The boys had made up their mind, after talking about it for months, and thinking about for even longer, they were going to break into the haunted whorehouse. It was Tom who made the decision official, and came up with the plan. He did not tell the other two that Jenny had promised to blow him if he could bring back something to prove he had been there, but he knew in his heart that this was something that was going to bring glory to them all.
The “plan” was pretty simple, basically just an excuse to borrow Tom’s dad’s car, and a pair of bolt cutters to make a hole in the fence. They probably wouldn’t have needed the bolt cutters if someone had gone up there and scouted around for an existing hole in the fence;they certainly weren’t the first ones to be interested in the place, but for some reason none of them could work up the nerve to take a first step like that; it had to be the full adventure, all at once, or nothing.
One thing that the boys had all done, and hadn’t talked to each other about – they had all brought all the money they had with them. They knew there was no one there but ghosts,but you never know, right?
They parked on the side of the little dirt road that adjoined the property, walked a few hundred yards to the chain-link fence that surrounded the grounds, made a few cuts, and scrambled under it. The house was only one story but unusually tall and was at the top of a slight rise, which made it loom as they walked towards it. They had talked at length on the drive about how to break in, but as they got close it became obvious that the front door was flapping loosely on its hinges and would present no barrier. Some boards had been nailed up across the opening but there was plenty of room to duck under them and walk into the house.
A small foyer led to the dilapidated but still elegant parlor, a big room that seemed to run the length of the house. Across from the door was an ornate desk, against the walls were divans and fancy wooden chairs with upholstered seats, tasteful nudes hung on the walls. Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust and cobwebs, but somehow did not feel quite abandoned, just neglected. Past the furnished part of the room, there were several doors on each wall, with a small sign hanging from each. Instinctively, the boys split up and each wandered over to a door, to read the sign on it.
The first door Tom looked at had a picture of a sailboat. He tried the doorknob and it turned. He walked in.
The door Michael looked at had the name “Giselle” written on it. He hesitated a bit longer than Tom had, but he opened the door and walked in.
Loren looked at a few different doors; when he realized that he was alone in the parlor, he opened the door he was in front of and walked in. He didn’t pay attention to the sign.
Loren stepped through the door and pushed past the curtains hanging just on the other side. The room was lit by candles and had black walls, and a brass bed with a canopy hung with crimson banners on the corners. She was there, on the bed, propped up on one elbow, wearing a matching black bra and panties, black hair, dark eyes, a winking smile on her lips. She was amazingly good-looking. “Just leave the money on the dresser and come over here, beautiful. Or don’t you want to get started?” The curve of her hips was like the beacon of a lighthouse, a command that must be followed. He pulled the wad of bills out of his wallet, set it on the dresser next to the door without taking his eyes off her, and walked over to the bed. She patted the mattress, he sat down and she reached a hand to his chest and pushed him down. Soon, he was on top of her, his pants around his ankles, fucking her while she made sexy noises and curled his hair around her fingers. He was too shy to look into her eyes, so he stared at her neckline for a while, then he looked up at the wall. It was dark, and the flickering candlelight made him realize that it was a mirror, except he couldn’t see himself and as he looked a woman’s body came into focus out of the dark, kneeling on a white fur rug and looking at him. Naked except for a lacy scarf that just barely covered the tops of her breasts. Blond, flouncy, buxom, smiling that same winking smile. Hands resting on the ground in front of her, swaying her hips back and forth in a little circle.
“Hi there. You like you see?” Her voice was high-pitched and girly.
I do, he thought.
“Then why don’t you come over here and show me how much you like it?”
He looked down again, at the girl underneath him, but he still couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact – it scared him somehow, like he would be admitting to something that he didn’t want to admit. Her breathing had become deep and regular. He looked up again, at the woman in the scarf. who beckoned him with a finger, and he crawled forward into the mirror, and was face to face with her.
