Lovers From Beyond 1.01

"How does this explain where you've been for the last two weeks?" Eleanor asked.

Katherine looked first to Victoria, and next to Eleanor, and for the first time that morning, she was fighting back a mischievous grin. "I couldn't believe what had happened to me that night. I thought I'd imagined it, so to prove to myself that it had really, actually happened, and that I wasn't going crazy, I went back to that same apartment. In the last two weeks, I've gone back five times, and the same, exact thing has happened each and every time I've spent the night there."

"Do you really expect us to believe that you've been getting some kind of phantasmagorical fellatio from a ghost in an apartment in the ghe-tow?" Eleanor questioned.

"I don't expect you to take my word for it." Katherine opened her mouth to let out a long sigh, and afterward, she was indeed smiling. "I'm challenging the both of you to jump into my car, as soon as the sun goes down today, and to spend the night in that same apartment with me. And it's not pronounced ghe-tow, darling, it's pronounced ghetto."

In a very rare occasion, the well-mannered Eleanor found herself at a loss for words.

Victoria, however, wasn't quite so intimidated, as with her cheeks blushing, she said, "Eleanor, I'll go, if you go!"

Later that evening, the apartment complex's chocolaty brown exterior was revealed by the swinging glare of the headlights on Katherine's Toyota Rav 4. The miniature Sport Utility turned into the narrow drive behind the apartments, and after driving past several of the large buildings, the car pulled in at a slant into one of the few open spaces.

Neither Eleanor nor Victoria had ever been in such a lower class neighborhood in their entire lives, and understandably, both were hesitant to walk away from the relative safety of Katherine's car.

"Can we even step out of your car without being accosted?" Eleanor asked.

"Well, I suppose you can stay there in the front seat for the entire night." Katherine teased. "Maybe you can count how many transients come by with their shopping carts, and climb in to sift through the garbage in the dumpsters right over there." She pointed toward the little dumpster housing, sitting just a few yards behind her car.

"Oh, dear God." Eleanor grimaced. "Please don't tell me they have transients here."

"They have oodles of them." Katherine replied, exiting her car and heading to its rear end, where she opened up the back hatch.

Timidly, the two other women left their seats, and rushed to join their partner.

"If you keep acting like that, you're only going to draw attention to yourselves." Katherine observed their hastiness. "Act casual. Pretend you're out shopping at Tiffany's or something."

"Easy for you to say." Eleanor said. "You actually like working around these people."

"They're people, just like you or me." Katherine shrugged. "The only difference is that we have a little more money in the bank than they do."

"Oh, I beg to differ." Eleanor countered. "There are worlds of difference between myself and the people that live in this neighborhood."

Hoping to avoid being drawn into yet another lengthy debate over social classes with Eleanor, Katherine instead sought to lighten the mood a little. She studied Eleanor's and Victoria's choice of attire; both women were wearing cashmere tracksuits, Eleanor's colored in an ominous black, which suited her brooding character perfectly, while Victoria's was colored in a pretty and soft pink. "You ladies look as if you're ready to run a marathon back to La Jolla."

Victoria, who hadn't said much during the entire ride, finally spoke up. "You don't really think we'll be accosted, do you?"

"Not unless you plan on standing out here all night." Katherine kidded. "Now, grab some of this gear and follow me to the apartment."

Eleanor suffered through the indignity of having to carry, on her own, Katherine's loaner sleeping bag, while the least physically inclined of the three, Victoria, was nearly huffing with exertion after lugging about her own sleeping bag, and a rolling tote that scraped along the ground, because she hadn't managed to get its tiny wheels to extract.

Katherine led the two women to a darkened patch of the complex, counting down the doors to number 13, and after fumbling through several keys on her collection, she unlocked the front door and motioned her tiny entourage inside. Luckily, the utilities were included in the price of the rent, and thus never needed shutting off in the vacant apartments, resulting in electricity and hot water being only a switch or a knob turn away. As soon as the interior lights went on, the newcomers were instructed to settle themselves on the floor of the living room, while Katherine went back to secure her vehicle, and to retrieve the trio's dinner, which consisted of Panini sandwiches, a tiny side salad, and a light wine.

Eleanor almost gagged when she realized they were going to be eating with plastic utensils and drinking from Styrofoam cups.

