A Halloween Ball

After the Ball is Over.

All characters are adults.

*****

Rose's costume gown was black silk tulle and sheer gray chiffon that looked like wisps of smoke against her white skin. Black, glass beads and rosettes covered the gown. Her shoes were red leather, closed-toe 3-inch heels with silver buckles fastening the ankle straps. Rose's red hair was cut in a bob style popular in the 20s.

All afternoon she fretted whether to add a black under-dress for modesty, and whether to define her waist with a red scarf. In the end the scarf was in, the under-dress was out, and the black lingerie beneath the smoky chiffon was in, too.

Gene, Rose's escort and husband, said, "Baby, you'd look yummy wearing a gorilla suit."

Rose laughed, told him he was "sweet," and called her body "a work in progress."

One feature all agreed on was her eyes: so green they illuminated her alabaster complexion in a dark room. Some mistook the effect for an aura.

Gene wore a yellow Zoot suit; "You look like a pimp," she said.

She wasn't ready when he arrived home, and finished dressing in the car, applying lipstick, eye-liner, and perfume as Gene drove and jabbered. Rose smelled like delicious candy, and that aroused Gene.

"Looks like a storm is moving in," Gene observed, looking out the window to mute her stimulation and mask his obsession with her charms.

Rose turned her head to look at the sky, "I think you're right. Did you catch the weather?" She applied mascara to her eyelashes.

"No, did you?" He said.

"Not really, I was busy getting ready for the party and barely heard any of it.' Rose hiked the hem of the dress up her thighs, pulled the stockings on, then the garters; Gene looked at her legs as often as he dared.

"Watch the road, not me!" Her mouth frowned though her eyes smiled.

"Ummm! I was just thinking how even Santa couldn't stuff stockings better!" Gene squeezed her knee.

"I know what you wanna stuff! and it isn't stockings!" She stuck her tongue out at him.

The Mercedes made short work of transporting them to the college.

Dressed, painted, and parked, Rose grabbed her purse and opened the car door. A brisk breeze erupted, blowing her dress almost to her waist, pressing the fabric tight against her breasts, abdomen, and bottom. She squealed, smoothed the fabric back into place with her hand, took Gene's arm, and went inside the old building.

Sylvan Abbey State's red brick campus was built in the Gay 90s, and conformed to the popular gingerbread Queen Anne Style that dominated the end of the Victorian Era. Gene taught poetry at the college.

At the entrance they passed close by a girl and her companion from the Black Lagoon. Rose guessed the girl was eight or nine; the child's white silk dress, pink sash, and pink bonnet reminded Rose of the girl Sir Thomas Lawrence painted: PINKIE.

The creature beside Pinkie had a careless languor that rolled about lazily. The beast was costumed in sodden, black wool; a leather jerkin blacker than India ink, and corduroy slacks. It wore shoes, and some indeterminate sort of meat bulged between the shoes and the cuffs of the pants. The head, Rose supposed it was, was covered with a mass of long, tangled, black hair. Bloated, limp hands hung from the sleeves of its blouse. Its face, a swollen, pulpy gray-white mass of tissue without eyes or mouth or nose, looked like a blob of Silly Putty.

"Beauty and the Beast?" Rose whispered to Gene as they walked to the ball room.

An usherette handed Rose a program and two adhesive name-tags, smiled at no one in particular, then ignored them to chatter with a companion. Gene and Rose found their table and sat alone. Rose checked her watch; it was 9PM.

"Want a Coke?" She asked Gene.

"Not really." Gene suddenly ignored Rose and looked around the building until he saw three of his friends and waved them over to the table; two sat and one hovered over them. Gene didn't introduce them to Rose. The guys talked football as Rose smiled like a Stepford wife.

Then Lisa Walsingham slithered over to the table, loitered silently until the guys left, and parked herself close to Gene, leaning close to touch his arm with her breast. Lisa ignored Rose, then both ignored Rose.

Rose interrupted the flirting, "Gene, I think I'll get a Coke; can I get anything for anyone?" She searched their faces for a response.

"Thanks, no," Gene replied; Lisa dismissed her with a hand wave. Gene was looking at Lisa dreamily when Rose left.

Rose moved through the congestion of tables and dancers to the bar where she encountered a handsome stranger dressed as Dracula.

