Haunted Twins
Lubrican
Haunted Twins
by Robert Lubrican
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2023 Robert Lubrican
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Table of Contents
Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five
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Foreword
This story isn't necessarily what it appears to be on the surface.
It's key-worded as being mind control, for example, but is it really?
It's key-worded as being consensual, but is it really?
Each chapter, at least in the beginning, could be its own little stand-alone story. But the ghost in this story is active only on one day of the year, so each year there's a new story on that day ... sort of.
So don't make any assumptions and don't draw any conclusions until the last chapter is read. And don't pass this by just because of a key-word you don't particularly like. That key-word may ... or may not actually apply. You'll have to be the judge of that, yourself.
Bob
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Chapter One
It all happened because we moved into a haunted house.
You probably don't believe in ghosts. We didn't, either, back then. We do, now, though.
It happened because Dad sold his company for a lot of money and we moved to Morganville, where there was this old house that Mom fell in love with one time when we saw it as we drove through the town on our way to Grandma and Grandpa Bunter's house. They were my mom's parents and they lived in Ohio. We lived in Nebraska, in Lincoln, where Dad started his own business after college.
We'd driven through Morganville dozens of times, but always just through it. Then, one time, it happened to be lunchtime when we got there and Mom said we should find a park to eat in. We always packed our own food for trips back then. So Dad turned off the highway, looking for a park, and Mom saw the house. We were ten, at the time.
"We" is my sister Emily and me. We're twins. We're the kind of twins you hear about and see in pictures. We always knew what the other one was thinking and we liked the same things. We're fraternal twins, which means we don't look identical, but our mother dressed us alike until we were seven or eight. She still makes us matching shirts and stuff like that. She's a sewer, or seamstress or whatever you call it. When we were first born and Dad's business was just getting off the ground, she made all our clothes because they couldn't afford to buy them. I guess it's harder if you have to buy two of everything.
Anyway, Emily and I were ten when we first saw the house. It looked cool and spooky, back then. It was three stories tall and old. When you're ten you don't think about how old stuff is, but it had to be a hundred years old when we first saw it. It was faded, with almost no paint left on it, and was surrounded by a tall, rusting old fence. Even as kids we could tell it had been the crown jewel of the town once upon a time. But the crown jewel was all run down, and it was obvious nobody lived there. The lawn was mowed, but around the edges the weeds had been allowed to grow up. Little trees, too.
I remember seeing a little octagonal window in the wall, high up on the top floor. I wondered what the world would look like if I could lean out that window and look around.
Mom oohed and aahed over the house and made Dad stop the car so she could look at it some more. We didn't get out, though; just looked. And then we went on and found a park and had our picnic and I thought the house was just another semi-interesting piece of architecture I'd seen in my life.
But every time we went to see Grandma and Grandpa after that, she told Dad to drive by the house. She called it "her" house. She'd say, "Drive past my house, Paul," and he'd detour to the old thing. Mom was always afraid it would be gone, torn down or something, but that never happened. It was always there.
It never changed. Nobody ever lived in it and it just sat there. It looked like it was ... waiting for something. Or someone.
Then, when Emily and I were thirteen, Dad sold his business for a ton of money and suddenly he could retire. Mom had always worked for his company so she could retire, too.
When they told us we were going to move, I had this premonition that I somehow knew where we were moving to. I was right.
Dad bought Mom's house for her.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
We didn't move in right away. It took them a year to fix the place up. Dad said it cost as much as if we'd built a brand new house, and Mom kissed him and said, "This one is better than a new one."
We were still living in Lincoln when Dad dropped the bomb shell. It was at supper and he'd just gotten back from inspecting the progress on our new/old house.
"Guess what?" he said, grinning with relish. "Our new house is officially haunted."
"What do you mean, officially haunted?" asked Mom.
"I went to the library to see if I could find out more about the house. I ran into an interesting lady there named Gertrude. She's in her nineties and she's lived in Morganville all her life. She told me the story about how our house is haunted. That's why nobody has lived there since 1968, and that's why we got it so cheap."
"Nobody said anything like that when we were trying to buy it," observed Mom.
"Of course they didn't. They were afraid we'd back out of the deal if we knew," said Dad. He thought this was all great fun.
Of course to a couple of thirteen-year-olds this was all fascinating stuff. We didn't believe in ghosts but it was still fascinating. We both had vivid imaginations and this was fodder for some great fantasies.
