To the Manor Passed Ch. 01

Spooky story for the spooky season, released to the public for the first time! Enjoy, folks.

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Everyone knew that the mansion was haunted, it was not a very well kept secret.

Only a select few were ever allowed to pass from the mortal world within its halls, but they did so with a certainty few others could share. Perhaps it was a quirk of the grounds around there, some metaphysical contortion that made things the way they were, but the mansion produced ghosts, stamped shades out of those that passed away the way factories turned out hubcaps. Every room had an occupant, every hall and nook a spectral attendant, each one carefully picked by the lady of the house... and every one chosen for their talents in life.

There were living attendants, of course, and guests of the Mistress that were not on death's door, but they only interacted with the spirits when allowed to. Only the Mistress herself had full command of the shadow court she had put together, each shade offering her a deference that the living staff could only guess at. All they knew for sure was that dead eyes watched the living from every corner, impassive figures that bowed to one woman only.

So when the kitchen maid spilled a dish, otherwise unseen during a dinner party, the only certainty was that she had been seen. The small, lithe figure of Eurydice slipping through the wall was more confirmation than discovery.

The Mistress was waiting for her when her shift was finally over, the ghostly cat perched on her shoulder, fur exuding a gray mist that seemed to bend respectfully away from the lady of the house. Eurydice whispered into her ear, the language of the dead universal between species yet known only to a select few. The maid, Jasmine, did not need to guess to hard at what the cat was saying.

'I'm to understand you had an unfortunate accident in the kitchen this evening, my dear?' Tall, thin, the sort of woman who seemed to subsist only on evening cocktails and strong black coffee, the Mistress looked at Jasmine kindly, yet with an unmistakable edge of control that would not be questioned. 'These things happen, of course, but I'm afraid redress will be needed regardless, dear. You understand.'

'Y-yes, ma'am,' Jasmine bowed her head, hands clasped in front of her. Employees far more secure in their jobs than her had acquiesced to far more onerous words, rather than cross the Mistress. Dead eyes, and more importantly, dead hands, were everywhere here.

'Good girl,' the Mistress sighed, and a shiver went down Jasmine's spine. Eurydice descended from the Mistress' shoulder, padding off to someplace else, most likely not even within this plane of existence. Two other figures took her place, spirits in gray that did not yet have fully developed facial features or bodies; they were simply silhouettes, crafted of the mists from the other side of the divide between life and death.

More than enough to handle one girl...

'Let's get you situated, then,' the Mistress nodded, her ghostly retinue flowing through the still night air to take Jasmine by the shoulders. 'Kind of you to be so understanding.'

Of course. There were rules to living at the manor (as opposed to dying there), and transgressing them always came with costs. That was the sort of thing one came to accept when they took a post here, the rewards for doing so worth everything the Mistress considered a punishment. Something deep inside Jasmine, a tightly coiled part of herself that had been binding tighter and tighter with each passing day in the Mistress' service, ratcheted up the tension just a little bit more.

The shades flitted a few paces behind the Mistress as she proceeded up the stairs toward the first floor balcony, rows of doors leading off into private rooms, each of which could be where Jasmine was to spend the night. She herself didn't take a single step, her feet not even touching the ground as the manor's ghosts carried her where she needed to be; Jasmine couldn't help but glance toward every door they passed, replete with bronze name plates gesturing toward the nature of the occupant within.

Names, dates of birth, and dates of death. A history wrought from grave markers and the things that lingered after.

Mistress paced along the balustrade, gazing speculatively at one door after the next. Jasmine was familiar with a few of them, but not deeply enough to understand what might go on behind them. Some were already occupied, the sense of tension hanging behind their doors enough to signify this even if the sounds coming from behind them were not.

The seamstress had fouled up a stitch earlier in the day, and had been taken to the room of one James Heller, deceased as of 1952; indeterminate cries and the sounds of impact could be heard from within his room. The new sous chef had mistaken the Mistress' coffee order this morning, his young, grunting voice audible from behind the door of Marco Alberto, passed in 1996 without once having let it stop him. The first floor rooms were the most public and, consequently, the most often used; the threat of them inspired ambition instead of apprehension.

