5 - Mrs. Crawley

Latoya already had her candle in hand, as Leroy doused his. She leaned against her brother's shoulder, the patch of vitiligo along her chin catching the light of the small flame, even as her flat cap hid her eyes from view.

"A good story about how one step into darkness can lead to another. But what Leroy didn't tell you is that there is a sequel to that tale. Because subsequent to events, the occurred the episode of...

MRS. CRAWLEY

James Crawley was the only mourner at his mother's graveside. Perhaps that was for the best. There was no money for a wake. No life insurance, and without his mother's income, he could barely meet the mortgage payments. The only thing keeping alive his hopes of graduating college was the fact that the videos had been doing amazing numbers. That trickle of income was the one black hope in James' life.

A fleeting hope. He had no idea how he could top that...and the ghouls on the internet wanted more. Late at night, he would read the comments, the sick fucks who sat anonymous behind their VPNs. Some of them declared it was fake. Some of them wanted grosser things.

"I'm not sticking my dick in an eye socket just so you can get your jollies," he said aloud, in the privacy of his house.

Except...there was a part of James that wanted to do exactly that. Or at least, was willing and excited at the thought. There were late nights, after he'd returned from the morgue or class, when he'd watch the porn clips play, and felt nothing. Not a twitch from his dick. Not a surge of passion. Even when he went without stroking himself for days, and he could feel the pent-up need, no normal fantasies haunted his dreams.

It was worse at work. Sometimes, when the autopsy was done, and James was rinsing the corpse down, he would get a spontaneous erection of such painful intensity that it demanded immediate attention. Which was the one thing he absolutely could not do. The one thing that every morgue was set up for was to watch to make sure the male attendants didn't interfere with the bodies. James could feel the invisible eyes on him, and kept his movements utterly proprietary. There could be no lingering caress on a limp breast, no cupping a cold cunny in the palm of his hand.

There was nothing else for it. On a moonless night, James cut through the Eastside Cemetery again.

It was time for Mr. Crawley to shoot another little film.

The chain had fallen off the gate to the Gamwell family crypt. The door was slightly ajar. James' stepped cautiously, holding his breath as he heard the soft moans from within. A part of him knew he should turn back. Yet no one else was supposed to be here, either. They were trespassers, just like him. Who could it be? Teens fucking? Maybe if they let him shoot them in exchange for silence, that would be something new...

He opened the door, just a little. Glad the hinges, which someone had recently oiled, did not creak. Let his eyes adjust to the darkness within...

"Ah ah ah..."

The protruding, rounded knob of Martha Gamwell's left femur pushed into the dark brown pussy of the half-naked young Black woman whose back was braced against the wall of the crypt. She was still wearing her boots, some old, black military footwear, and she was still wearing the long, dark green jacket that bore the patches of a forgotten war, amid the pins and patches of punk bands and progressive causes. Yet her black shirt was pulled up so that her soft, gently sagging tits with their pierced nipples swung freely, and her pants were pushed down around her ankles as she worked the femur like a lever with both hands, grasping, tugging at it.

The image was almost comic. Almost morbid. For a moment, James thought her some actual figure of **** from the Renaissance, with a single bone as mute priapic satire of fecundity jutting from her crotch.

Then some sense made her turn to look at him. Her eyes widened.

It was too broad a face to be called pretty; the jaw too strong, the hair dyed red and black and cut short, shaved at the side. Rings adorned both ears in a jingle of profusions and at some point, she had carved an upside-down pentagram on her acne-scarred forehead. The light, which came from a flashlight set on the floor, had been propped up on Martha's skull, now separated from its body.

Inspiration took over. James gave his most winning smile, and his most sepulchral voice.

"Hello. I'm Mr. Crawley. What's your name?"

Her face, the deer-in-the-headlight look that showed no guilt or shame, only the heart-stopping moment of fear, transformed swiftly.

"I'm Latisha."

James stepped into the crypt and closed the door a little further. He set his backpack down and took out his camera.

"Latisha. How would you like to make a movie?"

That was the debut of Mrs. Crawley, as she was presented to the fans. Though the pair were not legally married at the time, there was something in their shared experience that bound them closer together than most lovers. They were partners in crime, and as she moved into his house, they explored those darker interests. It turned out that Latisha had a line on selling human remains, forging documentation to make them look like former medical displays, now decommissioned and available to the highest bidder. Martha Gamwell disappeared that way, piece by piece into the mail, and the money that rolled in made things a little more...comfortable.

James graduated. He spent more time behind the camera now, doing shoots for local news and film productions, and managing online business in morbid curios. Latisha took his place in the morgue, as female attendants drew less notice. Their shared passion became a library of obscenities, the basement of their house a set for some of their productions, which were no longer crude things shot handheld, but slightly lavish productions of morbid artistry.

Then two things arrived in the mail that upset James. The first was a notice: James Alexander Crawley and Latisha Emilia Fenton were now considered married under the common law, due to the length of their cohabitation. The other was packet of fertility ****.

"What the fuck is this?" he said.

Latisha took the packet.

"I want a baby," she said simply.

James shook his head. They had, in the seven plus years since their meeting in that crypt, almost never fucked each other. There had been times when James had happily played body parts in and out of his partner's hole for the morbid glee of the thing, but that strange, terrible shift in his desires was still there, still dominant. It didn't matter how long she sucked him. He couldn't get hard for a living woman.

"Over my dead body," he said, more irritated than he let on.

Latisha had smiled at that, a nasty smile that he had seen only when they were planning some of their more heinous crimes.

"We'll see."

The next shoot a special one. Something they had talked about. Dead man's candles. The terminal erection was something that happened in the corpses of men who had died by hanging, an old and well-established phenomenon. When such a victim came in—Alfred Steinberg, 58—Latisha already had the wax ready to make the mold. Even caught the whole process on camera, so that their audience would know it was the real thing.

James knew she was planning something, even as they set up the shoot. The dildo cast from the dead man's corpse was a slick grey silicone, mounted on a thrusting machine. They were using the mad scientist's lab set in the basement. James behind the camera. Mrs. Crawley was dressed only in knee-length vinyl boots, elbow-length vinyl gloves. James watched her take a hit of poppers, the little brown bottle held up to her nose for a big sniff, to help loosen up her anus for the coming marathon.

He wasn't sure when it went wrong. He was looking through the camera when she stopped moaning. When the froth appeared at her lips and she went limp, the dead man's cock pounding her assholewith steady mechanical abandon, her body twitching but not moving.

James didn't even turn off the camera as he rushed toward her. Déjà vu ripped through him as his hands groped at her neck for a pulse. He slapped her hard, twice, as the machine whirred on and on. Blood trickled from a nostril, but she didn't respond...

...and once again, Mr. Crawley took over. His cock seemed ready to burst from his pants. In an instant, he was inside of her, the body still warm. James could feel the movement of the corpse-candle as it plowed her ass, pushing against his own dick through the thin skein of her flesh.

There was no conscious thought. Maybe she had planned this. Maybe it had been the poppers. A sudden heart attack. All he knew was the sudden, urgent need that poured his seed into what he thought was her dead womb.

"But as it turned out," Latoya said. "Mrs. Crawley was only mostly dead. By the time he realized she wasn't getting quite as cold and stiff as she should have and rushed her off into the hospital, the diagnosis was persistent vegetative state. Of course, they kept her on life support for the duration of the pregnancy. James even filmed the 'birth' where they cut the babies out of her. Twins."

Her hand gently stroked the back of her brother's neck. The wax from her candle had melted onto his. With a pinch, she ended the tale.