"A Coke, please," Rose said to the boy operating the bar. "Thank you!" She paid and turned back to study the handsome stranger.

"You here alone?" He asked.

"No, my husband is at the table absorbed in a friend. I don't know you, are you a student or professor here?" Rose looked at Dracula directly, sipped her Coke, and savored the carbonation fizz.

"I'm new," Dracula replied. "I teach gothic horror."

"Wow!" Rose said. "Vampire stories are so popular lately."

"My classes are filled," Dracula added.

"I believe you," Rose said.

They talked and danced and lost track of time. Soon Rose had a dreamy awareness of lying on a strange bed, naked, with Dracula's head between her legs, eating her to sublime orgasms unlike any she'd ever experienced with anyone. She lost herself in the enchantment until later when she saw herself sitting alone at the bar. She suddenly remembered Gene, and looked for him; he was sitting alone at their table sulking and glaring at her. Dracula was gone. She returned to her table.

"Where you been?" Gene asked.

"At the bar talking to one of your colleagues."

"I saw you and him leave. You were gone for almost an hour."

"We were dancing."

"You left the gym together."

"No way!"

Back home Rose undressed and discovered two small puncture bites on her pussy lips. She touched them. She expected pain but the feeling was exquisite and strangely arousing. They went to bed.

Later.

"Wake up, Rose!" Rose opened her eyes and looked around the dark bedroom. The voice was familiar. A brisk night breeze fluttered and stirred the window curtains against the wall and glass panes. Gene was asleep beside her.

Her eyes adjusted to the dark quickly because the room was bathed in moonlight that laid strange white silhouettes and patterns around the room. She listened patiently for the voice but only heard a dog barking far away.

"I must have been dreaming," she thought.

"You weren't dreaming, Rose," the voice spoke again.

"Where are you?" Rose seemed surprised.

"I'm downstairs. I told you I would come," the voice reminded her.

"What do you want?" Rose whispered.

"You know what I want," the voice said.

"No, I don't. What do you want?"

"You know why I'm here," the voice insisted.

"How do you know?" Rose cocked her head, trying to locate the voice in the dark.

"I know everything you do, and I know what you did before you fell asleep," the voice said..

"So?"

"So, I know what you want and came to make it happen again," the voice reminded her.

"Come to me," the voice commanded.

"I can't do it," Rose plead.

"Get up, Rose, and come to me," the voice insisted.

Rose pulled back the covers, got up, pulled on her robe, and left the bedroom, walking through the house, through the moonlight. She went through the kitchen to the garage door and opened it.

"What now?" Rose played dumb.

"I'm over here," the voice spoke to her.

Her awareness ended there though she again had a flash of the previous encounter with Dracula's mouth on her sex. It was almost dawn when she found herself getting back in bed beside Gene.

In the morning Gene left to spend five days at a convention out of town.

Late that night Rose awoke, moving through woods somewhere. Saw-palmetto barbs cut at her flesh, and the undergrowth was a twisted treachery. She followed the Moon west.

The moonlight was bright enough to see plainly: Refuse of old fires littered the sand with matted limbs, plus stumps, and logs, all bound together with thorny vines. Chameleons and lizards gamboled round the trunks of the trees, and distended their green throats until they became scarlet, as if in elfish mockery of her. On every side dark pine trees grew, varied now and then by little copses of oaks, where fires or the axe had made a small clearing. A starling, inky black, screamed from the woods.

When Rose reached a river she saw the trail on the other side, and knew she'd have to swim to it. She contemplated the obstacle. But to turn back from a swim of fifty yards in smooth water was absurd, and she must reach her destination. She removed her clothes, bound them up, raised the bundle above her head, and waded into the river through the maidenhead cane.

The bearded tops of the cane obscured her view, the submerged vegetation felt like squishy snakes beneath her feet. Her relief was immediate when she rolled comfortably into a swimming posture upon the open water, and struck out for the other bank. The water was deliciously warm, and a pleasant change from the rasping, nervous touch of the grass. She swam with a leisurely sweep of her arms.

The water had a sparkle of salt in it, not enough to flavor, but quite enough to give it brilliance and transparency. She saw the bottom six or eight feet below, with its pure white sand. Now and again the surface was broken into bright prismatic ripples, she imagined she was floating on a sea of pearls.

