Candle Street Hall

by Monica Belle

  He’d never let go, and he kissed me again, this time on my lips. I couldn’t help but respond, already imagining myself sat on the dais with my skirt rucked up and my knickers to one side for his cock even as I let my mouth open under his. To my surprise he broke away quite quickly, to run one finger gently across the curve of my chest as he let his breath out in a low sigh.

  ‘Ah, what I wouldn’t like to do with you.’

  ‘Do it then, anything you like.’

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Why not? It’s lovely ...’

  ‘I’ll explain, but not now.’

  He simply picked me up, tipping me back into his arms to carry me outside without any obvious effort at all. I didn’t protest, more than happy to be manhandled. Outside, he laid me down in the long warm grass where the woods gave way to a bank. I thought he’d mount me straight away, as rough and urgent as he’d been before, and I opened my arms to him. He just grinned, kneeling over me as he pushed my legs up and open. My skirt had already come up, and he reached under it, to grip my knickers and pull them off down my legs.

  I closed my eyes, open to him, expecting his cock, but what I got was his tongue. A little gasp of surprise and pleasure escaped my lips as he began to lick, holding me by my hips with just the very tip of his tongue flicking over my sex. He was teasing, pressing just hard enough to leave me helpless in moments, but not so hard it would make me come. I relaxed, smiling happily as I fumbled open the buttons of my blouse. My bra came up and my breasts were free to the warm summer air, my nipples quickly stiff under my fingers.

  Julian saw what I’d done and gave a soft growl, but he didn’t stop licking. I arched my back, pushing myself against his face as I caressed my breasts. Nobody had licked me for a long, long time, and it was bliss. So was lying near naked in the long grass, and if I wasn’t actually on show to anybody, then I was at least out in the open. I let my imagination run, thinking of how anybody who came out of the woods would see me, with my thighs spread to Julian as he worked his magic on my pussy, my breasts bare in my hands. Inevitably that person became Vanessa, looking down with amusement and a little contempt as I gave in to the pleasure.

  This time I didn’t try to fight my feelings. Julian had begun to lick harder and his hands had moved lower, cupping my bottom. I’d begun to moan and I couldn’t hold back my feelings at all, my head full of rude thoughts as my pleasure rose towards ecstasy and I imagined what Vanessa might do if she caught us. She’d said I had no morals. She’d called me a slut. Maybe she’d take advantage of me, telling Julian to hold me in place as she came to straddle my body, to lift her smart skirt, to squat down over my face, to pull her knickers aside and make me lick her to orgasm just as Julian was licking me.

  It was all I could do not to call out her name as I started to come. Julian had pulled my cheeks open, to tickle the tight little hole between, a deliciously dirty detail to add to what he was doing to me with his tongue and one that gave my thoughts a final filthy twist as I went into orgasm. In my mind Vanessa was on my face as before, but facing the other way, her skirt rucked up to expose herself, her knickers pulled down to bare her small firm bottom, her cheeks open to show me the tiny pink hole between, which she was about to make me kiss.

  I screamed, wordlessly, which was just as well. My back was arched tight, my thighs locked on Julian’s head as he licked, my fingers dug hard into the flesh of my naked breasts and my mind dizzy for what was being done to me and the imagined but glorious, filthy indignity of being made to lick Vanessa Aylsham’s bottom. The inevitable embarrassment arrived an instant later and I collapsed back in the grass as Julian finally pulled back. I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t dare, and besides, he had other things on his mind.

  When we’d made love the first time I’d wanted to suck his cock, and it was just as well. He came around beside me, and he wasn’t having any nonsense as he took me by the hair and stuck his erection in my mouth. He was already fully hard, making me gag as he pushed himself deep. I struggled to be a good girl and give him what he so obviously needed, sucking and licking at his shaft. He’d begun to groan in moments, pushing urgently into my mouth as I squeezed at his balls and played with my breasts to show off for him.