As the story goes, the house was built in 1850 by a man who was in the mining business. Morganville was just a little farming community back then. His son died in the Civil War and his wife died of a broken heart. He married again and had a bunch of kids, but something bad seemed to happen to them all. Some got sick and died, and one was trampled by a horse. Different people owned it in 1917 when the US entered WW I and their sons went off to war and were killed. It changed owners again before WW II and the same thing happened. The sons went off to war and never came home. It skipped Korea, but then, the older of two sons went to Vietnam and was killed.
The family moved out, and that was the last time anyone had lived there.
Gertrude said that it was haunted by the souls of all those boys who had been killed in conflict. She said they had unfinished business. They hadn't gotten to get married and have families and grow old with someone they loved. And, because they had lived in that house when their business became unfinished, they haunted the place.
Mom laughed and said this was silliness. She said the reason nobody had lived there since 1968 was because it needed so many repairs and was so expensive to heat and cool and all that. That was one of the things Dad was having them do during the renovations. The workmen had removed all the lath and plaster to facilitate rewiring everything, and before they put sheetrock up they were also putting in insulation. Mom and Dad only planned on using the lower two stories and to help with utility expenses (and resale value, according to Dad) he had people put in geothermal heating and cooling.
There were two bedrooms on the main floor and three bedrooms on the second floor. One of those was going to be Mom's new sewing room. The other two were for me and Emily. The bedroom at the back of the house on the main floor was reserved for when Grandma and Grandpa came to live with us in their old age. That's one reason Mom wanted this place. It was big enough to handle all her future plans.
The third story wasn't very big, in terms of usable space, at least if you wanted to stand up when you walked around in it. It consisted of one long room with sloping sides that were the underneath the roof. It was maybe ten feet wide at shoulder level and forty feet long. That octagonal window I mentioned was at one end and that was the only natural light source up there. The window was bigger than it looked from the ground. It was four feet tall and had stained glass in it in the shape of a rose. It made the attic, as Mom and Dad called it, look hot with all the red light it cast on everything. It didn't open, though, so I never got to see the world from that vantage point.
When they started the work Dad told them not to worry about the third floor, except to rewire and insulate it. The board floor was left alone. You could tell it had been plain, rough boards when they were new, but they'd been worn smooth over the years by whoever had lived up there. It was full of broken furniture and boxes of old things and junk. Dad said that, when we moved in, it would be Emily's and my job to clean it out. He said that would be our "sweat equity" in the new house.
We moved in during August of the summer before we started 9th grade. We hadn't wanted to leave all our friends in Lincoln, but Mom said we'd make new friends. Starting high school was a good time to make new friends, she said.
She was right. We did make new friends. We were the talk of the town erven before we showed up for school on the first day. We had moved into the haunted mansion. We were twins. Everybody was interested in us. Morganville's population was around six thousand. It had been that number for the last two censuses and would probably be the same for the next two. The local industry supported agriculture and the town was surrounded by farmers for fifty miles in all directions. Morganville wasn't a destination. It was a place you drove through on your way to somewhere else.
Unless you were my mother and fell in love with a haunted old house.
Of course we didn't believe it was haunted when we moved in. It creaked a lot, but that was to be expected. Our rooms were new and smelled of fresh paint. We were starting high school and, while we weren't excited about moving there, we were resigned to make a go of it. After all, it would only be for four years, and then we'd go to college and go off to start our own lives as adults.
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There were no omens or harbingers. What happened did so suddenly and without any warning. Emily and I were engaged in clearing stuff out of the attic and we found this old trunk, buried under other stuff. Inside it was clothing. It looked like it was from styles popular in the twenties. There was a flapper dress that was all silver and glittery, with lots of fringe on it, and a man's outfit that included spats and a broad-brimmed hat in a hat box.
"This is cool!" gushed Emily as she held the dress up.
"Looks like something some couple treasured," I said. "I bet they went dancing in it."
"Yeah," she sighed. "I'm going to try it on."
Then, right there in front of me, she took her clothes off.
Don't get me wrong. Emily and I had seen each other naked plenty of times. Mom had bathed us together until we were eight. On that birthday she said we had "graduated" to taking our own baths by ourselves and that we should be proud. We couldn't think of anything to be proud of and both of us missed being together in the tub. There was nobody to play with, after all. But life goes on and, since then, the only times we saw each other without clothes on was by accident. Like if I went to her room to ask her something and she wasn't fully dressed. Like that.
Now, though, she just took her clothes off. We were fourteen, and I hadn't seen her naked for six years. Not entirely naked. But that's how I got to see her then. I mean she even took off her bra and panties!
