by Cara Vance
They didn’t last long, however. I didn’t intend to let him off the hook, mind you, but anything done in haste would only result in more victims. Harold might wind up dead or mutilated, but whoever I was possessing at the time would take the blame for it. Could I really allow that? Though their actions with my husband (ex-husband I reminded myself. Til death do us part and all that) were obviously not innocent, that didn’t mean it would be right to set them up for a fall.
I’m not ashamed to admit that there was also a selfish element to my thoughts. With Harold dead, I’d be stuck here with no conduit back to the living. My sensation addiction - for that’s what it was - didn’t like that conclusion. Even worse, there was the possibility that he’d find me here and we’d spend the rest of eternity in a cosmic screaming match.
No. Whatever course of action I took, it would have to be well thought out. I needed to continue along the path I’d been following, using my extra time to learn more. Knowledge was power, after all.
I knew what it meant. I’d have to continue letting him use me. In this, I was split. Part of me didn’t want his murdering hands touching my body, whoever it may be. At the same time, I yearned for the pleasure of the flesh. Fortunately, there was a compromise.
I would have to separate my emotions from the equation, treat each visit with Harold like a one-night stand with a stranger. Though I had been faithful to him, I had experienced a few such meaningless trysts before we had met. Chalk it up to the daringness - and stupidity - of youth. I was way out of practice doing such, but I could still remember the thrill of being pinned to the bed by a man whose name I barely knew.
If anything, I would now be using him much like he was using me...only this time the advantage would be mine. I just had to make good use of it.
Chapter 17
The next time I was summoned, I appeared in the body of a brunette with an average build and a pixie haircut. Amusingly enough, it was nice for a change not to be constantly brushing hair out of my face in the middle of love making...no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t making love; it was fucking, plain and simple. Harold was undeserving of anything that had to do with my love.
Not that it really mattered in this case. My face was pressed firmly to the bed as he took me doggie-style from behind. The curve of his cock pressed roughly against my insides, just the way I had always liked it. This body was different from the redhead’s. I was going to have no problem cumming. I could already feel it building up inside of me.
That was good. It would feel nice to climax while Harold fucked me. It would feel even better when the time was right and I eventually fucked him, albeit in a completely different way.
♦ ♦ ♦
My first stop that night was to check on the supply of mandrake. It wouldn’t do me any good if I made a breakthrough, only to go back to being Harold’s three hour whore. I needn’t have worried, though. There was still almost half the original amount in the belladonna jar. Even if that ran low, there was still some left in the unmarked mandrake container. I had plenty of extended visits ahead of me. That didn’t mean I could slack off, though. What if he grew tired and stopped summoning me? Fortunately, I didn’t think that scenario likely. He didn't seem to be growing particularly disinterested. Still, it was stupid to assume.
A new thought crossed my mind. Harold had killed me for doubting his manhood. Perhaps he was using my afterlife for the dual purposes of living out every fantasy he ever desired out of me as well as continually proving his masculinity in doing so. I actually chuckled at that last part, knowing that he was chugging his supernatural dick juice to do so. If I wasn’t certain he would be able to make more, I might’ve poured it all down the drain just to spite him.
I quickly pushed that from my head. While amusing, such thoughts were just a distraction. At the most, each visit left me with three hours to myself. Oftentimes, though, especially when Harold was in a particularly randy mood, it would be less. I needed to be continually conscious of time management.
I glanced at the watch on my wrist and grinned. After Harold had finally passed out, I had crawled under the bed. Sure enough, it was exactly where I had dropped it weeks before. I made it a point not to lose it again. It was my lifeline, my sanity check against the clock. With that thought, it was time to get to work.
♦ ♦ ♦
That night was mostly spent at Harold's laptop again. I found it hard to believe that he was meeting (and picking up) so many different women via conventional means. I decided his email was as good a place as any to see if I could find a pattern.
I couldn’t have gotten a bulls-eye any quicker had I been a championship darts player. A page full of emails stared back at me from a variety of sources: Harmony Online, cupidsarrow.com, this one service called Local Fuck Finder, and a half-dozen other such places. I used to surf the web during my life and had even started to grow fond of online shopping, but I had no idea the digital world could be such a meat market.
I opened a few of the emails and read them. The messages from the girls themselves ranged from the demure to the outright blatant (“I can’t wait to taste your cock”). Harold’s, on the other hand, were almost all the same. Like I said, he was a creature of habit. Once he found something that worked, he kept using it over and over. It didn’t seal the deal every time - there were rejection messages strewn throughout his inbox. It didn’t need to, though. It worked enough to make sure Harold had an ample supply of Saturday night pussy into which to summon me.