There were places in this wilderness treacherous to tread upon, places that invite sure and solid foothold, but open like traps on a scaffold, then close over the victim. The ooze beneath is filled with skeletons of unwary animals. To tread there is to risk vanishing forever.

The region is thick with palm trees, growing on little hammocks that rise above the stagnant water, festooned with slender parasitic creepers, which keep up a constant, strange motion no matter how still the day, and have a talent for reaching out and catching the trespasser. Huge, fan-like palmetto leaves, interlacing overhead, darkened the ground, and millions of water-weeds tangle in Gordian confusion in the gloomy reaches underneath. Rotting tree trunks obstruct passage everywhere, and the stench was fearful.

Bloated cotton mouth moccasins slid through the ooze; poisonous insects enveloped her head like smoke; and fat spiders, spotted red and black, and poisonous as serpents, moved about their gossamer threads. Now and then alligators floated across the black-green slime.

Rose had no idea she was on the trail to an abandoned house swallowed whole by the jungle long ago. People familiar with the area avoided it, as did superstitious hunters fearing ghosts. It was an abandoned sugar plantation the Navy plundered during the war. They removed what didn't burn, and left the rest to rot. Kudzu vines concealed the ruins.

After a while an old wood pergola materialized out of the darkness, Rose walked to it, and followed the stumble-stones beneath it, through the darkness, on to the old house.

When Rose reached the house, she pushed through the vines covering the porch looking for a place to enter. Discovering the front door, she entered and felt her way along the walls in the dark, she located a staircase, then went up cautiously.

Reaching the upper floor, she found a bedroom above the front entry. The glass panes were obscured with mildew and dirt, one pane was shattered. The room smelled dank and musty. She stood by the window and waited for something, she knew not what.

The old house was built in a style popular in the 1800s; this one reminded her of Cinderella's castle except for its abandoned and neglected condition. The floor boards creaked beneath her feet.

Something ran between her feet across the old carpet; a large rat looked up at her, then fled. Ferns grew out of the carpet beneath the broken windows. Somewhere in the old house a bird screeched in terror and was never heard again. The balcony and hallway were encrusted with spider webs and darkness.

Rose touched a bed in her room and sat upon the mattress. She fell asleep.

Later, the din from a disturbance awoke her. The house was filled with light, and the trouble seemed to be downstairs in the gathering room. Rose left the bed, crept to the balcony banister, and looked down.

The gathering room's appearance looked archaic and dated but seemed to be clean, organized, and in good condition. And a group of women, in sundry costumes, were assembled around a matron dressed in a style common in the 1950s: full skirt with crinolines, a halter top, girdle-bra, and nylon hose clipped to a garter belt, and stiletto heels. The woman reminded Rose of Lucy, even the red hair.

The other women looked haggard and ill and thin and pale. Their costumes ranged from a flounced bustle, on one, to mini-skirt, diaphanous blouse over braless tits, and knee-high boots at the other end of the scale. Girls from every fashion period. A punch bowl with ladle, and cups, sat on a table. The bowl's contents reminded Rose of sangria. Overcome by sleep Rose returned to bed.

Later she awoke in a room she didn't recognize, lying next to a young woman she didn't know, and both of them were naked. The other woman, her name was Fanny, was lying on her stomach, Rose lay awake on her back. Rose looked at her watch, it read 6 o'clock.

Rose got out of bed and went to the window to look outside, the window was shuttered, she tried raising it but couldn't. The sleeping woman opened her eyes, lifted up off the bed, smiled at Rose, and said, "Come back to bed my love." Rose did.

Fanny moved close to Rose, draped an arm across Rose's chest, and pressed her mouth against Rose's, kissed her with soft, pulpy lips, and pushed her tongue in when Rose yielded to her lust. Rose pressed her hand against Fanny's head to feel her hair.

Fanny moved a hand to Rose's sex, Rose spread her legs, Fanny rubbed the soft skin and traced its furrow with her finger, Rose spread her legs wider, and Fanny moved her mouth to Rose's gash. "Oh God that feels so good when you suck me," Rose purred.

"You belong to us, now," a familiar voice spoke. Rose turned her head and saw Professor Dracula standing in the doorway. "Later you'll return home to bring others to join us.