Snow Mesmerism

He switched on the radio to hear an old 'Black Sabbath' song:

'What you get and what you see

Things that don't come easily

Feeling happy in my vein

Icicles within my brain.'

"Good ol' Ozzie. But it's not drugs I need," he thought to himself.

There was a flurry of snow across the road. Once more the snow seemed to float up to the Land Rover.

"The snow did me proud," he mused, "things like that don't come easily to me these days but the snow certainly brought me something this year."

He sung on with the record:

Don't you think I know what I'm doing

Don't tell me that its doing me wrong

You're the one who's really a loser

This is where I feel I belong.'

A laugh, perhaps a little forced, "well it's not been me that's a loser. No, that was something special". His face became serious, sad and wistful, "Shame it couldn't last though." It was a blow, her going like that, more than he realised.

'Crystal world with winter flowers

Turns my day to frozen hours

Lying snowblind in the sun

Will my ice age ever come?'

His thoughts went back, remembering.

He had been coming up the pass, miles already from the town by the lake, when he had seen her. The windscreen wipers of his battered old Land Rover had been working hard trying to keep the snow from obscuring his vision - not that it was easy to see beyond the Land Rover anyway. The snow was falling thick and fast. As yet he was not concerned but even a Land Rover can have difficulty in too much snow. It was a relief to crest the summit. There would be no going back that day and the worst of the inclines was over. It was a fairly straight couple of miles to the farm now.

A warm kitchen and a cup of tea - 'Scordy,' in the local dialect. He would have to prepare it himself, there was no one waiting for him back at the farm.

Willet Dodd, 33 year old Cumbrian farmer, was not a bachelor but a divorcee. He still did not know quite what had gone wrong all those years ago. It hurt, it still hurt. Since school he had loved that girl and then one day he had come home to find her gone. It was not that she was an outsider. True, she had not been brought up on a hill farm, rather in the town, yet she should have known the score. Perhaps it was the loneliness, perhaps it was the emptiness all around, perhaps it had just been him. She had gone and her note had said how much she hated it all.

He had never understood what she meant by 'it all.' Had never seen her again. One morning she had been there, central to his life: the next gone.

She was not Mrs. Dodd anymore, was not even down in the town but the other side of the world apparently remarried and with kids. It still hurt and Willet was still alone. How he had wanted the old farm, where generations of Dodds had come and gone farming the land, alive with the sound of children, laughter and... Mary.

That had been years before and he had just kept on farming. Sheep, his dogs and him. And he had made a living, a lonely living but a living nonetheless and it was not as if he was exactly friendless. Other farmers, friends from school. Good friends whom he saw now and then. Perhaps down at the pub for an evening. Good to meet up at the Kirkstile, Britannia or down in the town.

The Land Rover purred and it was warm enough inside. The path of the road was still clear enough in his headlights, though the tarmac had long disappeared under cover of white snow. The wind that had been blowing as he had climbed the pass had dropped and the snow eased so it was just slowly falling, a little hypnotic in the myriad floating specks of white gently making their way to the ground in the light of his headlights.

And then he saw her. Willet braked, carefully though, so not to slide. It would neither do to skid off the road or into her. She looked a poor little thing, right done in. Willet surmised she had come out and up onto the fells for a run, a long run perhaps up ____ and along the Edge and then back down the pass or perhaps even further.

The girl had stopped in the glare of the headlights and Willet had jumped out into the snow with his dogs leaping from the back as if to round up the stray female. The girl looked frozen. Running shoes, singlet and little thin running shorts - not the clothing for a blizzard even with the inner warmth of the runner. Her fair hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her skin had that tight look from being really cold. Willet was pretty sure if he touched her thigh or arm they would be cold to the touch. And they were worth touching. Even with her face pinched from the cold, and she not exactly looking her best, he could see she was an attractive lass. An attractive lass in next to nothing. Good for a farmer to see but not like that, not half frozen. It was not safe for her to be out, not one little bit - dangerous in fact still miles from anywhere.

"Hop in," he said, opening the passenger door. It was not an offer or a request but a command. Willet was not going to debate the issue and the girl was too tired, too exhausted by the cold to do anything but obey. The wet noses of the dogs, their breath showing in the cold air pushed her towards the Land Rover.