Moments later he was standing up, leaning back against a piece of furniture, and she had taken his pants off and was running her lips up and down the shaft of his cock, flicking it with her tongue. He closed his eyes when she took the whole length into her mouth, and when he opened them, he saw that there was another mirrored wall, and the reflection of the girl’s back framed by his legs flickered and shifted around, until he saw another girl, tanned and slender, standing facing away and bent over a wooden chair, her ass sticking up in the air, wearing a garter belt and sheer stockings. She looked back at him over her shoulder through the rungs of the chair. “Any part of this you want, it’s all yours. Any part.” She reached a finger up between her legs and ran it slowly over her ass crack and pussy.
He put his hands on the head of the girl kneeling in front of him, pushed her aside, and walked through the mirror.
In the next mirror was Miss Hanover, the youngest and best-looking teacher at his school. She was straddling the seat of a school desk, wearing a cheerleader outfit, spreading her legs to show off her naked crotch. She put two fingers in her mouth and slid them slowly in and out.
In the next mirror a naked girl was hanging upside down from a rope tied to one ankle, her legs crossed in a 4 shape, like the Hanged Man in the tarot deck. Her hands cupped her breasts. He remembered the image from when Robin Zaleski had told his fortune, in her bedroom, on a night when her parents weren’t home. He thought about the smell of her body as he stepped through the mirror.
There were more mirrors, more girls, but he started to lose track. All there was was the constant throb of his hard-on and the parade of exposed, magical flesh. He started to see several mirrors at once, and walking through them blindly, wanting whatever was on the other side.
And so he found himself outside the house, back in the woods by where they had parked the car. It took him a moment to realize that he was naked, sans wallet or keys. Dazed, he picked up a branch with leaves on it that was just big enough to cover his crotch, and sat on the cold hood of the car, wondering how he was going to explain this to his parents.
Michael stepped through the door and pushed past the curtains hanging on the other side. The room was dimly lit, almost as dark as the moonlight outside, and had only one piece of furniture. An ornate couch made from carved wood, tall and spindly, one of the arms pointing towards him. A woman, nude except for high heels, was bent over the arm, her shapely ass pointing up, her body and hands stretched out across the wooden seat.
He walked a few steps closer, quietly. The woman was humming breathily, almost purring, not acknowledging him even though she must know he was there. Her dark hair was spread out on her bare shoulders like a fan. He saw that balanced on top of her ass was a small white card, folded to make it stand up, and on the card in neat handwriting it said “FUCK ME”.
He stopped just behind her. It felt awkward, even wrong, to be standing here without saying anything, but he wasn’t sure what he would say, and there was that card… he dropped his pants and slid his dick into her.
She cooed in response, and began to push back against him, swaying slightly back and forth. He leaned forward, and the bench seemed to shift under them as he moved, so that she was lying on her belly and he was on top of her, and he laid his chest on her back and propped himself up on his elbows. Their hips continued to move in rhythm, and for a moment he felt like they were joined together. Then he realized that they were joined together – somehow, straps had come up out of the bench and wrapped tightly around both of their legs, pinning them together. They had just enough give to let him keep thrusting his cock into her. He almost froze up when he realized this, but he was close to coming, and he closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around the girl’s shoulders, and kept at it until he exploded inside her. His body relaxed, and he found that more thick straps had appeared, around his back, his shoulders, and his arms, pinioning him to the girl, their bodies almost contiguous, their legs and genitals clamped together. His face was pressed up very close to the back of her head.
She was very slightly sweaty, and was humming again, quieter than before. Her body flexed with his when he tried to move his arms and legs; whether on purpose or because of the tight straps he wasn’t sure. After an awkwardly long time, he realized that the thing to do at this point was to talk to her.
“So – uh – you must be Giselle?” That sounded really stupid, he thought to himself. “My name’s Michael”
“Hello, Michael. Yes, that is me. Thank you for coming to see me.”
“Oh, sure… so are you… I mean… what are you? Like, a ghost?”
