Helm explained how, on account of a recent COVID outbreak, it was vital I isolated for twenty-four hours, then took a lateral flow test. Maya and I could meet so long as it came back negative.
“In the meantime, you can help me round up the sheep.” After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Ms. Helm stubbed her cigarette and disappeared upstairs.
Something wasn’t right. To come this far and not even get to see my girlfriend of six months. What if Dad was right? What if Maya was a catfish.
Before I could work all this out in my mind, Maya called me over Whatsapp.
“You’re here,” she said, excitedly. Her voice sounded a lot softer and higher than her mother’s.
“I’m here. And I can’t wait to meet you.”
“How was your flight?”
“Exhausting. It’ll be worth it to see you, though. Assuming that actually happens.”
“I’m really sorry. Mom just told me about the isolating thing. She gets really strict about this stuff.”
As the two of us talked, my suspicions melted away. Maya knew everything about me—about the school bullies picking on me because of my size, and the endless arguments with my father, who couldn’t understand how I met someone through a My Hero Academia Discord group. How do you know she looks anything like the photos? For all you know she’s a fifty-year-old guy in a stained speedo.
Maya began to ratchet liquid coughs. Between gasps, she said, “Sorry, I need oxygen. I’ll call you in a bit.”
Shortly after, Ms. Helm strolled back into the room and asked for help gathering up her flock.
The two of us traipsed all over the nearby hills, tracking down sheep with a red ‘H’ spray painted into their wool. Some had wandered as far as a petrol station two miles out.
There was a small enclosure beside the house we ushered them into. Each time I passed the bomb shelter, that awful metal whine started up again.
Long after sunset, once all thirteen sheep were present and accounted before, we kicked off our boots at the front door and went back inside, sweaty and exhausted. Ms. Helm led me upstairs into the guest room. “There’s an en-suite through that door”—she wheezed like an asthmatic child into an oxygen mask—”you can have a shower before bed. First thing tomorrow I’ll need your help fixing that busted fence.”
“Then we can do the COVID test?”
“You’re so cute. Yeah, then we’ll do the test.”
After washing up, I called Maya from bed. “Won’t be long now, huh?”
“Sorry. Mom won’t budge on this. She thinks you’re really cute, though.”
That set me off giggling like a schoolgirl. “She’s pretty strict, huh?”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hey, don’t tell her I said this, but I had trouble keeping her lamb down.”
Maya paused. Thought about that. “Oh…really?”
“Yeah. You might hear me running to the toilet all throughout the night.”
Quickly she said, “I’m getting pretty sleepy. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Lying there in bed, I imagined how lonely it must have been for her. Confined to her room all day, hooked up to an oxygen mask and a respirator, an IV tube to her side. My heart broke just thinking about it.
I didn’t get much sleep that night. Partly from indigestion, partly because of those metal thumps ringing out from the shelter. How the Hell did Maya sleep with the animals making so much noise?
At breakfast the next morning, her mom set a thick bowl of porridge in front of me. “Hopefully you can keep this down,” she said bitterly.
Ut-oh. Did Maya tell her what I said before? I suddenly found myself sweating like a pig.
After a long draw from her cigarette, Ms. Helm started hacking up a lung. Yellow globs of drool dangled from the corner of her mouth. I’ve heard those same long, hoarse croaks before, over what must have been hundreds of hours of voice and video calls. I began to wonder how much Ms. Helm and Maya exactly shared with one another. Clearly, more than I imagined, considering she knew I had insulted her cooking…
Things weren’t adding up, but before I could get all this straight in my mind, Ms. Helm tossed me a pair of gloves and told me to follow her outside, where she held up fence posts while I hammered them into the dirt, quietly counting down the minutes until my COVID test.
One more excuse, one more delay, no matter how minor, and I was out of there.
Come supper time, we made our back to the house with wheat in our hair and ears, our boots crusted with dirt. My shirt was a drenched rag clinging to my back.
By now, I could hardly sit still. Either I was about to meet Maya, or things were about to get seriously weird.
Ms. Helm had me take a lateral flow test and then, while we waited for the results, heated up a pot of chili and dished out an extra-generous helping. “Shouldn’t we wait for Maya?” I asked, studying her face for any guilt.
“N’ah. I’ll go wake her once we have the results.”
The chili tasted odd. Not bad, not horrible. Just…odd.
“Is it better than the lamb?” Ms. Helm asked, jaw tensed.
“Better.”
The two of us sat in silence, the tension swelling, our eyes locked on one another. And then, from out of nowhere, black spots danced in front of my eyes.
I pushed the bowl away and sat back. Maybe I was coming down with something—maybe Ms. Helm was right to make us isolate.
Around us, all the kitchen furniture seemed to sway from side to side. I shook my head and said, “Okay, that’s thirty minutes. The tests negative. I wanna meet Maya.”
“Let’s wait a little while longer.”
“What? Why?”
Ms. Helm grinned. “Just to be safe. Sit back down. Maya’s not going anywhere.”
I’d had enough. This couldn’t carry on. I had to know whether Maya was real.
