TO SEDUCE A DEMON

By

Barri Bryan

© copyright July 2005, Herb and Billie Houston

Cover art by Jenny Dixon, © copyright July 2005

ISBN 1-58608-587-5

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

The muffled shuffle of footsteps echoed through the corridors of Clara Stonebridge’s slumbering senses, stirring her to wakefulness. As sleep released its tenuous hold, she sat up in bed, leaned forward and listened intently. Crickets chirped outside her bedroom window. The sweet scent of honeysuckle filled the night air. In the distance a dog’s bark was answered by the shrill whistle of a far-away freight train.

Recognizable sights, sounds and smells should have reassured her, but they didn’t. Silky fear shivered down Clara’s backbone as she not so much heard as she felt a presence. The rays from a full moon shone through her open window. She stared into the shadows that lurked beyond that silvery spill of light and saw nothing but darkness.

Her overactive imagination must be playing tricks on her. She was, after all, alone in a rambling old Victorian house that was far from the main highway and miles from the nearest neighbor. Or maybe she’d been dreaming. Yes! That was it, it was all a dream. By sheer effort of will Clara subdued her fears, lay back down, closed her eyes and compelled her mind to drift back toward the vague world of sleep.

Just as she was falling into slumber’s oblivion, she heard it again--footsteps walking through her senses, disturbing her equilibrium and challenging her common sense. Flickering and foreboding images rose in her mind bringing her to startled wakefulness and near panic. Turning, she whispered, “Who’s there?” The answer was sepulchral silence.

Pushing herself to a sitting position, Clara addressed the nebulous darkness. “Answer me, who’s there?” The coppery taste of fear coated her mouth and lodged in her throat.

As if her brazen words had conjured him from nowhere, a dark and mysterious man appeared in the doorway. He was tall and strikingly handsome. Wearing a square cut waistcoat with braided edges and striped wool trousers, he looked as though he had stepped from some eighteenth century parlor and into the privacy of Clara’s old-fashioned bedchamber. The shadowy darkness accentuated rather than obscured his strong facial features, revealing a sturdy jaw line, an aquiline nose, full sensuous lips and a firm cleft chin. Clara gasped. Her present state of near panic was making it difficult for her to breathe.

The stranger ran long slim fingers through his dark hair. That innocuous movement sent another shiver down Clara’s spine. A few far-reaching moonbeams lighted his path as he took a step in her direction. When he spoke, his voice was deep and scintillatingly sensuous. “Claire, my darling, my love, you’ve come home.”

Clara narrowed her gaze. Fear was giving way to eerie fascination. Shouldn’t he have floated in on an ethereal cloud, soundless and silent as an elusive phantom? She splayed one hand across the base of her throat and felt the rapid beating of her erratic pulse. “How did you get in here?”

He spoke in that same intensely sensuous voice, “I never left. Did you think I would? Did you think I could?” A strange, unearthly light kindled in his eyes as his voice took on a condemning tone. “I have been waiting for you to come home.”

“This is not my home.” The realization that she had answered his allegation brought her up short. Could it be that pragmatic, realistic, Clara Stonebridge was disputing with a ghost? It would seem that was exactly what she was doing. She felt a little foolish but that didn’t stop her from saying, “Before last April I didn’t know this place existed.”

The aura that surrounded her guest shimmered and flickered like a neon light with a short circuit as his mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “You are such a lovely little liar.”

This ghost--that was a ridiculous assumption. This apparition--that was even more absurd. This thing--whatever it happened to be--was an inhabitant of some other dimension who had wandered into a world not made for him.

He took another step in her direction. His face moved from the shadows. Clara gasped as a flash of common sense brought a flicker of insight. This being was violent and sinister. She struggled to hold onto that bit of knowledge and failed. It was gone almost before it came.

Clara Stonebridge was a mature twenty-three-year old woman who prided herself on being level-headed and logical, even in the most mystifying of situations. She applied that logic now as a means to explain the illogical. Just like the footsteps she had heard, this little episode was a dream. How else could she explain how some other-world entity could appear from nowhere to stand at her bedroom door? “Where did you come from?” It sparked again, that feathery flare of insight. “Do I know you?”

“Sweet Claire, lovely Claire.” His words for all their sweetness rode on a note of anguish. He extended one hand and then clenched it into a fist. “You were supposed to be mine!”

A fleeting gasp of foreboding caught in Clara’s throat. She couldn’t shake the feeling that this handsome face hid some wicked intent, that this pain-ridden voice masked malice. “I’m not your Claire.”

“You will always be my Claire.”

Real or imagined, this thing was frightening her. Clara found the courage to protest, “My name is Clara Stonebridge.” Maybe her visitor wasn’t a dream. Maybe he was an invention of her overactive imagination. In the quiet stillness of a soft summer night she found she’d lost the ability to distinguish between the two. Taking a deep breath, she shocked herself by saying, “Get out of my bedroom, now!”

“This is my bedroom remember?” The intruder moved like a shadow across the floor and sank down onto the side of the bed. The mattress gave under his weight. Clara realized that this entity had density and volume. That realization brought turbulent and ever increasing fear. Once again she sought to convince him that he’d made a mistake. “I’m Clara, not Claire.”

The incredibly handsome ghost--she had to call him something--smiled at Clara’s obvious distress. “I knew you would come to me.”

The kaleidoscope of Clara’s mind shifted, settling into segmented colors from some dim and distant past. “I keep having this feeling ... It’s something I can’t quite capture and hold.” An ache lodged in her chest as a poignant almost-recollection once more eluded her. “Do you have a name?”

“Oh, my sweet torment, I’m Nicholas.”