This was a very different sister than I remembered from the bathtub. Her chest wasn't flat anymore. Of course I knew that. I'd seen her boobs push her shirts out more and more over the last couple of years, but I hadn't thought anything about it. Her friends' chests did the same thing. Women had boobs, you know? They had never been that interesting.
But now, as I stared at her boobs, with their bubble-gum-pink tips, I was suddenly interested in boobs. And then she stood up from pushing her panties down and I saw the fluff of hair between her legs. This was something I had been paying attention to. Not on her. On me. I was finally producing a crop of darkish pubes around my cock and balls that I wasn't ashamed of. It had taken long enough. It seemed like all I could grow for years were a few wispy hairs.
Emily was ignoring me completely as she shimmied into that flapper dress. And she did shimmy. As she pulled it up over her hips her body moved and her boobs shook like Jell-O shakes before you cut it up into cubes. She tugged and pulled and somehow, that dress fit her like it had been designed with her body in mind.
Finally, she looked at me.
"Isn't this cool?" she gushed. "It fits me perfectly!"
That was a harbinger we didn't catch. Here she was, fourteen, standing at five-three, and a dress clearly intended for wear by a full-grown adult fit her like a glove. How could this be?
"You're not getting dressed!" she yipped.
I hadn't been aware we were playing dress up. I was still a little stunned by seeing my thoroughly grown-up twin, naked.
Which is why, I'm sure, that I didn't think anything about getting naked too, to put on a dead man's clothing. I kept my socks on, but that was all. And, for some reason, it didn't bother me that I had a stiffy when I started pulling on that man's clothes that we had pulled out of the trunk.
"Bobby!" squeaked Emily.
I looked at her. She looked amazing in that dress.
"Look!" she squeaked again, pointing at my groin.
That's when I realized I had a boner. It was ... weird.
"Stuff happens," I said, lamely. I started putting on the silk shirt, pants, suspenders, and shiny black shoes that were in the trunk.
I didn't know what to do with the spats. Mom would explain them to me later.
Another harbinger was there and, again, we missed it.
Those clothes fit me to a T, too.
"We should wear these for the Halloween party," said Emily, whirling around to make the fringe fly away from her body.
That day was October the fifteenth and the first major social event of the year in school was the Harvest Festival. Over the years it had turned into a Halloween-themed event and everybody wore costumes to the dance. Or so we were told.
"Cool," I said. I had planned on going as the Hulk, but this was fine.
That was another warning I missed. It was suddenly just hunky dory that I was going as some dude from the twenties, dressed in suspenders and a fedora.
But the biggest omen of all was that while we did all this, it felt completely normal. Nothing seemed odd or unusual at all. We had taken off more clothing than was needed to try things on, and displayed our naked bodies to each other without shame of any sort. And we had decided to wear these clothes that had belonged to people long dead without a thought about that, either.
If we'd have thought about all this, it would have seemed like something very odd was going on.
But we didn't think about it. We just did it.
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Mom thought our outfits were "adorable." I think she was happy we hadn't begged her to make costumes. She was still setting up her sewing room and a million other things associated with moving into a new house. There were still boxes everywhere that hadn't been unpacked.
And so it was that, the first Halloween in our new/old house, Emily and I wore the stuff from that trunk to the Halloween dance.
We weren't allowed to date, yet, and we hadn't had time to get interested in any particular members of the opposite sex, so we danced together. Your average siblings probably wouldn't dance together in public events like that, especially during the slow songs. But we did. That also felt normal, but it wasn't odd. If you were a twin you'd understand.
Nothing strange happened at the dance. We talked to the few friends we'd made or were making, and drank punch and danced and had a good time.
The strange part happened when we got home. It was about 10:30.
"That was so much fun!" exclaimed Emily. She whirled again. She'd had fun with that fringe all night long.
"It was," I agreed. "I liked dancing with you."
She stopped.
"I liked dancing with you, too! Especially the slow dances."
"Really?"
"Dance with me one last time?" she offered.
"There's no music," I pointed out.
"We can dance to music in our head."
We had climbed up to the attic. I still can't explain why. Maybe it's because that's where our "costumes" had come from. I know we eventually put them back in that trunk.
But before we did that we danced again. Really, all we did was embrace and move our hips to silent music.
And - again I can't explain it – but I kissed her.
I should say we kissed, because she kissed me back instantly. We've never been big on shows of affection in our family. We've seen Mom and Dad kiss, but it was always something semi-chaste. They certainly didn't grope each other in front of us. And while Emily and I have always had that twin bond that's closer than most siblings experience, we had never had any interest on a ... romantic ... level.
