Sharon, she whom Helen had nicknamed 'the Elf,' a name Sharon had gladly taken to herself, rose naked from her bed at dawn. Pattering downstairs on her tiny bare feet, she entered the kitchen, still holding the warmth from the Aga she'd banked up with logs on the previous night. Skipper rose to greet her from his bed in an alcove by the big stove, and the Elf opened the door to the yard outside to let him pass through.

Her next task was to place more logs in the Aga, for the stove, their only source of hot water for heating and bathing, was never allowed to go out even in the height of summer. The water in the kettle she'd stood on the hob before going to bed was hot, and the Elf took it the gas cooker and bent to turn on the supply from the big gas bottles outside the kitchen. Lighting the gas under the kettle, she soon had it boiling and she tipped the steaming water on to the leaves (themselves a revelation to Sharon, who'd thought tea came in little bags) in the tea-pot and went into the coolness of the larder for milk.

Sipping her tea, the Elf felt the weight of responsibility on her shoulders, a frightening sensation. But she felt proud too, and pleased that her friend had entrusted her with caring for the farm and its animals in her brief absence.

The Elf smiled. Never would she have thought that she, a streetwise and quick-witted Streatham girl who'd lived all her young life on the fringes of the South London underworld, could have settled so well to rural life and come to enjoy the solitude of Helen's remote farm whose nearest neighbour was four miles away across the moor. She never ceased from blessing the day Helen had found her, drenched and miserable, hitch-hiking on the slip road of the motorway. She'd seen the car stop and heard the gentle voice inviting her to enter and had accepted eagerly but with her usual streetwise suspicion. The weather continued to be foul, her chances of a lift to her destination, further down the motorway than Helen was going, seemed to be at vanishing point, and she accepted her Good Samaritan's offer of a bed for the night with alacrity, intending to travel on tomorrow.

Now, as she sipped her tea, the Elf ran through the early morning programme in her mind.

First she must milk the cow, Crumbock. She remembered how Helen had smiled when she'd told her the cow's name, saying that Crumbock was a traditional name for a cow. That had been news to the Elf, for she'd only had the vaguest notion that milk came from cows and had never thought of cows having names. Anyway, she would milk the cow and then turn her out to graze in the field bordering the yard. She would feed their chickens, and collect their eggs from wherever the foolish birds had chosen to lay them, a task the Elf enjoyed immensely, treating it a sort of Treasure Hunt.

Skipper would need feeding next, and she'd also put down some biscuit for the semi-feral cats inhabiting one of the barns. Then she'd feed Percy, and at the thought a warm glow of anticipation swept over the Elf. 

At once she felt guilty, a feeling she'd never had before she'd met Helen. Once their work had been completed, and Percy installed in his new, permanent quarters, Helen had told her, in that gentle way of hers, that Percy had been punished enough, that he'd continue to be punished as long as he lived or his mind held out, and it was wrong and cruel to gloat over him. All the same, knowing what Percy had done to her friend, and to so many others in his career, the Elf couldn't resist relishing his utter helplessness and his total, domestic animal-like, dependence on them for all his simple needs.

Draining her mug, the Elf slipped on the sandals which were all she ever wore except whenever she went beyond the farm premises and went outside, shivering deliciously at the touch of the cold air on her bare skin. At once Skipper ran to her side, and she walked briskly over the beaten earth of the yard to the cowshed, her hand resting on the big dog's furry head, to enter the smelly warmth of the cowshed.

CHAPTER TWO

Returning to the grateful heat of the kitchen, her skin blotched blue and red with the cold, the Elf drank a full mug of creamy milk, still warm from Crumbock's udder. She couldn't resist a giggle at her old self as she drank, the old Sharon had always bought milk in cardboard cartons or plastic bottles from a supermarket and she'd had no idea milk could taste as good as this. Perhaps tomorrow when Helen returned, she would allow the Elf to assist her in making butter and cheese from the surplus milk Sharon had religiously poured into the big churn in the dairy and stirred as she'd been directed.

But now it was time to feed Percy, he would be hungry, and the Elf knew that, pathetically, being fed was now the high point of his life. gHuman beings eat; animals are fed,h she quoted to herself with a giggle, remembering Helen's words.

