Day 29 - Breathplay - Phasmophobia

“I don’t know, it looks like an orb.”

Chelsea squinted at the screen, she tried, she really did. The thing is that the majority of skeptics didn’t want to be skeptics. They wanted to see something amazing, something that blew their minds. Everybody wanted to believe in magic, at least a little bit. Everybody wanted the guy to really be pulling the rabbit out of the hat and not just doing sleight-of-hand which might be more profitably used robbing people in broad daylight. But part of being a grown-up, part of being “normal” included realizing that it was a trick, that there wasn’t actually magic going on there. Even if you didn’t call it out, even if you didn’t point out the strings like an asshole, you still saw them. You had to balance the want to be amazed with knowing better. Of course, if anybody ever did actually bring the magic, you’d be the first to say. That was the problem though, it was basically always orbs. Orbs and bad vibes. And those were if you were lucky sometimes.

“Is it? Where? That thing in the top left?”

“What? No!” Jimmy pointed at the bottom-left corner of the screen, “There!”

“Jimmy, that’s a lamp. It isn’t moving.”

“Orbs don’t have to move!”

He kept his camera pointed at her while Chelsea tried to find the right words and expressions to send the idea to the audience that she wasn’t mad, just disappointed.

“Jimmy…”

“You’re the one who says if you ever see evidence of a ghost, you’ll admit they’re real, but I’ve got great evidence right here!”

“Jimmy, you said when we started this you weren’t an orb guy.”

“I’m not usually, but look how bright that one is!”

“It’s a lamp!”

“I thought you turned them all off! If it’s really a lamp and it’s still on, then somebody else must have flipped the switch.”

“Okay, fine,” Chelsea sighed and stood up, “I forgot to turn it off. I’ll go back in and fix that, then when I come back it’ll either still be off or ghosts are real, how about that?”

Chelsea stormed out of the van before Jimmy could respond. She hadn’t realized she was as angry as she was until she actually stepped into the house and took a deep breath. Jimmy was a decent guy, a good friend, but he had trouble turning the content brain off. Once upon a time, she would have said the reason they’d never turned into a proper item was that they were both too involved with other people, a little too scared to actually ruin things between them. Now it was because he’d probably vlog about the hookup.

Still, every good ghost show needed a skeptic for the crackpot to bounce off of, and she was just macabre enough to have read about most of these places he wanted to go to. And the pay was… shockingly good. All of the kids who grew up watching Scooby-Doo needed something to put on in the background between therapy sessions and whatever else it was that bisexuals did in their free time. If you had asked her a year ago what kind of money amateur ghost hunters made, she wouldn’t have guessed a living wage. She also wouldn’t have guessed it was the new get-rich-quick scheme Jimmy would get into.

She stepped back into the house, so lovingly donated for the night by the current residents (who offered the same service to anybody who wanted to stay at a haunted place, it turned out) and currently hanging open like it was in a surgical gown. If you weren’t a mover or a painter, you weren’t used to seeing houses… undressed, for lack of a better word. There was something almost voyeuristic about it, but that was the nature of haunting, too. Ghosts may not be real, but hauntings are. A place is haunted by the sense that life has been disrupted there. That what was once normal and everyday about the place has been violated or offset in such a way that means it can’t easily return to being a home. When you come back from vacation to find one of your windows smashed, when you walk into the laundry room to find one of the pipes burst, when that first sight is caught of a worm-like pink tail darting behind your fridge, that queasy feeling in your stomach, that low-level buzz of anxiety is a haunting. You, and the place you are looking at, is now haunted. Life can only resume as it was there with time, with distance, with forgetting.

Contrarily, some people saw ghosts. Some people attached macabre stories to buildings like the past resident being ax-murdered bore any greater bearing on the place’s spiritual standing than them having a heart attack. Some people were orb people.

The living room lamp had been left on indeed, so Chelsea stepped over and turned it off, then pressed the button on her walkie-talkie.

“Did the orb just vanish?”

“Yeah, but I got something else for you, our stationary mic and camera in the basement just went dark.”

“Don’t those things have an auto-shutoff? How long have we been running them for?”

“They wouldn’t turn off at the same time, I always set the cameras up first.”

“And you couldn’t possibly have made a mistake,” Chelsea rolled her eyes and spoke into the walkie without turning it on, sighed and then pressed the button, “Okay, fine, I’ll go look.”

