The Bucks Mansion

"Dead inside, yes," Lydia said. "Yes indeed. But very much alive through these fifty-five years that found me here in the wake of the foul deed I had to do. Very much alive and forced to wait out my sister's rightful fate while I continued to live in her shadow."

"You had to do," Jesse repeated, more outraged than terrified now, as he was feeling resigned to whatever evil Lydia had planned for him.

"Oh, I had to, all right," Lydia said. She lit a candle on her bedside table to add to the glow of the lamp, then walked around the bed to a waiting candle on the other side. They cast a ghastly yellow glow against the yellowed walls of the musty old bedroom. "Penny was my twin sister, Jesse," she explained as she did it. "She was all right as a child, I suppose, a ready playmate whenever I wanted one. But I suppose every pair of twins must have one who is a bit naughty and one who is nice. Penny always was the nice one, the one who preferred to curl up in a chair and read and never give the grown-ups any trouble while I'd be running wild in the garden, and then of course which of us got whipped by Father's belt if I should happen to knock over a flowerpot out there or some such?"

"Why shouldn't it be you, then?!" Jesse demanded.

"A loyal sister would offer to share in the blame," Lydia argued. "I would have done the same for her, but oho! Of course there was never any need for that on her part! She was much too busy being Little Miss Goody Two Shoes, from the very beginning. All the way up through school and our debut and even off to college, always there was the good child and then Lydia. Lydia Leftovers, that was me!

"So you killed her for it?!"

"Of course not, you silly boy!" Lydia was smiling through her painful memories now, and she sat before Jesse on the bed and opened her robe. She was naked beneath it, her body a train-wreck of morbid fascination for Jesse, whose leg she started rubbing as she continued. "No, I was far more reasonable and forgiving than all that, Jesse. Up until the day Wally came between us, that is. There's always a man, honestly, at the root of these things, and it happened to be Wally who caused our undoing."

"Wally," Jesse repeated, doing his best to ignore her unwelcome caresses that reached a bit further up his leg every time.

"Wally," Lydia confirmed. "A lovely young man if ever there was one, so handsome in his Army uniform when he arrived on our campus on his leave. We had a dance, Wally and I, and his touch was delightful. He came calling the next weekend, too, and I spent a day with him on the beach. Too cold to swim that time of year, of course, but it was so delightful just to sit and have a chat. Oh, Jesse, dear, I wanted to give myself to Wally."

"I'm not your dear," Jesse said defiantly.

"Could have fooled me," Lydia teased, grabbing at Jesse's hard cock. "Just what does this mean, if not that?"

"Ungh..." Jesse winced at the pain and disgust as she squeezed it, and closed his eyes.

"In any case, dear," Lydia continued. "I wanted to give myself to Wally. Truly I did. In those days, of course, a girl did not just sleep with a fellow -- certainly not a girl of my status, in any case. But I've told you I was the rebellious sort, now, haven't I? That being the case, Jesse dear, I had every intention of giving myself to lovely Wally. But first I had to learn just what to do, if you will. There were no books for that sort of thing in those days. Not for girls anyway. So I arranged with Father for Wally to join us for Thanksgiving, and of course he had a room of his own far from where Penny and I slept. But I vowed to join him in his bed once I had the experience I felt he deserved. But where to get that experience, you might be asking?" On that note she stood up and shrugged off her robe, now standing before Jesse just as naked as he was.

"You told me not to ask anything." Jesse was shaking in outrage.

Lydia laughed, and ran her right hand playfully through her gray pubes. She let her hand stray momentarily against herself as if she intended to masturbate. Then she turned and walked to the foot of the bed and around it. She continued her story as she went: "I wasn't just the bad girl, I was also the enterprising one, Jesse. If I wanted to learn about sex, there were ways to do it. Father had a stableboy in those days, I can't recall his name to tell you the truth, big and dumb as an ox, but handsome. Oh, so handsome!" On that note, she resumed fingering herself. "I hope you are enjoying the show, incidentally, but if you're trying to imagine Penny doing this for you, dream on, dear. You're never going to enjoy her favors again, my dear. In any case, the stableboy, he'd have loved to get me alone anyway, but he was just smart enough to know Father would fire him or worse if he ever touched either of his daughters. So when I approached him, he said no. of course. At first. That's why I had to sneak into his quarters that night and take off my dress, and threaten to run out in the hall in the nude and tell everybody he had had his way with me unless he actually did." She paused to stroke herself a bit harder with the erotic memory. "It worked!" she went on. "That man taught me all a girl needs to know that night. Wally would have been putty in my hands, without a doubt."