But if she wasn’t, that meant my host was a potential psycho, and the closest neighbour lived two miles away. I had to tread carefully.
I pushed myself up and said, “I need to use the bathroom.”
She nodded, her eyes tracking me across the room.
Out in the hall, I veered left instead of right and tiptoed up the stairs, glancing over my shoulder to check Ms. Helm hadn’t followed me. Then I stood outside Maya’s room and gently rapped the door. “Maya?”
Nobody responded, and the handle wouldn’t budge. I decided to call her.
From inside the room, I heard a phone buzz. It vibrated against something wooden—possibly a cabinet or a desk.
By now the air had grown thick and heavy. I gulped for air, sweating like a pig. The hallway seemed oddly warped now; it awkwardly swayed from one side to the other, forcing me to readjust my feet like a sailor on a boat.
This couldn’t be a sudden illness, it had to be something I ate. But the only thing I’d eaten was…
Oh shit.
I took a step away from the door, kicked it open, and stepped into a room with no bed, no oxygen mask, no respirator, and no IV tube. There was only a computer desk and chair, along with a fancy microphone.
I half ran half fell into the center of the room, using the desk to keep myself upright. Behind me, Ms. Helm filled the doorway.
“What’s going on?” I rasped, my voice tired and groggy. “What is this?”
A wicked grin spread across her face. Casually, she strolled across the room, letting her fingertips brush against my damp forehead along the way, took a seat at the chair, and pulled down the microphone so it was next to her mouth. Then she said, “What’s wrong Mason?”
A half-second later the computer repeated what she said, except the voice didn’t sound like Ms. Helm.
It sounded like Maya.
“No,” I said, awkwardly collapsing onto the floor.
“Yes,” she replied.
I lay flat along the ground. “So Maya isn’t real? It was all bullshit?”
“Oh, she’s real. Don’t worry. You’ll get to meet her real soon.”
And at that moment, despite the sensory confusion and dread blossoming in my stomach, all I could think about was how mortifying it would be when my dad found out what happened.
After that, there’s a series of images mixed with swirling darkness. I got dragged along the floor by Ms. Helm, toward the top of the stairs, where she pushed me forward and let me tumble down like a crash test dummy.
By the time my vision stopped swimming, I was strapped into the wheelchair, my wrists and ankles bound by leather restraints. It felt like somebody had dipped my brain in battery acid.
Ms. Helm was wheeling me toward the bomb shelter. I could hear those metal thumps again, but now there was something else too. Growls.
I slowly regained control of my senses, but my body was still asleep. It took all my concentration just to wriggle my big toe.
The thumps inside the shelter gathered speed. What was even in there? I pictured a serial killer—possibly Ms. Helms’s twin brother—swinging a cricket bat against the walls.
“What the fucks going on?” I shouted.
“Oh good. You’re awake.”
“What the hell did you do to me?”
“Just slipped you a little narcotic.”
She pushed me up to the shelter, flipped up a metal latch, and pushed the door aside with a heavy grunt. Even the foul reek that wafted out of the structure couldn’t completely shock me back to my senses.
“Why? What the fucks this all about? What are you going to do to me?”
Ms. Helm wheeled me through the door, into the darkness, and parked my chair. there was a chord dangling nearby. She gave it a tug, then a bulb blinked on, and light filled the vast space.
To my right-hand side stood a table, littered with human skulls and femurs. There was blood everywhere—even across walls. Flayed corpses dangled from chains; metal hooks stabbed through their mid-sections.
At the sight of all this, a rope of vomit ejected from my mouth at the sight. For a moment I thought Ms. Helm was a cannibal or some sort of mad surgeon. But then she wheeled me toward a large pit, at least eight-foot deep by thirty-feet wide.
Ms. Helm wheeled me over to the very edge, looked down, and said, “Did you miss mommy?”
The pit was partitioned into two horizontal sections by a metal barrier. Something hefty threw itself against the metal partition, hard enough to make the thing rattle and shake. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. The metal was badly dented from where whatever she kept down there had tried to ram through.
Ms. Helm walked over to the wall and cranked a pulley, coughing as she did, then, inch by inch the partition lifted into the air.
And that’s when I saw it: the largest, ugliest, most disgusting pig to ever walk the earth. It was the size of a small car, with two white tusks longer and thicker than my entire arm. Every inch of skin was cracked and dry, like a blanket of warts, and the forehead was little more than a series of fat wrinkles slumped over the eyes. Thick white foam seeped from a humongous mouth and fat flies buzzed around twitching ears.
The beast let out this awful whine, to which Ms. Helm said, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long, but Mommy had work to do.”
When the partition was five feet off the ground, ‘Maya’ forced her way through the gap and jumped up against the side of the pit on her hind legs, her powerful jaw crunching and closing mere inches beneath my feet.
The realization hit me like a lightning bolt. That’s why Ms. Helm brought me here. She didn’t want to use me for sex. She wanted to feed me to a fucking pig.
To Maya.