A few very discreet emails from a place called Confidential Escorts confirmed to me that, in those few instances where he couldn’t score, he wasn’t above paying for it. Pathetic, Harold, really pathetic.
Just out of curiosity, I scrolled through some recent messages to find the girl that I inhabited that night. It only took me a couple of seconds. An email from her confirming their date was near the top of the list. I clicked through to her profile. The web browser opened up and I saw that her name was Candace. She claimed to be a college student who had transferred here from out of state and was looking to explore the night life...
I turned it off. It wasn’t particularly useful anyway. I mean it’s not like I was going to call her up and ask if she wanted to grab some lunch while we discussed the finer points of her screwing my murdering prick of a husband.
I went back to the emails. Now that I knew where he was getting his tail from, I could start to work to shape it a bit. I began with the easy stuff...deleting the paid whores and anyone else who was close by. At some point, I was going to need access to a car, so it made sense to bring in girls who were likely to drive over.
♦ ♦ ♦
Once finished, I resumed my searches from the prior week...curious to see if there was anything else about my disappearance. I found a smattering of interesting tidbits. People on the internet weren’t shy about posting the news, or their opinions for that matter. There had been a few candlelight vigils...that was nice to know. There was mention of a tearful plea to come back home by my bitch cousin Minnie. I’d never known her to care about anyone other than herself. I had little doubt that she had seen a chance to get her jowly face into the papers and jumped on it.
Something potentially useful finally caught my eye. There had been a brief police investigation regarding Harold, but it had been called off. What was interesting, though, was the abruptness of it all. In the beginning, there had been a lot of statements regarding my husband being a person of interest. Just like that, though, it seemed they just dried up. Even a few editorial pieces stated confusion around the quick turnaround. The police, it seemed, had suddenly given up any interest in Harold. One day they just announced that he was no longer considered a suspect and that was it. They were mum on the fact afterwards.
That was odd. Wouldn’t there have been some mention of how or why? Usually in a case like this, someone would have an informant on the inside and get the dirt. In this case, though, there didn’t seem to be. One minute the police were talking abou
t possible charges. The next, they had all but assumed I had either run off or been killed by a nameless psycho.
They just stopped caring about Harold, almost like...magic.
I could have banged my head against the desk. How could I be so dense? There was his erection elixir. Hell, he had brought me back from the dead. Why wouldn’t magic explain everything else? I mean, if you’re going to flip the finger at the forces of nature, you might as well go all the way. I didn’t even need to be convinced it was real. I was living, or unliving, proof of that.
I thought back to Harold’s little hobby. He had been into it for as long as I could remember. In the early days, this had amounted to little more than collecting ghost pictures and hosting the occasional séance around Halloween. As time went on, though, I noticed his collection getting a bit weirder. Still, it was his thing, so I never paid it any mind nor really cared all that much. Everyone was allowed a weird hobby. Heck, was it any stranger than my aunt’s collection of creepy child-sized dolls?
The question was: when had it become more than just a hobby for him? I had no answer to that. He had always played it close to the vest in that regard. For all I knew, he could have started taking it seriously right after he killed me or he could have been working on these things for years. Thinking back to the tomes down in the basement and their odd collection of languages, I thought that latter scenario more likely. Even with help, I doubted he could have translated anything useful in such a short amount of time.
Wait just a minute...the translations...Harold’s notes! Weren’t there stacks upon stacks of them downstairs?
I smiled as a plan began to form. Two could play at this game.
First things first, though. I glanced at the watch; my time for this week was almost up. I shut down the laptop and walked upstairs, contemplating with which orifice to wake Harold up. I decided that since he was such an asshole, it would be fitting for him to lick mine.
For the first time since deducing my cause of death, I felt good. I was going to enjoy this.
Chapter 18
Even with Harold’s CliffsNotes, studying the finer points of the arcane arts was a slow and tedious thing. Weeks stretched into months, the pattern repeating itself over and over again. I’d return to this plane of existence, let Harold fuck me in whatever hole he pleased - always making sure I never let my soured feelings for him ruin my enjoyment - then head downstairs to continue with my studies.
At first, it was a nightmare. I didn’t know where to start and his rambling notes often left me lost. I came close to quitting several times, once raking Harold’s back bloody in frustration with the three-inch nails that the body de jour happened to sport.