"You shouldn't be out in this," he said climbing back into the warm cab. It was rather stating the obvious. The girl sat, hunched up, holding her legs. He could see her running things were soaked, a mixture of sweat and fallen snow warmed by her body to liquid and then considering returning to ice. She needed to get those wet things off and be wrapped in a towel. Even with her clearly in distress Willet could not help wondering what she would look like with those wet scraps of clothing removed before the towel came. He could see her nipples were like peas with the cold. Despite her predicament he felt a familiar hardening in his trousers. He smiled at her. The smile was meant to be encouraging and reassuring. In part it was him smiling at himself, at his typically male reaction.

Her teeth were chattering and her words were none too clear, "I'm staying on a farm by the lake. I came out for a run and the weather changed."

"Does that up here, just like that."

It did, but even Willet, Cumbrian farmer of several generations as he was, had been surprised at the change and the speed of it. One moment warm and sunny, the next the clouds rushing in dark and heavy with snow. It had looked all wrong and he had started out from the town with foreboding.

"Can't take you back. Won't get through. I'll take you to my farm. Hot fire and tea. I'll telephone the farm. Say you're OK."

The girl had nodded, finding talking difficult. She was shivering. The sooner he got her back the better. He had not mentioned her changing from her wet things or a hot bath. They would have to happen.

The warm engine started easily, Willet switched the radio off and the Land Rover headed back the way the girl had come. Probably she had run past the entrance to his farm, seen the wooden gate and the old sign. Perhaps she had not paid it a glance, perhaps, seeing no light, had not thought it worth heading down the track to see if she could find shelter and warmth.

The Land Rover moved on through the gently falling snow. Willet shook his head finding it difficult not to focus on the falling flakes of snow rather than the road. Gently, and but for the throb of the engine it would have been silently, the snow fell. Millions of flakes of snow just slowly coming down from the sky picked out by the headlights against the blackness of the early night. The regularity and leisurely speed of the fall had a hypnotic effect, made worse by the steady swing of the windscreen wipers and the 'whirr whirr' as the motors moved them back and forth. Willet shook his head again and tried to focus on the road. He glanced beside him. The girl was still holding her legs as she stared out into the night. 'Whir, whir' went the motors, back and forth went the wipers and outside the snow floated down. He took a good deeks at her.

"You'll have to have a bath when we get home, get those wet things off. Don't have a bathroom but I can make you up a bath in front of the fire. You'll find that cosy, if you've never done that afore." He didn't like to mention how much he would enjoy seeing the girl taking a bath. He used to take pleasure in seeing Mary... Bad thoughts. Enjoy the moment. Don't think back.

The girl had simply answered, 'yes.' Of course she was done in and exhausted but even so it seemed a bit monotone. Willet glanced again at her. She had not moved her head, had not turned to answer him but was staring out at the falling snow.

The snow kept on coming, down and down, the myriad flecks coming towards him in the headlights or, rather, they appeared to be coming towards him, it was he, of course, in the Land Rover who was moving towards and through them. Yet, it was so like, he thought, the image on the View Screen in Star Trek of stars passing the USS Enterprise as it speeded at warp drive through the galaxy. His eyes being drawn to a single flake and watching it come towards the moving car. Willet shook his head. It was dangerous. So dangerous. The falling snow kept distracting him from watching the road - or where he thought it was under its mantle of snow. The falling snow was just so hypnotic.

"You with friends?"

"Yes, three girlfriends. Lisa, Jane and Lou."

"Don't they jog?"

"No, they do not jog."

"They'll be worried about you."

"Yes, they will be worried about me."

"You look done in and so cold. Sooner we have you in that bath the better."

"Yes."

To Willet there now seemed something not quite right about the girl's answers. They were definitely monotone, giving an impression of being a little detached from reality as if she was in a dream. He wondered if that was the onset of hypothermia. The sooner she was out of those wet things and into a bath raising her body temperature the better. He glanced at her still wet thighs. He was concerned for her but just that thought of raising her body temperature - her really good looking body temperature - raised emotions other than concern in him. She was really nice - smart to look at.

