by Jenny Plumb
They all looked frustrated as they sought to improve their own lot and that of the living and yet they could do nothing. Whether they eventually faded into the mist or the mist faded into them Carol could not see, but they soon faded away entirely and night was night again.
Carol closed the window and examined the door by which the ghost had entered. It was still locked as it had been before. She tried to say humbug but stopped at the first syllable. Being tired of the emotions endured whilst seeing Martin reach orgasm, she went straight to bed and refused to answer the call of her body, ignoring the throbbing need within her, lying still with her arms fixed by her side until she at last fell into a frustrated and disturbed sleep.
Chapter 2
When Carol awoke it was so dark that looking in the direction of the window, she could hardly distinguish between the window and the wall of her bedroom. She was attempting to pierce the darkness and make out any form at all when the chimes of a nearby church struck. Her mind was as fogged as the sky outside as memories of her dream washed over her, blurring with her memory of Martin’s visit. In her dream, Martin was handing her over to a burly spirit who took the form of an enormous brute who was in no way gentle with her body, pushing her onto the bed and sliding into her whilst she could do nothing but enjoy the sensation, unable to move, barely able to breathe, able to feel him driving into her, filling her completely.
The heavy bell did not stop chiming. It went all the way up to twelve rings. Twelve! It was two when she went to bed, the clock must be wrong. “I cannot possibly have slept all day and into the night again. It must be noon.” Leaping out of bed, she was obliged to rub the frost from the window before looking out and even then all she could see was fog and darkness.
She went to bed again, her nipples painfully hard in the cold, her body throbbing with desire which she chose to ignore. She lay in this state for three more quarters, unable to sleep as her core screamed to be touched, and yet she was unwilling to degrade herself by deigning to attend to it in any way. She remembered all of a sudden that Martin’s ghost had warned of a visit at one and resolved at once to lie awake until the aforementioned hour had passed.
The quarter was so long that she was convinced she must have dozed and missed the clock, until it broke in upon her listening ear with the most sonorous of tones.
Ding dong.
“Quarter past,” said Carol.
Ding dong.
Half past, thought Carol, an image of a half hard cock entering her mind, a cock stiffening under the touch of her icy cold fingers. She would bring it to life with her hand before warming it with her mouth.
Ding dong.
Quarter to, thought Carol, visions in her mind of her body receiving a member at the same angle as the minute hand of the clock, the hardness of it as it entered her brushing against that spot inside that she did her best to never think about.
Ding dong.
The hour and nothing else, she thought.
The hour bell sounded and at once a light flashed into the room. The curtains of her bed were drawn aside by a hand. Carol started up and found herself face to face with the unearthly visitor. It was a strange figure, young and old at the same time. Its hair hung about its neck, white with age, yet the face bore no wrinkle. The arms were long and muscular, the hands the same. It wore a short tunic of shimmering white and jutting from its hips was a member as green as holly surrounded by red berries in a bright circle. From its tip sprung a jet of light by which all in the room was visible at once. Its face was an exact likeness of Bob Crackitt, her clerk. Was she dreaming of him?
“Are you the spirit whose coming was foretold to me?” asked Carol.
“I am.” The voice was soft and gentle, low as if coming from a distance and yet seductive as if whispered softly into her ear. It even sounded like Bob.
“Who and what are you?”
“I am the ghost of erotic encounters past.”
“Long past?”
“Your past.”
“Perhaps you might shield the light coming from your member for it is blinding my eyes.”
“What? Would you put out the light I give? I am here for your welfare and that is how you greet me, asking me to cover my cock?”
“I apologise, good sir, but perhaps sleep would be better for my wellbeing than the sight of a stranger’s reproductive organ unsheathed in such a way.”
“It is a cock, not anything shameful and I want you to take hold of it this instant for we will walk together this night.”
It would have been in vain for Carol to plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to walking, that she was clad in nothing more than a nightshirt and that she had no interest in holding his prick. She rose as the spirit moved over to the window.
“I will fall,” said Carol, looking down at the ground far below.
“You will not. Step out with me.”
“I will not step to my death.”
“You are a wilful one. On all fours, this instant.”
“But why, oh spirit?”
“Because I say so.”
She could not refuse that voice. Something in it made her need to obey greater than her disgust at the request. Once she was on all fours, the spirit moved behind her and she felt her nightgown raised to expose her posterior to his unearthly light.
“You have needed this for many years,” the spirit said.
“Needed what?”
“This.”
Carol let out a shriek as a hand slapped down on her posterior, warming the very spot where her step-nephew had caught her in the counting house. Before she could protest, a second spank hit her and then a third. The spirit rained down blows on her, the onslaught continuing until her legs lost strength and she fell onto her front, a tear rolling down her cheeks.
“There,” the spirit said at last. “Will you step out now?”
Carol looked up at him, her bottom lip trembling. He raised his hand again and she shrank away from it, nodding frantically. “I will.”
