Come Hither

Why do foolish men walk willingly into damnation, and more importantly, do they really have any choice?

I had no idea how long she had been watching me. In fact, I wasn't even sure what time it was when I first noticed her, sitting with her back against the stained marble door to the mausoleum.

I had been sitting alone in the graveyard for quite a while, and the moon had traveled at least three-fourths of the way across the starry sky. For a long time, there had been only dry, dead leaves on the cracked steps leading to the crypt; then all at once she was there, although I wasn’t sure how. The only thing I was certain of, was that I had never seen such a beautiful but intensely scary woman in my life.

My first thought was she must be one of the sorority chicks from school, but the way she moved her hand provocatively across her chest and unbuttoned the top button was too mature, too practiced—too designed—for her to have been an undergrad. My initiation into the Fraternal Order of the League of Crypt-Minders was almost over, and the thought she might ruin my acceptance passed through my mind, but only for a fleeting instant.

I turned to face her and held my candle-lantern up higher.

Her eyes sparkled in the flickering light, and her smile commanded my full attention. She ran her tongue around her lips, and I felt myself go hard. The fact that her top teeth seemed too long and too sharp wasn’t enough to overcome the raw lust that seemed to ooze from those lips. She seemed to know the effect she had on me, and her eyes traveled to the obvious erection that was becoming more and more uncomfortable by the second. I tried to move and found that other than my eyes, I was unable to control a single muscle in my body.

She pulled her bent legs closer to her chest, then let her feet slide as far apart as she could. Slowly she spread her knees, and her skirt slowly slid down from her knees, along impossibly smooth and creamy thighs, settling into the spot where her torso met the ground between her legs. There it rustled, as if in a slight breeze, playing peek-a-boo with my mind, providing tantalizing glimpses at promised mysteries and elusive folds of flesh, just out of sight.

My eyes traveled back up toward her face, but only made it as far as the swell of her small, firm breasts. Dimly glimpsed in the flickering light, visibly erect nipples strained against the sheer fabric of her blouse. The constriction in my pants had grown unbearable, and a dull ache traveled down into the depth of my testicles. They felt like twenty-pound weights had been inserted in them, and the sound of her slight laughter sent chills down my spine.

I wanted her, and she knew it. She slowly moved her hand from her knee, down her thigh, one finger drawing ever closer to the shadowy spot that had now become my sole focus and purpose.

It was then that I noticed her fingers.

They didn’t seem to match the rest of her, and were in fact bony, and each swollen knuckle was bent at a strange angle, so that none of them seemed normal. I felt an instant of fear, and as I did, her whole image shimmered.

Where she had been seated, there now sat a wizened crone, with shriveled skin and strings of graying hair. Gone were the sexy blouse and skirt. The ancient witch was nude; her wrinkly flaps of breasts lay with elongated and flat nipples across a bloated stomach. My eyes traveled down past the sagging belly to a wiry nightmare of gray hair, and God-help-me, what looked like small writhing snakes.

I felt my eyes grow wide, as I looked back up into that hideous face. She waved one of her skeletal hands in the air, and just like that she was back. The gorgeous young woman, impossibly erotic, in an altogether mind-blowing portrayal of raw sexuality and desire. “Sorry about that, my pet,” she said in a voice of liquid honey. “I’ll try not to slip like that again . . . at least until after.”

From the depths of my animal-brain, I felt only a white-hot desire to touch, to taste, to penetrate and to be consumed by whatever fate she had in store. My reasoning mind wanted to scream, but seemed to be detached from the body that now betrayed me.

The ache in my groin, the pulse in my swollen member, and the hunger in her eyes made my feet move forward of their own accord. In terror, I watched myself take another step closer to my doom . . .