Duskwood Manor

Jules had that expression on her face.

Alex noticed from across the room, the moment he entered the restaurant. The way she sat up when she saw him, her eyes widening slightly, the smile on her face broad but restrained. Like she had reserves of anticipation she was pushing down with a will. Trying not to scare him off but unable to quite contain her excitement.

He'd seen that expression countless times over the years. Too many times. It almost always spelled trouble.

"Hey," he said, cautiously, as he approached the table. Jules watched him with willful patience. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail; her blue eyes tracked his every step.

She sprung up when he neared, pulled him into a tight hug. "Hey." She grinned up at him. Too sweetly, he thought.

She was halfway through a cocktail. A fresh beer sat waiting for him at his seat.

"Thanks," he said, gesturing to it as he sat. She nodded. Took a sip of her drink, her eyes never leaving his face.

He was afraid to ask. Through his mind marched a mini-montage of episodes through the years when she'd fixed him with a similar look.

I think I know where your mom hid your birthday presents.

I know someone who likes you.

I know how to get us into the show this weekend.

I know how we can get back at Mr. Butcher.

He took a slow drink of his beer. Watched Jules for some sign.

"So," he said, "how are you?"

"Good." Her smile broadened. He groaned inwardly. Whatever this was, she was particularly excited about it. She seemed to savor the anticipation of telling him. The dance they would enact, the routine they'd done so many times before: he would begin dead set against it, whatever it was. She'd poke and prod at his resistance, wheedle and plead and promise. His absolutely not would become I would, but, would become we shouldn't, would become maybe, no promises. And they both knew he'd acquiesce, they both knew he couldn't say no to her. He never could.

He nodded at her noncommittal response, as if she'd given him an interesting answer.

He took another drink of his beer, sighed, and relented. "So. What's going on?"

He shouldn't have had to ask. He should have known. The days were getting shorter, the leaves beginning to turn. Cool breezes carried that distinctive smell: the smell of soft soil and cold nights, sweaters and blankets and football and everything flavored with pumpkin. It meant autumn. It meant, to Jules at least if not for Alex, spooky season, Halloween, creepy decorations and scary movies. And, of course, the oft-repeated accounts of Duskwood Manor, the abandoned mansion that sat on the hill just on the edge of town, watching over the town with its darkened windows, filling the townspeople's heads with stories of its history and its supposed haunting.

"We're going in," Jules said, her eyes brightening, boring into Alex's, as if daring him to protest.

"Going in..." Where? he almost said. But he knew.

"To Duskwood."

He shook his head. No. That was too far. The place was locked up, condemned. Whether or not you believed the stories, this was a bad idea.

Jules nodded in an exaggerated motion, as if trying to by sheer force of body language convert Alex's no to a yes.

"You know what day the full moon falls on this month?" she said.

"Oh, sure, let me just consult my Farmer's Almanac..."

She laughed, rolling her eyes. "Well, guess then."

"I think you're going to tell me whether I guess or not."

"You're no fun at all."

"I can be fun."

"When's the last time you were fun?"

He laughed, shook his head. Took a sip of his beer.

"Fine," he said. "Wild guess. The full moon is on October 31."

Jules's grin widened, toothy and gleeful. She nodded.

"That's right," she said. "Technically it's a blue moon. But yes. Halloween."

"So you want to break into Duskwood Manor. On Halloween."

"Uh huh."

"No fucking way."

"Yes fucking way."

Alex and Jules had first heard the story behind Duskwood Manor's supposed haunting nearly twenty years before, when they were seven years old, thrilled to be allowed to tag along with Jules's older sister Gretchen and all of her friends. It was Halloween, and it was a full moon.

Just as it had been the night Miss Eleanor Shipley of Duskwood Manor was said to have died, nearly one hundred years prior.

Eleanor Shipley was the last daughter of a once great family. They'd owned half the town, in addition to various other holdings the details of which were never quite clear. They were fantastically rich, fantastically powerful. But Eleanor's grandfather, Charles, was a drunk, a speculator. Utterly convinced of his own intelligence, of the depths of the family coffers. He made one bad deal after another, and when he died he left his son, Franklin, little more than the house: Duskwood Manor, named for the forest that abutted the town at its founding, thinned and cleared in the years since.

Franklin Shipley was no better than his father. He squandered the last of what he'd been born with, and when the debtors came calling he hanged himself. But not before shooting his wife, Mabel, perhaps to save her the disgrace of living in the shadow of the name he'd given her.

Whether spared by mercy or simply forgotten, their daughter Eleanor was left alone among the ruins of her family's name, her family's house.

For a long time, she did not emerge. Ashamed, people thought, or mad, preferring the shadows of her moldering mansion to the curiosity of the townsfolk.

But when she did emerge, she shocked everyone. Her clothes may have been years behind the fashion, their colors faded, the material thinned and patched. But that was scarcely to be noticed next to the warmth of her smile, the striking blue of her eyes. She was quiet but curious, bright but modest. She was beautiful in a softly muted way: not a look that would dazzle but was quietly pleasing to the eye. She didn't turn heads so much as invite the gaze to linger, and despite her shyness she did not wither under scrutiny.

She and William found each other immediately. He was a sturdy, unassuming young man, well liked, and though the townsfolk were protective of him and distrustful of the Shipley name no one could find it in themselves to disapprove of the match. They so clearly loved each other, right from the start. No one could fail to see it, and no one could find fault in it.

Their courtship was fevered, joyous, and brief.

War came, and the young men of the town were sent away, William among them. And Eleanor withdrew again into the shadows of Duskwood Manor.

The war dragged on for years. Slowly, one by one, the young men returned from overseas. Some few whole. Many broken. More still in coffins carried by somber men in uniform. But one did not return at all.

Lost at sea, they said, of William. All souls lost. There was no body to send home to bury.

Well wishers and condolences lined up at Duskwood Manor, but none were allowed in. Some caught furtive glimpses of hooded eyes through the window, barely discernible in the unlit interior. If Eleanor said anything at all to her visitors it was only, "My William will come home to me."

This went on for months, then years, and gradually, again, people forgot Eleanor. The town moved on. The manor darkened and vines grew thick across its walls. Winston Fenec the longtime groundskeeper, though he was no longer paid for it, continued to tend the gardens, kept the well clear and in working order, left his small harvests in baskets by the door, where they would be found empty the following day.

Until that night, that Halloween night when the moon was full, when revelers in town stopped short, chilled, and bent their ears to the night, hearing from up on the hill the unmistakable sound of anguished wails. The suffering that suffused the sound was so acute, so raw, that it's said that some who heard it fell to their knees and wept.