The kaleidoscope of mental colors faded into dissolving tints. “Nicholas?” She knew no one by that name, she never had--or had she? “Nicholas.” The moon glided behind a cloud, bathing the room in surrealistic hues. The name on her tongue left a quicksilver taste of delight in her mouth, “Nicholas who?”

“I’m Nicholas from the other side.”

“What other side?”

“You can’t remember. That comes from your limited consciousness. I have come to you from that vast twilight that neither rises nor sets.”

Clara’s fears evaporated, leaving confusion and deepening bewilderment.. “I don’t understand.” Strange and disquieting thoughts ran through her mind bringing an agony of unrest and almost physical pain. “Can you explain?”

“Don’t ask for explanations. Let it be enough that I can come to you again.” His soft sonorous voice fell across Clara’s psyche like a mantle of shimmering silk leaving a lingering aftermath of dreamy reflections and delicate sorrow.

An unbidden tear rolled down her cheek. “Nicholas?” His name tasted of guilty pleasure and promised tainted passion. His nearness drew her like a magnet. She reached to touch him.

He melted and faded into the opulent tints. Those tints converged to form a shimmering mist that wrapped around Clara’s body like a shroud. She tried to move and found that the mist held her fast in its gossamer grasp. Filmy fingers formed to intimately caress her body. This thing was touching her breasts and skimming across her face and hair. To her great surprise she welcomed his touch.

A vortex of air suctioned across her face and opened her lips to plunder the depths of her mouth. She tried to move and found that she was quite immobile.

The caressing mist created inside her a sexual arousal that was as intense as it was unexpected. How swiftly desire twisted and spiraled through her motionless body, leaving her mouth dry, her skin hot and moist, and the damp spot between her legs aching with desire.

Clara was no stranger to sexual encounters, but she had never before experienced anything to compare to the sudden cataclysmic storm of passion that now shook through her. Her motionless body screamed for penetration. A ragged plea bled from her quivering lips, “Please, please....”

That sensuous, scintillating voice--disembodied now--whispered in her ear. “Forget for once that you are a lady. Speak my name and stoop to beg a little.”

Desire so intense that it boggled her senses stripped Clara of all pride. Without hesitation or question she did the ghost’s bidding. “Nicholas, please.”

A soft breath blew in her ear and teased through her senses. “Tell me what you want.”

The usually discreet and disciplined Clara Stonebridge screamed her need. “I want you to ... Please, Nicholas.” She couldn’t move, she could hardly breathe. Her motionless body was a firebrand throbbing with need and desire.

The voice deepened and demanded, “Do it, Claire, say the vulgar words that prove you are, for all your haughty airs of civility and respectability, a woman of easy virtue.”

Through the haze of passion that was consuming her, a thought impinged. This entity was bent on punishment and revenge. For what, she wondered. Reason slipped away as need rose and fanned through her body. “What do you want from me?”

“More to the point, what do you want from me?”

Desire was a burning brand between her legs and a knot of passion in her stomach. “I want you inside me.”

“You must be more specific.”

At this point Clara would have done anything to gain release from the hunger that gnawed through her body and ate into her very soul. “I want you to make love to me.”

This thing seemed determined to humiliate and shame her. “Love--we never knew love--only lust. Be more exact.”

From the deep recesses of her subconscious the answer came. Without knowing how she had come to that understanding, Clara knew the exact words she must say to obtain release. “Damn it, I want you to fuck me!”

A sighing, “Ah yes,” whispered through the room as Clara felt a round, smooth shaft press against her clitoris and sink deep into her vagina. It moved slowly, driving her mad for more. A sound resembling laughter, only as a grimace resembles a smile, echoed through the room.

Clara was begging now, pleading for release from the obsessive need that was driving her to the point of madness. “Please, yes ... don’t stop.”

Slowly, oh so slowly, she was building toward a tremendous climax. Her immobility only added to her anticipation. It finally arrived, an orgasm such as she had never dreamed possible shook through her body and singed flames through her brain. The contractions lasted for eons and left her spent and fatigued.

As she relaxed, the mist that held her captive loosened and tightened again. She felt another sudden, and most unwelcome, stab of desire as the malevolent mist began once more his cruelly amorous exploration of her immobile body. This time she didn’t fight her increased muscle tension, her heavy breathing and her desire to thrust her hips upward.

Her guilty sense of anticipation was fired and fuelled by the lewd fantasies that were shaping in her head. She was being lifted to another plane, a place filled with music that played a discordant melody.

Once more the entity was taking her to the heights of soaring sexual splendor. In a matter of minutes Clara was climbing the helix of desire. Her second climax was no less spectacular than the first. She experienced an orgasm that shook her to the core of her being. Afterward she lay replete, perspiring and still held securely by the mist.

“Slut, whore.” The words beat into the air, as slowly the mist dissolved into a rainbow of lavish colors. Malicious laughter filled the room as those elusive colors drifted toward the door.

As the colors melted away, a fist of foreboding closed around Clara’s heart leaving her to wrestle with the hazy shadows of guilt that floated across her narrow horizon of understanding. She had experienced sex such as she had never dreamed possible. Now she was humiliated by her perverse actions and ashamed of her depraved behavior. With that feeling of degradation, a revelation came. That was exactly what her strange visitor had intended. His sole purpose had been to make her feel wanton and immoral. He had succeeded. She did. She had succumbed to a nameless evil that left her feeling contaminated and ashamed.

She had thought she couldn’t fall asleep again. She was mistaken. Even as she tasted the dregs of degradation, her heavy eyelids fell shut. A drug induced slumber would not have been as profound as the sleep that overtook her.