“Oh, fuck,” I said softly.
“What?” Lila asked.
I didn’t answer, I splashed into the nearest puddle and started digging.
Angelina came out of the cabin with the ashes and approached really, really slowly.
I ran over and tried to start the Bobcat but it was dead, so I had to work by hand. Mina grabbed a shovel and joined me in the hole. The others all stood around me watching silently, realizing slowly what was happening.
About four feet down, we found…them.
“It can’t be,” Angelina said, backing away, her hand over her mouth. “That was just…just a rumor…no…no way…”
I looked up at her from the muddy, rocky hole where I stood – a pair of identical human skulls at my feet.
“You knew!” I said to her – I practically screamed at her. “Your whole fucking town knew and you didn’t put a stop to it. You people are monsters!”
PART VIII
The next few hours were a complete blur. Lila called the police, and soon the area was crawling with law enforcement. Angelina was separated from us. The last we saw of her that day she was riding away in the back of a trooper’s cruiser. We gave statements, but it was clear we were just here for the ashes Bart had stolen, so after hours of sitting around, we were thanked for our efforts and allowed to leave.
The drive home was spent in complete silence. I think we were all in shock. When we passed through town on the way to our house, the place was in utter chaos. The response from law enforcement was overwhelming. Unlike after the Helmsworth murders, this time they weren’t taking “no” for an answer from a bunch of bullshit locals.
Bart’s house and yard were cordoned off and it was lit up like a Christmas tree with police cars. And it wasn’t just the state troopers. The FBI and ATF had SUVs outside, and other agencies were scattered around town getting in on the party.
But the police presence wasn’t what made things really chaotic. There were townsfolk willingly coming out to the police to confess their complicity in covering up the murders. There were so many that the troopers established a command center in the little town hall where a line about a couple dozen deep waited.
The people in line looked really, really scared and upset. In short, they looked like they had all seen ghosts. A lot of ghosts. Enough ghosts to fill all those graves up at Bart’s shack. The town had become something straight out of Ghostbusters. There were bloody twin women wandering around the sidewalks, some dressed in the tattered clothes they had died in, some wearing nothing at all. They were knocking on doors, and if the guilty didn’t open, they went in anyway.
It was not a good night if you were one of the people who looked the other way all those years – which included about half of the town’s population.
The town was in absolute mayhem. Beautiful, righteous, well-deserved mayhem. We drove to the center of town and parked, just to watch the justice being served.
Around 2:30 AM, having seen enough, we drove home. We were all exhausted as we slowly climbed out of the SUV.
“What’s going on in the attic?” Callie asked, pointing upward. The house had two windows in front that opened from the attic. Both windows now glowed with a bright light coming from within.
We went inside and cautiously climbed up the stairs. The entire attic was suffused with a bright white light and standing within, there were twenty young women, all twins. The Helmsworths were there, along with nine other pairs of women I didn’t recognize. Strangely, they were all naked.
Dorothy stepped forward.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You can speak?” I asked.
“I can now, we all can. You’ve given all of us a voice.” There were murmurs of assent among the other women.
I looked around at the ghostly women who stood, crowded into the attic and spilling over into the twins’ room. It was too much. It had just been a little over 72 hours since I lay back on that bed and unexpectedly met the Helmsworth twins. So much had happened.
I broke down and wept. My wife and my daughters did as well.
Dorothy smiled down, laying her hand on my shoulders.
“You are exhausted, overwrought. Go get some sleep. We can talk more when you’ve rested. We are all so very grateful to all four of you for what you’ve done.”
The glow in the room faded some, and the other women slowly flickered out, until there was just a faint reddish glow and only Dorothy, Lorelei, and two young blonde twins remained. They helped us undress, get bathed because we were all muddy, and crawl into bed.
The story (and our pictures) were all over the news by the time we made it out of bed early afternoon the next day. A couple reporters showed up at the door and we sent them away empty-handed. The state police stopped by courteously several times just to see how we were doing. My boss, Lila’s boss, and the twins’ professors all told us to take some time off after what we’d found up in the mountains. So we decided to take them up on that advice.
All four of us were listless and exhausted Monday. We lay around the house, drained, vacantly staring at whatever happened to be on the television at the moment – as long as it wasn’t the news. Dorothy and Lorelei came down to see how we were doing a couple of times (apparently they now could appear or disappear at will), but mostly left us alone. We ordered pizza for lunch and kebabs for dinner. Nothing got done all day and we were all in bed early that night.