A group gathered. They pounded on the doors of Duskwood Manor, on the windows, they shouted Eleanor's name, sure she was suffering some terrible fate beyond their reach. They roused Fenec from bed, entreated him to help. Finally they managed to get in through the cellar, and in their haste they pushed through the scene of rot and decrepitude throughout the house, reaching finally the second floor, troublingly quiet now.

And they found Eleanor there, lying on her bed as if sleeping, her eyes shut, her hands neatly folded over her stomach.

Her once dark hair had gone bone white. Her skin was drained of all color, even down to her lips. She was ice cold to the touch. She seemed to have been dead for days.

The house still sat atop the hill at the edge of town, over a hundred years later. Empty, dark. Overgrown and crumbling. But still it seemed to keep watch.

People in town were fond of telling and retelling the tale. They were fond, too, of relating the reported sightings of Eleanor, most commonly on Halloween nights, moving through the shadows of Duskwood Manor.

Gretchen and her friends had told Alex and Jules the tale, that night, as the younger kids had tagged along trick or treating, as they'd walked in the shadow of the old house, its ivy-scarred face ghostly white in the light of the full moon.

"Sometimes," Gretchen said, "On a full moon, you can hear her crying out."

"Oooooh," someone said, behind Alex, a ghostly wail, absurd in its cartoonishness, and unfamiliar hands had trailed lightly down his back.

He never saw who it was. He jumped, cried out, and ran, as much from embarrassment as fear as he heard the echo of raucous laughter trailing after him.

This wasn't the first time Jules had suggested they break into Duskwood Manor. It wasn't even the first time she'd suggested they break in on Halloween in particular.

But this year was the first time since that night when they were young that the full moon fell on Halloween. And this time she was set on it: she was not going to take no for an answer.

"Okay, say we do that," Alex said, as if it really remained in doubt. "What would we do: just break in, look around? See if we meet any ghosts?"

Jules smiled, a loaded wouldn't you like to know smile, and for just a moment Alex swore a flush crept over her skin.

"I have a plan," she said.

"Are you gonna tell me what it is?"

"No." And this time Alex was sure Jules's face reddened, her eyes flicking uncertainly away, as if she couldn't meet his gaze.

That was new. She'd been cagey with him before, many times, withholding the parts of her schemes Alex wouldn't like. He didn't recall ever seeing her blush. Not with him. What was that about?

Whatever it was, he found his heart was beating a little faster, heat rising to his own face. His stomach tightening. And it was not the prospect of breaking into an apparently haunted house. Or, not only that.

The weeks leading up to Halloween were strange for Alex. He found he was looking forward to and dreading the day in equal measure. Something about the way Jules had looked at him in her caginess brought him a new sort of anticipation, a feeling he didn't quite know how to identify.

The town gradually filled with Halloween decor: spiders and skeletons and bats and jack-o-lanterns. Advertisements abounded for cheesy staged haunted houses. Why bother, Alex thought, when we have the real deal right here in town?

He let Jules drag him to an all-night horror movie marathon at the local theater. More Jules's thing than Alex's, to be sure: he remembered times when they were kids watching IT or Friday the Thirteenth or Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Jules, eating up the jump scares and the gore, playfully mocked Alex's evident discomfort. But sitting next to her in the theater now, as costumed fans cheered and jeered at their favorite scenes, he was surprised to find Jules leaning close to him, clutching his arm in moments of suspense. More than once he was sure her eyes were on him rather than the movie, but when he turned to look he saw only the screen's reflection on her wide rapt eyes cast forward.

On the eve of Halloween, Alex had a dream. It was long, vivid, unfolding almost like a movie in his sleeping mind.

He dreamed of Duskwood Manor as it stood a hundred years ago, well past its prime but not yet the abandoned ruin it was now. In his dream it was a place he longed to be, but it was out of reach, seen from some impossible distance.

He dreamed of Eleanor Shipley. Young, beautiful, alone. Alone among the shadows of that old house, the shadows of her broken and disgraced family. In his dream she spent hours, days, staring out the window over the town below, watching it come to life with the dawn, watching shadows crawl across it until it was again engulfed in night. Watching, waiting, day by day the last of her hope leeching from her chest, leaving her hollowed out.

He watched her weep, watched her curse the empty house. She cursed the town at the bottom of the hill, she cursed the world and the war that had taken her Willaim from her, left her alone.

And in his dream he felt such an unbearable sadness at seeing her like this, seeing her alone, that his desire to go to her and hold her, as if he was the one she waited for, was so strong that he woke, and he lay looking at the ceiling half-lit by the waxing moon outside. His chest ached with lingering sadness, his eyes were wet with tears, even as echoes of the dream faded from his mind.

He held onto it as long as he could. Held onto the image of Eleanor, young and beautiful and alone.

And before the image had faded entirely, before he fell back into fitful sleep, he realized with a pang that the Eleanor of his dream had worn Jules's features.

The day of Halloween — a Friday — was overcast all day. The air was heavy, damp. Alex couldn't shake the feeling that the day itself was waiting for something. Waiting, maybe, for the full moon to rise, to reflect its light into the clouds. Only then, maybe, would the clouds part.

I have a costume for you, Jules had texted, along with a toothy grin emoji. An emoji that matched her expression when Alex showed up at her door. She was midway through doing her makeup, wearing an oversized men's button-up shirt as she got ready.

"It's in there," she said, nodding toward her bedroom, her eyes shining.

She followed Alex when he went to retrieve the costume, her eagerness to see his reaction only enhancing his misgivings.

He found it hanging on the bedroom door, wrapped in plastic. Reluctantly he pulled it down, lifted the plastic off.

"Are you serious?" he said, running his hands over it, lifting his eyes to find Jules watching him from the hall. She nodded excitedly, her grin still stamped on her face.

He shook his head, sighed, returned his attention to the costume. The uniform. It looked... authentic. Navy blue, red piping, its gold buttons freshly polished as if awaiting inspection. Gold insignia on the collar, bright yellow chevrons on the sleeves.

Just what a marine might have worn returning home from war, a hundred-odd years ago.

He didn't know why: he felt sick. His stomach twisted. He wanted to say this felt wrong, this felt cruel. But he stopped himself.

Because: why would it be wrong, why would it be cruel? Unless he believed the ghost of Eleanor Shipley was truly still in her mansion, would see him impersonating her lost love, these many years dead?