There were rumored to be other rooms, ones left off of the floor plans that the majority of the staff were familiar with... basement chambers crawling with specters beyond the understanding of the above ground employees, and attended by-

Well, Jasmine didn't know for sure, but she did know better than to speculate. It did no good, particularly not in the minutes before a punishment was to be administered.

And there was, of course, the matter of the Mistress' private chambers, a section of the manor so secretive that Jasmine was not even sure how many of the staff were even allowed inside. All she knew was that she herself was not, and that its exclusivity was not a rule made to be skirted.

'Hmm...' The Mistress was accustomed to taking her time, lingering before one or two promising rooms with deep thoughts etched into her angular face. Her dress swished about her ankles, suggesting the tapping of her heels that could not be seen from outside. Immaculately painted nails clacked together as, door by door, they approached the eventuality of Jasmine's punishment.

'Remind me, dear:' The Mistress said, turning to the floating woman with a kind of casual airiness. 'What is it that you like? Ladies, gentlemen, or something else?'

'L-ladies, ma'am!' Jasmine stammered, a chill racing down her spine the moment one of her spectral guards looked down at her.

'Thank you, Jasmine. I wouldn't want to pair you with someone incompatible for something like a kitchen mishap,' the Mistress patted her maid on the shoulder. 'You know what they say about spilled milk and the appropriate reaction to it, I'm sure.'

Having concluded that particular problem, the Mistress led the way down to the other wing of the balcony, the ghosts keeping pace and leading Jasmine along with them. Three doors down, the lady of the house stopped, sank deep into thought for a moment or two, before nodding, finally decisive.

'Yes, young Natalie, I think,' she mused to herself. The doors seemed to react to the Mistress' wishes exclusively, opening when a cleaning was assigned, rejecting all entrants when there was no need for a living person to be in there. When she herself touched them they opened without even needing to be pushed, swinging inward eagerly to admit her and her guests. Her shades floated Jasmine inside, depositing her on the lush carpet inside with a brisk fondness, vanishing almost the moment she had left their arms.

Smiling fondly, the Mistress did not bother to verbalize her needs here, positioning Jasmine in front of her and beginning to untie the strings of her apron with a practiced touch. All around them were the soft furnishings of a profoundly comfortable guest room, dark wood trim over ashy gray fabric chairs, lace curtains billowing with the pleasant breeze coming in from outside. The Mistress hummed to herself as she worked, as though she wasn't preparing a servant for a punishment that would be administered by a ghost.

She slid off Jasmine's apron, folded it carefully, and placed it on the dresser. By the time that she had turned back, Jasmine was already partway through removing her dress.

'Let me help with that, ma'am,' she said, eyebrows raised with a gentle helplessness, an expression that seemed to suggest "oh well, what else are we to do?"

'Such a kind girl,' the Mistress clucked her tongue, smiling. 'I do hope she treats you gently.'

'I'm sure she will, ma'am,' Jasmine said, without truly knowing one way or another. Like most of the living staff, she had not been able to gain the measure of the vast majority of the spirits dwelling within the manor's walls. Even so, she stripped off and stood, naked, slender, young, in front of the Mistress, ready to commit herself to the mercies of one such spirit for the duration of the night.

Gesturing to the bed- a four poster affair wrought in black wood- the Mistress led Jasmine over and bade her to lay atop a comforter softer and more dense than anything the latter had used in her private life. Her dark brown bareness made a fabulous contrast with the cream of the sheets, and when the Mistress uncoiled the restraints that had been left wrapped around the posters, they were of a white and gleaming leather, padded within by red velvet.

One limb at a time, the Mistress strapped Jasmine in, at wrist and ankle both, two additional straps going around the maid's thighs just above the knee. Their ropes attached to the foot of the bed too, stretched apart enough such that Jasmine was unable to fully close her legs. A lesser woman might have taken a peek, lasciviousness or simple curiosity bidding them to look at Jasmine's private dimensions, but the Mistress was lesser in no capacity. She bustled about, ensuring that her employee was comfortably situated, that the constrictions of the restraints were not in any way injurious, even that young Jasmine was adequately hydrated, before leaving her to her post and returning to that door, with its burnished nameplate.

