Lovers From Beyond Ep. 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 it very much 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 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 also to retrieve the trio's dinner, which consisted of a bag that held Panini sandwiches, tiny side salads, 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 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 long nightshirts. "Lucky for you that I brought an extra shirt. Just in case I get 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. 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. Especially a ghost that did not exist!

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 over-sized spare shirt instead. Next, Eleanor spread out her sleeping bag. Since she was unaccustomed to using 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.

To be continued.