It’s a story about the ghosts of what was done and the lingering death of those turned on by their community. It’s also smut. I am a perpetual motion machine of Southern angst and pornography.

18+, naturally, and a special warning for depictions of racist and homophobic violence. If either of those topics is sensitive, probably don’t read this. Other than that, it’s pretty standard horror porn, so look out for that as well. I hope you enjoy!

The house is haunted, and everyone knows it. It belongs to the Preston family, but they left town a while back. Someone in some distant city owns it, sometimes sends someone out to make sure nothing has happened. Every few years, they make noise about selling it, but they never do, the reason being that the house is haunted.

Only a few people have seen the ghost, but almost everyone has seen something they can credit to her continued presence. It could just as easily be rot. Could just as easily be squatters. Could just as easily be some hoaxers looking to stir up fears among the hillbillies, or local hoaxers too.

It’s not, though, it’s the ghost that sometimes appears in the broken-out windows, the ghost who walks the tangled, unkempt pastures and ivy-cloaked oaks. The ghost of Mary Freedman, the young black maid, who was killed there.

It’s not something the people in town like to talk about.

They still tell the story of how her murderer got driven from his home by her ghost, but he gets reduced to ‘Evil Ol’ Mister Preston,’ and they just say ‘he done her a terrible wrong.’

Christian learned the truth from the ghost herself’s very mouth. She was running away from home and huddled up at the roots of one of the tall oaks when she met Mary.

Mary, small, sad-eyed and with her maid’s kerchief tied over her hair, looking for all the world like she’d stepped out of the twenties just a moment ago, holding a lantern. She asked Christian’s name, and why she was out at such a late hour, all other pleasantries one might expect, as she took Christian back to the road.

She had such a delicate, soft-skinned hand, warm in Christian’s. She told Christian not to be sad about her homelife, that the secret was to find her little light and keep it real close to her heart.

“If you have your secret little light, nothing can hurt you. Not permanently. You’ve got your secret, and that gives you something over them. Sometimes, that’s all you need. Get on home, now.”

She was ten, then. Mary Freedman would have been about nineteen when she was murdered. Christian didn’t know about the story, then, and because she didn’t want her step-daddy to realize she’d tried to run away, she had to go about asking around very carefully.

Nowadays, she visits whenever she can. Nobody else ever comes out to the old Preston house. The stories of what befalls people who go there with mischief in their hearts–the stories of what happened to Evil Ol’ Mister Preston–keep people from going, except on dares.

It’s not fair. Mary isn’t a bad person. She doesn’t deserve to be locked here in this awful, falling-down house, the house where she was murdered. She doesn’t deserve to be an entire community’s bogeyman. The object of terror.

Christian comes in the evening, opens and closes the front door delicately to keep it from coming off the rusted hinges. Dust hangs heavy here, catching what’s left of the sunlight. Evil Ol’ Mister Preston left everything here, and it’s said that Mary chased away anyone that tried to reclaim it.

Through the collapsed walls and open doorways, Christian catches a glimpse of Mary, how she really looks. Long, jittery limbs, the broken shards of teeth sharp as those of a shark. Her hair in lank locs that obscure parts of her ruined face.

But when she appears before Christian and opens her arms, she looks like she just stepped out of the twenties. The lips she presses to Christian’s are full and warm, the teeth behind them sweet in their crookedness, smooth, blunt. The palms on Christian’s cheeks are just as soft as they ever were.

“What’s the matter, Chrissy?” Mary asks, forehead pressed to hers.

Christian shrugs and pulls Mary hard to her chest. Mary gasps and tucks her face into the crook of her neck, one hand still on her cheek, the other on her side.

“More of the same. I don’t… I don’t wanna think about it…”

“Don’t, then,” Mary says. “Don’t think about anything at all.”

It seems like Mary is the only person who is like her, who doesn’t hate her. People say they don’t, of course, they say they never wished no ill on her, but Christian knows–the disdain of the ones that know, the way they spit, the horrible words they have for people like her.

Unnatural. Disgusting. Abomination. Sinner. Freak. If my child was like that, I just don’t know what I’d do. You know what those people do to children, don’t you? Unnatural. Filthy. Sinner. Sinner. Sinner! Sinner! Sinner!

It’s just her imagination, but there are times she can hear her step-daddy screaming those words, and they fill up her head and make her want to vomit, want to die, just to escape the all-encompassing, all-devouring noise of his hatred. At times like that, she has to go visit Mary. Mary is the only one who can make it go away.