  It was too much for him almost immediately. He moaned something about how big I was up top and he’d come in my mouth, holding me firmly until I’d swallowed and only then easing himself slowly back. Again I lay back, grinning for what we’d done. He came down beside me, cuddling me into his arms. For a long moment we lay together, my mind hazy with happy thoughts of what we’d done and slightly guilty ones for what I’d been thinking about, which led me to imagine how it would have been if he’d had me in the folly, and why he hadn’t wanted to. He had sounded quite serious, making me wonder what was going on.

  ‘Why’s the folly place so special?’

  ‘It’s a very peculiar folly, and if I tell you it might put you off.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘OK, but don’t say you weren’t warned. You can see we’re standing on the foundations of an older building, can’t you?

  ‘That was built by the first Baronet, John Aylsham, who also built the new house. He was ... let’s say he had some strange beliefs, especially towards the end of his life. Most of all, he wanted to make a bargain with the Devil, but being a practical sort of man nothing would do but a personal meeting and a written agreement. That’s why he built the original folly, which was five-sided and is said to have had a silver pentagram laid out on a floor of black marble.’

  ‘What, so he could hold satanic rituals?’

  ‘Yes, more or less, but not the sort of occult stuff you might think. His theory was that the Devil would be drawn to sin, so he held an orgy, with the assistance of a few compliant and well-paid village girls, although I doubt they knew the full story. The Devil failed to turn up, but that that didn’t put him off. He tried again, with an even more depraved orgy, and again, and again. Some of the things he did ... well, never mind, but let’s just say that if you found out you might not have been so keen on sex in the same place.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. It sounds fun.’

  He looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and gave a soft chuckle, which immediately made me suspicious.

  ‘Hang on, this isn’t one of your stories for the visitors, is it? You were telling it when you showed us around.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s real, and so is everything else I tell them, more or less. It’s what I don’t tell them that matters, like what causes the odd feeling in the Hall. Anyway, Sir John never did get to meet the Devil, or at least not during one of his orgies. The last was too much for him, he died.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Nobody knows for sure, although he was 78 so it’s not all that surprising. We can guess though, because all the details of all the others are recorded in his diaries, along with notes on how to make things even more sinful the next time. He never got to write the last one up, being dead, and I don’t suppose the other people involved would have been able to write at all, or wanted to admit to what they’d been up to. That was in 1692, not long before the business with Lady Howard, and this part of the country was notorious for witch hunts.’

  ‘So what happened to the original folly?’

  ‘It stayed as it was, more or less, although it may have been bricked up at some point. Nearly 200 years later, in 1884, one of the big oaks fell in a storm and it was damaged. The Baronet at the time, Sir Robert, was superstitious, and his brother, who was the local rector, was keen to cover up what he saw as a stain on the family’s good name. They had the place torn down and this structure built on the same spot, and consecrated, so technically it’s a chapel.’

  As he finished his mouth briefly flickered into a smile, not wry, nor amused, but wicked. I remembered his expulsion.

  ‘I remember another chapel, and what you did ...’

  He laughed.

  ‘You’re thinking of Amanda, aren’t you?’

&n

bsp; ‘Was that her name? Tell me about it, come on.’

  Again he laughed, and put his arm around me, leading me away from the folly and back through the woods as he talked.

  ‘You remember what they were like at college? So stuffy, so self righteous – especially Haines.’

  ‘Reverend Haines? He seemed OK?’

  ‘OK? Sure he was, as long as you were one of his flock, or kept quiet. I didn’t. I went to him to explain that my beliefs wouldn’t allow me to attend chapel any more, but he wasn’t having it. He gave me this long lecture too, about my emotional immaturity and how I would come to see the truth with time. I was pretty militant about my atheism at the time, and a cocky 18 year old, so you can imagine how that went down! So I had Amanda over his precious altar.’

  ‘But you got expelled! You were one of the best in the college. Everybody thought you’d get into Cambridge!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to get caught! It was three o’clock in the morning, so fuck knows what Haines was doing wandering around. We weren’t even noisy, because I’d stuck Amanda’s knickers in her mouth to stop her ...’

