Crystal Lullaby

"Hey guys, welcome back to SkepticalNate-"

"AM I IN SHOT?" Sienna mouthed from the other side of the camera.

"What? No, you're fine." Nate shook his head, "You could have asked out loud, you know."

"I don't want my voice in the video either," Sienna uncorked one of the bottles of wine that came with the room.

"It's fine, I'll just restart."

She gave him a halfhearted thumbs up and passed him a glass, then ducked as far back behind camera as she could, making sure to look out for any mirrors.

"Hey guys, welcome back to SkepticalNate. Today, I'm all the way out here in New Mexico at the Harvey Motel, the supposed final resting place of Estelle and Lucinda Davis. Estelle, a waitress from Arkansas, met Lucinda hitchhiking and the two started what was called at the time an "illicit business relationship" but which we recognize now as probably a lesbian romance. Just one that happened to involve luring rich heiresses and housewives and then robbing them blind. I mean... you go girls?"

Nate looked across the camera at Sienna for a reaction, but she just sipped her wine and gave him a halfhearted thumbs-up. He missed having somebody else to bounce off of. Being the single host of something, no matter how un-demanding, was a skill reserved for psychos.

"Are you sure you don't want to be on camera any more?" Nate leaned off-camera.

"Nate, honey, last time I did you show with you I wasn't wearing a bra and basically all of the comments were about my tits. Your fans are freaks and I want nothing to do with them." She sipped her wine, "I'm more than happy being the producer and editor."

He sighed and looked back into the camera, trying to find his place in the script again. There was a cleaner and a bawdier version of the story, and since it wasn't some horrible personal tragedy and the episode didn't seem to be that interesting on its own, he went with the slightly less appropriate version of events.

"Accounts at the time were that the pair would lure heiresses back to hotel rooms just like these where they had jobs as maids, and then hold them at gunpoint. But their own accounts in their journals and the rumors tell a different story. Apparently, the pair were known to seek out women they suspected were sexually frustrated or unfulfilled, then empty their pockets after... giving them a taste of the taboo."

Sienna shifted behind the camera. While hardly a blushing virgin, she was still sensitive enough to these things to be properly scandalized. The version she had read had mostly covered the robbing, and the violent end.

"Until eventually, the pair picked the wrong housewife. Miss Chadwick, the heiress to a wealthy estate, was apparently unafraid of word getting out that she might have been lured in by a pair of lesbians and then robbed, and she brought the law down on them. In their confessions before execution, they named every single heiress and wife they'd robbed, causing a massive scandal that rocked the socialite circles of the town to their core. It's even said that the girls' last words were each other's names." Nate straightened up and brought his hands together, "So, do we have a pair of Bonnies who haunt these halls at night, looking for their next victim? Or do we have a pair of misunderstood girls born in the wrong era who this hotel milks the legacy of to this very day? You may have your own conclusions, but I know what my money is on."

Nate's money, of course, was "on" taking out a series of overpriced gizmos, waving them around the hotel room for the next half an hour, then editing that down to a few minutes before filming a "conclusion" video at home which he basically could have copied and pasted from the past few times he'd done this. Even if ghosts were real, and that was a big if, they usually followed the rule that the better the camera nearby, the less likely they were to show any sign of it. A realistic video about ghost hunting would have been a third traveling, a few seconds of making an ass of yourself, a few minutes of sleeping badly in a hotel bed, a third traveling, and then a few minutes of editing. But it wasn't actually about ghost hunting. It was about equal parts gawking at tragedy, hanging out somewhere dark and dirty, and making things seem more interesting than they were after the fact.

One small problem, the room wasn't really dirty enough. Even when he turned off the lights and drew the curtains to make it dark enough, it was too nice. You could hardly imagine a pair of "outlaws" staying here, let alone committing crimes here. Though it had probably been a lot less nice back when they'd been doing it. In the balancing act of attracting people for the ghosts versus not driving them away with crummy rooms, the hotel had chosen to look nice. He couldn't exactly complain about staying somewhere nice for once.

"Estelle Davis, can you hear me?" He turned on the spirit box and winced as it started flicking through signals at rapid speed. "Lucinda Davis, are you here? Can you give me a sign?"