“Yes, Michael, that is what I am. Well, that is one thing I am.”
“Oh, uh, yeah.” He couldn’t think of anything more to say for a while. “What’s it like to be ghost?”
“It is not so bad. I don’t remember very much about not being a ghost, though, so I can’t compare it to much else.” Her voice had a slight trace of an accent that he couldn’t quite place.
“How did you… ” Don’t ask her that! That’s rude.
“Die? I don’t remember that either. You see, I’m only really here when there is someone else around. When there’s no one around to see or touch me, I’m not real, exactly. I’m like a shadow or an idea.The idea of a person. So, I never look back or remember or reminisce, because there’s no time when I would do so.”
“Oh.” He couldn’t think of anything to say in reply to that. “Well, that was really great.”
“Thank you Michael”, she said, with a tiny giggle. “I enjoyed it as well. You are very young and strong.”
He blushed at that, then blushed more when he realized that she could feel him blushing since they were pressed so close together.
“Were you always a prostitute? I mean, like, before?”
“I think so. I like it, and ghosts don’t change their minds, so I must have liked it before.”
“You can’t change your mind? About anything?”
“As I said, we are only real when real people are around us. There is nothing about us that can change. You are a living person, and you experience things. That is what living is, is things changing and you changing with them. Nothing ever happens to me, except what happens to a living person like you. When your story crosses paths with mine, it grows and changes. My story doesn’t change any more. It repeats. That’s what it means to be a ghost.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not at all. There are angry ghosts, vengeful ghosts, out there. That might be a bad thing to be, I don’t know. I’m a pleasant ghost. I play out this story. To you, it sounds very unsatisfying, I’m sure. But, ghosts don’t want things like living people do. We just are.”
“So, when I leave – when no one’s here – you just stop existing?”
“I am always here. I am always something. Just not real.”
You sure feel real, he thought. “Uh – are these straps real? Because they’re really tight. Should I, like, get off you now or something?”
She giggled again. “I don’t know anything about the straps, Michael. I didn’t put them there. I thought you did.”
“No! They just like, showed up. Is that not… part of it? Is this not what usually happens?”
“Oh, there have certainly been straps before. There’s been all kinds of things that happen. But I didn’t make them happen. What did I just tell you?”
He wasn’t sure what she meant at first. “That things happen, because this is my story? So – I made the straps appear? Is that what you mean? I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“Oh, you didn’t? Why not? Don’t you like being this close to me?”
“No, I do! It’s… nice. It’s just, I do have to go. Sometime. My friends will be waiting.” He paused, thinking this is actually pretty nice. “Tom drove us here. So…”
“Of course, Michael, I am teasing you. You must go when it is time. I don’t think I will see you again. I don’t remember many things, but I don’t think there are very many men I see more than once.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t thought about that all, and he felt a pang of sadness at the thought of Giselle disappearing forever, but at the same time it sounded right. “Well, goodbye.”
In a blink, he was standing up in the room, Giselle and the wooden couch gone. His pants were still around his ankles. He bent over to pull them up, and he could just barely smell the traces of their encounter on his dick.
Tom stepped through the door and pushed aside the curtains hanging on the other side. The room was decorated all over with drapes and curtains, dark blue and green, thick and plush. A woman glided up next to him and took his hand; she must have been standing right next to the door when he came in. “Hello! Welcome!” she said, and guided him by the hand past the curtains hanging in the middle of the room. There was a round bed with no headboard, like a giant ottoman, with a cover in the same color scheme as the rest of the room, but slightly iridescent. The woman lay down on the bed; she was wearing a dark green robe which she opened up to reveal her naked body, full and inviting. Pants off, Tom lay down on top of her, entered, and began thrusting. He had read somewhere that it was bad manners to kiss prostitutes, so even though his instinct was to put his face next to hers, he closed his eyes and let his mind go blank. In a few moments, he started to feel strangely weightless, like he was drifting in space, but there were so many sensations going through his body that he ignored it and focused on the heat in his crotch. He started to drift downwards, towards the woman’s body and then suddenly he was falling! He definitely felt that he was falling like a skydiver. He opened his eyes just in time to see the water.