She undoes the buttons of Mary’s dress reverently, kissing the dark skin slowly revealed between the panels. All of her is so perfectly smooth, so perfectly feminine. Christian wishes she could be like her, so beautiful, so womanly, but all Christian has to show for her long battle with puberty is acne scars and gangly limbs, all the wide joints but none of the cushioning flesh.

Mary watches her through heavy-lidded eyes, hot with love, one hand braced on the floor where they sit and the other on Christian’s shoulder. Christian cups her breasts, squeezes her already-stiff nipples between her knuckles. Nothing too hard. Nothing that might put an edge in those eyes, nothing that might not be comfortable.

It’s not enough to make up for… for all of this. For being a ghost, a bogeyman, an object of terror, trapped forever in the house she died. But God himself will fall from Heaven and burn before Christian becomes another factor in Mary’s pain.

She laughs as Christian blows on her stomach, sighs as she dips lower, kissing a trail through her pubic hair. She’s not very wet, not yet, but the blood–or the memory of it, the image of what is supposed to happen, the illusion of life in this body that isn’t flesh, just spirit, just memories–is starting to pool there, making her puffy and red. Her clit is just starting to poke out of its hood. Christian kisses it, and Mary sighs again, this time shaky, and lowers herself all the way to the creaky wooden floor.

How many evenings have passed this way? It feels like it’s been forever. Summer has a way of dragging its feet through these parts, stretching the hours, the weeks, until they seem to be years. Years of heat and late sunsets. Years of katydids and fireflies.

Years of Christian on her tummy between Mary’s open thighs, licking desperately at her pussy. Suckling the pretty lips and teasing her entrance, but mostly lathing her clit. Up and down, up and down, a rhythm that makes her forget breathing, forget everything that isn’t the taste, the overwhelming scent of her.

Forget the town. Forget the stories. Forget the expletives shouted by her step-daddy. Forget that Mary is a ghost, a memory, forget everything that isn’t the here and now. Forget everything. Forget. Forget…

She reaches up and gropes for Mary’s breasts, harsher than before. It’s okay now that her mouth is on her pussy, okay to be rough. The thrum of pleasure enough to make up for a little bite of pain. Mary moans wordless encouragement, holds Christian’s hands over her breasts and digs her fingers in to make her knead to the rhythm she wants.

It feels like Christian could drown here, could lose herself entirely. Mary’s fat, jutting clit on her tongue, strings of fluid between Christian’s chin and Mary’s dripping hole. Her rocking hips and the shallow gasps, the creak of the floorboards under their writhing.

Mary screams as she cums, her clit pulsing against Christian’s lips as she kisses it through the orgasm and the aftershocks. Her pretty thighs tremble to either side of Christian’s head, her heels colliding with Christian’s back as her feet kick helplessly.

“Oh, you–it’s too much, you have to stop!” Mary insists, but there’s a laugh in it, a breathless giddy laugh that makes Christian not feel so bad as she gives her one last lick before sitting up.

Mary kisses her, both hands tight on her cheeks, but when she sits back, there are tears cutting two dark trails down her face.

“Mary?!”

“I love you,” Mary says, wiping them away. It does no good; they’re replaced not even a second later. “I love you so much.”

“Aw, Mary, that’s no… that’s no reason to cry…”

Mary stands up. For a second, she’s a corpse, a ragged, broken thing with her face all bashed in, her soft, sweet hands ravaged from where she held them up, trying to deflect the killing blows.

Christian blinks, and the Mary she has come to love is back, in her maid’s kerchief, her thin, button-down shirtdress. Still crying.

The sun is gone, and the moon shines through the broken-out windows. When did it get so late? It was only just getting to be sundown when Christian arrived, and the sunsets in summer are long, lazy affairs.

“Seems like forever,” Mary says, voice crackling with tears. “Christian, won’t you just stay with me? Please? This… after all this time, won’t you just wake up for me?”

Christian covers her face. Mary’s juices have already gone frigid and tacky, but Christian doesn’t want to scratch it off, doesn’t want it gone. Not until she has to leave. It’ll just disappear the second she leaves the grounds of this house, anyway.

“You know I can’t. My step-daddy would come looking for me. He’d beat the Lord Jesus outta me if he caught me trying to run away and live here…”

Mary sighs, turns to walk into one of the other rooms. A guest room, the one she would sometimes sleep in back when she thought Mr. Preston was her friend. Christian follows her, lays down next to her on the dusty, mildewed bed.

There’s not much for that. Christian has boarded up the window to keep any more moisture and debris from coming in, shaken out the sheets. But this is an abandoned house. There’s not much to be done. If she tried to wash the linens, they’d probably up and dissolve.