Sienna poured another glass of the wine with surprising ease in the dark.

***

"I don't know how much of that was any good and how much of that was me tripping around in the dark like a dumbass," Nate moaned between spitting out his toothpaste and taking his cup of mouthwash.

"I thought you did great," Sienna replied sleepily from behind her magazine in the huge queen bed.

Nate swirled the mouthwash and stared at her, she didn't stare back. Sienna was sitting upright with her back against the headboard and her legs under the covers like a sitcom housewife, just missing the curlers, though they probably couldn't have made her hair any curlier. She had a seemingly endless supply of magazines, which was weird because he'd never seen one in her mailbox or suitcase. They were all classy ones too, not celebrity gossip. Magazines about things, things that adults actually cared about, not ghost hunting. That was why she could afford magenta (not purple, he'd been corrected) camisole and panty sets that cost more than what his channel made in a year. That on top of funding, you know, his channel.

He spat the mouthwash out, "You don't have to be a bullshit artist for my feelings."

"I'm not," Her magazine didn't so much as budge, her face remained obscured behind it, "You asked, I answered honestly."

"Yeah, but it's also not something you care much about," Nate finished in the bathroom and stepped back out into the bedroom. "It's like me saying a new sofa or a new floor swatch looks good. You know I mean it, but you know it probably doesn't actually mean anything."

"Then it doesn't mean anything," Nate heard her set the magazine down and settle into bed as he was moving around to the other side. "But I thought you did great."

"Well, thank you."

Nate brought the blankets up around him and took a breath before turning out his light. The room didn't go completely dark, a gentle blue glow came from the TV which was on with the volume very low, just enough to cover up the gentle creaking and sounds of people in other rooms. Honestly, that made the room a little more eerie than full darkness had. But this was easy to overlook. The blankets were soft and thin in the warm night, the mattress was so comfy he felt himself already getting drowsy, and the pillows smelled like something pleasant he'd caught the scent of once as a child and then forgotten about.

"Man, what a nice bed." He murmured.

"Wuh huh..." Sienna grunted sleepily.

After a moment's pause, he smiled to himself.

"You know, it seems like a waste not to get our money's worth."

Sienna didn't respond. Nate waited for what he felt was an appropriate amount of time to not be pushy, then rolled over onto his side. Sienna was already fast asleep, mouth hanging open slightly and drooling gently in a way that seemed unfitting for a girl of her class and grace.

"How does she do it?" He mumbled and rolled back.

Sienna's ability to fall asleep in any bed, on any couch or chair, so long as she had a blanket up around her shoulders, bordered on a magic trick. With how expensive and lovely her actual bed was, he would think she was spoiled and needed something to be the best for her to doze off, but she'd slept on the plane ride over, then again in the taxi from the airport, now without any problem in a strange bed she'd never been in before in a room she didn't own or know. Even wrapped in luxury like he was, Nate could tell he was going to get three or four hours of sleep, tops.

This at least worked for the content most of the time. You had one person asleep in the room in question, then another person awake. Ghosts supposedly like to choke and hit people in their sleep, so you had somebody waiting to see if that happened. Meanwhile, Nate would lay awake and stare into the dark corners of the room, trying to see if some orb or shadowy figure didn't appear in the gloom. Of course, one never did.

What did happen, a few minutes after that, was the sound of feet moving outside the door to the room. That wasn't unusual, staying in a hotel meant simply living with noises and shadows moving around you at all hours, he just had expected a place this nice (and this expensive) to do better at blocking those things out. But the footsteps seemed to stop and settle into place outside their door, prompting him to crane his head and look. No shadow poked through the light on the other side, so he was ready to write it off as shifting floorboards upstairs when something moved slightly about the door. Not so much like motion as like the door itself had changed and warped, like it was swimming in his peripheral vision. Nate could swear a patch about head-high was shifting and blurring like he had a spot floating in his vision.

Then, slowly, a head poked through.

