WARNING: This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. Contains graphic MF, FF, and MM sex, seduction, mild reluctance, anal sex, nongraphic violence, and MM and MF love, all of which may be considered offensive by some readers.
All sexually active characters in this work are at least 18 years of age.
This book is copyright © habu
Published by BarbarianSpy in 2011
Published by BarbarianSpy at Smashwords
Cover design © S Bush 2011
Cover images: © Imre Forgo | Dreamstime.com
ISBN E-book: 978-1-921879-74-6
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Not all books listed below may currently be on release.
BOOKS BY DIRK HESSIAN
Blue and Gray
Colonel’s Treasure
Beginning of Time
Prophecy of Noto
The King’s Men
Labyrinth
BOOKS BY HABU
13 Ways for Halloween (Menage)
The Indian Prince
The Handyman
Grab Bag
Cairo Surrender
Fetish Galore!
Homeward Bound
Journey to Mirage
Choke Hold
Sporting Life
BOOKS BY SHABBU
Dirty Pool
Operation Black Jade
Yap, Yap
Cigars!
Angel in the Barn
Gayly Complicated
Despoiling David
The Tree of Idleness
Rough Road to Happiness
I Met a Man
The Interview
Rough Road to Happiness
BOOKS BY SABB
The Legend of Holleystone Grange
Surprise Encounters
She is He
Wrong Man
Loyal to his King
Barbarian Tales - Book One - Traveler’s Tales
Barbarian Tales - Book Two - Journeys Begin
Barbarian Tales - Book Three - The Inheritance
Barbarian Tales - Book Four - Road to Persepolis
~
13 Ways for Halloween
A Ménage Anthology
by habu
Contents
If you are up for a Halloween treat of open-minded, unguarded readings of scare-season stories, this ménage anthology collection from the wildly imaginative pen of habu is for you.
The stories in this collection take Halloween-inspired cuts at stories that combine horror, erotica, nonerotica, literary fiction, gay male, historical, interracial, supernatural, Romance, cougar, lesbian, vampire, transexuality, cross-dressing, humor, cuckold, masturbation, toys, voyeurism, treachery, incest, and . . . whew . . . satire. Oh, and men and women.
And, yes, we know there are fourteen stories in this thirteen-story anthology. This is the season of nothing being quite what it seems.
Boo! from habu
(Lesbian)
“I don’t know, Cheryl. Why’d we rent this other costume at all?”
“I told you why and what might work,” Cheryl said in that low, breathy voice of hers. I was standing at the mirror, a costume in each arm, holding them in front of me, one after the other, trying to decide. “You’ve been mooning over that Tim for months now. Something has to give.”
I heard the catch in her voice and looked at her through the mirror. She was standing behind me, taller than I am, her cheek against mine and her hands on my waist. She looked so wistful—at least until she saw that I was looking at her in the mirror and then she smiled wanly and lifted a hand to my head and patted a couple of strands of my blonde hair back into place.
“I’m sorry, Cheryl,” I said. “I know you hate this—that this isn’t what you wanted. But I told you from the beginning I wasn’t sure.”
“I didn’t mean to crowd you, to pin you in, Liz,” Cheryl said with that sad voice of hers that I’d heard increasingly as I’d revealed I had feelings for Tim, the new division deputy manager in my office. “It was all new to me too,” she added.
Falling in with Cheryl had been a fluke. I hadn’t thought of that at all until the night, having just been dumped by Pete in accounting, that I found myself on the town with Cheryl, each of us with a broken romance to mourn, and we’d both gotten three sheets to the wind and wound up between the sheets together here in Cheryl’s apartment—now my apartment as well.
“It seems like just too wild an idea,” I said at last. “So, I think it has to be this Marilyn Monroe costume.”
“That’s fine, honey. You’ll knock ’em dead in this. It shows off your blonde hair perfectly. That’s what everyone notices about you—that gorgeous hair.” Cheryl took several strands of my hair and pressed them against her lips. Then, with a little sigh, she said, “I’ll hang this French court costume up in the closet. Maybe they’ll give us a discount on the rental if we say you didn’t wear it. We got both costumes for you there.”
“Three costumes,” I answered back. “And you look terrific in that little devil’s helper costume, Cheryl. That was a good choice.”