'Do try to enjoy your evening, my dear,' she said, nodding in a knowing, suggestive way before clicking the door shut behind her. The nameplate shone by candlelight, reading: "Natalie Auburn, 1854-1899."

The ancient ghost was awake from the very moment the latch closed, the pressure of her gaze filling her chamber. Heat flickered along Jasmine's bare skin immediately, the strange wash of emotions more than she could identify all at once; at base, the spirit was nothing but emotion, the soul a crucible for the ideals, affections, and anguishes of the human experience. Stripped from the body and left to its own devices for year upon year, distilled into a purer form than anything the crude flesh could produce...

To merely lay in the presence of an old ghost could be revelatory.

Jasmine gasped, the sound alone in a silence that rang through the room. Something creaked within the hidden geometries of the walls, bringing to mind old rumors of repairmen getting into the crawlspace only to come out reporting that several months had passed for them. Above a luxurious armchair that probably cost more than Jasmine's monthly salary, a landscape painting in a heavy frame swayed once, side to side. The colors began to blend together.

Natalie Auburn. A painter of some renown, passed away before her time with only a few surviving pieces remaining. Including the last she had ever painted, incomplete but worked on until the last evening of her life. Her talisman, as it were.

Jasmine watched from the bed, her eyes wide as the divide between the hereafter and the living world blurred and bent. A dark shape resolved in the paints, coming closer and closer. It slid from the two-dimensional, slipped out and alit upon the carpet as though it were meant to be there. Something that lived there, and had done for over a century. The room itself accepted her, as much a fixture there as the walls themselves.

Natalie's image flickered and danced, a candle subject to some otherworldly wind that Jasmine could not feel. At times she looked all but human, pale of skin and dark of hair, with piercing blue eyes that shot through Jasmine just looking at her. At others she looked completely not of this earth, a blue mirage with a skeletal visage, a death mask made for the most beautiful of women. The alternation between states was a living thing upon her form, a flow of two worlds rising and falling with tidal rhythm.

Slowly, coolly, the spirit turned her grave gaze toward the bound woman on the bed. Her eyes looked out from within sunken sockets, the contours of her skull drifting in and out of emphasis with the swimming spectral sweep of the afterlife on her countenance. Jasmine, spellbound, caught the precise moment that recognition caught in Natalie's mind, the scene before her coming to make sense.

The ghost smiled, the emotion of it working like a ripple across the surface of her face; humanity poured in, creating a visage more soft and refined than before, a raven-haired woman that was transparent and yet definitely, truly there.

Her feet were bare, and they did not touch the carpet as she walked toward the bed. Dark hair flowed around her face as though in an uncanny, slow wind, her eyes luminous, ghostly lamps set into her skull. The foot of the bed did not stop her, calves passing through it as though it weren't there at all, ambling with gradual steps up between Jasmine's spreadeagled legs. Her approach was like ice, dripping slowly down Jasmine's spine.

Every inch that closed between them ratcheted up the tension in the maid's bound body, until she was truly pulling at the restraints for the first time, entirely unconsciously.

But the specter of Natalie did not stop short of Jasmine, immersing herself in the crude matter of the maid up to her thighs. She walked a line straight up between Jasmine's legs, phasing through the lips of her pussy, striding through her genitals, walking into the woman with a look on her ghostly face suggesting that it was no great thing.

Jasmine, however...

The mere touch of a ghost could be shocking, to have one walk into you a cold caress that moved and petted but never left. Jasmine stared at the spirit, her eyes darting from her bewitching eyes to the point where they joined, Natalie's thighs and her own hips rippling and lapping at one another, as though they had both become liquid merely by coming into contact. Jasmine could no longer feel her legs beyond a reaching cold and a kissing, unnameable eroticism that verged on the unbearable. An intimate massage from fingers of snow, coffin velvet sliding along supple skin.

Natalie simply stood in place for a while, inspecting Jasmine as she arched and strained against her restraints, toes curling with helpless sensation. Casually, she slipped forward, just a few inches, so that her legs shot through Jasmine's abdomen and the plushness of her ass lingered just above the maid's pussy.