"What's that got to do with Penny?" Jesse demanded, still struggling to look away or look only at Lydia's face, yet morbidly drawn to her body.

"What, indeed?" Lydia grumbled. "Remember what I said about how stupid the stable-boy was. You would think, a nice smart boy like you surely would, that since he was stupid, you wouldn't find his room next to the library of all places. Leave that space to someone who would appreciate it, you would think. But that is where Father, in his infinite wisdom, did indeed have the imbecile staying. Right next door to the library. Now, the stable boy, he may have been stupid, but he taught me well. And when a woman is good at sex, Jesse, she makes noise. Lots of it. In my careless abandon that night, I thought I was safe in making so much noise when my family was so far away in another part of the house. I thought, but I had forgotten the library and my darling sister's affinity for it. So it was, then, that while the stable boy was making passionate love to me, I shrieked in careless joy and was overheard by Penny while she was browsing for some bedtime reading. Upon hearing my lusty yells, she came barging into the stableboy's quarters without so much as a knock, and found me there on his floor with him in my thighs.

"Oh, time stood still, Jesse, I can tell you that. Finally, she spoke, in that whiny little goody goody voice of hers...'Oh, Lydia, forgive me, I thought you were having a fit of breathing trouble!' Breathing trouble!" Vexed across the decades by the hateful memory, Lydia pounded the mattress perilously close to Jesse's mercilessly exposed balls. "Breathing trouble!" She was now crying in frustration and outrage, and then she flopped down on the bed beside Jesse. "Well, you can surely guess what I had to do then. Recall, I knew from our childhood that I could never trust Penny to cover for me on anything. As long as she lived and she knew, I'd have been a ruined woman and certainly Wally would have never looked at me again. And in that instant I knew it all too clearly. So as soon as the stable boy had the sense to get off me -- he was cowering in the corner, actually, shielding his cock and balls from Penny as if they might make her go blind -- I leapt up and grabbed the heaviest of Father's horse trophies from the case by the door and chased her out in the hallway, and cornered Penny and bludgeoned her with the trophy until she was dead on the floor."

Jesse was weeping softly. Lydia wasn't.

"It could have ended there. It should have ended there. Of course Father never imagined I could have done such an evil deed. The stable-boy, he went to the electric chair for it, actually, and none suspected the truth at first. But Wally was spooked by the entire matter and never wrote me again. That was but the least of my worries, though, for Penny wasn't dead. Not completely."

"She still isn't," Jesse declared defiantly.

"Indeed," Lydia agreed. "I don't know how, but she clung to some slim reed of connection to our world, and still does, as you know. She maintains just enough contact with our life to continue ruining mine. People knew, Jesse, even after that silly stable boy went to the chair, somehow they knew what had really happened in the hallway."

"Why shouldn't they?" Jesse demanded.

"I have told you not to ask any questions!" Lydia took a deep breath and stood up again, her naked body looking oddly dignified in spite of everything. Jesse had to admit through his fright and repulsion that she must have been a beautiful woman once. "The servants knew. They got word to their friends, who got word to our friends, whom they worked for. Mother and Father didn't believe it at first, but somehow they were ultimately persuaded. Even the other girls at college learned about it. I was the outcast even when I was the sole surviving daughter. I was disowned! Mother and Father moved permanently to their beach house, and I was left to go stark raving mad in this house while the neighborhood went to hell all around me. Alone."

"Not quite alone," Jesse reminded her.

"Oh, yes, of course!" Lydia snapped. "Penny and her heavenly wonderland, where even to this day the worthy young men flock when they can. She cost me my Wally in life, and in death she has cost me any hope I have had with any man I might have loved, from that day to this." On that somber note, she climbed onto the bed and once again took Jesse's hard cock in both her hands. "Until now," she said.

Now Jesse's fear had returned with a vengeance, and he did his best to kick Lydia off the bed. The best he could do was wiggle his knees a bit, and Lydia didn't seem to mind at all as she began to straddle him. Jesse at least managed to keep Lydia off balance so that she couldn't keep still enough to draw him inside her, but Lydia wasn't giving up.

"No!" Jesse called out. "No, no no!"

"No one can hear you," Lydia teased. "Except maybe Penny, but she knows better than to tangle with me, now doesn't she?" Lydia squeezed him as hard as her old hands could, and Jesse shrieked in pain.

