Olivia and Owen

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Twins, an old mystery, ghosts, a fresh love.
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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. Was Owen?"

"If he was, it's been forgotten. It sounds like Earl and Owen were good friends. So anyway, Olivia returned to Schuyler in the spring of 1927, eighteen years old now, and went to work at the Alberene Stone Company. Earl went right back to courting her. Zachary seemed easy about it - if they'd married at eighteen or nineteen, that would've been pretty normal. Owen and Olivia turned nineteen on the eighth of July. And on the tenth, Earl blew them both away as they were walking near his father's house on Rockfish River Road. Two shotgun shells - his and hers. Then he walked to his house, called the Nelson County sheriff - his father was one of the few people in town with a telephone - and waited."

"There was never a trial," I said.

"Nope. He said he'd done it, he didn't put up any defense at all, and when the time came for sentencing he said he was ready to meet his maker."

I said, "If he ever explained himself, it didn't get in the newspapers."

"They say he never did explain. He left them all to guess. It took them only three months to get around to executing him, and he kept his counsel in the meantime."

"Jesus," I said.

"Zachary left here in September and went to work at a quarry up in Greene County," said Frank, "but he couldn't outrun his grief. Just two days after Earl went to the electric chair, he put the business end of a shotgun in his mouth and blew the top of his head off."

3. To the graveyard

Frank wasn't comfortable with my plan. "Some of the neighborhood boys hang out and drink on an old logging road off the Howardsville Turnpike," he said. "It's just a quarter mile away. They're a rough lot: I'd rather you didn't run into them."

"I'll bet they don't go to the graveyard," I said. "They probably don't even know about it. They won't know I'm there."

We'd taken precautions. We would approach the graveyard from the house of some of Frank's friends, in the opposite direction from the logging road. My phone didn't work in this neighborhood, so I'd acquired one that did. Frank would walk me along the footpath to the graveyard and then retreat to his friends' house. I'd phone if there was trouble or when I was ready to leave.

To me the precautions seemed a bit much. I'd spent plenty of nights among the dead. They didn't scare me, and neither did beer-drinking boys.

The graveyard was small, less than a hundred feet on a side, and entirely surrounded by forest. Part of it had been kept clear by the families of those buried there; the rest was a tangle of bushes and vines, and trees had grown up among the graves. In the middle of the overgrown part I had found two identical soapstone markers side by side. Perhaps names had once been carved on them, but if so, rain and wind had long since erased the writing from the soft stone. Still, I was sure I'd found Olivia and Owen's graves - the markers would have been Zachary's work. Surveying the graveyard during the day, I had picked out a spot at the edge, from which I could keep an eye on these two graves.

By ten thirty I had settled in. It was the eighth of July, the twins' birthday, and the night was clear. Light from the moon, which was just four days from full, filtered softly through the trees. Far away I could hear the voices of the drinking boys, but I doubted the ghosts cared any more about them than I did.

It won't do to let your mind wander when you're watching for ghosts: they'll slip by you while you're reviewing your yesterday or planning your tomorrow. I worked on keeping my mind clear and my senses awake.

I had been there a bit more than an hour when I heard a rustling in the leaves behind me. It might have been an animal, but I didn't think so. I turned and caught sight of something moving - too briefly to make out what it was.

Then I was alone again. I was sure I'd seen one or more of the ghosts, and I was just as sure I wouldn't see them again tonight. I called my brother, who soon came with a flashlight.

The next night I sat in the same place, but turned sideways so I could see either the graveyard or the spot where I thought I'd seen the ghosts. The moon was closer to full, but the night was partly cloudy, so it was harder to see. I waited.

Again the rustling came, and in the same spot. I didn't turn towards it immediately, but counted to ten and then turned my head slowly.

The figures were indistinct, as if made of smoke, and yet unmistakably human. One was male, the other female. They were slender, and they gave the impression of youth.

They were kissing, arms wound about each other.