It looked faraway, faded like it was coming through on a channel that the screen was only half-getting. Nate wasn't sure if his inclination was more that he was dreaming or that he was seeing things. A dream might not be so unfocused and intangible, a hallucination wouldn't be so constant or so unchanging. Whatever it was had a very plain, un-made up face. A Karen Carpenter shag with bangs, and a little frilly headband. She looked around the room almost in slow-motion, then her ears (still sharp and cunning in spite of her existential challenges) caught on the bed.

"Housekeeping," She called out slowly and uncannily, like her voice was being pitched down and stretched, like it was being muffled by something that he couldn't see.

Sienna didn't stir in her sleep. Nate was frozen in bed.

The figure in the doorway gestured like she was pushing the door open and looking around animatedly into the room. She took a large, dramatic step and then another toward the bed before turning and putting a hand to her mouth as she called back toward the doorway.

"Oh Lucinda~"

Another spectral head came poking around the doorframe, wearing a pair of golden hoop earrings and with a puffy black afro, though the same frilly headband pushing it up and back from her forehead. They were both wearing the sort of undersized, flamboyant french maid costumes that one would have probably had less luck cleaning in than a birthday suit, more frill than fabric, more curlicue than covering.

"We got a room? The figure called from the doorway in the same waterlogged, off putting manner.

"Oh, we got a room and a half." The first one giggled and gestured to the bed as the second joined her with a sashaying, eager bounce. "Will you just look at her?"

"Why Estelle," The second figure whistled, "I don't think that we ever been half this lucky before."

The sheets on Sienna's side of the bed pulled back seemingly without being touched. Nate's girlfriend murmured and shimmied a bit in her sleep, but didn't wake up. Her camisole was pulling tight around her chest as she had settled and shifted in her sleep, and it was making what was already a healthy excess of curve even more alluring.

"I mean, forget about the look of her for just a second, have you ever seen nightclothes this nice?" Estelle gushed.

Both figures had come up beside the bed without appearing to move and they were leaned down low to ogle Sienna, hands occasionally reaching out and touching the fabric of her sleepwear, not distorting and leaving any impression on the fabric but drawing a couple of sharper breaths from the sleeper.

"This color, this hemming, this fit at her size?" Lucinda fanned her forehead.

"And for sleep!"

"Can you imagine having the kind of money to pay for something this nice to be custom fitted, just to sleep in?"

"Well," Estelle giggled, "I just got better at imagining having at least some of that kind of money."

Nate finally managed to move, though what he actually accomplished was falling backwards half out of bed as he reached for the camera which was sitting on the chair beside the nightstand and not the stand itself where he might have reached it easily. Even if this was a dream, he would have an easier time living with himself if he still at least tried to get something with night vision recording it. When he got a hold of it and pulled himself up to bring it in view, both of the spectres were looking at him. Not angrily, not even curiously, just sort of dispassionately. Like they couldn't have had any less interest in him and whatever he was going to do if he had been a cockroach. When they moved again, they both brought a finger to their lips in unison.

"Shh!"

He held up his free hand in surrender, then both of them vanished suddenly. Nate blinked a few times and looked around for them, hoping he hadn't scared them off, but a moment later the sheets around Sienna's waist started to balloon outwards, a pair of human-sized and human-shaped lumps taking shape in the fabric. Whatever part of Nate's brain that had become a slave to the content formula took over, and he pulled the sheets back, fully risking the pair vanishing again, but they stayed there when he did. They were both lying on either side of Sienna's thighs as her panties slowly moved down around her ankles, then off without being touched. Then her legs slowly parted, knees raising up to around her hips in a position that a person sleeping would never come into of their own doing. The ghosts ogled and cooed at her brown-and-pink pussy, now exposed for them in the semi-dark, then both of them drew closer all at once, one of Sienna's legs over each shoulder, and the half-transparent forms of them obscured what exactly was happening, though the sounds that started making their way out painted a clear picture.

Sienna caught her breath hard in her sleep and then let it out again as a soft little moan, fingers gripping hard into the sheets. If you believed some of the urban legends about the case, this was the kind of thing that the pair had made their bank on. Back then, it had been a lot easier to find a sexually frustrated married woman and promise to show her something she'd never seen before, then have cunnilingus actually be something that lived up to the promise. The couple (allegedly, of course) had been famous for passionate, almost obsessed oral sex which they would perform on their singled-out victim until she was begging them to stop, and often for a while after too. They had promised things like "more pleasure than you've ever felt from a man" and "the kinds of delights that would have made Joan of Arc blaspheme". And they'd usually meant them.