“Be careful, the basement is supposed to be where the killer-”

Chelsea turned the volume down on the walkie before she had to listen to Jimmy dredge up horrible human tragedy for views again. There was an unspoken, implicit amount of exploitation to these things, but that didn’t mean she had to engage with it. Sometimes you just wanted to eat a hot dog without being reminded either that a pig died for it or that the parts of the pig which had gone into it weren’t ones you’d be eating otherwise.

The basement was one of those midwestern exclusives that was a whole room in and of itself instead of a dank little box that attracted junk or a single crawl space that nobody acknowledged or used. With the house in question being more of a tourist trap than an actual living space it was mostly used as storage, a brick-walled, low-roofed storeroom lined with metal shelving units, most of them broadly empty outside of boxed seasonal decorations and kitsch furniture they could swap in depending on which decade’s nostalgia they were milking at that particular time. It reflected a deeply cynical business practice, though those who did internet ghost hunting content for a living probably shouldn’t throw stones. She walked until she found the microphone, set up on one of the shelves, and toggled a few settings until the walkie buzzed again. Chelsea turned it back up.

“You say I had it back?”

“Yep, camera should be near the wall at the back.”

She was about to set the mic back down when something thudded in the basement behind her and made her jump. It was like somebody slamming their fist on one of the shelves suddenly. With her heart pounding in her ears, Chelsa was ready to write it off as something falling over, but then another sound came from higher up, like a single stomp on the floor above her, then another. Moving, making its way to the basement stairs.

“What the hell was that?” Her walkie crackled.

“I think there’s somebody else in the house!”

“The cameras upstairs aren’t seeing anything, maybe it’s the ghost.”

“Jimmy if this is you fucking with me-” The footsteps had started down the stairs.

“Try not to hide, don’t make any noise.”

Chelsea put the microphone back down on the shelves and did her best to hold completely still, turning down the walkie to just a whisper. Fuck the ghost, the idea of somebody else having wandered into what they thought was an abandoned house was much scarier, much more dangerous, certainly. The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs and Chelsea waited for something to move out into the thin moonlight, but nothing did. Even as the footsteps came slapping forcefully toward her, nothing crossed in the visible spaces. As it got even closer, Chelsea pressed her hand over her mouth.

Whatever it was suddenly slapped the microphone off of the shelf in front of her. Chelsea couldn’t see a hand, a limb, anything moving to do it. She wasn’t sure if this had to be a dream or a hallucination of some kind, she couldn’t imagine that a place this long having not served as a home would have up-to-date carbon monoxide detectors. The smart thing to do would have been to start walking out as soon as she saw there was nothing there, but she couldn’t force herself to move.

Something else did for her. Chelsea felt what her brain was convinced was a hand grabbing her hair, then suddenly thrusting her forward into the shelf. Whatever it was, delusion, ghost or otherwise, was strong enough to force her head between the shelves. It felt like there were a dozen hands on her, holding her in place, grabbing fistfuls of her hair, digging their fingers into the skin of her hips and stomach. They felt like they were simultaneously above her clothes and under them, wherever they wanted to be. More importantly, when she reached out her hand to try to catch herself and she gasped, she felt like one was over her mouth and nose too, even with her own hand no longer covering it. Air came in little trickles, like she was filtering it through a sheet.

She could hear it breathing hot in her ear, but it didn’t speak. She could feel it grabbing, squeezing, pushing, and pulling but it didn’t have anything to touch back. It was like a shape without form, a void of unreality moving around and making spaces where not even dust or air could fill. Where it touched her she felt cold, not the mild environment around her, but a sheer and piercing iciness. An undeniable shiver like the first true day of winter, the first time seeing her breath when outside after a long summer. Localized goosebumps.

And whatever it was wasn’t just touching her after a moment, she felt something sliding through her pants without moving them, pressing against her cunt with the same icy feeling as the hands. Chelsea realized in a heartbeat that the placement of the hands was no accident. A pair had greedy handfuls of her breasts, a pair gripped her hips and dug their fingers in like they were trying to find purchase, several grabbed at her plump stomach like they were trying to get leverage, and the ones which pulled her hair back seemed to pull with the same strength that the frigid invaded between her legs pushed.

It slid in suddenly, she wasn’t necessarily surprised, she wasn’t sure if the moment of hesitation had been for anything other than letting her anticipate it, considering that whatever it was wasn’t really there. Chelsea could feel herself spreading around something, but it was more like being pulled open than pushed apart, her lips stretching outward and away from each other. A second later she felt her ass splitting too. Neither was painful per se, the coldness of both entrants made them more strange than uncomfortable, even as they forced both holes open wide. Then the hand was gone from her mouth and her jaw was forced open before she had time to even gasp for breath. Icy non-stuff packed her throat, her ass, her cunt. Without any real tangible thing where their force was, not even air, as she quickly realized. She could feel her neck distended where whatever it was that was with her had buried itself, but she couldn’t draw air past it, even with her mouth open wide enough for her jaw to ache.