So he said nothing. Jules took his silence as assent, and bounced off to the bathroom to continue getting ready.

Alex sat on the bed a long time, staring vacantly at the uniform. He felt strange. Out of place, out of time. Even after hearing Jules's plan, even as he'd made his way over, he realized now he'd never quite believed they were actually going to do this. But now, looking at the uniform he was apparently intended to put on, hearing Jules in the next room getting ready — her music, upbeat and modern, sounded oddly anachronistic — it was becoming a solid thing, a plan, an intention.

The more he looked at the uniform, the more it began to feel familiar. As if he could recall what its freshly-ironed stiffness would feel like as he walked, the way his sweat would pool under the thick fabric when worn in the sun. He could almost recall the outsized pride he'd felt, the first time he'd put it on...

"You're not dressed!"

He blinked. An image that had occupied his mind shook, dissipated, was gone. He looked up, at... Jules, he thought, banishing a second of confusion.

"Get dressed!" she said, and her features collapsed firmly into Jules's, whoever else he'd been thinking about gone like smoke.

Jules looked strange, Alex thought. She looked beautiful.

Her dress was old — in contrast to Alex's crisply maintained uniform, it looked old, threadbare and faded — but it maintained an air of class. It looked refined, stylish, expensive, though its luster had faded with the years. The fabric was silky, pale pink, draped tastefully over Jules's bare shoulders, cut low on her chest. A light blue shawl completed the look, settled across her back, held at the elbows. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pinned up at the side of her head, curled into rolling waves. Her lipstick was cherry red, her cheeks rosy with blush. Dark eyeliner made her blue eyes shine all the brighter.

"Stop staring," Jules said, betraying only the slightest blush, "and get dressed. We gotta go."

She turned and left him again. Alex needed a moment to gather himself.

How long had he been sitting here, staring into space, thinking about... what had he been thinking about? He felt he'd lost time, the minutes fled from his mind.

He had never seen Jules dress like that before. He'd seen her on plenty of formal occasions: weddings, funerals, prom, graduation. Always she looked pretty — even beautiful. But...

But what? He shook his head, trying to shake the confusion away. He didn't know what was getting into him. This was Jules. His friend, his buddy. Jules.

He stood, undressed, his mind wandering as he pulled the uniform on. First the pants, starched and stiff. Then the shirt. The buttons felt natural in his hands, as if he'd done this half a hundred times. It felt like a well-worn routine, something rehearsed. Something he'd mastered because he'd had to, because it was expected of him.

Stop it, he told himself. I've never worn anything like this before.

Still, when it was on, it felt right. It felt, strangely, almost like home, like stepping into it was stepping into a distant memory.

He let himself enjoy Jules's obvious delight when she saw him. He smiled and winked, stifling a laugh, when she said, "Oh yeah, love a man in uniform." Most of all he enjoyed the slight flush that accompanied her grin.

And it was the most natural thing in the world to offer her his elbow, though she giggled when she took it, and he escorted her out into the evening just as the clouds began to part to show the moon in all its fullness.

As far back as the story of Eleanor's death, the front door of Duskwood had been a problem. Realtors with copies of the key, locksmiths, contractors: the lock would jam or the old warped wood would stick, or something fallen from inside the house would impede its opening. It was as if the house itself was determined to deny entry.

People got in, of course. Every few years there was a story of someone breaking in, through a window, maybe, or the cellar door. Scaling, somehow, the ivy to the rent in the roof that could be seen from the ground. Sometimes they sought a place to be free of prying eyes, for drugs or sex or just some refuge. Sometimes it was tales of neglected treasures that led them there. Or, like Jules, fascination with the house itself, with its former occupants, with notions of the occult. Whatever it was, people got in, and usually when they emerged they told some story of seeing or hearing something they couldn't explain. Shadows moving on their own, voices whispering cryptic things in their ear. Messages scrawled on the walls, there one moment and gone the next.

Jules had chosen the cellar door. "That's how they got in, that night," she told Alex, of the townsfolk that had found Eleanor that full moon Halloween. It was kept locked, of course, chained and padlocked, but replacing the lock every so often had become part of the cost of the minimal management the property required, as dispensed by the town council. The cheap chain was nothing a pair of bolt cutters couldn't handle, and Jules had hidden some in the overgrown bushes to the side of the house.

It was a pleasant evening, cool but not cold. Kids in costume ran up and down the streets, filling their sacks with candy, trailed sometimes by parents urging them to remember their manners, to be careful on the roads. Alex and Jules watched it all smiling mildly as they walked, as if rewatching scenes from an old movie seen many times. They said little, though they laughed when people paused to look at them, at the expressions on their faces, seeing them as how they felt: ghosts, visiting from a bygone time. Returning home.

Everything about the evening had an unreal quality to it, even the familiar avenues of the town seen as if through new eyes. The everyday suddenly strange. Sights and sounds and smells that made up the only place Alex had ever considered home had new import, noticed as if for the first time. The way the streetlights hummed, the way competing music pushed and pulled from open windows, from passing cars. The way the streets of the town seemed all to curve toward that hill that sat to the north, as if some gravity tugged on them, twisting them until they all led inexorably toward that house that still sat its watch after so many years empty.

The house had a smell to it, even from the outside. It seemed to accompany the shadow that fell over them as they neared. Moldering, rotting, like deep piles of damp leaves. Alex had never stood this close to Duskwood. It towered over them, its bulk sprawled across the hilltop. Its boarded-up first floor windows were blindfolded eyes; those on the upper floors were dark and watchful.

Jules slid her hand off Alex's arm and led him to the side of the house, through knee-high grass and wild weeds and bushes. She looked out of place in her aged finery picking through such a wilderness. Alex had to tamp down a sudden impulse to force his way in front, to spare her from anything that might tear or dirty her dress. An odd impulse, he thought: in all the years they'd known each other Jules had always been the one to push forward fearlessly, to try new things, and it had never occurred to Alex to try to stop her. Why now?

He held himself back, watching as she pushed her way into the bushes, bending down. She made a small triumphant sound: "Ah!"

She turned, grinning, holding up a set of bolt cutters.

"You ready for this?" she said.

He sighed. Was he?

It wasn't like he could turn back now. So he nodded. Jules's smile broadened.

"Let me," he said, extending his hand, giving in to this newfound sense of chivalry, or whatever it was. Jules shrugged and handed him the bolt cutters, and a litany of crimes — trespassing vandalism breaking and entering — rolled through his mind as he took a knee and with surprising ease cut through the chain. It was oddly satisfying. More so because of the girlish squeal of delight Jules emitted when the lock came free.