I had to admit that Cheryl was right about the Monroe costume from The Seven-Year Itch when we hit the landing before descending into the basement of Nick’s on the Beach that evening. The place was decked out in crazily carved pumpkins, orange and black crepe paper streamers, and plastic skeletons for the bar’s Halloween costume party. The landing was spotlighted and was about the only point of light in the room. The floor below was swathed in shadows and smoke and a swirl of garishly costumed partygoers.
But when Cheryl and I appeared on the landing under the spotlight, I could see faces turn to me, and the buzz in the room increased. Cheryl quickly descended four steps into the room as if to give me the spotlight all to myself. I smiled and swished my billowy skirt in the tradition of Marilyn Monroe—and, I admit, searched the faces turned to me for signs of Tim.
As we waded into the room, I lost contact with Cheryl. I was searching, and I was admitting to myself that it wasn’t Cheryl I was searching for. I was trying to find Tim.
Luckily, I saw him before I came upon them and he noticed me. The two of them were leaning into bar stools at the very end of the bar, almost entirely in the shadows and partially hidden by the combination of cigarette and fog machine smoke. He hadn’t looked up at all when I entered the room, because I remember seeing the back of his head—I could hardly not have noticed him; he was in a werewolf suit. Somehow on him, however, the hair just made him sexier, more desirable.
He was talking with Sondra, Jack Forester’s secretary, from the office. She, dressed in a gypsy costume with a plunging neckline, was acting coy, and Tim was eating it up.
I wanted to vomit. Sondra was the office slut; she’d been had by any of the men executives who wanted her, if the rumors were true. Tim would just be another notch on her victory paddle.
Well, that’s not what he would be for me. I could one and only with Tim. I was sure I could. Cheryl was nice—and could make me feel really, really special—but Tim was almost all I could think of since he’d come to the office. I knew this was upsetting Cheryl. For a couple of months I’d what I could to find out where Tim was going to be, and I had been dragging Cheryl out to be near him—the two of us together so it wouldn’t seem strange that I was always there alone.
And I talked of Tim incessantly. I knew Cheryl must be sick of it, but she had never complained. She had listened to all of what I fantasized about and went with me to where Tim was in the evenings. And she watched Tim with me and commiserated with me on what a perfect man he was—and how sexy and desirable. I had conditioned her to speak of him much as I did.
And now he was talking to Sondra. Sondra had been who Pete had dropped me for—and she’d only spun him a couple of times before she dropped him. He’d wanted to come back to me, but no chance of that.
They weren’t too much into it yet, but I had heard Sondra talk about Tim in the office, and I knew she’d be after him.
I was panicked. I had to do something. Not just because I wanted Tim, either. Of course I wanted Tim. But mostly I didn’t want Sondra to have him. She’d taken Pete and had made it so easy that I’d felt inferior for weeks. God, I still felt inferior. It didn’t help that Sondra was gorgeous and naturally sexy.
It was just a matter of time before she’d have Tim too. There she was with those big chocolate tits almost falling out of the front of the gypsy blouse.
What could I do? I thought about what Cheryl had suggested that I do if we came here and I found Tim with another woman. I’d laughed at the time. I’d said it was a Hail Mary pass sort of scheme. And it was. But maybe it was time for a Hail Mary pass.
I turned and headed for the door.
Trembling because I was in a hurry to get back, I sat at my dressing table and adjusted the white powdered wig of the French court dandy that went with the costume I’d initially rejected. For the first time since I’d decided to try it I thought that I might have a chance. Cheryl was right. My memorable feature was my long, blonde curls. With those tucked up inside this wig, and without my usual makeup—and with a black fake mole applied right here under the eye to attract one’s attention away from my feminine features—I decided that I just might pull it off. The silky foppery of the costume was so well recognized and brought the one wearing it close enough to the androgynous zone without evoking the effeminate that it was the perfect male disguise for a slim woman like me.
I looked at myself hard in the mirror. I looked good. Better than that, I looked handsome. Not beautiful. Handsome. And that’s the difference I was after.
* * * *
The low light and smoke in Nick’s downstairs room helped a lot.
“Hey, fellow, watch your hands.”
“It’s me, Cheryl. Liz. Don’t you recognize me?”
“Oh, god, no. You’re a guy now. The transformation is remarkable.”
“Thanks . . . I think.”