SPLASH! He went under for a second. Flailing his arms, he got his head above water and looked around, trying to compose himself. He was in the middle of the ocean, or a huge lake. It was nighttime still, and the moonlight was strong. The water was not that cold; it felt tolerable on his naked skin. He paddled for a while and looked around, and after his eyes had adjusted a bit he saw to his relief that there was a shore visible, pretty far but he knew he could swim that far if the
currents didn’t screw with him. He started swimming, alternately crawling and doing a backstroke to save his strength.
There was just a whisper of a breeze, and the water was very calm. When he paused for a moment to catch his breath – he hadn’t been swimming in a while, and it tired him out quicker than he thought it would – he noticed a school of fish passing near him. There were several hundred of them, bright-colored little fish like goldfish, but in shades of red and purple, swimming in close formation. The school seemed to be milling around about 5 yards away from him to his right, almost as if it was watching him to see what he would do. He watched it back for a minute, then started swimming towards the shore again, which seemed barely closer than before. The school followed him, keeping pace, still about 5 yards away. Then it started to sing.
At first he could barely hear it over the splashing of his arms in the water. It wasn’t singing, exactly, but a pleasant melodic sound with a certain rhythm. When he stopped to listen, the sound stopped; and when he started again, it slowly increased in volume. As it got loud enough to hear more clearly, he realized with a mild shock that it wasn’t a song at all; it was the sound of a woman’s voice moaning in pleasure. The woman in the bed had barely been vocalizing at all, just breathing a little hard, but the voice from the water around the fish school was a full-throated cry of sexual abandon, a rising and falling wave of inexpressible ecstasy. When he slowed down his stroke, the moaning slowed down in intensity, and when he picked up again, it got louder. He decided to swim as hard as he could. He saw that there was another school of fish swimming to the left of him, and he thought he could see other fish further away in the water, all somehow joining in to the crescendo of erotic wailing.
It occurred to him that in some weird way he was fucking the entire ocean. This was not at all an unpleasant thought.
He looked up and saw that the shore was close, a few hundred yards at most. The schools of fish were closer to him now, almost brushing up against him, and the movements of the fish were more frenzied, almost vibratory. The moans of the ocean were longer and deeper pitched. His lungs were burning from exertion. He swam as hard as he could, feeling like he had to get to shore as soon as possible, even though he didn’t want this to end because it was amazing. As he got close, the water got suddenly shallow, and he felt his dick, which was as hard as it had ever been, drag along the soft silty sand on the bottom. That did it. The voice screamed in delight, and he came so hard that he jetted forward like a squid, out of the water entirely and onto the beach, yelling like a berserker warrior.
The voice – or was it voices? – subsided back to a sigh, then a babble, then just the sound of little waves hitting the shore. He lay there on his belly for a few minutes, content, then rolled over and sat up. It was dawn. The lake seemed much smaller than it had from the middle. Next to him on the sand was a small blanket with his clothes neatly folded and stacked on it. He put them on, in a hurry, suddenly aware that he was naked in the daylight in a place he didn’t know. He pulled his shirt over his head, and when his head was out and he could see again, he was back in the house, in the same room, except all of the curtains and wall hangings were gone, as well as the bed, and there were just bare wood frames everywhere. The blanket his clothes had been on was still there, and on it was a piece of clothing he didn’t recognize. He picked it up and examined it; it was a corset, of dark purple velvet with little white lacy frills. Inside, between the breast cups, was a label that read “propriété de Claudette. la maison des filles de joie.” This is what Jenny will want, he thought, and for a second he thought he heard the ocean voice again repeat after him “yes, this is what Jenny wants” but the room was quiet.