He looked up at her, already laughing. She blushed, embarrassed, but shrugged.

"Whatever, man," she said. "I've only been waiting to do this my entire life."

"Fair enough," he said. He pulled the chain free and stood, gesturing with an exaggerated flourish at the unencumbered cellar door. Voila.

She grinned, swallowed, nodded. He felt a sudden swell of warmth at seeing how important this was to her. Any regrets he might have had at agreeing to this were gone in the view of her obvious thrill.

The cellar door was wet and dirty, warped with age and weather. It groaned and buckled when Jules lifted it, its rusted hinged protesting loudly.

The cellar was a pool of pure darkness. It might have been a bottomless pit, an abyss cut into the earth, leading anywhere or nowhere.

Alex looked at Jules. She grinned, catching her breath, leaning on the cellar door she held open. And she gestured to the entry, mimicking the exaggerated flourish he'd offered her.

"Shit," Alex said. Jules laughed.

A smell emanated from the hole. Musty and wet and close. Alex pushed away thoughts of black mold and whatever else might have made its home down there. He looked at Jules. She bit her lip, watching him. She looked nervous, he thought, with no small amount of surprise.

As if she'd read his thought, she smiled, nodded toward the entry.

"Come on, man," she said. "Time is money. Age before beauty."

She wants me to go first, he thought, because she's scared.

And what kind of guy would I be if I didn't?

He looked again at the darkness. Took a deep breath. "Shit," he said again, and ducked into the hole, groping with his feet to find the crumbled and uneven stone steps that led into the darkness.

The darkness seemed to pull Alex in. It enveloped him, cocooned him. The world above disappeared even while the cellar door still stood open.

The cellar smelled like wet earth, like the wriggling soil under an overturned stone. With no light to see by Alex would swear he was in some cavern deep in the earth, not a shallow manmade cellar scant feet from the surface.

He heard Jules scrabble down behind him, the protesting hinges of the door as she lowered it behind her. The sound of her closeness, the sound of her breathing, calmed him. He crept forward a few steps to give her room. Carefully, unsure what obstacles stood down here.

The cellar door made a sickening thunk when it landed home. Too loud, Alex thought. Too... final.

For a long moment neither of them moved, as if the darkness might part for them if they were still. Alex heard nothing but his own breathing, his pulse thrumming from within, and a faint sound like water dripping somewhere in the darkness before them.

Then he heard Jules rustling, unzipping something. A click. He blinked against the sudden cone of light piercing the darkness as she turned on a small flashlight.

She stepped closer to him, sending the light out in front. Automatically he took her free hand. She squeezed his hand, as if grateful for the gesture.

"This place," Jules said, moving her flashlight back and forth, "is fucking creepy."

She was right. The cellar was a warren of rotting wooden shelves lined with random junk that became vaguely terrifying when seen in a dark basement: old dolls, moth-eaten suits, ancient-looking shoes. Rows of books with faded leather covers. Boxes of toys, old and wooden and broken. All of it caked in dust. All of it festooned with garlands of spider webs. Shadows shifted in the light, as if the darkness sought to regain control.

Alex looked at Jules, could just make out a hint of her features in the reflected light. Her eyes danced over the scene; even in the dark he could see she was smiling.

The darkness seemed to thicken as they ventured further, stepping carefully. Shadows seemed to push closer in on them with every step they made from the cellar door, from the outside, from the world they knew. Alex could almost feel the shadows reaching out, touching him, grasping him, as if they might pull him into their embrace, swallow him. Jules clutched his hand, squeezing; he squeezed back.

The cellar seemed huge. Too huge. A world of its own, a world of darkness and alien things leering from rotting shelves. A world of silence newly disturbed by Alex and Jules's shuffling feet, their heavy breathing. They meandered through corridors of shelving, around squatting hulks of overfilled crates, shapes that in the half light looked like creatures hunched and waiting. Alex lost all sense of direction, lost his notion of where they'd been, where the cellar door was.

It's just a cellar, he told himself, just a single floor of a house. But still his mind swam with notions of getting lost down here, of circling and circling and never finding the stairs to the ground floor, never finding the way out. Their flashlight would sputter and die and the waiting shadows would swallow them, and they'd be just two more things left to molder and rot in this unending darkness.

Jules was the first to see it; her sigh of relief loosened the tension that had crept into Alex's shoulders even before he saw the first steps of the wooden staircase disappear behind the wall in the corner.

She squeezed his hand again, as if reluctant, then slid her hand from his as she stepped in front and climbed the rickety stairs.

Alex tried not to think of the years of damp and whatever burrowing creatures the wooden stairs had endured. He followed close behind Jules, matching his steps to hers as she stepped carefully into the pool of light from her flashlight.

The door at the top of the stairs look solid, impassive, made of heavy gouged wood, its tarnished brass doorknob sitting over an old fashioned key hole.

Alex swallowed, suddenly sure it would be locked, sure they would have to make their way back into the cellar, grope in the dark for the way out, uncertain if they'd find it, uncertain if the cellar in its apparent willfulness would let them out.

Jules turned and met his gaze, and moved slowly as she put her hand on the doorknob. He had the sense she was thinking just what he was, and both let out a breath when the door gave only a cursory protest against its warped frame before it creaked against its hinges and swung slowly open. It scraped loudly across the floor, unused to being moved. Alex found himself flinching at the sound, as if there might be someone to disturb above, someone who would rouse at their presence and come looking for who trespassed.

The first floor was draped in shadow, but gaps in the window boards allowed some moonlight to spill in, and next to the pure darkness of the cellar the first floor seemed almost brightly lit. Jules clicked off her flashlight. Alex opened his mouth to ask why, but then saw the expression on her face: she wanted to drink this in, this moment long anticipated.

For long moments the two of them stood still, reluctant to disturb the stillness of this place. It held a heavy silence, as if silence was a thing that could grow over time, becoming stronger by the day, by the year. The silence here was a palpable thing, and it seemed to turn to look at them as they entered in on its domain, wondering what sort of thing threatened it.

Finally Jules turned her light back on, and the two of them began to wander, slowly, through the house.

Alex wasn't sure what he'd been expecting. A preserved time capsule, maybe, like a diorama. As if by crossing the threshold of this place they were crossing the boundary of all the intervening years, stepping across a century like stepping over a fallen log. He'd expected, he thought, something curated, an exhibit. Something less than real.