  ‘Julian!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Sticking a girl’s knickers in her mouth!’

  He shrugged, as if to say he’d had no option, but I was imagining how she must have felt, how utterly humiliated, bent over the altar with her knickers stuffed in her mouth to shut her up as she was fucked from behind. It had been from behind too, because he’d said over, not on, and the picture was clear in my mind as he continued.

  ‘So he caught us, and I suspect the old perv was watching for quite a bit before he stopped us, and enjoying the view. That didn’t stop him coming down on us like a tonne of bricks, but I’m sure you remember that bit.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So I got kicked out. Amanda got off with a spanking.’

  ‘A spanking? What, from Reverend Haines?!’

  He laughed.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’

  ‘That’s still awful!’

  ‘What, having her bum smacked? Come on, it’s hardly the same as being expelled from college. It’s been a millstone around my neck ever since. Anyway, what I’d meant to do was leave just enough evidence for Haines to be very sure somebody had desecrated his precious altar, so that he’d guess it was me but couldn’t prove anything.’

  ‘What about DNA?’

  ‘I thought about that, but I couldn’t see the police getting that worked up over his suspicions, so I took the risk. Anyway, it was that which gave me the idea for the folly. Did you see the stain on the altar?’

  ‘Yes, I wondered about that.’

  ‘It’s blood.’

  ‘You sacrificed something?’

  ‘No, I poured off what came out of Vanessa and Henry’s Sunday joint one morning.’

  ‘Why?!’

  ‘I’m coming to that. The thing about places like this, and ghost tours, is that nowadays everybody’s a cynic, well, too many people anyway. A lot of people know about the low-frequency vibration thing, because you can look it up on the internet. Because of that Candle Street Hall is beginning to lose its mystique. I want to restore that mystique, because when people think it’s all just a story they won’t pay much and we really only get organised ghost tours and local tourists anyway. But if they think we’ve got something to hide ...’

  He trailed off, leaving me to fill in the gaps, but I’d only been half listening because my head was full of images of the unfortunate Amanda, taken from behind with her knickers in her mouth to shut her up and then spanked for what she’d done. Julian was oblivious, and clearly thought gagging a girl with her panties was a perfectly normal thing to do, and worse, that to be put over somebody’s knee and having your bottom smacked was an acceptable punishment, even trivial, even quite funny. The thought was making me shake, but I forced myself to respond to what he was saying.

  ‘So you’re setting up a conspiracy theory?’

  ‘Something like that, yes. I let the visitors wander around on their own after the formal tour. Some of them are bound to find the folly, but I’m hoping it’s well enough hidden to make them think it’s supposed to be out of bounds. They already know about John Aylsham, because I’ve just told them, so they assume I’m trying to summon the Devil, or something like that. The details don’t matter, just as long as the story gets out, and of course I can help it along on the net.’

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘And is it working?’

  ‘Not yet, but that’s where you come in.’

  Chapter Five

  I WAS EXHAUSTED BY the end of my first day at Candle Street Hall, not just physically, but mentally too. That morning I’d woken up in my room, an ex-student with no job, nowhere to go and no boyfriend, and by that evening I was assistant manager at Candle Street Hall, with the run of a country house and Julian d’Alveda as my lover. All that would have been more than enough, but my head had been filled with more weird and disturbing thoughts than I could really cope with.

  For one thing I was in love with Julian, but that hadn’t stopped me from developing one of the annoying and inappropriate little crushes I get from time to time. It’s always somebody older and stronger, usually with authority and more often than not a woman. I swear I’m no lesbian, but women like Vanessa Aylsham get to me in a way I don’t want but can’t do anything about. As if that wasn’t bad enough, learning the background to Julian’s expulsion had put really dirty ideas into my head, ideas that shouldn’t even have been sexy, just the opposite. For years I’d been wondering what had really happened, and I’d always assumed, and hoped, that there would be lots of juicy details, but I’d never guessed it would involve anything so rude, so wrong, as Amanda being gagged with her own panties and then spanked for her punishment. I could feel her humiliation, and I felt deeply sorry for her, but both lewd, grossly objectionable details turned me on and there was nothing I could do about it. The whole thing left me dizzy with guilt and arousal, shock and excitement, to the point at which I just didn’t know what to think of myself.