“You went home and changed.”
“I thought I’d give your scheme a shot. He’s with Sondra—the ‘sleep-around’ woman at the office I’ve told you about. Worst scenario. I’ve got to do something. Could you go over there and see what you can do to distract him—long enough for me to make a move on Sondra? Do you think she’ll bite on the switch?”
“From the way you’ve described her, Sondra’s ready for anything in pants. That’s the easy part. But, yes, Sondra will think you’re good enough to eat—or to eat her.”
“That’s what I’m counting on. If I can get her into the alley, give us fifteen minutes and try to get Tim out there, can you? So he can see what a slut Sondra is. You think you can vamp Tim enough to get that done? Or that you can think of some other way to get him back there? I know he’s not your cuppa and that you’re tired of hearing about him.”
“I can try,” Cheryl answered. She had the most enigmatic look on her face, though. I couldn’t figure out what it represented. At least not then.
We approached Tim and Sondra from different angles, and Cheryl hailed him from behind, so that he had to turn away from Sondra to talk to her. I used that opportunity to slip in beside Sondra.
“Hello, precious,” I murmured in the lowest register I could reach.
“Precious?” she chirped, as she turned to me. She was giving me a good look, and, as I hoped, she was showing interest. Thank god for the shadows and the smoke—and that Sondra had already had a couple of drinks.
I moved in close, bought her another drink, and sweet talked her the way I always wished an attractive man would do to me when I was playing pickup at a bar. Cheryl had somehow managed to get Tim off on the dance floor.
One thing led to another and Sondra agreed to step out with me for a bit of fresh air. It was obvious to me that neither of us were fooled about how fresh I wanted to get in the air. I took her hand and led her through an open doorway at the back of the room that was covered with a beaded curtain. We were in a corridor with small rooms on either side. The sounds coming out of them left no doubt in my mind that more private, very intimate parties had slipped out of the main party room of Nick’s bar. At the end of the corridor was a stairway leading up to a metal door—and beyond that was an alleyway with a street at one end and a drop down to the water of the bay at the other.
There were turned-over rusting barrels of assorted sizes lining the wall we had exited. Sondra’s fat butt fit nicely on one of these, and Sondra wasn’t shy when I leaned into her and came in for kiss.
Sondra was a fantastic kisser. I was beginning to see how she so easily entrapped the men.
Sondra was a good moaner too. It hadn’t taken much to push the top of her gypsy blouse down and to get her tits out and squeezed good. They were beautiful chocolate mounds, and I almost gasped to see that she rouged her nipples.
Cheryl should be getting Tim out here pretty soon, I thought, so I had to give him a really good look at what Sondra would do for a man at the drop of a dime. I had maneuvered around so that my back would be toward the door into the bar. All he’d see was Sondra and her look of unbridled passion when I was showing her what my lips and tongue could do. I knew I could bring this out of her. I had discovered, with surprise, that I could bring it out of Cheryl.
Sondra gasped and groaned as I played her nipples with my tongue and teeth, and she gave a deep moan of “yessss” as I worked a hand under the hem of her peasant skirt and wormed fingers beyond a leg hole of her panties and into her slit. She jerked and groaned and tightened her grip on my shoulders when I found her clit and began to worry it with the pads of my fingers.
Sondra leaned back onto the wall and widened the spread of her legs, welcoming my attentions. She was biting the finger of one of her hands and clutching at my wig with the other. I had enough separation in my mind from what I was doing—and increasingly drifting into arousal and lust myself—to worry that she might pull my wig off. But I had pinned it on real well and it held up to her grip.
Damn she was arousing. And she was loving it. I had to admit that I was too. Tim and Cheryl would be along at any moment. I had to give him a definitive look at the fickleness and brazenness of Sondra—although that was a gamble. Some men loved a woman’s brazenness, especially in sexual pursuits.
She begged for it and hiked her skirt up around her hips herself. I was going for broke, so there was no second thinking before I had slipped her panties off and lowered my mouth to her slit, searching in the folds with my tongue until I found what I sought.
We were moaning in stereo—both lost in the coupling, when the totally unexpected happened.
Sondra was crying out. I don’t know how many times she’d repeated it before it sank in, but eventually it did. And I stopped in shock.
“Yes, yes, take me to heaven, Liz!” she had cried out.