But what he felt, moving through the hallway on the first floor, was time. A great gathering of it. All the years that had worked through this place settled in the grooves and creaks of the wood floor, the patina of dust that rose and shifted as he and Jules walked. The heavy musty smell. The moldering peeling wallpaper, whatever colors it may once have held bled into layers of grays, its floral pattern wilted, as if given enough time even pictures of flowers might die. The wood molding was stripped and gutted in places, the work of rot maybe or burrowing insects. Paintings were askew on the walls or collapsed to the floor, frames bent and warped, colors bled and faded, their subjects grotesque, twisted and deformed by time.

Their movements were unnaturally loud in this place of silence. They found themselves walking softly. They said nothing for a long time. Alex realized after a while that he held his breath as he moved, releasing it finally in soft slow exhales.

Furniture was bowed and broken, limned by dust. Spiderwebs hung thickly from shadowed corners. Things skittered along the walls, along the floorboards, fleeing Alex and Jules's advancing footsteps, fleeing the light of the flashlight.

When Jules finally spoke, her voice barely a whisper, the sound startled Alex.

"I can't believe I'm actually inside this house," she said.

"I can't either," Alex said, keeping his voice low.

"It feels..." Jules trailed off, but a shudder went through Alex, sure he knew what she meant to say.

"Occupied," he suggested.

She turned to him, smiling, her eyes wide in the dim light. "Exactly."

His mind had been reaching toward that very thought, pressing against the edge of it as if testing its solidity.

Despite the dust, the rotting wood, the broken art frames and the neglected furniture, despite the years, decades, more, of obvious disuse, the place felt lived in. He couldn't point to what about it made him feel that way. But at every turn he half expected to see someone sitting quietly, comfortably, aware of their presence and waiting...

Superstition, he thought, forcing the image from his mind. It's just the stories around this place. It's just an empty house. Nothing more.

Still, he continued to walk softly, flinching when his steps caused the floorboards to creak. Still he breathed slowly, shallowly; still he felt that the thrumming of his pulse might just be loud enough for someone or something to hear.

The feeling was most pronounced when they reached the base of the long curving staircase that led to the second floor. Beside it, smashed and broken on the floor, was a huge crystal chandelier. Alex wondered when it had fallen, wondered what a spectacular crash it must have made, heard maybe from the town below as a crack of thunder on a clear night.

They paused at the foot of the stairs. Looked at each other.

"Ready?" Jules said.

Alex took a deep breath. Shrugged. Too late to back out now, he thought. "Ready."

Jules took his hand in hers as they ascended. He found some comfort in the contact, in the warmth and solidity of her touch. He squeezed her hand. She squeezed back. And together they climbed the winding staircase, its wooden surface pocked and worn, its ornately carved banister cracked and broken.

The second floor was more brightly lit than the first, as moonlight fell through unobscured windows, through rents and cracks in the ceiling where fallen sections of roof had allowed nature to reclaim the upper floors. But the light seemed somehow colder, less welcoming of color. That feeling of presence remained. If anything it was stronger, harder to dismiss or ignore. And it was accompanied by something else.

Death, Alex thought, and at the same time Jules squeezed harder on his hand as if the very same thought had occurred to her at the very same time.

Jules seemed to know where she was going. She walked more purposefully now, and Alex followed. He thought perhaps she'd reviewed the layout of the house, studied its floor plan.

Or perhaps she was guided by something else. Some instinct or intuition. Something pulling her.

Alex felt it too, he thought. A sort of gravity here. As if the floor sloped toward their destination. As if the house contorted itself, bent its hallways, angled its walls, funneling them toward where they were bound, or where the house wanted them to go.

Alex wondered briefly if they could turn away. If he stopped, expressed some misgivings, somehow convinced Jules that this was a bad idea: would the house let them leave?

The thought sent a fresh wave of chills down his back. He tried to dismiss it, to push it away: more superstition. But his mind clung to it, and a slow-building certainty formed, a certainty that there was a kind of will here, an intent. And whatever it might intend for them they had come too far. They would have to see this through.

He tried to slow. He opened his mouth to speak, to warn Jules, perhaps, or to suggest they abandon this plan. But he said nothing, his words dying in his throat. And he walked on, one foot after the other, as if his body was not his own to control. And he looked at Jules, and she looked at him, and for the first time he saw something like fear in her eyes.

The door to Eleanor's bedroom was shut. Its surface was smooth, undamaged, unblemished. As if it alone had been well used, well maintained, these hundred years. As if it had been dusted, polished, refinished.

That it was the door to Eleanor's room was self evident, somehow. Alex didn't question it, nor did Jules: this was where they were meant to go.

The door was not locked. It did not stick. It opened easily, smoothly. And the room beyond was clean, tidy, fresh. The bed was neatly made with pink satin sheets. The pillows artfully arranged. It looked like it had been slept in just that morning, its sheets recently laundered, waiting for its occupant to return any moment and lay her head down.

It was almost strange that no one lay there, that Eleanor herself was not even now sleeping softly, blinking awake at the intrusion, smiling at her expected guests.

Alex felt a pang of disappointment, almost panic: Where is she? As if he'd eagerly awaited some reunion, assuming she'd be here, waiting for him.

He swallowed, his mouth dry. Jules exhaled a long breath, one she'd evidently been holding.

Their hands were still joined. Alex's ached with the force of Jules's squeezing, with his own.

She died here, Alex thought.

A wave of sadness hit him. This house, so large and empty, so separate from the town it loomed over, was a tomb. How long had she been here, alone, before she finally died? How long had she waited, before she gave up?

He was struck with a sudden and intense desire — a need — to step back through time. To come to Eleanor before the end. To put an end to her waiting, to put an end to her unbreaking solitude.

He took a step forward, toward the bed. As if she was there, as if he could reach her.

"Wait."

He stopped, turned. He still held Jules's hand, but Jules still stood by the door. She looked at him pleadingly, nervously.

"Wait," she said again. "There's something... we have to do..."

Her face was suddenly flushed. Her chest rose and fell with heavy breaths. He thought he could almost see her heart pounding.

She looks so like her, he thought, and caught himself. Like who? He'd seen only old and grainy pictures of Eleanor, her features obscured by the ill-kept artifacts.

"I think it's about time," Alex said, "you told me the plan."

Jules's features softened. She smiled. She wagged her head as if weighing the merits of Alex's suggestion.

"I guess it's too late for you to bail on me," she said.

"Is it?" Alex, half jokingly, looked back the way they'd come, across the threshold into the shadows of the hallway, the aged wood dimly lit by the pale light of the moon.