The Land Rover swung into the farm entrance and Willet got down to open the gate. Normally he would have asked or expected the passenger to hop down and do the job. The girl, was in no state to hop anywhere. Willet drove through and, again, got out to close the gate. He swung the car around in front of the stone house and turned off the engine. The girl sat there still staring out of the windscreen. She had not volunteered one word since they started driving. She had just answered questions.

"What's your name," he asked.

"Eleanor Ann Mavis Summers," she replied.

Willet was surprised. He had not exactly expected her to give her full name. He walked around and opened her door. The girl, Eleanor, looked so cold despite the car's heating. Her flimsy running things were still sodden. She did not make to move but just kept staring. Willet reached, worried she had lost the ability to move. He needed to get her inside. His hand slipped under a cold, wet thigh close to where the thin shorts started and he put his other arm under and around her back clasping her shoulder and pulling her to him. She was unresisting as he carried her into the house. A man used to manhandling sheep and much else on a farm did not have much difficulty carrying a slight girl.

Inside, the kitchen was warm from the Aga. Willet plonked the girl down in an arm chair and filled and put a kettle on to boil. From its accustomed hook, a hook probably placed on the wall by his grandfather, Willet took down the old galvanised bath. It had seen some service. He could remember how big it had seemed as a little boy when he had sat in it in front of the fire in the sitting room as his mother had fussed around him. The yellow plastic duck which had accompanied him for many years in that bath, finding the open water less and less each year, was around the house, somewhere.

The girl was still sitting looking ahead when he came back with a couple of big bath towels.. He draped them over the Aga and turned to the girl.

"Let's get those wet things off."

The girl did not move.

"Stand up, come on now." And she did which was promising.

But she did nothing more. She was a bit waffey on her feet, swaying as if her knees were not quite up to the job. Willet thought she must be really beat.

"Look I'll help you. You don't mind."

"No, I don't mind." Again such a monotone. Was the girl OK?

And then it came to Willet. Surely not, but... It was not hypothermia, rather something quite different. He had felt it in the Land Rover and had fought against the seductive, hypnotic effect of the falling snow flying so steadily towards him. He had definitely not wanted to end up smashed against a dry stone wall! The girl, exhausted, cold and tired had just stared and stared and been drawn into the ever moving snowflakes.

The surge of lust took him aback. Inside his old brown corduroys, shapeless and dirty, his chull - his penis - filled and made itself felt. It was not a feeling that had come much in recent years.

The girl just stood there, literally dripping on the stone flags from her wet clothing.

"Hands up," he said.

It was like undressing a child - 'hands up for marmalade' - only Eleanor was not a child. Far from it! Willet reached and tugged her singlet upwards and off over her head and ponytail. There was no reaction as the girl stood there in her sports bra. White and wet.

A married man for quite a few years, Willet had no difficulty with the clasp of the bra.

Eleanor's breasts needed the sports bra. There was a pleasant fullness and topped, he could see because of the cold, by really hard nipples. Her coldness was even more obvious with her top and bra removed. Hard peas of coldness, the little bumps around her areolae standing in support. As hard, indeed, as Willet's penis in his trousers - though that was very much warmer.

It was not time to stand and admire the half naked girl, hands still raised and naked from the waist upwards. Willet knelt and unlaced her running shoes, got her, one by one, to raise a foot and removed them and her soaked socks. He then reached upwards, put his fingers to her waist band and pulled. The wet scraps of material came down her hips and legs as one. Kneeling he had an almost straight on view of her suddenly revealed fair pubic hair. Slicked with moisture - not sexual moisture, obviously, but melted snow. Her plump mons veneris looked cold, her thighs not only looked cold but, where his fingers touched them, as he pulled her shorts and knickers down, were cold. Really cold.

Paul did not waste any time gawping. He could do that later as she sat in the bath. He tossed her clothes and running shoes to one side and went for one of the now warm towels on the Aga. Turning back, Eleanor still had not moved. She was standing on the stone flags completely naked and with her arms upraised. Completely defenceless, so vulnerable and so cold. Willet felt he wanted to hold the poor thing in his arms and warm her though it was very obvious to himself that warming and comforting Eleanor was not the only thing he wished to do. His hard penis knew exactly what it wanted to do. It wanted to do the age old thing that men and women did. It wanted to be inside the girl and inseminating.