She’d called me by name. She’d called out “Liz.”
“What? Why? I’m almost there,” she exclaimed, looking down into my eyes, as stopped what I was doing and turned my face up toward her in shock. I was panting hard. I was almost there too.
“You called me Liz.”
“Yes. Yes. I know who you are. You don’t know how much I wanted this, tried to get your attention. Taking Pete didn’t work. But I saw how attracted you were to Tim . . . and I wanted—no, I want—you so much. Please, please, don’t stop.”
As I had said, I was almost there myself now, and suddenly Sondra had flowed in to fill my horizons. I had stopped thinking of Tim—wanting Tim—while I was still working Sondra’s breasts. I only now realized that.
So, we finished.
When we reentered the back corridor of the bar, arm in arm, I almost didn’t pick the sound out. But I had been focused on that voice—that moan—for several months now.
We paused at the door to one of the rooms off the corridor. Inside, sitting on a table, with a werewolf standing between her spread legs and rhythmically moving his hips back and forth, was a little devil’s helper. Cheryl. She had her arms flung around Tim’s neck, pulling his face down to her breasts as, with hands on her waist, he fucked her in long, deep strokes.
Cheryl was facing the door, and she must have sensed that Sondra and I, arms entwined, were standing there, because her eyes caught mine from over Tim’s shoulder and she gave me such a knowing, satisfied, victorious look that it all fell into place.
The scheme she’d come up with for me to wear the men’s French court costume wasn’t to help me catch Tim. She—and maybe in collusion with Sondra—had been scheming to have Tim for herself.
Well, I had Sondra now, so who gave a shit?
(Nonerotic, Literary, Historical, Horror)
(Three short, short stories written in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe to pay tribute to that master of literary horror on the 7 October anniversary of his death in 1849)
The Rächer
For the horrific tale I am about to narrate, I neither expect nor solicit sympathy or expiation, but compelled to tell it I am, as it is with me every waking moment. Would that I could go back in time and not be standing over Jacques, the old comte De la Arbois, my eyes lost in terror to the drip, drip, dripping from the blade of the knife, the horror of wresting the ring from the gnarled claw of an old man who would not yield. Who could have known such a rotted body had the strength in it to deny me to the last? You ask why I will not lift my hand above the table to clasp yours. The truth is more damning than you can imagine—yay, more reason to distrust me than that I had a pistol waiting for you here.
But perhaps all I need do is relate to you my name. I am Louis, once the comte De la Arbois, now once again just Louis. I see that means nothing to you but that yet you begin to countenance the glimmer of understanding.
I plunge ahead lest I lose you, and I must repeat my story, again and again. I cannot leave it resonating in my head.
Margaretta was her name. And I would have her—and she me—but my father would marry her himself. Four years of misery and Margaretta came to me for sufferance and comfort—and for release. Five years of scandalous yet wedded bliss with Margaretta after my father’s demise, and we were on the fly before the tide of the great uprising sweeping across France—her north to England, me, the revolutionaries close on my trail, across the German border to my family’s modest holdings in Koblenz.
Reaching late on All Hallows Eve the small village of Saint-Avold, a hard half-day’s ride west of Metz, trembling from exhaustion and fever, I slipped from my steed into the arms of an innkeeper. One look at the signet ring of the De la Arbois on my finger, and he wished me off again posthaste in fear of what was pursuing me. But he was charitable enough to provide a fresh mount.
“Which road to Koblenz?” I stuttered through my chattering teeth.
“That one over there, young sir,” he said. “You are feverish; you will not last the ride. Trier is closer and will yield sanctuary. And there’s the high forest of Hunsrück in the Saarland between you and Koblenz. The Rächer is about in those woods.”
Unhearing, unheeding, I spurred the fresh horse off toward Koblenz beyond the Hunsrück at the sound of the hoof beats of my pursuers on the village cobblestones.
At the darkest hour, my weary steed slowed its pace deep in the high forest of the Saarland. Barely conscious, fever fighting hunger, both eclipsed by weariness, I slipped and tumbled to the mossy verge. Heavy mist swirled up from the puddles in the narrow dirt road that slithered between the close-knit trees of the Hunsrück.
