The Testimony of Guinevere Coffey

You’re probably wondering how a single slice of chocolate ganache cake managed to save my life. But you see, it wasn’t just the cake, per say.

It was the allure that the scrumptious morsel used to conceal the flavor and suspicions of one rather clandestine ingredient. I had slipped it into the saccharine batter when Bates had slinked off to his “office” to do some “work”.

Deadly Nightshade.

Now I have never been the type of person to methodically plan out and execute the poisoning of a man. But these were under completely dire circumstances. I simply had no choice. Please believe me on that.

You see, with Edmund Bates, it was either eat or be eaten.

I had gone out on exactly three dates with Bates before he had invited me back to his country home to watch some indie movie that he had been raving about all evening at dinner.

He had been such a gentlemen, so friendly and polite. With the words of honey he had used to rot my teeth and sense of willpower. I thought he was quite the catch.

But then I got caught.

Like an insect stuck in his web of corruption and lies, I found myself locked in a damp 10x10 room in his basement. The walls covered in once white, but now nicotine yellow tiles and the overhead lights flickering, buzzing and swarmed with flies. A single stained cot for me to sleep on sat in one corner of the cell and a small kitchenette mirrored it on the opposite wall.

I remember thinking that this was it. My life was over. That this room would surely become my coffin.

But endless hours of solitary confinement sure leave the brain a lot of time for thinking. And after a few days of helplessness, I pulled myself back together. I thought, hell, if I ever plan on seeing the light of day again or getting out of here then I better play the part, and I better play it well.

That is how the days turned into weeks, with me acting sickeningly sweet towards my one and only captor, Edmund Bates. The role I cast for myself, as a loving and dutiful housewife, never failed to make my stomach churn. And after I’d kiss his heinous lips goodnight or hold his destructive hand while we watched a film in the evening, I’d always spend the first minutes after he’d left scrubbing myself mercilessly until I felt clean.

When he would get angry with me, I would apologize. When he asked me if I loved him, I said yes. When he told me to cook him spaghetti, I’d start boiling water.

It was a wretched thing that I was doing, but the fruits of my labors began to pay off over time.

I guess you could say that Bates was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Or perhaps his mind was so twisted and unaware of normality that he actually believed that I could love him this way. He bought in to every kiss on the cheek, dinner I cooked and fraudulent word I spoke.

Soon, Bates began to trust me. And light started to shine through the clouds of his controlling and abusive behaviors.

He began letting me out of the basement room I spent most of my time in and the downstairs living area he had arranged for us to watch TV. Then sometimes under his close supervision, he even let me walk around out back, throughout the overgrown yard and wild flowers.

Slowly, as weeks went by of me not trying to run (as it was of no use) and listening carefully to the rules and conditions of my little outings, he began to let his trust grow. Then he started to slip up.

He would go inside on occasion, to use the restroom or to get a glass of water, and in those few fleeting moments I was free to do as I pleased.

During one of these times alone is when I originally caught sight of the belladonna growing in a small patch, close to one of the back corners of Bate’s house of horrors. That is when the seed of the poisoning idea was first planted into the soil of my mind.

A few days later, when Bates told me that it was going to be his birthday next Sunday, I knew it was the perfect time for me to strike.

“Oh, happy birthday, darling!” I had cried, and then insisted that I wanted to make him a special birthday cake and that he should fetch me the ingredients before the weekend. It was almost too easy, the execution of my plan. I suppose it was not a difficult task, the manipulation of a deranged man.

Looking back, I question Bates’s skills as a criminal. He had tricked me, yes. I will give him that. But after the initial ploy, he kind of lost all sense of cleverness. So I proceeded to play him like a fiddle.

It was completely nerve wracking, trying to gather as many berries from the deadly nightshade stalk as I could and stuff them into the pockets of my over sized coat before Bates returned from his short trip into the house. But I managed it somehow. In all my trembling glory.

My hands were shaking as I mashed the berries up with a dull fork between looks over my shoulder and sounds that I kept fearing was the opening of the cellar door.

I might have felt bad, if it wasn’t for the black eye I was sporting and the ringing in my skull because he thought I was looking too long at Harrison Ford while we watched Indiana Jones two days prior.

So nothing but relief fled through me, as I set the slice of cake I had cut for Bates on the table in front of him after singing him happy birthday.

When he had just blown out the twenty eight candles he insisted I put on the dessert, I couldn’t help the smirk that engulfed my lips as he swallowed his first bite. He will never have twenty nine.

When his plate was licked clean, it didn’t take long for the hallucinations to begin. He was sweating profusely and started screaming about how women are demons. Not before long, he pointed his anger towards me, demanding to know what I had done to him.

When they got really bad he started accusing me of being a witch and swinging at the air. Then when he rushed me I tried getting away, but the room was much too small and he was much too fast.

He cornered my body against a wall of peeling paper and started to choke me. And for the first time since I arrived at this house of hell, I fought back, and I fought back hard.

Within minutes of our scuffle’s beginning, just around the time when I thought that I might not win this fight, he went limp against me before tumbling to the floor. Then after a few moments of the sickening horror that was watching him writhe around, Bates was dead.

After that can only be remembered by me in a blur. The horrible guilt I felt for taking a life was outweighed by the knowing that I was going to be okay. I was alive and I could see my mother. My poor mother who was probably losing hope for me by now.

I do recall leaving the house, walking for what felt like forever in a daze before flagging down the first car I saw.

The police later found out that Bates had done this before. I was not the first women that had lived between his basement walls.

But I was the first woman to leave.

Every morning when I wake up in my cushy queen sized bed and feel the golden sunlight pouring in from the open windows and dancing across my face, I thank the Lord for chocolate cake.