Putting her empty mug on the draining-board to be washed up later, the Elf bent to take the slop bucket from the cupboard under the sink and peered into it doubtfully at the greasy remains of the mutton stew Helen had made for the Elf's evening meal of the day before. There were stale bread-crusts, already spotted blue and green with mould, in the bucket, and half a pint of sour milk that the Elf had poured in earlier. She could see bacon rinds from yesterday's breakfast and used tea-leaves from the pot, in short, anything and everything edible that would otherwise have been thrown away. Helen, and the Elf with her, prided themselves on not wasting food, a cardinal sin, Helen had told her. Well, Percy would eat anything – not that he had any choice in what he was fed. The contents of the bucket, along with a shovelful of the cheap pig meal they'd bought for him, would fill his belly and keep him from feeling hungry for several hours.

A thought struck her, and she hurried back outside to the vegetable garden. Whilst feeding the chickens, she'd noticed a small cabbage, its leaves limp and brown from the first frost of the coming winter and she cut it from its stalk and went back with into the kitchen where she chopped it into pieces and put them with the rest of the swill.

The bucket swinging from her hand, the Elf went out again into the yard. In the few short minutes she'd been indoors, the October sun had broken through the clouds, shedding its warm rays over her diminutive bare body.

The long shed which housed the pig sties was the last of the maze of outbuildings beyond the farmyard, set a little apart and downwind of the rest. Low and squat, its yard-thick stone walls bled inwards the heat they acquired from the sun all through the coldest nights, and the air inside was fuggy and warm as the Elf unbarred the outer door and slipped inside to walk down the stained concrete floor between the twin row of sties on either side. Percy lived in the last sty on the right, and he'd heard her coming in, for the Elf could hear him moving about in his filthy straw,  snuffling and grunting in anticipation.

Continuing past Percy's sty, the Elf came to the hopper holding the pig-meal, and at the sound of the little shovel scooping up the marble-sized pellets, the grunting and snuffling from the sty doubled in volume. The Elf grinned to herself, wondering if Percy knew the true nature of the pig pellets, their sickly sour-sweet smell reminding her of the meths drinkers in the park near to where she'd lived in Streatham. They were the cheapest available, made from finely-chopped straw and the pressed pulp of sugar-beets mixed with used cooking oil to add consistency, with industrially-produced protein powder and those trace elements essential to the long-term health of pigs. The diet lacked salt, but Helen said that was a good thing. The Elf agreed, but not for that reason; she liked to toss little salty scraps into Percy's sty and watch him snuffle about for them in the straw matted with his own trodden-in droppings.

Picking up a stick, the Elf stirred the mess in the bucket vigorously and the grunting from the sty rose to a crescendo of eagerness.

When Percy heard the wooden box the diminutive Elf needed to stand upon being dragged into position beyond the front wall of his sty, his excitement knew no bounds. The Elf mounted the twelve-inch high box nimbly and tilted the bucket over the edge of the concrete wall, watching the contents slither downwards into the dirt-encrusted metal trough below.

Percy's head was already low in the trough, snuffling down her offering before the Elf had climbed from her perch. Putting down the empty bucket, she dragged the box on to the bare concrete floor of the neighbouring sty and climbed back on to it. Leaning on the top of the dividing wall, she looked down at the creature noisily feeding from the trough in the next sty.

  As always when the Elf regarded what Helen had made of Percy, she was filled with admiration for the older woman. She'd known that her friend was what the Elf had called an 'Animal Doctor' – a Veterinarian - but she'd no idea that profession required surgical dexterity on such a scale, nor did she know that prosthetics could be fitted to the bodies of animals, a speciality Helen excelled in, both making manufacturing and fitting her own such artificial devices.

What a magnificent job Helen had done on Percy, thought the Elf, pleased that she'd been allowed an insignificant part in the operation. She stared at the oblivious creature at the trough, admiring his hairless head with the long, blunt  jaws Helen had given him and his broad, flat nose with its widely separated, cavernous nostrils. To insert a steel ring through the cartilage dividing Percy's new nostrils still seemed to the Elf as good an idea as when she'd first suggested it, equal to her notion of having an alphanumeric serial number tattooed on his right thigh below his rump. Helen had agreed; such things added verisimilitude, she'd added mysteriously, sending the Elf straight to the dictionary.