My pulse shot into the stratosphere. I had to get the fuck out of there. The restraints heated up and cut into my wrists as I shimmied my arms back and forth, trying to work myself loose. Ms. Helm was too busy ‘cooing’ her pet to notice.
“What do you think?” Ms. Helm asked the pig. “Does he smell good?”
The beast went into a frenzy of snarls.
While Ms. Helm made baby sounds and went coochie-coochie-coo, I worked on my restraints. Soon my left hand could rotate all the way around, then the forearm could slide back and forth a few inches.
The second my captor turned around, I made myself perfectly still.
“Let’s get you ready,” she said.
As she swung the chair around and wheeled me toward one of the tables, Maya furiously thudded the side of her enclosure. “Won’t be long sweetie,” Ms. Helm shouted back. Then, to me, she said, “It’s been so long Maya had a proper meal, I don’t think there’ll be anything left of you by the time she’s done.”
“You crazy bitch.”
That just made her laugh.
She parked me beside the skull-covered table, where she pulled on a butcher’s apron and then, using a sharp pair of scissors, cut away my jeans and shirt while I pulled furiously against my binds. Soon my left hand had almost worked itself loose. If I craned my fingers the hand might be just narrow enough to slide through the gap.
Without warning, Ms. Helm grabbed a bottle of BBQ sauce from under the table and doused it across my face and chest. The stuff stuck to my hair and dripped off my chin.
“This is Maya’s favourite,” she said, licking her fingertips. “I usually carve up Maya’s meals so they’re easier to swallow but it’s been so long since Maya ate I think I’ll just toss you in whole.”
There wasn’t much time left, I had to think fast. Halfway toward the pit, I rocked furiously from side to side.
“Stop that,” Ms. Helm shouted, struggling to hold on.
I threw my whole body from one side to the other, tipping the wheelchair from its left wheels to the right.
And then, mercifully, I toppled over.
Ms. Helm let out an annoyed grunt. Before she could circle in front of me, I craned my fingers like I was making a shadow puppet, then ripped my whole hand backward. It slid right through the restraints.
The second my captor bent down, I made a fist and socked her square in the nose. She went careening backward like a boneless sack.
Using my left hand, I unbuttoned the straps holding my right in place, then freed my legs. What drug she’d slipped me still hadn’t completely worn off.
Beside me, Ms. Helm popped up, joints cracking. Her entire jaw was streaked red from the blood spewing from her nostrils.
She spat a thick wad of blood, grabbed the scissors from the front pocket of her apron, and said, “You little shit.”
Then she was on top of me. The two of us rolled around, toward the edge of the pit, finishing with her on top, both our heads facing toward the pit. I had a major weight advantage but there was a five-second delay between my brain sending instructions and my body responding.
Maya’s jaw snapped inched below the crown of my skull. The vile beast’s warm, repulsive breaths engulfed the back of my neck. Mayas didn’t taste much better.
Ms. Helm’s plunged the scissors deep into my left shoulder. Then she stabbed between two of my ribs. Then deep into my torso. The drugs dulled the pain, although not by much.
There was blood everywhere, soon the blade was too slippery for Ms. Helm to keep hold of.
She couldn’t get a tight enough grip, the most she could do was wriggle the handle. It stuck out of me like a pincushion.
Lathered in blood and BBQ sauce, darkness crept to the edge of my vision. Simply staying awake took all of my energy and concentration.
Maybe it was better to just let sleep take told. Maybe Maya would finish eating me before I woke up.
Suddenly Ms. Helm was overcome with another coughing fit—an especially nasty one that forced her to sprawl out and place a hand against the ground for stability, otherwise, she would have toppled over. That was my chance.
I reached up, grabbed both her wrists, and kicked my left foot into her chest. Then, summoning all my strength, I lifted her off the ground and rolled onto my upper back, sending her sailing over me in a smooth arc, straight into the pit.
Bones snapped as she collided brutally with the stone floor. I rolled onto my side, careful not to lodge the scissors any deeper, and looked down.
One of Ms. Helm’s feet pointed in the wrong direction, and when she tried to stand, it twisted even further. Maya dropped off the side of her enclosure onto all fours and sniffed along the ground, toward her owner. And there, she took an extra-long sniff.
The creature’s snout began to twitch.
Ms. Helm ordered the beast to leave her alone—to listen to its mommy and behave. When that didn’t work, she begged and pleaded.
Maya opened her mouth and licked Ms. Helm’s face, slurping off blood and BBQ sauce. Ms. Helm froze up.
The creature sniffed up and down Ms. Helm’s torso, contemplated for a moment, then decided it was time for dinner.
It started with Ms. Helm’s feet. The first bite stripped the flesh off the bone like a chicken wing. The second cut straight through a femur, leaving a squealing Ms. Helm with a weeping stump beneath her right knee.
For the second time that day, a rope of vomit ejected from my mouth. By the time intestines started spooling all over the door I decided I’d officially seen enough.
I forced myself to my feet and limped toward the door, still bleeding profusely. I’d need to call an ambulance before I blacked out. Then probably my dad, to tell him how my weekend went.
Next time, maybe I’ll insist on having any and all first dates at a coffee shop…