Through my fever I barely heard the muffled sound of churning wheels—a black carriage materializing out of the mist, stopping abruptly beside me, emitting a command in an authoritative, rich voice. A dark-clad liverymen conjured from the shadows to gently lift and place me inside the carriage.
The carriage once more under way, the voice emanated a second time from the darkness of the bench across the carriage. I heard the rustling of a silky material. A hand, the arm covered in shiny black, emerged from the darkness. In the hand was a flagon.
“Here, son, drink this. It will soothe you. You are spent and in deep fever.” The voice was melodious, familiar, calming in its sing-song tone.
I reached for the flagon and heard an audible sigh, as the dry, taut bone of a hand closed for a long moment over the signet ring on my index finger. At a second sigh, my hand was released, and I drank greedily from the flagon. The wine was rich, red, delicious to the taste. I could not achieve my fill of it.
“And bread. Eat a morsel of bread.” Once more the hand appeared from the darkness, offering me a fine, thinly crusted roll that would not have been out of place at the banquet table at the chateau of the De la Arbois.
I took the bread and tried to eat it slowly, in keeping with my noble training, but famished, I devoured it like a feral cat.
I had thought the sustenance would give me strength, but it made me even more confused and weary than I had been before. I drifted into a haze. But I did not sleep; I was numbed. I felt the hand reach out and take mine again. And I heard the cackle of a dry laugh. And I felt the searing pain in my hand. And then no more; then I felt no more.
When I awoke I was laying on a clean bed in a small bed chamber. Sunlight was streaming through the window, and two solid-figured, middle-aged men were staring down into my face, their eyes full of concern.
“Ach, Gute, he awakes,” grunted one to the other.
“Sir, can you hear me? We dressed your hand. Does anything else pain you?”
“Where am I?” I asked weakly.
“You are in Netunkirche, in the Saarland, at the edge of the Hunsrück forest,” one of the men answered in German. “We were so afraid the Rächer—”
And then when he understood I was struggling with the language, he repeated this in broken French. “The Rächer—the Avenger—we were afraid . . . your hand.”
“My hand,” I asked. And then the horror. I lifted my hand, and it was missing—the signet ring of the De la Arbois—finger and all.
And so, patient drinking companion, I keep my hand below the table, still not able to face the mark of my villainy and the judgment of the Rächer.
You ask about my Margaretta? The journey of my dear, sweet Margaretta, partner of my shame, did not reach England. On the very night of my chastisement in the Hunsrück forest, Margaretta was being introduced to Madame La Guillotine in the streets of Paris.
The Silken Memory
If LaCroixes on the Louisiana coast existed still, I would pursue the matter. As it was, months elapsed before a chance sighting of a silken skirt caught in a door as I lurched from the path of an onrushing Biloxi carriage surfaced in mind what had disturbed me that last morning when I found myself alone in the rotting mansion’s music room, empty save for Henri’s beloved massive square grand piano. Here had been my last sighting of the despairing and forlorn youth, Henri LaCroix, the reluctant and despondent sole heir to a once-mighty family brought to despoil by deceit and death.
Even now I would pursue my fears to assure myself of a final accounting if I only could remember the address Henri had reluctantly provided. I do remember writing it to paper when at last I could take the foreboding atmosphere of the music room no more and mounted the stairway to the hollow ringing of heavy boots echoing off moldering walls of empty chambers. I consigned the scrap of paper to the stand by my bed—and am most assured I did so—but on the morrow when I arose, I did not see it. And later, when I returned to the chamber, no manner of search revealed it.
It had taken a single generation for the LaCroixes to descend from wealth, position, and grasping to a moss-encrusted St. Mary’s Cemetery vault. Nothing had been enough for them. It was Sarah LaCroix, Henri’s mother, who simply must have Raven’s Rest. But Raven’s Rest had been owned by a LeMoynes forever. Ham LeMoynes would not sell.
Many there were, even at the time, who claimed Sarah had falsely woven the slight—never fully disclosed but assumed heinous enough to send the women of the parish into swoons and double flutterings of their fans. Letters were written; rumors abounded. Charges flew at the summer cotillion that were denied. But letters continued to circulate and fans continued to flutter furiously. Outside the St. Mary’s Cemetery gate, pistols were fired, Ham LeMoynes fell, and the LaCroix hand reached out and snatched Raven’s Rest.
