Smoke and Roses

I stirred, my gaze moving toward the girl dancing behind her, and if my dick had already been hardening, it took a major leap upward in my pants. This was the second girl, the other who'd been kneeling beside me on that fur rug before Annie's fire. I'd seen nipples then and I saw nipples now, bold and distended behind a black-lace bra straining to hold her firm, high tits. Her hair, thick and red, was a force all its own as it bounced with the wild movements of her liquid body. I glanced lower and saw nothing but a black thong over sweaty young flesh, and I swallowed in a dry throat.

The fiddler dug into his strings now, the noise rising as the dancers flew even faster around the mysterious woman in the middle, and now the third dancer pranced into view and my cock went ballistic.

The third dancer. Annie.

I dug my fingers into the windowsill, my whole body tensing with need and desire. She danced with grace and skill, her body a figure of absolute perfection with her short, gossamer robe a cloud around her. As it whipped through the dim, otherworldly light, she looked naked when the gauzy fabric wrapped tight around her lush flesh, and as she spun before me I saw the nightgown climb high, floating, showing a sweetly rounded ass and then a smooth, vibrant slit, both in succession as she whirled for me, displaying herself. Drawing me.

Bewitching me.

I opened my mouth, not even thinking anymore, the beer and my lust crowding out all thought. I needed to cheer her, to cry out my desire for her, and even as I drew my breath I noticed the beautiful, gowned woman in the center of the dancing girls, her eyes huge and dark as they settled directly on mine. I blinked, flushed, and shouted my approval into the Chapel. "Fuck yeah! What a sexy little gown!"

At once I knew I'd have been better off keeping my mouth shut.

A dry sizzle of lightning pounded the sea behind, my whole world flashing white, and for an instant all I saw were staring eyes, joining the voluptuous woman in the gown. Everything in the Chapel was fixed on me suddenly: the dancing young sorceresses. The waxen dead, in their candlelit coffins. The hanged man, twisting slowly on his rope, his crow-pecked eyes meeting mine. The rotten-fingered figure in the cage, his head nearly a skull, the sockets now pinned to me. And at the head of it all, standing above the unholy altar, his violin silent now, the green giant towered, still too hideous to be seen.

But he saw me. They all saw me.

My heart sank as a gust of wind came past me off the ocean, whiffing out the candles, and in the sudden pitch darkness I gasped. My soul knew immediately that it was in danger, deep danger, and through the beer and the erection I knew I needed to ride. Fast. Far.

I couldn't see anything as I pushed off from the window and fumbled my foot onto the pedal. Behind me I sensed a gathering, a darkness, the things in the Chapel coming together to find me. The wind continued off the sea, scouring my face with damp sand as I got the bike going across the decayed concrete, skirting the Chapel wall as I rose from the seat, my legs already pumping for all they were worth.

The thunder came, finally, in a boom that shook my teeth. And then they were after me.

I heard them coming, a chatter like a hundred marbles rolling across the floor, almost a skittering noise that struck terror into my brain. No way was I going to look back: it had dawned on me, much too late, that this was no kids' Halloween party. This was something secret, something cold and mysterious, something I was never meant to see, and now I knew the creatures from inside the Chapel were going to make me wish I hadn't.

The bike churned off the concrete and into the pebbles, hesitating a moment before blessedly, thankfully, it found its traction, speeding me away into the breezy chill of a night gone mad. My eyes at last pulled themselves out of their blindness, seeing hints of virulent green in the sky above, and the sickly sheen of the beach below. And, in the distance, just a couple hundred feet away, the pale ribbon of the bridge over the dune, climbing toward home and safety, beckoning me. I had a wild idea that if I could just make it to that bridge, if only my tires could find the hard firmness of the wood instead of the treachery of the sand, then I'd be safe.

I drove on hard, my breath tearing, as though all the demons of hell were chasing me. As I thought they were, my back sweating and chill with the fury of the pursuit. And still, I dared not look back. I heard moaning, and distant shrieks borne on the spurts of wind, and all the while I heard footsteps. Firm, even footsteps, running after me, light on the sand and always heard, no matter how fast I rode. And as the bridge approached and my legs grew tired, I began to despair of ever shaking those mocking, patient steps.

But thank god, the rest of the sounds seemed to be fading at last! I gritted my teeth amid the drifting sand, the thunder squabbling over the sea to my left, with no sound now but my breath, and the whirring of my wheels, and those running footsteps behind me, inevitable as death, a threatening drumbeat.

This time, shivering, I did risk a glance back. And it was her.