"Come here," Jules said, and tugged on his arm. She shut the door behind them, which made Alex flinch a little, despite himself. As if once closed the door could not be reopened. Not until they'd done whatever it was they'd come to do.

Jules smiled, apparently noting his reaction.

"Sit here," she said, and gestured toward the bed.

Alex hesitated. The bed was empty, but in his mind the image of Eleanor lying there in death was so vivid he felt as if she were there in truth, lying undisturbed as if sleeping, as if she'd laid down only moments before.

Jules slipped her hand from his, stepped forward — slowly, almost ritualistically — and sat on the bed. She looked up at him waiting: Your turn. Moonlight filled the room through the parted curtains over the window, casting everything in an unreal blueish tinge.

Alex moved slowly, as Jules had. He sat down next to her, and for a long time they said nothing, looking at each other. Alex waited for Jules to reveal the plan; Jules waited for something else. An invitation, perhaps. But not from me, Alex thought, with a shiver.

The presence he'd felt throughout the house was thick here. Alex could smell it, he thought: somewhere beneath the musty smell of stale air and rotted wood was something else, something sickly sweet, like a perfume gone sour. There was a watchfulness to it, and as they sat waiting on the bed it seemed to lean closer as if to envelope them.

Alex fought the urge to rise, to run. He knew Jules would not come with him, and he would not leave her here.

Jules, apparently finding what she'd waited for, pulled her legs onto the bed, positioned herself near the middle. She gestured for Alex to do the same. He did.

They sat cross-legged, facing each other. Jules extended her hands and Alex took them. Her hands felt cold, dry, when he could swear just moments before they were warm and damp.

In the pale light Jules's eyes looked dark, widened as if in surprise.

Alex told himself it was just the two of them here. But he couldn't believe it, couldn't shake the feeling there were others here. That the room, the house itself, was aware of them, watching them warily.

He did not feel welcome.

Jules's hands in his calmed him some. But his heart rattled in his chest. He found he had to remember to breathe, to pull the air into his lungs with a will. Or it might stop at his dry throat and slip away.

"Are you ready?" Jules said.

No, Alex thought. He nodded.

"Repeat after me. Okay?"

"Okay."

Jules took a deep breath. Unsteady. Alex thought he could feel her pulse through her hands, pounding in time with his own.

Her eyes were locked on his as she began. Her voice was soft, but still it seemed to fill the room. It was utterly without intonation, without affect.

"Spirit of Eleanor Shipley," she said. And she paused. Waited for Alex to repeat.

Oh God, really? he thought.

But he complied: "Spirit of Eleanor Shipley."

"Hear us: we invoke you."

"Hear us: we invoke you." Alex's voice shook. He wanted to think this was nonsense. Something from a hackneyed movie. But the words terrified him. He could feel something like power in them as they spilled from his lips, joined with Jules's. He could feel their combined voices moving through the room. Seeking, pushing, pulling.

He could feel the room hearing them, regarding them.

"You were in pain," Jules said. "You were alone."

Alex repeated the words, feeling their truth. Feeling something like rage well up around him.

"Your pain lingers, even now."

The room grew hot. The air thick. Sweat prickled Alex's flesh.

"We come," Jules said, "to ease your pain. To grant you succor."

As Alex repeated the words he feared they were lies. He felt the presence here would know. The rage was boiling on all sides, leaning in toward them.

This isn't working, he thought. This isn't good.

The presence here was real. He believed that now, even if he hadn't allowed himself to before. Even if until this moment he'd been sure it was only his own irrational fears creating shapes in the shadows, conjuring unseen watching eyes.

There was something here, and it was angry.

What did they hope to get here? What could they possibly offer this rage that would placate it?

He wanted to call out, to tell Jules to stop. But he feared it was already too late.

When Jules went on her voice trembled. She cried out louder, as if to overcome her obvious fear.

"You waited for your love," she said, and she squeezed Alex's hands harder. "And your love never came."

"Stop," Alex said, "we have to stop," but his voice was lost in the churning rage, as if a gale poured in from the closed window.

Jules went on, squeezing Alex's hands so hard it began to hurt. "We come to ease your pain," she said again. "To grant you succor." She paused, but Alex didn't repeat her words. He couldn't, his pounding pulse deafened him, his throat was dry and closed. He could scarcely breathe. Jules didn't wait. She went on. "We grant you succor in the form of flesh. He is here, Eleanor. Your love has come."

"No," Alex said, but he couldn't hear himself. "Jules. What are you doing?"

She squeezed his hands again. He could no longer see her. He could no longer see anything. The room went dark, and Jules's hands slipped from his, and the rage flared up, surrounding him, engulfing him. He screamed. It would consume him. This was the end.

As darkness took him words fled from him, spoken maybe or imagined, their meaning unclear.

He thought he heard: Our flesh and our bodies are yours.

And then he heard nothing.

Alex was pulled under a wave of rage and fear. It burned him, inundated him, filled him.

What have we done? he thought. What have we awakened?

But they had not awakened it, he knew. He could feel inside it all the years it had sat in this place, all the time gathered up in its intolerable awareness. Lonely, afraid. Angry. They had not awakened it, they had simply called it to them, made themselves known to it.

It would consume him. Its pain was too great to do anything but cause more.

It was Eleanor, or what had once been Eleanor, shut away, neglected, forgotten in life, unmourned in death. Her love had soured into grief and had not died with her, had been locked inside the ruins of Duskwood Manor, rotting and twisting into something else, into rage, into malice, dormant but never gone.

Alex could feel all the years it had been waiting here. For relief, for oblivion. And all the years it found none it only grew darker and angrier.

Alex was inside it. It was inside him. He could feel its anger as it became his anger. Its grief, its loneliness. It reached inside him and filled him until it drowned what he'd been before. Who he'd been.

He tried to cry out. Tried to hold on, to remain Alex. He tried to call out to Jules, tried to find her inside this presence, to take her hand, to find strength together.

But he found nothing. Jules was gone. Alex was gone.

All that was left was the image of a dark and endless sea rising to engulf him.

He blinked. All was quiet, all was still.

He lay on his back. The room was darker than before, only a sliver of moonlight falling across his legs.

He sat up. His head swam in confusion.

He was in a different bedroom. Smaller, simpler.

There was a sound coming from beyond the door. Muffled, distant: soft tinkling music. A piano? The melody was familiar, but in a remote way, like something dreamed and forgotten.