This kiss, however, was definitely ... romantic.
I should say all of our kisses were romantic, because that kiss went on and on, and then we took a breath and kissed again and kept doing that, standing there hugging each other tightly while our hips moved. To put it plainly, we made out. I felt this urge to see what French kissing was like. I'd never done that in my life. Our lips had been closed, up to this point, and I opened mine a little and pushed the tip of my tongue against her lips. We hadn't said a word since starting to kiss and she said nothing now. Her mouth opened and we started swapping spit like we'd been doing it ten years.
Finally we pulled our lips apart. Our embrace didn't ease. Our noses were almost touching and her wide eyes stared into mine.
"What was that all about?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said.
I could smell the faint odor of the punch we had drunk on her breath, and was wondering if my breath smelled the same when she kissed me again.
It was another French kiss, and it just kept going on. I realized I had an erection, and that she had to feel it pressed against her groin, but she didn't pull away.
Time seemed to be suspended and we kept kissing each other eagerly. This was so different than our usual behavior, and yet it felt normal, somehow.
Finally, when I realized my hand was moving toward the side of her breast, I pulled back.
"We should stop," I panted.
"Okay," she breathed.
And then we got undressed and put those old clothes back in the trunk. Again, this seemed completely normal, to get naked in front of each other up in the attic, in the dim light from the few, bare bulbs the workmen had left hanging from the peak of the ceiling.
We looked at each other. She stared at my boner, but didn't say a word. We had both stripped naked. We didn't talk about it and I don't remember deciding to do it. Her bra and panties were on the floor beside my briefs when she closed the trunk with a soft thump.
"We shouldn't go downstairs naked," she whispered.
She put her bra and panties back on and I stepped into my briefs. The front stood out obscenely, but there was nothing I could do about it.
And then we went back down to our rooms. In front of her room she kissed me one last time and rubbed her loins against my boner.
Then, without a word, she went into her room. I went down the hall and went into mine.
I jerked off.
Then I went to sleep, like it was a normal night.
Chapter Two
The next morning I woke up and went downstairs to get some breakfast. Mom was in the kitchen, humming as she did something at the counter. Emily was already in her usual seat, eating cereal while she looked at her phone. She looked up at me, smiled and then looked back at her phone.
Dad shuffled in. He hadn't shaved yet, and his dark stubble made him look faintly like the picture of a hobo I'd seen one time.
"How was the dance?" he asked no one in particular.
"Great," we answered in twin style.
"Did it help make up for me dragging you here?"
"Yes," we twinned again.
"I will never get used to that," he sighed.
The rest of the day was like that, just ... normal. Emily and I talked, but not about the kisses, and not about getting naked together. Everything was just ... normal. We didn't feel the urge to kiss again, or at least I didn't.
The rest of the year was normal, too. Emily and I didn't sneak off to dark corners to kiss again. By February, when Valentine's Day was coming up, it was like it had all been just some strange dream.
Everything stayed normal, too, until October of the next year got there. Mom talked to us at supper one night.
"What are you two thinking about for Halloween costumes this year?" she asked. "My sewing room is up and running, now. I assume you don't want to go as a flapper and a gadabout again."
"A gad-a-what?" said Emily.
"A gadabout, a man who habitually seeks pleasure and chases women."
"That's what Bobby was last year?"
"He was dressed like a typical gadabout might have dressed in the twenties," she said.
"I have a hard time visualizing Bobby chasing women," laughed my sister.
"Just because you're too young to date doesn't mean he's not interested in girls," said our mother.
"I'm right here," I complained.
"Don't be rude," said Emily. "Be quiet while we talk about you." She grinned and cackled.
"I have an idea," said Mom. "It might be a little juvenile for two high school sophomores, though."
"What?" asked Emily.
"I have some gingham in my stash. I was thinking Raggedy Ann and Andy?"
"Perfect!" exclaimed my sister, without consulting me.
She and Mom made the costumes together. Mom was always trying to teach Emily how to sew and, before this, Emily had shrugged it all off. Now, though, she got into it.
The costumes had matching tops made out of blue and white gingham. The high-water pants they made for me were dark blue. A cream-colored apron went over a skirt made of the same dark blue material for her. Mom bought two cheap mop heads and dyed them bright red. They kept falling off our heads until Mom sewed them onto the tops of two of Dad's old baseball caps, with the brims cut off.
"Don't tell your father we used these," she said conspiratorially when we tried them on.
You could tell there was a hat under the "wigs" but it didn't matter. It was just for Halloween, anyway.