Lovers from Beyond Ch. 01

From the embarrassment, Katherine hid her face with her hands.

"And I fancy you thought it was some handsome young buck pleasuring you?" Eleanor teased, as she was sure her friend was joking with her. All that was missing now was the punch-line.

"Young man, old man, how should I know what it was?" Katherine snapped back. "I told you, I never saw the thing! I only heard it stomping up the stairs like some kind of serial killer. I am not making any of this up!"

"So it could have been a woman?" Victoria asked.

"If she walked like a man, and threw her weight around like a man, I'm sure it could have been." Katherine's sudden fury at Eleanor fluttered away with another cold gust of wind. Unlike the other two, she was not wearing a sweater. "You're the first two people I've told this to, and I'd appreciate if you don't go and blab it around to everyone you run into."

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

Katherine looked first to Victoria, and next to Eleanor. For the first time that morning, the woman was fighting back a grin.

"I couldn't believe what happened to me that night." She explained. "I thought I'd imagined it. 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. The same, exact thing has happened each and every time I've spent the night there. What do you say to that, Eleanor?"

Eleanor was not impressed. "Do you honestly expect us to believe that you've been getting some sort of phantasmagorical fellatio from a ghost in an apartment in the ghe-tow?"

"I don't expect you to take my word for it." Katherine opened her mouth to let out a long sigh. Afterward, she was indeed smiling. "I'm challenging the both of you to step into my car. As soon as the sun goes down today, I will be driving over to my apartment complex. I plan to spend the night in that same apartment, and I want the two of you to 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. Her cheeks were blushing as she blurted out, "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. After driving past several of the large buildings, the car pulled into one of the few open spaces.

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

"Can we 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. They climb into the dumpsters to sift through the garbage, right over there."

She pointed toward the little dumpster housing, sitting just a short distance from 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.

She headed to the vehicle's 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 so-called 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 turned to study Eleanor 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. Victoria's outfit 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. 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. 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. This resulted 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,. 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 serving of wine for each of them.

Eleanor almost revolted 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 right now. 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 skeptical 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. Upon hearing her friend's distress, she pulled it close and began to rummage through it. From the pack she pulled out two extra long nightshirts. "Lucky for you, that I brought an extra shirt. 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 certainly not taking it upstairs for you."

"Right." Eleanor came back to grab it.

Soon enough, Eleanor was seen lugging 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. When she realized the bedroom had no curtains to cover its two large windows, she immediately shut the lights off. but shut them off. She was not about to give any ghe-tow punk a free peep show. In the dark, Eleanor 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 just 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. While she would have much rather put on her silky black pajamas, she donned Katherine's oversized spare shirt instead. Next, Eleanor spread out her sleeping bag. Since she was unaccustomed to them, she 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 for the ghost.

And she waited some more.

And almost two hours later, she was still waiting.

Finally, the woman had enough waiting. 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..." Eleanor called out, as she started down the stairs. "I cannot believe you dragged us out here to the middle of nowhere, just to..."

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

Eleanor paused on the stairs, 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. She stepped over to take a seat next to her two buddies. Eleanor leaned close to them and whispered, "What is 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. I think it knows we're here, too. 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. It feels just 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 on my other visits. It was much later than it is now."

"We should tell the ghost to go and take a shower." Victoria joked.

"Listen!" Katherine whispered.

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, ghost." Her voice was direct, but friendly. "I'd like to introduce you to my two friends. This is Eleanor and this is Victoria."

Eleanor thought the introduction to an invisible entity was weird, not to mention foolish.

Victoria held up her hand, smiled cutely and waved. Merrily, she said, "Hi!"

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. "What sort of nonsense is that?"

"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 caution. A moment later, the steps started trotting up the stairs. 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 realized. "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, and so it's louder."

"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 felt 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 women. "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. The curvy brunette cast one final glance at her two comrades, at about the midway point up the stairs. After sucking up a resolute breath, she went on. Soon, only Victoria's legs were visible, and then only her pink and plaid Burberry sneakers. Finally, there was nothing of Victoria left to be seen at all.

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! I'm talking about the ghost tongue, you know!"

As Katherine said this, Eleanor noted, her eyes were lingering on Eleanor's loose shirt. To be specific, Katherine's eyes were resting on her full bosom. The woman gazed at her for a handful of seconds longer than what Eleanor would consider proper. It wasn't the first time, the shapely blonde recalled, that she'd seen the leaner woman's gaze on her figure. Eleanor had always just assumed that Katherine simply hadn't been raised as a proper lady. She'd never been taught that it wasn't polite to stare at a person's body that way.

Normally, Eleanor wouldn't make such an issue of the impropriety. On this occasion, she'd been at odds with Katherine for much of that day, over this whole ghost nonsense. Eleanor 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." Eleanor started; raising her arms high into the air as if she were about to yawn. At the same time, her action drew 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, Katherine, I've been meaning to ask you..."

"Yes?"

"Why are you always staring at my tits?"

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

"Do you 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. I demand to know why you're doing it."

For several moments, Katherine stayed quiet. With a downcast gaze, she turned back in Eleanor's direction. "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, and 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. Had they more of an audience around them, a mockery of a catfight might have quickly ensued. As it was, neither woman felt like being overdramatic, or at least not without a crowd present. 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 do that."

They both reached the stairs at the same moment. Since Eleanor suspected that Katherine might stare at her butt if she ascended first, she stepped aside and allowed the other woman to pass.

"It's your apartment, so you take the lead." The blonde said.

Katherine gave her a snide look, before quickly trotting up the stairs.

As the hallway light was on, the women had no trouble in reaching the haunted bedroom. 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, allowing a breeze of cool air to flow inside.

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