This is my first attempt in the "Incest/Taboo" category here at Literotica. It's a ghost story, much more romance than romp. If you like that kind of thing, read on: if not, feel free to skip this story - I won't be insulted.
The town depicted here actually exists, as does the company that operates there. The tiny cemetery is real, too - I saw it some years ago while visiting friends in the area. Out of respect for those buried there and their families, I have taken the precaution of changing its location: it is a beautiful and fragile place, now on privately owned land. All the characters in this story, both living and dead, are entirely fictional. Although the story contains reminiscences of childhood, only adults participate in the action, either present or remembered. Tags: Twins, Oral sex, Straight sex, Group sex, Murder, Ghosts, Spectrophilia.
* * *
1. The ghosts of Schuyler
Any of the citizens of Schuyler, Virginia, will happily point out the places that figure in the television series "The Waltons," which is based on life in that small town. They'll show you the family home, the Baptist church, the store, and the high school (now a museum) - but few can direct you to the tiny graveyard hidden just a couple of miles away.
This graveyard was once the property of the Alberene Stone Company, which has operated in the neighborhood since the 1880s. The company has changed hands several times and sold off most of its property to developers: it's a small operation now. But in the early days, when demand for soapstone washtubs and lab benches was high, it employed thousands. You can still see evidence of the former industrial glory of this area in the abandoned quarries that pock the land, the huge rough-cut chunks of soapstone scattered through the woods and fields, and the cracker-box houses the company used to put up for its workers.
If you worked for Alberene and had nowhere else to be buried, they'd bury you in this graveyard at company expense. They'd supply a little tin cross with a place for a paper label. They'd even supply a bit of isinglass to protect the label from the elements until your family had scraped together enough to buy a proper headstone. Some families managed to swing the headstones, and some crafted their own markers out of soapstone - but a number of tin crosses remain even now, the paper labels too faded to read, the people buried under them forgotten by all but the dead.
My brother, who lives in bucolic retirement near Schuyler, happened upon the graveyard while hiking in the woods, asked around, and, with some effort, got the story. He told me about the place and the rumors that it was haunted by a pair of ghosts - a young couple. I decided to come down from New York during my summer break and spend a month visiting him and investigating. I'm an anthropologist, and ghosts interest me. You can't truly understand the living unless you get to know the dead.
It's a tricky business, seeing ghosts, because they've gotten a lot less substantial over the years. Centuries ago, people believed ghosts to be as corporeal as we are, but now most of those who believe in them at all think of them as spirits without substance, misty but less material than mist, nearly impossible to see. Don't get me wrong: the ghosts themselves haven't changed. Rather, our relationship to them is different. They're less important to us than they used to be, so we don't look for them and, not looking, we don't see them when they're right in front of us. And we've become about as uninteresting to them as they are to us, so that a ghost who's been dead for a long time can start to have trouble seeing us. I hear there are ghosts who deny the existence of living people.
But ghosts are all around us, all the time, and it's quite possible to see them, get their attention, and communicate with them.
If you visit the Schuyler graveyard, I suggest you go on a moonlit night, because ghosts are easiest to see by moonlight. Still, don't expect to see anything right away. First you may notice a kind of altered quality of the light, as if a moonbeam were shining up instead of down. Or, if the summer night is humid, you may spot a vague area of mist moving almost imperceptibly through the still air. Perhaps you'll hear a step in the leaf clutter that doesn't sound quite like a deer, or a rustling from one of the surrounding trees that reminds you, just faintly, of a human voice.
If you notice any of these things, focus your attention there. You may have spotted your first ghost.
I'd done my homework. I'd made daily trips from my brother's rambling old farmhouse to the nearby University of Virginia Library, where I combed through archived company records and old newspapers until, after weeks of bleary-eyed searching, I came up with a hypothesis about who they were. Owen and Olivia Cross, son and daughter of Zachary Cross, murdered in July 1927 by one Earl Wilson, who, in the precipitate way of justice in those days, had gone to the electric chair for the crime in October of the same year. Newspaper accounts didn't have much more to say about the matter. In the 1920s, the doings of country folk weren't all that interesting to the mostly urban people who read newspapers. This story wouldn't have gotten as much play as it did if the victims hadn't been twins, born on the same day in the summer of 1908.