“Good. You learn fast.”
At once she felt lighter and as the spirit took her hand, he stepped off the window ledge into the night air and away they went, passing through the wall in an instant.
All of a sudden, they were stood upon an open country road, fields either side. The city had vanished, as had the mist, for it was a clear cold winter’s day with snow deep upon the wintry ground.
“I was a young woman here,” said Carol, clasping her hands together. “I lost my virginity in this place. I recognise it heartily.”
“Your lip is still trembling,” said the ghost.
“It is nothing. Lead me where you will.”
“You recollect the way?”
“I could walk it blindfold.”
“Shame I did not bring one. That could have been fun. Though it is strange you forgot your home place this many years.”
They walked along the road and Carol recognised every gate and tree as being where she took her first fumbling forays into womanhood. They reached a market town with bridge, church and winding river. A group of men and women approached, stepping off the path into the field beyond. Carol looked across at them as one man spoke.
“I’m glad no one is watching us,” he said to his companions.”
“Are we sure none can see us here?” asked another.
“We are alone,” a woman replied. “Let us begin, for I am desirous of discovering what the delightful thing is of which you’ve often spoken. What is the reason for bringing us out to this location?”
“I wish to learn the pleasures of spanking post-haste,” added another.
“I am in need of soothing the deep itch within me that can only be brought about by the method we never mention in public.”
“And I’m dead horny,” cried a third.
They laughed at her coarse tone before the three men in unison pulled out their paddles. They gave guidance to the women as to the best way to bend forwards. Carol and the ghost observed i
n silence until the women raised their skirts and in a line bent over on their knees, posteriors presented to the men behind them. It was a sight Carol had never observed, that of such wanton displays in unison.
“This is the story they told me when they returned,” Carol said. “I did not believe they had really done it but it was true. They did do it.”
The three men spanked the three women at the same moment, the air filled with the moans and cries of each of them. The three couples tried numerous types of blows, experimenting with what felt best as they were guided by each other towards powerful climaxes.
“I wish that I could join them,” said Carol. “It looks like the most fun I have seen in many years.”
“These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said the ghost. “They have no knowledge of us and you would pass through them as if you were a mere chill wind. Believe me, I have tried.”
Carol could name each of the participants and her heart leapt up at the sight of their pleasure, jumping for joy as each man reddened the rear of his partner. Afterwards the group parted and went away to their different homes, a smile on each face and a skip in each step.
“The finishing school is not quite deserted,” said the ghost. “A solitary eighteen-year-old woman, neglected by her friends, is left there still.”
Carol said she knew it and began to sob.
They left the high road and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick with a cock shaped weathercock upon the roof. It was a large house but of broken fortune, walls damp, windows broken, gates decayed. Passing inside they found the rooms poorly furnished, cold and vast.
They went across the hall to a door at the back of the house. It opened to disclose a long bare room filled with desks. At one sat a young woman masturbating by a feeble fire. It was clear that the young woman was the young Carol, though the face was younger, the eyes could not lie and the hand did lie upon the most intimate part of her body, her other hand doing her best to spank herself.
Carol sat on a chair and wept to see her poor forgotten self trying ineffectually to reach an orgasm for the first time, following the guidance of the book open beside her but unable to pass the point of no return. “I remember putting so much effort into reaching my rear in the right manner but not being able to without assistance. It was a most frustrating time. And all the while my companions were out partaking of group spanking. For shame.”
The spirit touched her on the arm and pointed at her younger self, intent on her reading. Suddenly outside the window they could see the scene enacted.
“Why it’s Alison and Robert,” exclaimed Carol, seeing the story come to life as if a theatre stage had been set up in the same room as her younger self. “I remember the story. They came together in the tales of erotic adventures I used to read. And there is the school Alison was made to attend. Do you see the giant with his beanstalk? Biggest dick in the empire and used only to bring pleasure, never to harm or do evil. Fee fi fo fum, I fucked them all, ending up in the bum. Oh, how well I knew that rhyme. It was my favourite erotic parody. How I laughed when she went to the Tower of London in her school uniform and her nappy fell down for all to see.”
To hear Carol expending her heart on such a subject in a voice halfway between laughing and crying, her excited and aroused face shining with life, would have indeed been a surprise to her business friends in the city, they used to only the cold icy tones of a woman who would have none in her bed or in her heart.
“There’s the Parrot,” cried Carol. “So called because she squawked when she climaxed. Poor Robin Cumsoe, he thought she was ill when he first made her orgasm due to how red she turned and how her limbs did shake. Oh I wish…” Carol dabbed her eyes with her cuff. “But it’s too late now.”
“What is the matter?”
“Nothing. There was a man who works for me who asked my opinion on a story he was writing the other day. I should have liked to have given him my advice on what makes the best erotic tale, that’s all, not sent him out on his ear with a kick on his backside.”
The ghost smiled thoughtfully and rotated his member in a circle with his hips, saying as he did so, “Let us see another Christmas.”