They were all thrusting, though she wasn’t sure how she was feeling any of it. There wasn’t the drag of skin on skin, just the pulling and pushing inward and outward where her body was wrapped around something moving. The force and the coldness of it made her holes burn, her throat feel like she had been gulping down ice cream. Whatever strange sidegrade to pain it was that she was feeling seemed to have touched some aspect inside of her she hadn’t even been aware was there to be touched. As she shivered and her body tried to close itself and force out whatever was and wasn’t there, Chelsea could feel her pussy starting to soak her panties, her nipples ringed by goosebumps and grinding against the inside of her bra. Either she was actually being fucked by a ghost, or she had passed out and was in the middle of the strangest, most specific wet dream that she could have imagined. She wasn’t sure which one was easier to believe.

What was easy to believe and hard to ignore was that she couldn’t breath. Annoyed, aborted grasps and cheek puffing had turned into burning in her lungs, her ears popping as her body tried to move air one way or another but couldn’t manage either. Her heart was pounding, it was about all she could hear. All she could see was the shelf in front of her, little camera sitting on it with the recording light off, unable to capture whatever was happening if it was supernatural. Or maybe the light was on, she couldn’t tell. Her eyes were swimming with tears, her vision both darkening and losing focus.

Something popped and lit inside of her like a dull ember, she could feel her cunt clenching, her toes curling, her panties getting considerably wetter and a dim little flutter of pleasure rising up from between her legs, but it was trying to fight against something much stronger. She was passing out, losing her grasp on consciousness in big gulps with her airways blocked. The orgasm happening, seemingly a mile away from her brain, kept pulsing through her body like a great dull throb rolling through the ground under her feet, rocking her like she wasn’t planted firmly to the floor below her by gravity. Even when her vision gave out entirely and she fell into something like sleep, it didn’t stop, as she felt her lungs continue to burn.

The space between, wherever she went in some mixture of sleep, unconscious, and the borderlands of somewhere far worse, seemed to stretch on forever with her pleasure as a scent on the wind, a texture to the world. Seconds dragged on in clusters of microdetail that felt like they took an hour to fully process. Her mind creating flitting, ephemeral trees, rivers, valleys. Flowers that bloomed and died in instants and misshapen animals like children's drawings. It was all color dancing against the back of her eyelids as her brain panicked, but it dragged out as a long orgasm which didn’t seem to end. It was like a siren call, not beckoning her to the sea or the shore but tempting her to remain tied to the mast, to let the teasing song fill her ears until her anticipation was running down her legs.

Until Jimmy shook her awake.

Chelsea gasped and shuddered, the last ebbing ripple of what had been an orgasm likely several after her first passing away. She gulped at the air, head pounding and hurting, cunt burning… no, whole body burning. In the absence of pleasure she felt like total shit. She was outside, on the lawn of the house.

“What… the fuck?” She coughed.

“I came in as soon as I thought it was safe and got you out,” Jimmy realized he had given the end of the story before the start, “That whole basement is probably full of carbon monoxide. We only found out because the alarm upstairs started going off. I checked the one down there, and there aren’t even any batteries in it.”

It took a moment for Chelsea to connect the dots on what he was saying. She was still half-awake at best and her head was still pounding, but gradually she put it together and managed to get to her feet.

“How…” She started and stopped, “How much did the mic pick up?”

“The microphone?” Jimmy asked incredulously, “You picked it back up and turned it on, then it picked up falling off of the shelf and you falling onto the shelf. After that, silence. And snoring, technically, but that’s probably because of the gas.”

Back in the truck, Chelsea tried her best to start feeling even close to normal again, but the headache she had picked up wasn’t likely to go away any time soon. Probably most upsetting of all, if it had been all gas, was how thoroughly her wet dream while choking had ruined her underwear, even half an hour later they still clung damply to her skin. Equally upsetting, when she listened to the audio on her own, right after the microphone had fallen off of the shelf and she’d fallen onto it, there was a noise like a heavy, ragged breath after hers had grown shallow and quiet. Then a sound like a muffled, weak protest. Both things, in any other case, that she could have explained away as the house settling, a breeze passing through, even a rodent in the walls.

She could probably convince herself that that’s what this was too.

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