Annie ran fast, but with no sense of struggle or strain about her; indeed, it was almost as if she was floating above the sands, keeping up with me effortlessly. Even gaining a little. My eyes widened, her tiny gown snapping behind her like her hair, leaving her sexy body exposed as it ran in the night air, the whole of her silhouetted by the weird unhealthy glow of a thousand unseeable shapes behind her as they trailed us in a vague and shapeless horror.

I peered back forward. The bridge was there, right there!

I gave it one final effort, certain the bridge would be my salvation, the dune glowing pale in the moonlight beneath. And when I glanced back one final time, I saw to my mixed terror and excitement that she had gained, nearly catching me, and now that smirk I remembered from D Street loomed close on a hideous night, equal parts threatening and alluring, and I watching in helpless despair as her greedy fingers reached for the back of the bike in the very moment that my front tire pulled me onto the bridge.

I felt her grasping, yanking, the bike resisting as I stood on the pedals and forced them around... once, then again, and with a sense like a snapped rubber band, I bounded forward up the bridge to a loud wail from behind me, the wail of unearthly forms whose quarry has escaped them.

My shoes finally slipped, exhausted, off the pedals when I reached the top of the bridge, with the sea on my left hand and the twinkling city on my right. I fell over the handlebars, powerless to keep moving even if the leaden feel of my heart hadn't been emerging, slowly, from the blanket of horror it had burrowed into back at the Fishermens' Chapel. I coughed, then dragged my eyes over my shoulder to stare back over the broad expanse of the beach behind me, shuddering at what I might see: the seething demonic hordes, pulsing back there in frustrated malice? Annie and her friends, preparing incantations by torchlight? That ghastly feline fiddler, his wrath unbounded at last?

I found my eyes were closed, but when I forced them open I saw nothing. Nothing but green-skeined moonlight on the hard-packed sand, the tracks of my tires receding into the gloom toward the empty shell of the Fishermens' Chapel. I blinked as, one more time, lightning flashed weakly far out at sea, its strobe revealing an empty rack over my rear tire, my messenger bag gone from among a torn pile of sad-looking bungees.

The bag held everything. My laptop. My law books. My study guides. I needed it like I needed food and water, and yet? As I stood there, thinking of the trip back down the bridge onto the sand to search for the bag in the Halloween darkness? I realized nothing on Earth could drag me back down that causeway by moonlight.

So I turned back, my heart troubled, and slowly got my bike moving back toward home, and Kate.

* * *

I felt a wash of relief when I turned onto Shanter Lane and saw my own house, the little brick steps glittering with the dying candles inside the jack-o-lanterns. The house lights were all off, for the kids had school tomorrow and Kate had learned long ago that waiting for me to come home from my study sessions would just leave both of us tired and cranky.

Fog drifted among my neighbor's bushes as I curved wearily into my driveway, coasting to a slow stop by the corner of the garage. As I dismounted stiffly, the faint whiff of smoke and roses found my nostrils, pricking at my mind. And so I was not terribly surprised when I turned like a man facing the gallows, finding the grave smirk of Annie looking back at me from the fog. I sighed.

"Tom," she nodded coolly. Her nightgown, impossibly short, barely covered her pussy, but my eyes stopped there anyway... to see her hands gripping the torn strap of my messenger bag.

"Annie." I swallowed as the crickets chirped. I looked at her face, her body, her nipples staring boldly back at me through the sheer nightie. "Welcome."

"I'm going to bring your bag home with me, to keep it safe," she explained after a pause, winking. "You're more than welcome to come get it. I'm having a little gathering, me and my friends. I'd like you to join us, as I joined you. I live right over on D," she added, smiling into my weird sense of deja vu, "unless you're still worried about what your wife would think..."

When she spun to go, the speed of her whirl made the little shift rise up, mocking me with a glimpse of two lively legs topped by a bare, perfect ass, swaying saucily as she strode off into the night.

I glanced at the silent black windows of my house, then swung my leg back over my bike, the front wheel pointed toward D Street.

* * *

The Robert Burns poem on which this story is based is called "Tam O'Shanter," and it dates from 1791. It describes the efforts of the inebriated Tam and his brave horse Maggie (who, alas, was not a bike) to escape the clutches of the sexy young witch Nannie Dee (whose nightgown is, indeed, too short) after his lust for her gets the better of him as he passes a witch's ball one night. Tam and Maggie escape by reaching the bridge over the River Doon just as Nannie swipes Maggie's tail. It's well worth a look, though most modern readers find it needs to be translated from Scots, where "short nightgown" is termed "cutty-sark." Burns' poem is the origin of the ship name and the whisky brand.

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