  Then there was Julian’s conspiracy, but that was just fun and something I could focus on to keep my mind from making what I knew was an inevitable connection between my feelings for Vanessa and what had happened to Amanda. Maybe it’s that my imagination is just too vivid, or too kinky, but I knew from long and bitter experience that the next time I came those three unspeakably filthy fantasies would come together in my head, maybe even if I was with Julian, but if I was alone it would be almost impossible to escape. The only way out was his wicked scheme, which also fascinated me and turned me on, but in a much nicer way. When we made love that evening, in my new bed, I came to thoughts of how I’d feel bent over the altar in the folly as he pushed into me from behind.

  I threw myself into the scheme, happily agreeing to help him in whatever way he wanted, which turned out to be setting up a fake satanic ritual in the folly. He seemed to know almost exactly what he was doing, in obsessive detail, which meant that my work was going to be very different to the way I’d imagined it before. I’d be helping with the house and to organise the tours, but also dealing with occult stuff – some of it seriously weird. Julian knew that sooner or later his activities would be investigated by people who knew what they were talking about, so there were to be no half measures.

  The second day I was there Julian drove me down to Ipswich in the morning to pick up my stuff. I said thank you by taking his cock in my mouth in a lay-by beside the main road, with traffic whizzing past us just yards as I kissed and licked at his erection, and always the chance that another car would pull in and he wouldn’t be able to cover up in time. It was a great experience, and just the sort of risky exhibitionism I like, which gave me something to take my mind off Vanessa and Amanda.

  On the third day he sent me up to London to buy strange-smelling oils and a special sort of drippy black candle, plus some books from a little gnome of a man who worked out of a basement in the Charing Cross Road. I was travelling for most of the day, and passed the time with thoughts of Julian, what we’d been up to, and what we would hopefully be getting up to in the future. By the time I got back the tourists were already gone and we ate together in the kitchens of Candle Street Hall, sitting by the great stone fireplace and eating spaghetti and meatballs off fine china plates at a huge oak table more than 300 years old. It was so very different from the bustle of London, the old man in his cellar excepted, and by the time we went up to bed I knew I wasn’t only in love with Julian, but with the house itself. When I told him the next morning he kissed me and gave me his wry smile, only to grow suddenly serious.

  ‘I feel the same, which is why it’s very important to make this work. Vanessa is ... she’s OK, but ...’

  ‘She’s a bitch.’

  ‘I suppose you could put it like that. Anyway, at the moment I’m the golden boy, but if we fuck up she’d sack us without thinking twice, or maybe ...’

  He stopped, clearly thinking better of what he’d been about to say, then carried on.

  ‘Anyway, it’s got to work, and she’s the one we need to keep happy.’

  ‘What about Sir Henry? I haven’t even met him.’

  ‘He leaves everything to her, and he spends most of his time bird-watching and taking photographs. You’re bound to meet him some time, and he’s a nice guy, but very mild natured – too mild to run a business. He doesn’t know what we’re up to, by the way, not in any detail. He wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘But Vanessa does?’

  ‘Vanessa would sell her own grandmother. Let me tell you about her. First of all, this Lady Muck business is put on, or at least, she certainly wasn’t born to it. I’m not sure where she comes from, London probably, but if you look around the gatehouse you won’t find any photos of their wedding, or of Vanessa with the rest of his family. To them Vanessa is the worst sort of gold-digger, but that’s just snobbery, because she’s stuck by him and without her drive this place would be broke. He’d never have hired me, that’s for sure.’

  -->