He stood. He felt calm, though an echo of something else lingered in his mind: rage, darkness, fear. Some residue from a different lifetime. It seemed unreal, like wherever he was now it couldn't touch him.

He went to the door, moving quietly as if fearful of waking someone. But he was alone.

The hallway was lit by flickering lamps in wall sconces. There was a faint musty smell, a peeling and faded wallpaper. A once pristine house gone recently to neglect.

He emerged from the room, walking tentatively. He followed the music, louder now. The melody tugged at his mind from some unreachable place in his memory. Where had he heard that before? Whatever it was, it sent a wave of warmth through his chest. A feeling almost like longing. He quickened his pace.

The sound led him to a vast room, one he didn't think he'd seen before. Have I seen any of this before? he thought. He thought he had, but he couldn't think when.

He saw no piano, no source of the music. He saw only what he understood was a ballroom, its walls covered with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, cleaned and polished, its ceiling dominated by a huge and ornate chandelier that sparkled in reflected light from countless candles placed around the room.

And there, in the center of the room, directly under the chandelier, she stood, waiting for him.

Who? he thought. It's not...

She wore a pale pink dress, its silky material shimmering in the candlelight. Her shoulders were bare, a light blue shawl draped over her arms. She smiled at him, her eyes trembling with pooled tears. She waited.

He stepped forward. He felt uncertain. He didn't understand.

Two things were true, two impossible things.

This was Jules. This was Eleanor.

He didn't understand, but he stepped forward, because he could see in her eyes that that was what she wanted. That she'd been waiting, so long, for this, for him. And whether he understood or not he would not keep her waiting a moment longer.

It was the longest and the shortest walk he'd taken in his life. His body carried itself while his mind reeled. Eleanor (no, Jules) (no, Eleanor) stood waiting, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. She seemed to remain still only with a great effort, as if holding herself back from running to him, from leaping into his arms.

He smiled. Opened his arms. An invitation.

She let out a joyful sob. Her composure cracked and broke.

And she ran to him.

Years, decades, slipped off the world, off his shoulders and hers, and they came together as two people crossing uncrossable distances.

She was light and heavy in his arms. She fit perfectly. She bent her legs to hang there, and he held her, and they turned. He buried his face in her dark hair. It smelled like the lavender oil she'd scented it with on the day he'd left, the last he'd held her. It was the scent that had slid like smoke into his mind, unbidden, unwanted, when he was over there, when fear made him long for home so bad the pain in his chest had felt like impending death.

They danced. His body moved in well-practiced steps he'd never taken before, leading her expertly in a waltz, perfectly in time to tinkling piano music coming from somewhere unseen. He smiled down at her, she smiled up at him. Her eyes were a deep blue like the sea that had swallowed him. Like they'd swallowed Jules, he knew, as he saw now how she'd slipped somewhere beneath, behind. As Alex had, as the sea that was William rose above his mind, pulled him under.

Alex watched as if from afar as William and Eleanor danced, as they inhabited the bodies they were offered to be together, at last, after all these years.

He understood, now, what Jules had been saying, what she'd been doing: Our flesh and our bodies are yours.

And he smiled at her, from somewhere behind William's eyes that were his eyes, and when she smiled back at him he recognized Jules as Jules, emerging from somewhere beneath Eleanor.

And when finally they kissed he didn't truly know if it was William kissing Eleanor or Alex kissing Jules. He didn't care.

Her lips were warm, damp, hungry. Her tongue met his urgently. He felt her gasp as he pulled her body tight to his own. He felt her sigh through her whole body as she felt him growing hard against her.

The music didn't stop, didn't fade. But all was quiet. All but their combined breathing, their combined pounding hearts as he lowered her to the bed. Time was lost. Whatever moments lay between dancing in the ballroom and this one were gone. Unneeded.

Alex didn't know where he ended and William began; where Jules ended and Eleanor began. He didn't know who guided his body, or if his body guided itself.

He didn't care.

He'd wanted this for so long. William had. Alex had. The desire was there waiting for him, unacknowledged but all the stronger for that.

He kissed her, climbing on top of her, pressing his body against hers.

Their hands were frantic, like they couldn't touch each other enough. His ran up her legs, over her hips, her ass. Hers moved up his arms, his back, through his hair. They squeezed and they groped. They moaned into their kiss.

He tugged on her dress, pulling it up over her hips so his hands could find her bare skin. She moaned when she felt his hands on her, her breath hot on his neck.

He whispered her name: "Eleanor. Jules." It came out in one breath with two voices.

"William. Alex."

He moaned, hearing them together, the whole of their want creating something more than the sum of its parts.

They tore at each other's clothes. He slid the straps of her dress over her shoulders, tugged it down. She smiled up at him, her fingers fumbling in their haste at the buttons of his shirt. He unhooked her bra, took in a sharp breath when he pulled it away, when he saw for the first time her breasts. She bit her lip, her eyes shining, letting him look at her. As he looked she ran a hand down his front, rewarded him with a gasp as she gripped his cock through his pants.

He leaned in and kissed her as he tugged her dress down and off, as she urgently pulled open his pants, as she reached inside and took his cock in her hand. He moaned. She sighed.

He pulled himself upright as he slid her panties down. He wanted to see her. She lay back and let him look, her skin flushed.

"You're so beautiful," he said.

She smiled. Her eyes roved down to where his cock stood hard. "So are you."

He pushed the rest of his clothes off, lay down on top of her. Their bodies wrapped around each other, their lips sought each other.

Their hands again were everywhere. Exploring each other, delighting in their closeness, their nakedness. He kissed her neck and her breasts and her stomach, tasted her as she moaned and shivered. She pulled at him, urged him up to meet her. "Please," she said, "I need you. I can't wait any more."

He looked into her eyes as he entered her. She gasped, and smiled, and he kissed her, and pushed himself deep into her, and something inside him released, a knot that had been pulled tighter and tighter every day for years, impossible gulfs of years, came loose, and he felt it come loose inside her too, and he moaned, and she moaned, and he moved inside her and their bodies writhed together and all the chains of time fell away and their bodies were free.

Their voices rose as one. Two of them, four of them, they moved as one, and the house itself moved with them, all the energy pooled in that place gathered and coiled. Her body wrapped around his and she squeezed him and he throbbed inside her.

"Yes. Yes," said William Alex Eleanor Jules. "I'm..."

Duskwood Manor shuddered and shook. Their moans went silent, too strained for voice, their mouths open, their eyes shut. His cock pulsed and filled her and she shook and writhed and squeezed and for long moments they hung there suspended, wracked with pleasure, with release.