"Put your arms down." Willet enfolded the girl in the towel, arms and old and picked her up, indeed holding her in his arms, wrapped completely, and plonked her down in an armchair near the Aga. On the stone flag, where she had been standing, were the shape of naked wet feet.

Willet made the tea and then began the process of filling the bath. The boiler beside the Aga had plentiful hot water produced from pipes circulating inside the Aga but was not connected to a proper bathroom or even wash hand basin elsewhere in the house. Perhaps that was what Mary had been most fed up about. Not having proper washing facilities. Willet had never got around to it, after all, to him, the old farmhouse had always been like that and it was home.

As he had done countless times before, and his father and mother before him, and his grandfather and grandmother, Willet filled a pot from the hot tap and carried it to the bath. Lovely to smell the steam rising in the old kitchen. The familiar scent of galvanised bath and hot water. He could smell the brewing tea too. Strong and dark - Farmer's Tea or 'Scordy' - in big mugs. He set one beside Eleanor.

"Drink yer scordy - tea - but mind it's hot, Don't you go scalding yourself." Willet was being careful, he was worried a simple command to drink might be obeyed to the letter by the seemingly obedient and seemingly hypnotised girl. He watched as she pulled a hand and arm free of the encircling towel.

The bath was not actually half full but the girl's bottom would displace the water upwards. Archimedes' Principle, as he had learnt at school.

"Come on, Eleanor, into your bath."

Lovely to unwrap her. Winding the warm towel back off her naked body.

"The water's not too hot?"

"No, it is not."

She had not touched it. It had been meant as a question and she had merely accepted his word. It was all rather uncanny. Again he put his hand in, wondering if he should test it with his elbow like you would a baby's bath.

"Stand in the water. How does that feel?"

"Mmmm. Bliss."

"Now get down slowly, Eleanor, only get into the water when it feels comfortable. You are not to burn yourself." Was the instruction clear?

Slow was probably good for Eleanor. It was certainly good for Willet. Eleanor eased herself downwards and as she did so her thighs slowly parted and there, steadily widening as a view, as she settled herself lower, was a view between her thighs, a view of hair fringed, crinkly pink female sex. Willet's erection had not subsided. It was not going to with such a view of where men wish to go - and he could see exactly where, nothing was at all hidden as her bottom touched the water.

"I'd better ring down to the farm. Which one? Let them know you're safe here with me."

He knew the Thwaites. There were relieved female voices in the background on the line as he spoke. Evidently Eleanor's friends had already raised the alarm but now they knew all was well. He assured Mrs Thwaite that Eleanor was "OK, and warming up in front of the fire." What Willet did say was she was sitting in a tin bath in his kitchen with her sweet little boobies on show and him with a real raging erection in his trousers. Too much information did not need to be imparted. Eleanor Summers was safe and getting warm. Yes, of course he would feed her. "Get something hot inside her."

Willet swallowed. The import of the phrase hit him as it would not have hit Mrs Thwaite on the 'phone. Could he, should he? Could he take advantage of her in her rather obedient state? It would be sort of consensual and she did look so lovely in her bath... and he had seen exactly where he would like to get something hot inside her.

In the bath Eleanor sat. There was a smile on her face. Willet could imagine the sheer pleasure of changing from shivering, wet cold back to being a normal warm pink girl.

"Would you like some more scordy?"

"Please."

The girl sat in her bath with a recovering pinkness, knees drawn up to her chin and her mug held in both hands resting on her right knee. It was a sweet picture. Willet poured more hot water in behind her back, admiring the regular bumps of her vertebrae all the way down to the just seen crack of her naked bottom. He was careful to avoid the hot water touching her. It would have made her jump, perhaps jump out of her semi trance. Willet did not want that. And it would have burnt.

Willet sat watching her as he sipped his tea. He began asking questions about her and received increasingly coherent answers as the girl recovered from the cold. Coherent but completely honest. If he asked, she answered. It was as if the usual tinted glass through which one person saw another, or the distortion of the telephone had been removed and he saw the girl with complete clarity and heard her as if in clear mountain air on a sunny, still, winter's day. There was no pretence, no modifying of the reality. She told it as it really was. The effect of the snow falling had not worn off, not one bit.