By Tuesday, I was starting to feel at least marginally normal. In the early afternoon, we ventured back up into the attic. Dorothy and Lorelei were there, beaming.
“You seem so happy,” I said. “We just uncovered a serial killer who slew ten pairs of twins, including you. How can you be so happy?”
“We’re finally free,” she said. “All of us. It’s wonderful. Thank you, we are all so very grateful.”
“Are all the twins here?” Callie asked, looking around the attic.
“They are, for now, though they are a little shy. They need time to find their way. If it is acceptable to you, they will stay here until they are ready. For some, that will happen within a few weeks, others may take many years. Lorelei and I will stay here until they are all free.”
I nodded. “That’s fine, we’re glad to help. As long as we own the house, you are free to use the attic.”
“Thank you.”
There was a lull in the conversation, then Callie spoke up again.
“So…are all these ghost twins…like…say…as laid back as you are?” Callie asked.
Dorothy and Lorelei cocked an eyebrow.
“What do you mean by ‘laid back’?” Lorelei asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Callie said, suddenly looking nervous and shy and turning her gaze downward.
“Nice job, Callie,” Mina said, nudging her twin. “What my sister is trying to ask is if they are all as horny as you are.”
The Helmsworth twins laughed. It was the first time I had heard them laugh, it was a very sweet, lilting chuckle.
“There has been much interesting talk about our dungeon in the other room,” Lorelei said. “There are now some very curious women here.” she said, smiling. She made a gesture with her hands and the twins suddenly went from naked to wearing leather boots and fishnet body suits. Lorelei held a crop, and used it to lift up Mina’s t-shirt (she wasn’t wearing a bra), running the crop up between her breasts. “Do you want to help break them in?”
Mina and Callie nodded.
“And we want to film it!” Callie added. “We want to start a camshow from the dungeon. We can start with the ghosts, and then maybe even include some real live people too, if there are interested parties. We could bring back a virtual version of your bondage parties. It’ll be hot! Fuck all these murderous, stuck-up locals. The more we can piss them off, the better. Plus it would be a neat way for Mina and I to generate a little buzz as we transition from college out to our artistic careers.”
The Helmsworth twins looked at each other, then smiled.
“We haven’t a clue what you’re talking about, so you will need to bring us up to speed on your technology, but I think it sounds like fun.”
I turned to Lila. “Did you know that these two were planning this?”
“They kind of had an idea rolling around in their dirty little heads ever since we discovered the dungeon. I’d never seen this side of them before, but once that door got opened it rapidly evolved as events unfolded. I never knew how filthy our daughters’ minds were until all this happened.”
Mina mumbled something about apples and trees.
“And you didn’t share this with their father?” I asked my beloved wife. “What price did you extract for this secrecy?”
“We get to play too,” she said, placing an arm around her shoulder.
“We?”
“Yes, the two of us. We don’t have to show our face if we don’t want, there are some masks and gimp hoods in the dressing room. But how could we do this without your hard body and, well, certain other hard parts of your anatomy? And our little baby daughters need our adult supervision…and our parental discipline…”
Mina giggled and pressed her behind against my hips.
“Discipline me, Daddy,” she said, and giggled again. I smacked her ass.
“So enlighten me again how this is going to work,” I said.
“Let’s go to the dungeon and we can show you,” Callie replied, walking to the twins’ room.
“This room will be where Mina and I do our hosting,” Callie said. “It’s got a bed and enough room to set up a camera and still move around.”
“What about the Helmsworth twins?” I asked. “This is their room.”
“We’re not bound to this physical plane the way you are,” Lorelei said. “It’s complicated but this entire house also exists on another plane as well. The core area of the attic is the portal between the two for us ghosts. So you can use this room as you wish, the rest of us are living in a different version of this house in another plane. It’s counter-intuitive, sorry.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it.” I nodded to Callie and Mina to continue.
“Cool,” Mina said, taking over their narrative and herding us through the black door. “So coming back to the bondage show, once we want to do anything kinky, we shift to the dungeon. We have a couple of tripod cameras we can set up in here, depending on what device we are using. We can move them around at will, or we can go purely handheld. The danger with handheld when making erotica is that the hornier the cameraperson, the shakier the video.”
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