Staring down at him, the Elf wondered once more if Percy realised he'd been neutered, 'gelded' as Helen had called it as she'd plied her gleaming instruments in his groin, explaining that this should be done to all male animals not required for breeding purposes. Percy, in his prime, had often been seen with his latest young female trophy; there'd been more than one scandal about the way he'd treated them, but they'd all been silenced by his expensive lawyers or paid off in the end. The Elf, holding his soft, heavy testicles in her hand as her friend worked, remembered her vindictive joy at that moment; Percy would never trouble any young woman again. Then she'd thought of Lefty, Big Al and 'Razor,' and how pleasant it would be hold their testicles as they were removed by Helen's scalpel, and she'd vowed again to settle accounts with them some day.

The Elf continued her study of the gross body lying in the filthy straw. Percy's trunk Helen had left as it was, but she'd greatly shortened his limbs. Percy's legs now ended where his knees had been, and his arms just below his one-time elbows, now permanently locked. No part of Percy's limbs were any longer capable of articulation and, thanks to some  clever work amongst the tendons in his armpits and shoulders and in his groin, the movements fore and aft of his four new legs was limited to a mere twenty degrees from the vertical, and much less than that in the horizontal direction. Percy could walk, slowly and clumsily, on his four short, stumpy legs, but lying down was difficult for him; he would fall the last few inches to land in his straw with a thump, and standing up again was a matter of scrabbling for purchase with the blunt terminations of his altered arms and legs.

Other things had been done to Percy under Helen's scalpel. The ducts draining his eyes into his nose had been widened; now, when he wept – and he probably did still weep on occasion, in despair and self-pity – his tears went straight into his nasal passages to emerge from his gaping nostrils in a flood of mucus and salt water. The muscles of his shoulders had been modified to prevent him lifting his head above the horizontal, a task made even more difficult for him by the thick roll of fat at the back of his neck. Now, only by dint of rolling his eyes forward in their sockets, could he raise his vision beyond the patch of floor immediately below them. He could wander about his sty without colliding with its walls, but he couldn't see upwards to their tops, four feet above above the floor of his sty unless he lay down on his side and craned his neck, a difficult position for him and one he couldn't endure up for many moments.

Helen had done something else; she'd made him doubly incontinent. It had been no part of her plan that he should escape his life-long punishment by deliberately withholding his urine until his bladder burst. Now Percy's body relieved itself at the behest of his body, not his mind, and even as the Elf watched, his rapid feeding caused him to defecate, loudly and abundantly, as he ate.  She smiled, looking down into the six feet by four feet square sty with its stinking, churned up mixture of straw and trodden-in excrement. In this cramped space, behind its four dirty concrete walls with no view of the outside world, Percy would spend the rest of his life in filth and boredom, and she breathed in with a sort of relish the odour arising from his sty, the smells of sweat, dung and rotting, urine-soaked straw.

Percy had nearly finished eating, the steel ring in his nose clicking noisily on the metal bottom of his trough as he snuffled down the last scraps. Turning clumsily away, grunting softly in satisfaction, his huge, sagging belly almost brushing the floor, he lay down with an effort in the filthy straw, presenting his wide, dirt-encrusted back and broad, flabby buttocks to his watcher, who regarded the sight with satisfaction. Percy, thought the Elf, had been once a very naughty boy indeed; he had stolen from the widows and orphans, he had robbed her friend Helen, it was right that he should be made to pay for his sins. And it had been so easy to 'disappear' him, as she thought of it, snatching him from his big house in the midst of his servants had been child's play.

Now everyone thought he'd decamped, never to be heard from again, or had done away with himself in some lonely spot where his corpse would never be found.

She climbed down from her perch and left him, taking the slop-bucket with her. Percy would fall asleep with a full belly, the high point of his long and boring day. But in four hours he'd be hungry again, in eight he'd be ravenous, with another two or three hours to wait until the evening when the Elf would return to feed him again. There were a lot of evil people in the world who needed to be punished, Lefty Malone and his two lieutenants, Big Al and 'Razor,' the men who'd raped her and whom she'd robbed in revenge, and she cast thoughtful glances at the empty sties on either hand as she walked past.

Something would have to done about them; safe as she thought she was, there was always the possibility of some chance encounter with someone who'd known, vene in this remote spot.