"Stop!"

"She cost me my true love, my reputation and my family," Lydia continued. "Tonight I shall return the favor, and at last I shall know passion as well." She broke into a shameless cackle, and reached up to dabble in the blood from Jesse's wound. "Why, it's as good as fingerpaint," she teased, and began writing her name in blood across his belly. "L-Y-D-I-A. Now you're mine, dear."

Jesse reached desperately with both hands to wrench free of his bonds, but the knots held. He flailed at the wall, at both bedside tables, at anything within reach of his fingers that might at least fall over and make a noise. Just as Lydia was about to complete the rape at last, Jesse's left hand made contact with something -- he couldn't tell what -- on the table. He heard a wonderful sliding noise as something fell into something else, and looked over just in time to see the candlestick falling off the table. Jesse couldn't see from where he was pinned under Lydia, but the candle landed in a basket of yarn. He could and did see the resulting blaze that kicked up in no time.

Lydia noticed it a moment later, having been distracted by her efforts to draw Jesse into her. She looked in horror at the spreading fire, then back at Jesse, and broke into a triumphant laugh. "Now it's me versus the fire, Jesse!" she chortled. "Which do you prefer, a consummation before death or after?"

"It's my time," Jesse replied serenely. He had stopped putting up a fight, for now he recalled Penny's words and he was quite sure he understood them.

"Your time?" Lydia asked. "Your time for what?"

"Why should I answer your questions either?" Jesse asked, smiling through his uncertainty and fear. The room was now thoroughly ablaze, the bedsheets were smoldering, and it was merely a matter of whether the smoke would kill him before falling through the floor would do the trick.

Outside on Hall Street, they both heard sirens. Lydia heard them too. "They'll never get upstairs in time," she gloated. "No one else has been in this house in fifty years. They have no idea where my bedroom is." She was coughing with the smoke, more so than Jesse who was lower down, but that didn't stop her from doing her best to pin Jesse's wiggling hips down so she could have her way with him. Jesse did his best to keep bouncing back and forth on the mattress, and as fear overtook him, he shut his eyes tightly and thought of Penny.

One of the floorboards gave way, and the bed tilted heavily to the left. Lydia was then able to wedge herself atop Jesse, who could no longer wiggle. Somewhere in the distance, Jesse thought he heard the firefighters making their way up the stairs, but a crash somewhere below put a stop to their progress. He could feel Lydia gaining her advantage over him from above, but from below he was sure he felt the foundation falling away. Giving up the fight, he held his breath and hoped the floor would give way first.

"I shall live at least once before I die," Lydia said triumphantly, grasping Jesse in both her hands and mounting him again. Once she had a foothold against what was left of the floor, she spread her legs and began lowering herself onto Jesse.

Just as she had him at her nonexistent mercy, the hole in the floor ripped open wider. Jesse felt the bed tipping further, but resigned himself to the moment coming just a bit late and braced himself for the indignity and pain that awaited him. He held his breath and waited, and sure enough he felt his rigid cock being enveloped just as he'd feared...only it wasn't the nasty sensation he'd been expecting, but rather a warm welcome in a comfortable bed with no smell of smoke anywhere and no triumphant cackling but rather a gentle, passionate, feminine sigh.

Jesse's eyes flew open. Penny was gazing down at him with a joyful look on her face. "You came back," she said between lusty moans. "And you freed us both!"

"I did?"

Laughing, she dropped down atop him so her breasts mashed wonderfully into his chest, on which he now noticed his knife-wound had vanished, and kissed him deeply. "Yes, Jesse, you did. Now you can stay here forever, and we can go anywhere we like together. Beyond the borders to the wonderful beyond, anywhere!"

Jesse sucked in his breath. "You mean I'm..."

"Liberated!" Penny sat back up and took both his hands in hers. "That's what we call it on this side of the great beyond. Not dead, liberated. You'll be amazed at how soon that stops being of any consequence."

"I will." He wasn't convinced.

"You will, Jesse. I promise."

"We can go to heaven, then."

"We're already there, silly," Penny teased him. "That means we can go anywhere you ever cared to go in your mind. But not until I let you out of bed, and I warn you, that won't be for some time!"

Jesse lay back and exulted in the sensation of her body enveloping him so warmly. "I think I can live with that," he said.

"Poor choice of words, dear," Penny said, and she set about rocking them both into an orgasm fifty-five years in the making.