The only things that made sense were what a quick search on the name Osiris had turned up. He was an Egyptian deity, the god of the underworld, to be precise. No real surprise there, I guess. I had already figured out the Egypt part on my own. Osiris’s story was kind of interesting, though. He was the son of Ra, king of the gods. He was married to the goddess Isis and had a brother named Set. Set had apparently been jealous of Osiris and eventually murdered him for it, not too dissimilar to the story of Cain and Abel. I was a little surprised to learn that gods could be killed, but I guess that made the story all the more interesting.
Anyway, Isis had learned a powerful spell from her father and used it to bring her husband back. He had returned and together they had fathered Horus, another god. Getting knocked up by your dead hubby...kinky. Eventually, though, for some reason, Osiris decided to return to the land of the dead, taking up residence there and becoming lord of the underworld and judge of the fallen. Thereafter, the Egyptians worshipped him for all things spirit related. So I guess that made sense. Harold was calling upon Osiris as essentially the guy with the keys to the jail cell. Regardless of whether he existed or not, it somehow appeared to work.
Sadly, that was the end of the easy classes. The rest of Harold’s findings were far more oblique to figure out.
Things weren’t made any easier by the fact that most of my studies were done while sitting less than ten feet away from my own corpse. Talk about freaky. At first I kept glancing over, sure it was going to sit up. Guess I might have watched one too many horror movies while I was alive. Fortunately, though, that didn’t happen. I can’t imagine what my reaction would have been if it had, especially since dying of shock was probably not one of my options anymore.
Eventually, things started to get a little better. For starters, I finally got used to being in close proximity with...well, me. Heck, once or twice I even purposely stepped into the pentagram to get that little jolt to my loins I had experienced the first time. Odd as it was, it definitely added a little extra oomph for when it came time to leave. They say to always end on a high note, and I can think of few notes as high as a body-quaking orgasm.
Even more wonderful, I began to see patterns and hints of insight. Little by little, Harold’s notes began to sink in. I was beginning to see the magic.
I saved the necromancy (as I learned it was called) stuff for later, concentrating first on small things: terminology, the various schools of thought, herbs and their various usages...that sort of thing. Fortunately, Harold’s notes were quite thorough. Had he published them, he could have set up a sort of twisted Hogwarts correspondence school...although I doubted many of the students in those books spent their time studying, like me, more often than not in the complete buff.
As my confidence grew, I began to understand the nuances of some of the spells Harold had used. Though he hadn’t pinpointed them exactly, I was able to read between the lines and make some deductions. There was a mind-clouding spell from Central America, dating back to Aztec times. It was meant to cause confusion in one’s enemies, make them see what you wanted them to see, believe what you wanted them to believe. I had little doubt that the local police had gotten a good dose of that one.
Harold’s magical Viagra appeared to be based on fertility alchemy from China. That made sense. From what I had seen on TV, it seemed a disproportional amount of Chinese herbal remedies revolved around making their dicks hard. It served to make sense that they had eventually come up with something that actually worked. It wasn’t just for males either. The concoction served as a sort of mega-aphrodisiac. According to his notes, it had been used in Asian brothels, as recently as the fourteenth century, to make sure everyone was in the right state of mind.
As I learned, I began to experiment. Small stuff at first...a little bit of scrying, this silly spell from medieval Europe to make dust disappear (Harold was never much into housekeeping), and a few others. It was good practice, but it also meant I had to tap into Harold’s existing supply of herbs and components.
That was potentially problematic, especially if I wound up using too much of anything that was needed to bring me back. Fortunately, I had that covered.
♦ ♦ ♦
My not-so-loving husband apparently did everything by computer these days, and, fortunately for me, he was a bit of a digital packrat. Stupid, Harold. That will teach you to use technology as a crutch.
I was eventually able to figure out how to view the web browser history that had confounded me at first. Doing so, I was easily able to trace Harold’s suppliers. Color me amazed. You really could get just about everything online these days. Various shops sold rare and imported herbs. Between a few curio websites and eBay, Harold was able to find the equipment he needed to stock his altar with (six hundred dollars for a resin statue of Osiris, Harold? Another eighteen hundred for a silver-plated ankh? That’s just sad. A bargain hunter, he was not).
I was amazed at how much he had spent over the years, for indeed some of his receipts went back quite far. Of all of them, though, the most outrageous had been for nearly ten thousand dollars. Guess that explained why I never got to see Hawaii when I was alive. The receipt wasn’t particularly in depth. It just mentioned the price and listed blessed Aztec hoe - twelfth century, quantity: three. I had no idea whether that meant
Harold had purchased ancient gardening equipment or rented a couple of high-priced Mexican prostitutes.
Regardless, I now knew where he was obtaining his supplies. It would allow me to replenish what I had used, as well as potentially pick up a few new items - should the need arise.
That just left one little difficulty, delivery.