Startled, I gasped and raised my hand to my mouth - and they were gone. I knew the way back now, so I didn't trouble Frank to come and get me.

"There's no doubt about it, Frank," I said an hour later as we sat with our nightcaps in his comfortable living room. "But what does it mean?"

"Maybe it's Olivia and Earl," said Frank.

"Earl is buried in a prison cemetery outside Richmond," I said. "Most ghosts are averse to travel. Besides, would you kiss a person who'd blown a huge hole in you?"

"Good point," said Frank. "Maybe it's not Olivia and Owen at all. Maybe it's some other couple."

"Maybe," I said. That night I slept little, haunted by my memory of the kissing ghosts.

The third night was the tenth of July, the anniversary of Olivia and Owen's slaying. The night was clear and the moon just two days from full. I sat facing the place where the lovers had appeared the last two nights. I could see why they liked it: it was clear of growth, except for leaves and soft mosses. If I were going to make love in the woods, I'd likely choose that spot.

I held perfectly still as the boy and girl came to the clearing, holding hands. They were more distinct tonight than they'd been the night before, but still uncertain and unreal, fuzzing at the edges like figures on a very old and malfunctioning television. He was dressed in a loose-fitting white shirt and worn rumpled trousers held up with buttons and suspenders; she wore a below-knee summer dress with a floral pattern. They stood in the clearing, embraced, and kissed. They spoke some words I couldn't make out and kissed again, their manner awkward and frantic, as if they hadn't had much practice at this.

They were both laughing as the girl said something, pushed the boy to the ground, and fell on top of him. Cradling his head in her hands, she kissed him again, and he put his arms around her and pulled her to him tightly. How happy they looked, and how passionate! I resisted the urge to look away from this private moment. If I so much as turned my head, I might end the scene.

The boy rolled the girl over, pinning her to the ground: now it was her turn to embrace him and pull him to her for a kiss, laughing and squirming under him with delight. My heart was beating faster, affected as much by their joy as by the sexiness of the scene.

Now she rolled him over and sat up, resting her weight on his knees. More serious now, he spoke some words that to me were an indistinct whisper. She nodded, as if he'd asked a question, and undid his belt; he raised himself up on his elbows to watch what she was doing. She opened his pants and pulled out his erect penis. Holding it in her hand, she slid down his legs, dress flowing around her, bent over, and put him into her mouth, holding the base of him with her hand. She looked awkward and tentative, as if this was a thing she'd never done or seen done.

They grew less awkward as the minutes went by. Sometimes she'd stop long enough to say something, and they'd both laugh, or he'd say something to make her laugh, and she'd give his shaft a little lick before going on with her work.

Then, quite abruptly, they stopped. They got up, the boy fastened his pants, and they left the clearing together.

An hour later I was saying, "I'm sure of it, Frank. They were almost as distinct as you are right now, and she was performing fellatio on him."

"Then they can't be your twins," he said. "You'll have to find out who else is in that graveyard. Back to the library . . ."

"They looked as much like each other as we do, Frank," I said. "Anybody would look at them and say they're brother and sister."

Frank was silent for a minute. Then he said, "Well, if they're the twins, we can guess easily enough why Earl killed them."

"If they're the twins, I'll find out," I said.

"How are you going to do that?"

"Ask them, of course."

That night, in bed, I couldn't dismiss the image of the lovers in the graveyard. My heart went out to them - with sympathy, with yearning to know them, talk to them, find out their story and what was in their hearts. I confess that I was turned on, too, remembering the handsome young man's erection, the young woman's mouth closed around it as it slid between her pretty lips, the way he thrust upwards into her, gently, somehow, and lovingly.

Were they the twins? I still believed they were, and I was appalled by what I'd seen them doing. And yet their joy was infectious: there was something so innocent, so appealing about them, that it was hard to hold onto the thought that what they were doing was taboo. And I couldn't help myself - I put my hand into my nightie and masturbated. I don't think I would have slept that night if I hadn't.