Strangely enough, Victoria was the first to breach The Subject. "How will we be going about this... this thing we're doing tonight?"

"I know what will happen if I go upstairs." Katherine stated. "Which of you girls would like to go up first, to see if I'm telling the truth, or not?"

"I couldn't." Victoria shook her head.

Eleanor, seated on the carpet, crossed her arms defiantly. "I'll go first, just to prove you wrong. All you have to do is tell me when it's a good time to go."

Katherine checked her watch, and shrugged. "It's a little past eight, but I have no idea what kind of hours the ghost keeps."

"A very likely story." Eleanor huffed. "To cover your tracks when the ghost doesn't show up at all."

"Go upstairs now, if you like." Katherine suggested, already feeling a bit ruffled from her friend's attitude.

"Maybe I will." Eleanor said. She glanced around the room. "Where is my travel bag, with all of my night clothes in it? Did you forget it in your car?"

Katherine shook her head. "I didn't see it, and I checked the entire car before I locked it up."

"Well, you'll just have to check again." Eleanor demanded. "I won't have anything to wear tonight when I go to sleep, because everything I have is in my travel bag." A second later, her eyes and mouth opened wide in shock. "Oh, no. I think I forgot it in the foyer, back at my house. We have to go back to get it."

Katherine had brought along a red backpack, and now, she pulled it close and began to rummage through it. She pulled out two extra long nightshirts. "Lucky for you, that I brought an extra one, just in case I got the first one, uh, all wet in the middle. Would you prefer the white one, or the pink one?"

"The white one." Eleanor pouted and took the shirt. She got to her feet. "Where can I change into this thing?"

"There's a bathroom up the stairs and to the right." Katherine pointed out. "Of the two bedrooms, the one furthest away from the stairs, on the left, is the one you'll be sleeping in."

Resolutely, Eleanor stepped toward the access point to the second floor. "Go ahead and call your ghost, or whatever you're supposed to do."

"I'll try." Katherine rolled her eyes in Victoria's direction. "By the way, aren't you forgetting something?"

"What?" Eleanor asked.

"Your sleeping bag. I'm not taking it upstairs for you."

"Right." Eleanor came back, and lugged the bulky item up the stairs. She could hear Katherine's voice as she started to ascend the steps.

"Ghost," Katherine said out loud. "If you can hear me, would you be a dear and give my friend Eleanor the same sort of special attention that you've been giving me?"

What a load of nonsense! Eleanor thought to herself. She stepped into the haunted bedroom, and clicked on the lights, but shut them off a moment later when she realized the bedroom had no curtains covering its two large windows. She wasn't about to give any ghe-tow punk a free peep show, and in the dark, she tossed her sleeping bag onto the floor. She could have gone into the bathroom to change, but then she thought, what the heck, why not change in the shadows of the bedroom? Nobody was going to see her, anyway.

After shucking off her tracksuit, Eleanor stood there in her fancy black bra and panties, and while she would have much rather been putting on her silky black pajamas, she donned Katherine's oversized spare shirt instead. Next, she spread out her sleeping bag, and couldn't figure out which end was which until she noticed the slight hump that defined the bag's built-in pillow. Without bothering with the zipper, Eleanor folded the flap over and covered herself, and waited.

And she waited some more.

And almost two hours later, she was still waiting.

Finally, the woman had enough waiting, and leaving her bundle of clothes and sleeping bag behind, she stalked out of the bedroom to confront Katherine and force her to confess that she'd made the entire incident up.

"Of all the hare-brained schemes I've heard in my life..." She called out, as she started down the stairs. "I cannot believe you dragged us out here to..."

"Shhhh!" Both Katherine and Victoria shushed her simultaneously.

Eleanor paused halfway to the first floor. "What is going on?"

"Come down here, but be very quiet." Katherine said, in a hushed tone.

Sensing their agitation, Eleanor quietly finished her descent, and stepped over to take a seat next to her two buddies. She leaned close to them, and whispered, "What's going on with you two?"

Katherine kept her gaze steadily toward the tiny kitchen space. "The ghost is here."

Eleanor opened her mouth to refute this, when Victoria cut her off with a sudden and sharp - "Shhh!"

"If you keep really quiet," Katherine explained. "And I mean listening to your heartbeat quiet, you'll be able to hear it moving around down here."