2. The townsfolk's story
"I just had to mention the names and the story came tumbling out," said Frank, stretching out his long legs as we relaxed with after-dinner drinks.
Of course it did. Frank's people skills were legendary. He never forgot a name, and he could strike up a conversation with anyone he met - bank tellers, politicians, taciturn mountain folk - and soon have their whole life story.
He'd parlayed his remarkable personality into a lucrative career as a defense attorney, charming judges and juries in the service of the criminal classes of our nation's capital. After ten years defending ever wealthier malefactors, he'd landed the dream client - a venture capitalist accused of poisoning his wife. At the end of a long and headline-grabbing trial, the client had walked away with his freedom, and my brother had walked away with half his client's fortune.
Frank packed it in after that. Great lawyer though he was, neither he nor his wife Gina had ever been particularly ambitious or comfortable in the city: they had met in college, where they'd belonged to the same hiking club, and they'd bonded over their love of the outdoors.
So when they'd found themselves in possession of a fortune, they'd spent a piece of it on a big old house on several hundred acres of wooded hills. They'd endeared themselves to the locals by spending lavishly to fix the place up. They'd hunted, fished, hiked, and gardened.
And then, a year after they'd moved to Schuyler, Gina had been killed in a collision with a quarry truck. Now thirty-nine years old, Frank had been living by himself for about six months.
"They began their lives under a cloud of tragedy," Frank began. "Their father was one of the skilled laborers, a stonecutter, almost an artist. He did a lot of the special orders: you know, bowls, bookends, figurines. People say he was pious, sensitive, and high-strung. Their mother, a fragile beauty, died in childbed: her last act in this life was to give them their alliterating names.
"Zachary was distraught after the mother's death, not quite up to the job of raising them alone, and the town sort of adopted the twins, as little towns will. Everyone looked after them, and they repaid the community for that care by being perfect children: they were fair-skinned and flaxen-haired, ideal Scotch-Irish mountain types, and they were intelligent, friendly, and well behaved."
"There's got to have been a worm in the rosebud," I said.
"If there was, nobody remembers it. In the collective memory, they were golden children, universally loved."
"How about Earl?"
"He was well liked too. He was the son of a foreman, so well off by town standards. But not an evil overbearing overlord type - just a nice guy. No one knows when Earl first started looking at Olivia as a marriage prospect, but the feeling seems to be that they would have made a good match. By the time Olivia was sixteen, she and Earl were taking walks together, with Owen along as chaperone."
"Got to love that old-fashioned dating," I laughed.
"What they wouldn't have given for some alone time at a drive-in movie," he said. "Anyway, when Olivia was sixteen, Zachary sent her off to a secretarial school in Winchester, where she lived with an aunt. The idea was that she'd pick up the skills she needed to come back and work for the company. But some say Zachary, and Earl's parents too, thought things between their kids were heating up too fast, and they decided to separate them - not to break them up so much as to slow them down. Anyway, Earl was sent off for a year of school in Richmond, and Owen went to work at the quarry."
"No trouble between Owen and Earl?" I asked. "Twins, you know . . ."
Frank smiled ruefully. "I'm never going to stop asking you to forgive me for being the overbearing brother," he said.
"And I'm never going to stop telling you there's nothing to forgive," I answered, a little impatiently. "Sure, you were a jerk - briefly. Then you got yourself under control. When I broke up with George it had nothing to do with you. He just wasn't my type."
"I've always wondered what your type is," said Frank.
"Tall, dark, and handsome, of course," I said with a smile, attempting to deflect the topic.
"There's been no shortage of tall, dark, and handsome men prowling around you," he said, "but you've turned up your nose at all of them."
"Maybe I'm not the marrying sort," I said. "Maybe I don't like men all that much."
"Oh, come on," he said. "I know you better than that."
I said, "It isn't all that easy being married to a twin, you know. Maybe women are better at it than men. Gina never gave any hint that she saw me as competition, but men . . ."
"Do they run away when they find out you have a twin brother?"
"More like they drift away. Or maybe I'm the one who drifts away. It's hard to match the intimacy of twins in a romantic relationship."
"So I
am
to blame," he said with a wry smile. "Nothing I've done - just my existence."
"Maybe," I said, trying to make my own smile reassuring, "but I wouldn't trade you for any of the men I've dated. Now back to the story. Boys with twin sisters have been known to be overprotective,
though you weren't