Less than a month after taking up residence at Raven’s Rest, tragedies began to befall the LaCroixes. At first these malevolent manifestations were not beyond explanation—a thoroughbred horse downed by the colic, a treasured hound gored in the hunt, the LaCroix matriarch standing too close to a weak balustrade on the sleeping porch. But then Henri’s father took unexpectedly to drink and discovered the bottom of an unmarked well at the foot of the garden; Henri’s older brother, the hope of the family, was thrown by his horse; and his sister died of an untraceable malady that had not the respect to malinger.
At length there was just Sarah and the youngest son, Henri, a dreamer whose constant companion was the square grand in the music room. And Sarah went mad, which was not a mystery to the fluttering fans in the parish, as madness ran rampant in her family. And one moon-swept night, Sarah fired the hem of her nightdress with a parlor candle and ran headlong down the hillock and into the arms of Lake Pontchartrain. Unnervingly, she was screaming the name of the wronged Ham LeMoynes as she was swept into the roiling water.
I, the family solicitor, watched Henri sink into a morose madness as more and more of his being was absorbed in the melancholy tunes on his square grand. While Henri sank, the family fortune, power, and prestige melted away until the day came when it was my duty to suggest Henri must then pull free of this cursed house, if ever that was to be.
He told me he had relatives to go to but avoided telling me who or where—until that last evening and that scrap of paper—after the mansion and most of the furnishings had been sold.
We were alone that last night, in the music room, and Henri was playing by the flickering of the candlelight in the night breezes sifting through the cracks in the walls and by the flashes of heat lightning beyond the French doors to the veranda. His haunting tune set me on edge, and I felt my nerves fraying. Twice I felt there was a malevolent presence in the room, something moving in the shadows behind the rustling drapes at the French doors. But I told myself it was only the wind and the approaching storm. Only the wind and the approaching storm.
I spoke to Henri, but he, enshrouded in his piano and solitary mood, could not, would not hear me.
At last I could take it no more and told him I must retire for the night—that he needed rest as well for the move that was to come on the morrow. But he gave me no response.
I thought I was awakened by a cry in the night, but the storm had made its appearance by then, and I could not distinguish the howling of the wind from what many months of hindsight made clearer to me was an utterance more human than natural.
The next morning I passed by Henri’s chamber, but the door was ajar and his bed showed no sign of possession. Neither could I find him on the ground level. There were just the workmen starting to box the square grand for its journey I know not where. Unlike the previous evening, the piano top was firmly closed over the sounding board, held tightly shut with a heavy canvas strap, daring anyone to open it before its ongoing journey.
But now, months later, now that the view of the skirt caught in the carriage door has jogged my memory, I can clearly remember viewing a scrap of the material of the silk dressing gown Henri had been wearing that last night protruding between top and sounding board—and, on the subsequent day, when the music room was bare, I found droplets of blood where the piano had once stood.
I never heard from Henri again, and Raven’s Rest burned, as by its own volition, one full-mooned All Hallows Eve, before I could return and search for the slip of paper on which I had written the address where I could apprise Henri of that tragic event.
The Birthright
“They will see me when it pleases me to be seen. There are no LaContes save me,” Beau blustered as he waved the hand bearing the family signet ring, symbol of entitlement, in my face.
The ferocity of Beau LaConte’s angry declaration frightened me. I should have known better than to accept his offer of transport to the All Hallows Eve masked ball. It wasn’t only because all of the LaContes, save Beau, had promptly died from embarrassment upon hearing of General Lee’s surrender, but also because Beau had been in a morphine stupor for months as response to the infusion of carpetbaggers and freedmen in the ruling of life on the delta.
Instead of rumbling toward the masked ball, bravely launched to deny reality, LaConte should be hying to the new seat of government to affirm his inheritance of Mapleton, the LaConte seat. But his arrogance in the face of a world turned upside down clouded his vision as much as the morphine did.
I had a twinge of regret for poor little Samuel at the reins atop the carriage in the cold night and was grateful when we arrived at the ball, one of the last vestiges of gaiety left in this city mourning the stripping away of its once-grand way of life.
Beau was in an ugly mood. I made one last stab to force reality into his fevered brain. “There will be carpetbaggers at the ball, Beau. Perhaps even freedmen. You must try not to make a scene. We must adjust. It’s only right.”