"We heard it stepping in through the front door." Victoria excitedly added. "As if the ghost was coming home from work or something. And I think it knows we're here, too, because just like Kathy said, it stopped to stare at us for a really long time, before it went off into the kitchen."

"Well, I don't hear anything." Eleanor frowned.

"That's because you're not really listening." Katherine nearly glared at her.

"I think it's a man." Victoria stated. "It does sound like a man, just like Kathy said it would. It stomps around, and it bangs into things, and it just feels like a man."

"Why can't I sense anything?" Eleanor complained.

"I already told you why, it's because you're not trying hard enough." Katherine turned to address her. "I think I can smell him now, too. He stinks. Maybe he works as a janitor, or a garbage man, or something like that. He doesn't smell at all like the other times. But then again, I was already upstairs waiting for him, and it was much later than it is now."

"We should tell him to go take a shower." Victoria joked.

"Listen!" Katherine whispered, and sure enough, soft footsteps were heard moving about on the kitchen tile. Katherine half turned toward the kitchen, while staying seated on the carpet. "Hello." Her voice was direct, but friendly. "I'd like to introduce you to my two friends. This is Eleanor, and this is Victoria."

While Eleanor thought the introduction to an invisible entity was weird, and not to mention foolish, Victoria held up her hand, smiled cutely and waved.

"Hi." Victoria said merrily.

The ghost in the kitchen stood silent.

"He's watching us." Katherine informed the others. "I just know he is."

"Maybe he thinks that we're ghosts." Victoria suggested.

"What?" Eleanor asked.

"You know, maybe wherever the ghost is, he's real." Victoria elaborated. "Maybe we've gone into his dimension, like in an episode of the Twilight Zone or something. Maybe in his eyes, he's real, and we're the ghosts."

"Oh, please." Eleanor protested. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

"I know what he did to me felt real enough." Katherine whispered.

Behind the three, the steps started up again. They seemed to make their way around the three women, as if in precaution, and started trotting up the stairs a moment later. It sounded as if two heavy, plodding feet were stomping their way up.

"I know why the ghost is so loud, when it's going up the stairs." Katherine discovered. "When I had the carpeting put in, I put extra padding on each floor, but not on the steps. The sound isn't being muffled as much."

"Are you trying to tell me that the ghost has the weight of an actual human being?" Eleanor asked in disbelief. "Please tell me you're kidding?"

"Well, its tongue sure feels like a human tongue." Katherine snapped back. "I can't explain everything. It didn't need to open the front door to get in here, but now that it's inside the apartment, it sounds just like a normal person going about their business."

"It's on familiar ground." Victoria suggested. "Now that the ghost is back where it spent most of its time in its former life, it's drawing power and strength from the environment around it."

"Since when did you become such an expert on the paranormal?" Eleanor asked.

"Hey, I watch that Ghost Bustin' show sometimes. And, I've read quite a few books on the supernatural, thank you very much. Maybe I don't spend my entire day preening and brushing my hair like you do."

Eleanor was about to lash back, when Katherine spoke up. "I'm going upstairs."

"Oh, no you're not!" Victoria, usually the skittish one, halted Katherine and greatly surprised the other two. "You've already had your turn. In fact, you've already had a bunch of turns. I want to go up next."

Flabbergasted, Katherine merely waved at the stairs. "Be my guest. Eleanor's been kind enough to leave her sleeping bag up there for you."

Still dressed in her pink tracksuit, the voluptuous Victoria courageously stepped over to the stairs and started on her way up. She cast one final glance at her two comrades at about the midway point, visibly sucking up a resolute breath, before she went on. Soon, only Victoria's legs were visible, and then only her pink and plaid Burberry sneakers, and finally, there was nothing of Victoria left to be seen.

Like a conspirator, Katherine leaned closer to Eleanor. "I didn't think she had it in her." She then giggled. "But maybe in a minute or two, she will have it in her!"

As Katherine said this, Eleanor noted, her eyes were lingering on Eleanor's loose shirt, and to be specific, on her full bosom, and for a handful of seconds longer than she'd considered proper. It wasn't the first time, Eleanor recalled, that she'd seen the leaner woman's gaze lingering toward her curvy figure, but she'd always just assumed that Katherine hadn't been raised as a proper lady, and that she'd never been told that it wasn't polite to stare at a person that way.