When finally they breathed, and went slack, and collapsed together onto the bed, the house itself gave a sigh, a warm wind spilling down from the hill. Everyone in town who was out looked up, sensing a change, though no one could say what it was.

They slept, their naked bodies entwined, on the bed where Eleanor died those hundred years before, its strange fresh sheets damp with their sweat.

They dreamed the same dream, of a man named William returning finally to Eleanor. How after so many years they embraced, they danced, how they finally came together in this very bed. How when finally they shared that moment of release they slept, finally, at peace.

The room was bright when Alex woke. For several moments he lay confused, unsure of where he was, who he was.

He turned when he heard someone stirring to his right. Just in time to see Jules open her eyes.

They held eye contact for a long moment, as memories distant and immediate flooded into Alex's mind.

A dream, he thought, despite the fact of he and Jules in bed together, Jules's bare shoulder, bare arm held over the sheet, her hair tangled, her eyes glassy.

He was suddenly aware of his own nakedness under the same sheet.

Not a dream, he thought, as memories sharpened in his mind. Memories of dancing, of kissing, undressing...

He felt heat flood his face. Had that been him? Had that been Jules?

They were alone. That was new, he realized. Since they'd entered this place the evening before, someone had been with them. Every step. Every...

"Morning," Jules said, and there was doubt in her voice, in her eyes. The same doubt he felt: what exactly had happened last night? Had it truly been them? Had they chosen that? Or...

"Morning," he said, and he smiled, though it was a little forced. Jules returned it, though it held the same doubt as her eyes.

"So," he said, after a painfully awkward pause. "That... Last night... Was that your plan?"

Jules blushed, but relieved Alex by laughing softly. "Um. Not... exactly that."

"Not exactly that," Alex repeated.

"I didn't plan for... all of that."

"I see."

A silence settled again. Finally Alex said, "You know... If you had told me that was going to happen, I would have done this with you a long time ago."

Jules's smile grew slowly, from something tentative, uncertain, to something that filled her whole face, and with it some of the tension fled the room.

"Yeah?" she said.

"Hell yeah."

She laughed. Shifted her body subtly, barely moving but leaning closer to Alex. Automatically he raised his arm, inviting her, and she slid against him, resting her head on his shoulder. He draped his arm around her, held her. She sighed.

She didn't look up at him as she spoke, she looked down, her hand on his chest.

"Last night," she said. "I don't know... what was you, and what was..." She trailed off.

I don't either, he thought.

"Well," he said, and he smiled. "I'm all me this morning."

She looked up at him then, and she smiled. And he leaned in and he kissed her. And there was no William now, and no Eleanor. Just Alex and Jules, and she sighed and parted her lips and he slid his tongue into her mouth, and he rolled his body to press against hers.

She gasped and he felt her grin against his kiss before she pulled away.

"So this is all you, then?" she said, as she pushed her hand between them, wrapping it around his hard cock, squeezing it.

He moaned. He nodded. She bit her lip.

And she gave him a push, rolling over on top of him. She sat up, straddling his thighs, letting the blanket fall away. He looked up at her, taking in the sight of her naked body, sighing as his eyes roved over her curves. She still held his cock, and she stroked it slowly as he admired her.

"This," she whispered, "is all me."

And she slid her body down his legs, positioning herself between them, smiling at him as she brought her lips to his cock. He watched her, breathing hard, as she softly, slowly, kissed the tip of his cock. He moaned. Her smiled broadened. And she parted her lips to take him into her mouth.

"Oh, fuck," he said, as she slid her mouth down his length, her eyes on his.

She took him as far she could into her mouth, her lips meeting her hand where she gripped the base. She held him there, feeling him throb in her mouth. Then she slid her lips and her hand together up, then down his shaft. He moaned.

"You're so hard," she said, as she pulled her mouth off him, catching her breath. She stroked him, her hand sliding smoothly over his wet cock. "I remember what you feel like, even if it was..." She sighed. She didn't say even if it wasn't all you, she didn't express the doubt they'd both woken with. She didn't need to; he understood.

"I need it," she said, and she rose up again, still holding his cock, positioning herself over him.

Again he looked up at her, admiring the image of her naked body. He slid his hands up her thighs, to her hips. She bit her lip and lowered herself toward him. And even though he remembered, too, what she felt like, it was something new when he entered her, and she gasped, and paused there with the tip inside her, and then slowly started to descend, and he squeezed her hips and locked his eyes on hers and they moaned together as she slid down the length of his cock.

"Fuck," she said, breathy, strained, as she held him inside her, squeezing him.

He pulled on her hips and pushed himself up into her and she gasped again, and moaned, and she collapsed on top of him, her face buried in his shoulder as he held her and thrust up into her.

She rocked on top of him, he held her and buried himself inside her. His hands gripped her ass, hers ran through his hair, and their moans again filled the room, the house, until finally they shook and writhed and shuddered and he pulsed and came inside her, and she seized and clenched on him, her orgasm rising and falling and rising again until finally, again, their bodies went slack together.

He wasn't aware of falling asleep but he woke to her stroking him again, watching him. He sighed and she smiled as he again hardened for her.

The next time was longer, slower. He kissed her everywhere, he brought her to the brink of orgasm with his tongue on her clit, she came finally when he again slid his cock inside her, kneeling between her legs, looking down at her, flushed and overcome at the image of her body shaking with the strength of her orgasm.

He rode out her orgasm, in no hurry. He came down to meet her and he kissed her as he moved inside her. When she came again she pushed him off, guided him to his back. Patiently, slowly, she stroked his cock, kissed it, took him in her mouth. She watched him watch her as she took him in as far as she could, as she held him in her mouth and stroked him, swirled her tongue around him. She watched him watch her as she felt him throb and pulse in her mouth. She pumped his cock and held him there as he released, as he filled her mouth with cum. She smiled as she finally slid her lips over the tip, swallowing.

They slept, some, and then one would stir and wake the other, the day long, the two of them insatiable, as if their appetites were renewed by the house that had been so long dormant, so long unsatisfied. As if all the years they'd known each other and not done this had built up inside them, an inexhaustible well.

When finally they rose, the house seemed to give way to them as they emerged. The front door parted easily, its work done. It was dark again outside, the newly waning moon still huge in the sky.

They walked down the hill, hand in hand, saying little, thinking little, noticing slowly how the town had changed in a way too subtle to pinpoint. It was softer, somehow. At peace.