Their limbs tangle up, twist around each other. Mary undoes the button of Christian’s blue jeans–the ones her step-daddy was furious about–and slides those smooth fingers under the waistband of her panties, between her folds to play with her clit.

Mary is far more deliberate than she is. Probably on account of being a ghost. Christian still has all the impatiences of the living. Mary, though, Mary takes her time, doesn’t alter her rhythm one bit. Just moves her fingers in precise little circles, staring down hungrily at Christian’s face.

Used to be Mary would urge her to take off all her clothes, show her all of herself and put on a pretty display. Christian’s too afraid of whatever crazy infection she might get from the decay of decades here in this abandoned house to do so, though. Mary’s given up trying to pressure her, as well.

“You’re doing so good. So good. You’re gonna cum for me, right? You’re gonna scream when it happens, right? Just the way you made me do?”

Seconds melt into each other. The rusty iron frame of this old bed howls in protest as Christian and Mary writhe together on top of it. Katydids cry out into the humid night air, fireflies must be drifting on the lazy breeze.

Something drips onto Christian’s face. It could be sweat, or it could be blood. Maybe it’s even tears. She decides that it’s sweat, definitely sweat, and keeps her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open, sucking up air not half fast enough to catch her breath.

She can’t help but open her eyes as she cums, though, and for a second–for a second, the body stretched out in front of her–it’s not right–it’s not her–jittering limbs, ragged broken ribs poking under white, tissue-thin skin, ragged tears of the clothes she was wearing–and Mary is that way, too, the nightmare body she was cursed with when she found herself unable to move on.

She squeals–and the flash of wrongness is gone, replaced by her thrown-open legs, Mary’s hand still busy inside her jeans. Her shirt and bra pushed up over her breasts, and Mary’s lips on one nipple, her eyes burning into Christian’s.

Her head is spinning. When did she get here? How long–how long has she been here? Oh, God, she’s gotta get home! If her step-daddy catches her out, she’s gonna catch Hell, and, more literally, the buckle of his belt.

There’s still a wobble in her legs when she gets up and heads for the door. Mary stays in bed, staring after her, naked and silently crying.

Mr. Preston’s pride and joy, so Mary tells, was the big Victorian mirror he kept in the hallway. It belonged to someone real important, he would boast, and he won it in a high stakes poker game he had no business actually participating in. Mary says she used to be oh-so-careful while she cleaned it, gently dusting every crevice of its ornate frame, polishing the silver and wood to make sure it never tarnished, spot-cleaning the glass every single day just to be certain the reflection was perfect. Mr. Preston added a whole nickel to her pay because of how pleased he was with how she handled the mirror.

The very first thing she did as a ghost was break that fucking mirror.

She dragged Mr. Preston out of bed by his ankles and made him watch as, invisible, she destroyed it. She smashed spectral fists into it, over and over, and though she was unable to get most of the glass from the frame, she’s decided she likes the way the impacts look more. Craters, like the ones on the moon, ringed by cracks.

People have tried to steal this mirror, stopped by Mary every single time. Now it’s in the living room, where it was dropped by a particularly obstinate thief. Mary has it leaned up against the wall in a corner.

Out of her periphery vision, Christian sees herself, fractured into a million different shards by the cracks Mary left. Blood pours from a ruined face, hair clotted with it, white t-shirt turned crimson by gore. When she jumps and looks again, she only sees herself. Terrified, pale, but definitely alive.

She’s gotta get home. If her step-daddy catches her…

The road back home isn’t too long. And nobody’s up, everyone’s sleeping tight. So she assumes, at least. She ain’t about to tempt fate by peeking in on Mama and her step-daddy, not about to risk waking that old demon up. He keeps his belt on the bed frame. So it’s easy to put on his pants in the morning, but it also makes for very convenient grabbing.

Her room is wrong. All her posters and pictures are gone off the walls, and none of her clothes are in the dresser, or the closet.

A headache is setting in. Knees knocking, the too-clean room spinning around her, Christian lays down in a perfectly-made bed. She’ll have to ask Mama about this in the morning.

That night, she dreams of her step-daddy, screaming those awful words, and punctuating each one with a fist. It’s a nightmare she keeps returning to, one she seems to have every single night. She pulls the covers over her head, and promises herself it’s going to be alright.

She’s got her little light. Her visits with Mary. The way her soft hands feel in Christian’s, the way they kiss in that falling-down old house. It’s going to be okay.

Tomorrow, she’ll go see Mary again, and put the screaming, the blows, out of her mind. Tomorrow, like she does every time it gets to be too much, she’ll go to the old house again, and be among the ghosts.