Normally, Eleanor wouldn't make such an issue of the impropriety, but she'd been at odds with Katherine for much of that day over this whole ghost nonsense, and she quickly thought up a roundabout way to strike some venom in the other woman's direction. "Actually, I didn't expect Victoria to be so brash, either." She started, raising her arms high into the air as if she were about to yawn, and at the same time, drawing the shirt's fabric close to her prominent breasts. Automatically, Katherine's gaze focused on her bust, and Eleanor closed in to snare the other woman in her trap. "Say, I've been meaning to ask you..."

"Yes?"

"Why are you always staring at my tits?"

Katherine looked shocked at being confronted so directly, and both her eyes and her head darted in the opposite direction. "I wasn't staring."

"See, I can be as crass as you are, when I choose to be." Eleanor verbally belittled the other woman. "And yes, you were staring at my tits. In fact, I always seem to catch you looking at them, and I want to know why you're doing it."

For several moments, Katherine stayed quiet. Then, she turned back in Eleanor's direction with a downcast gaze. "I'm sorry. I'm jealous of you, and your perfect body. Your figure is so much more beautiful than mine ever was. And my breasts, they can't even begin to hold a candle to yours."

Maybe it was the wine that had loosened up both her lips and Katherine's, Eleanor considered. Or maybe it was the idea of doing something provocative with the ghost upstairs. Before Eleanor could begin to articulate a reply, however, they heard Victoria's raised voice upstairs. It was loud and stern in tone, but not quite clear enough for them to be able to discern the words.

Katherine raised herself up on her knees. "Do you suppose she's all right?"

"I don't know." Eleanor replied. "But it would be just like her, don't you think, to start having a debate with somebody right off the bat, even if that somebody is from the other side. She's always contradicting what's being said, after all."

"That's not Victoria at all." Katherine refuted. "You're talking about yourself."

"Oh, really?" Eleanor shot back. "And I suppose that you think you're Mother Teresa now, after you've the dragged the two of us down here to participate in your little sex scheme with a ghost?"

"The way I see it, nobody dragged you anywhere. You got into my car on your own two legs!"

The two women glared at one another, and had they more of an audience around them, a mockery of a catfight might have quickly ensued. As it was, neither one of them felt like being overdramatic, at least not without a crowd present, and as if they were thinking with a single mind, they both turned to look up at the stairs.

"We should go up and check on her." Katherine suggested.

Eleanor started to rise. "Let's."

They both reached the stairs at the same moment, but since Eleanor suspected that Katherine might be staring at her butt if she ascended first, she stepped aside and allowed the other woman to pass. "It's your apartment, you take the lead."

Katherine gave her a snide look, and quickly trotted up the stairs.

As the hallway light was on, the women had no trouble in reaching the haunted bedroom, and they both peeked into its shadows and found Victoria standing by one of the room's large windows. The window was as wide open as it could get, and cool air was flowing inside.

"You didn't throw the ghost out the window, did you?" Eleanor kidded.

Victoria had her arms crossed over her chest, as if she were irritated. She unclasped them and slid the window shut, then turned back to face the other two. "What are you two doing up here?"

"We heard you say something." Katherine divulged. "You sounded angry, and we came upstairs to look in on you."

"Oh, that." Victoria noticed that Eleanor had reached out to flip on the light switch. "Leave the light off. The ghost should be back shortly."

"What happened up here?" Eleanor asked.

"The ghost came into the bedroom, just like Katherine said it would." Victoria admitted. "But it came in here smelling like a garbage dump, and I told it to march itself out of here until it got itself all cleaned up. I told it that I didn't want it to come back until it smelled like a perfect gentleman."

Katherine laughed. "You really said that?"

"Of course I did." Victoria confirmed. "I may be desperate for a man's company, but I'm not desperate enough to go into a garbage dump to find it."

"We should go back downstairs then?" Eleanor asked.

Victoria shook her head. "No. I think that if something is going to happen here tonight, we should all be witnesses to it. Otherwise, both of you will say I made it up."

"Even if the ghost does something erotic to you?" Eleanor asked. "You don't mind us watching?"

"Especially if the ghost does something erotic to me." Victoria quipped. "We all came here to do something together, and if the two of you want to stay downstairs and miss the whole thing, then off you go! Besides, I'm not as insecure about my body as either one of you is."