Her head cocked to one side. A ghost's smile could be many things, but this one brimmed with the playfulness of the afterlife. The fun one could have with nothing to lose.

Floating on air, Natalie hopped up atop the crest of Jasmine's pelvis, her backside coming to rest on her fully, though there was no weight to speak of. Her legs milled idly through the maid's abdomen, with the air of a woman sitting poolside, trailing her feet in the water. She rested upon and within Jasmine, her demeanor idle and elegant, a lady at play. Leaning back, her long and phantasmal fingers played along the insides of the maid's dark thighs.

Intangible when they wanted to be, her nails played about Jasmine's skin, pinpoint pressures that appeared and disappeared according to ghostly whim. When they finally found her pussy, they were all too real.

Silent, cold as night but welcoming as a lover's embrace, the ghost slid her fingers through the very essence of Jasmine's pleasure, catching not on skin or nerves but on something more fundamental, the parts of her soul that received it. A direct line to the core of her sexuality, bypassing the crude workings that those on the material plane must settle for to obtain satisfaction.

Jasmine was robbed of breath immediately, her capacity for thought stripped away in the flood of pure connection that came with a spectral, interior touch. Natalie's nails traced lines across her very nerves, pressing deep and eliciting a deep shiver from the bound maid. It had only been a few seconds, but Jasmine was already blushing, sweat beading on her brow.

And she had an entire night of this?

Everything came more readily to the essence than to the body, pleasure obviously, but climax too; Jasmine surged to the edge far faster than she ever had before, held there at the very tip of Natalie's fingernails. The smallest of motions would have tipped her over, but the shade declined to give it to her, reaching instead for someplace else inside Jasmine. Leaning in, her arms trailing leisurely behind her like the tail of a comet, the ghost planted a kiss to the maid's lips

A tongue like secret ice, buried in the true depths of a glacier, slipped into Jasmine's mouth, carrying with it a wisp of the spirit's breath, a moment in her story.

All at once, understanding slid into place within the maid, the true nature of her punishment relayed in a spectral whisper.

Natalie Auburn had done her best painting in this very room, the windows open and the sunlight streaming in. To her the presence and interference of ghosts had been as inspiration, a peek into another world that she had tried to capture in her art. But of course, she had begun to create before discovering the manor, her habits developing long before her knowledge of the true afterlife. In this house where the dead watched, when ideas simply would not come to her and she had nothing else to resort to, Natalie would delve into her old habits, heedless of the spectral gazes.

One could pour any sort of emotion into their art, and find particular emotions especially provocative for the purpose; Natalie had always found frustration a potent fuel for her own. Her eyes would often drift closed in this very room, fingers straying between her legs to seek the raw edge of a sensation that could provide that frustration. Her paintings had always been known for their... urgency, the critics had called it, a sense of need unfulfilled, of hunger for something that was being sought, but had not yet been found.

If only they knew...

In the transition from life to death, that emotion had come to define her, had filled the shade of Natalie Auburn to the brim. She had become an avatar for that which had fueled her art, a being of the clarity and wild energy that her edging had produced. It had flowed from the tip of her brush for so long that, in time, it had come to fill the well of her being.

The only hunger left in Natalie was the sexual hunger at the core of her art. Every remembered pleasure, every recalled retreat from incipient orgasm, flowed out from the tips of her fingers and into Jasmine's living flesh. The soul, itself pure emotion, felt the edge of need far more keenly, something sharp that bit into the awareness until, in far too quick a span, it was all there was. Every second compounded, every moment an eternity lingering in the confluence of emotions that had formed Natalie's burning inspiration.

Jasmine understood the truth: arousal was the cruelest of muses.

Natalie sighed as she broke the kiss, the chill of it lingering on Jasmine's lips like a thin layer of ice. She sat back on the maid's waist, a smile curling on her ghostly face as she caught sight of Jasmine's wide eyes, the fundamentally stricken expression on her face. The scales had been lifted, understanding had been reached between the living and the dead: a rare occurrence indeed.