The Ghost of Christmas, Present

Jacob had been warned before he’d bought the old Holmstead farm that the house was haunted.  The barn, maybe he’d thought to himself during the pre-purchase inspection process.  Full of wind-whistle board splints and rickety loft ladders and three lone ghostly-looking bales of straw, stacked with incongruous neatness in the corner of what had once been a horse pen, the barn was dim and spooky and felt like Halloween.  He could believe ‘haunted’ of the barn.

But the house…

The house, with its broad fir board floors and single-pane glass windows and solid oak doors – all original – had beckoned him.  Like a living, breathing, seductively sexy ‘come-hither’ Christmas surprise, the house beckoned.  The embossed details on the kitchen cupboards, the farm-style flour bins under the counters, the four-legged standing stove…  Remnants of another time, he thought to himself.  And as he himself had always felt he’d belonged to another time – one much different than the constant-race-against-the-clock time he inhabited – he inhaled the scent of centurian wood and… Cinnamon?  Why the Dickens would it smell like cinnamon in here?…, smiled broadly at his nervous estate agent and said, “I’ll take it.”

Before the first morning he caught sight of her translucent voluptuousness, Jacob would have sworn he didn’t believe in ghosts.  Pressing his palms against his eyelids to shake off the early morning sleep-drunkenness, he peered cautiously through eyes that were now well and truly opened, and changed his mind.  Short and curvaceous, her unclothed Botticelli body and impish grin flashed through the room he’d been sleeping in, then simmered out of sight.

The rumpled bedsheets held the barest indentation of a shape not his own.  Small.  Feminine.  Along with the unexpected weight of her aura, the faint lingering spice of… Cinnamon?… – laced with something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on – lingered.

Putting his fingers on her – preferably in a carnal, tactile way – became, from that morning onward, first a sleep-hours curiosity then a daytime distraction before graduating to a full time obsession.

As if somehow spiritually aware of his ever-growing desire, she appeared to him – unexpectedly and at random – from then on, stuttering his heartbeat in his chest and echoing its throb in his groin.  He’d catch a flash of light in the upstairs window on his walk from the barn back to his house, only to see it disappear with the flutter of a curtain when he tried to focus on her face illuminating the pane; she’d shimmer into view at the kitchen sink while his eyes were on the stove, then disappear when he turned around.  Fey-like.  Unattainably unreal.  His inability to ‘catch’ her drove his desire to do so ever deeper into his being, until he could think of nothing else.

His research into the town’s archived newspaper articles had netted him a name: Marley Holmstead had lived and – quite unexpectedly died, young – in this house.  In life, by all accounts, she’d been vivacious and good-humored and was – at the time of her death – the last of the Holmsteads to have lived on the family farm.

Her spirit was still dwelling there.

She was all over the house, flitting to and fro around Jacob, always with a surge of energy introducing her presence and a sigh of cinnamon spicing her wake.

Yes, she was all over the house.

But she was most especially in his bed.

Never quite touching him, at least not in a corporeal way (though he could imagine… and imagine he did, in candle-glow vibratory tactile sensation, he imagined every inch of her against his skin, feverish and transitory and weightless and achingly arousing), Marley’s ghost – her energy – was most definitely in Jacob’s bed.

As the autumn days grew shorter, her nocturnal visits to his bed grew more frequent, and the outlined indentation she left behind each morning – along with the erection Jacob was left with as a result – grew gradually more pronounced.  By mid October, he could feel the weight and pressure of her not-being manipulating his flesh, and would wake Wait… I’m already awake, aren’t I? gasping and desperate to cum from the tingling press of her nipples grazing his skin Is this a dream? and the un-wet soft-suction demand of her shimmer-night mouth.

While shopping one early morning, bleary-eyed from erotic night-spirit exhaustion, Jacob overheard two elderly ladies at the grocery store whispering in giggling tones about being careful what you wish for on Halloween, because the spirits were listening and were bound to interpret your request a bit differently than you anticipated.

Their conversation came back to him in his wine-aided tumble into sleep on that last night of October, and in witching-hour hooded-lid murmuring curiosity, he asked his ghost aloud why she smelled like cinnamon.

She’d never answered him when he’d spoken to her before, but this time he felt the air flicker around him in curvaceously shaped cinnamon-infused response, crackling warm and stinging cold, the inviting scent of woodsmoke commingling with crisp snow, tinged with the bright baked aroma of cherry and apple and shot through with barely-there cloves.

Christmas, he thought, smiling to himself.  It’s more than cinnamon.  She smells like Christmas.

Inhaling deeply, Jacob made a Sahmain wish as he drifted off toward dreams:  I would give anything for one night with my Christmas ghost actually present.

He did not so much hear Marley’s response as he felt it, the seductive caress of Anything…? against his cochlea sending a shiver of arousal down his spine.

And so it was that Jacob learned exactly  what “Be careful what you wish for on Halloween” meant…

♦

The newspapers stated that the cause of death was heart failure.  The specifics were unknown, but given the state of his bedclothes and the breadth of the smile on his face when he was found, the attending officers presumed physical overexertion was a factor.

Nobody mentioned what kind of activities were assumed to have led to said overexertion.

And nobody mentioned the fact that Jacob was found dead – on the same date and in the same place as the beautiful young Marley Holmstead had been found dead, twelve years before – on the morning after Halloween, in room that smelled like Christmas.

But you can believe it was mentioned, twelve years later, to the next hardwood-and-original-pane infatuated buyer, that the house was haunted.

The barn, maybe, he thought.  He could believe ‘haunted’ of the barn.  The barn practically reeked of Halloween.  But the house…  He inhaled deeply, catching the faint scent of… Cinnamon?… Why would it smell like cinnamon in here?…

The house smelled like Christmas.

IMAGE NOTE:  Twinkle was originally published in December 2017 by Molly Moore and is used with permission.