Carol’s former self seemed to balloon out in her chest as the room changed around her, becoming darker and dirtier, the windows cracking as a year passed in the twinkling of an eye. There she was again, no longer masturbating but instead pacing up and down and glancing anxiously at the door.
It opened and a man of eighteen came darting in, kissing Carol and addressing her as, “Dear stepsister, I have come to bring you home.”
“Home, Fan?”
“Yes! Home for good and all. Your stepfather is so much kinder since he started taking the pills again. Home is like heaven now and I asked him if you could return, for you are like a sister to me, even though we are not related by blood. Remember that, we are not blood relations. It is worth repeating once more in case anyone litigious is listening, we are not related by blood.”
“Why are you saying that so loudly?”
“Just making sure anyone overhearing understands we are not related by blood.”
“Say blood more.”
“Do not mock me. Where was I? Oh yes, I asked Father if you could come home and he said yes and sent me in a coach to get you. You’re to never come back here and we’ll be together all the Christmas long and perhaps I could give you a spanking Christmas if you catch my snowdrift?”
“But we live together, dear Fan.”
“Yes but we are not related, I thought I made that very clear.”
“Then perhaps a spanking Christmas would be an adequate way of celebrating our reunion.”
He began to drag Carol to the door just as a terrible voice in the hall cried, “Bring me Miss Carol’s box.” In the hall appeared the schoolmaster who glared at Carol with such ferocity that Carol cowered backwards. He conveyed the pair into a parlour and produced a decanter of light wine. They drank to Christmas before she was bade farewell and set off with Fan into the snow.
“Always a delicate creature,” said the ghost. “But he had a large heart.”
“So he had,” cried Carol.
“He died a man later on and had children in his time.”
“One child.”
“Your step-nephew. Let’s move on.”
At that moment the school vanished behind them and they were now in the busy thoroughfare of a city where shadowy carts and coaches battled for the way. It was plain by the dressing of the shops that it was Christmas time again; it was evening and the streets were lit up ready for the warm cheer of the season.
The ghost stopped at a warehouse door and asked Carol if she knew it.
“Know it? I was apprenticed here in the sexual arts many years ago.”
They went in. At sight of an old man sitting behind a high desk, Carol cried out in excitement. “Why it’s old Lezziwig. Bless his heart. It’s Lezziwig alive again.”
Old Lezziwig laid down his pen and looked at the clock that pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his trousers, adjusted his hair, laughed all over himself and called out, “Yoho Carol, time for Dick.”
Carol’s former self now a sprightly twenty years old came briskly in followed by a man with hand outstretched. “Dick wanted to give me his dick,” said Carol to the ghost. “Bless me yes, he was much attracted to me.”
“Yoho,” said Lezziwig. “No more work tonight, Christmas Eve, Dick; stop dicking about, Dick and get the shutters up.”
You wouldn’t believe how fast the pair went at it, setting up the shutters in the street and returning to a cleared desk. “Clear the room,” was the next command.
There was nothing they wouldn’t have cleared and it was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, the floor swept and watered, the lamps trimmed, the stains washed off the walls and the warehouse was as snug and warm as a pair of trousers loosened over time, in that it became space enough for more ball room.
In came a fiddl
er. In came Lezziwig and three little Lezziwigs. In came six followers whose hearts they broke by not wanting the company of men. In came the house staff. In they all came and away they all went, round and round.
There was a cold roast and plenty of beer. When the clock struck eleven the ball broke up and old Lezziwig shook an intimate body part of each person as they went out, wishing them a merry Christmas. When all had retired but Dick and Carol, they went to their beds, Carol begging Dick to spank her and him refusing for he was repulsed by the idea of hurting her even as she tugged and pleaded with him.
During the whole of this, Carol acted like a woman out of her wits as she watched the scene. Her heart and soul were in the scene and Dick’s hand was on her as if it was on her at that moment when the two apprentices lay together. She enjoyed it all, her core growing wet as the thought of being spanked spread through her as if she were there once more, back in the past, back in her past. It was only when Dick finally agreed to spank her that she remembered the ghost was even there.
“A small thing,” said the ghost, pointing at Dick, “to make you so happy, him striking you just once.”
“Small!” echoed Carol.
The spirit signed for her to listen to her younger self, pouring out her heart in praise of Lezziwig before speaking again. “He has spent but a few pounds and expended but a few calories. Is that enough to earn so much praise?”
“It isn’t that,” said Carol. “His power lies in words and looks and things that cost little but add up to a fortune.”
She felt the spirit’s glance and stopped.
“What is the matter?” asked the ghost.
“Nothing.”
“Something I think.”
“I should like to be able to let my clerk spank me a little. That’s all. I think it might bring him a little pleasure.”
Her former self turned down the lamps and Carol and the ghost were again stood in the open air. “My time grows short,” observed the spirit. “We must be quick.”