As the sounds of tongues rasping against Sienna's pussy could be heard, the sounds of lips closing around her clit in kisses and to suck it, Nate thought briefly about the things he had in his bag. Salt, white sage smudge sticks, crosses and holy water. All things which he had "proven" (at least he certainly thought so) to not work but which his kit wouldn't be complete without. But he'd already done most of them during his video, and they clearly hadn't worked, at least not long-term. Even if one of them would work and suddenly make them go away, the prospect of just how good all of this footage was going to be won out over everything, even the fact that it was his girlfriend they were currently going after. After all, what did he actually have to worry about? That his partner would be so wooed by the affection of literal ghosts that she would lose interest in him entirely?

Plus, it wasn't like he wasn't having fun watching.

Estelle and Lucinda giggled and kept working as Sienna shivered and writhed in her sleep, breaths coming ragged and fast as she visibly tried to close her legs but couldn't. Nate moved slowly around the bed, keeping the camera trained on the action and watching it as he turned on one of the dimmer corner lights for better video. Again, the ghosts didn't disappear even though part of him had feared they would. He could see through them that Sienna's cunt was running with wetness, her clit swollen and throbbing as the ghostly tongues lapped back and forth, the spectral mouths biting and sucking. Sienna's camisole had started to ride up enough that Nate was able to reach out and pull it all the way up gently, exposing her plump breasts, his eyes gaping a little wider and his jaw dropping a little lower when he did. The skin was distorting and squishing around invisible hands so tangible and so "real" that he could make out the individual fingers where they dug into the skin. Her nipples pinched between two patches of nothing and pulled up or twisted to one side and then the other. Ghostly, ultraviolet lip marks flashing in his night vision around her tits, on her stomach, so all over her pussy that it glowed like a miniature sun.

Nate could only guess at what she was feeling, what she might be dreaming about to try to make sense of it. He could only imagine how good it must feel to have not one but two figures between your legs worshiping you with their tongues and their mouths like how good of a job they did directly correlated to how much money they were going to make from it. Even if their bodies were only half-real and cold, like the stories all said that ghosts were, their tongues moved like they were real enough and they dripped with wetness. They seemed almost to steam and sizzle in the air, like they were burning hot as they lashed up and down, side to side across Sienna's sex.

Her moans were growing louder, the thin film of sleep bubbled and and wavered more and more, Sienna's eyes scrunching, her arms moving to grip the pillow, then the sheets again, then to reach between her legs. Her breaths weren't even coming as pants any more, instead big, shuddering inhales and then gasping, shaking exhales. He wondered how she was even staying asleep.

A moment later, she wasn't. Sienna's eyes shot open as she let out a long, moaning exhale that caught in her throat as she gripped handfuls of the sheets. She gave Nate a bewildered look, camera pointed at her, then down between her legs just as her orgasm broke through and threw her head back into the pillow. Her eyes glassy and rolled back but cracked open, her chest rising and falling rapidly and then slowly, then rapidly again as she let out a cluster of creaking little moans and squeals, clearly too winded to let out the scream that was clearly bursting inside of her chest. Her back arched nearly a solid foot off of the bed, then her cunt squirted wetly, arcing out onto the sheets and wettening them with a scattered pattern like a spill. Nate had never seen Sienna squirt, certainly never made her do so, he didn't even know she could. He felt a tinge of something complicated, some mixture of envy and inadequacy, realizing that what the ghosts had done for Sienna was in all likelihood the best and most mind-blowing orgasm that she'd ever experienced. He would have hoped that he would be the one to give it to her.

When Sienna finally had enough control of herself to not just twitch and jerk, she gasped and let out a sound like a sob. Nate expected her to twist and try to pull away from the ghosts (she had always been very one and done with him) but instead she seemed to rock her hips into them, reach down between her legs like she could have grabbed a handful of either's hair.