Julia and the Cemetery Ghost

The iron gates of the historic cemetery had been chained since dusk, and Berlin’s late autumn air carried the wet taste of frost as I moved among the stones I had tended for years after every living visitor was gone. I am Elias Hart, thirty-one and already dead, and the work of righting a tilted marker was the only occupation left to a man the city had finished with. Julia Schmidt walked the closed paths with a glass portrait-doll eye warming in her palm, and I knew at once that I had been waiting since the villa used her, that I was the man the house remembered.

She was twenty-four, slender in a dark coat, her strawberry blonde hair falling over her shoulders and her green eyes bright even in the thin light of the old lamps. If she let me occupy her among these graves she might never walk out through the gates again. If she refused me I would lose the first woman who had wanted the person standing under the model’s composure.

I stepped from the shadow of a mausoleum and spoke her name the way a living man might have spoken it.

“You came carrying what looks,” I told her, and I watched her fingers close around the glass as if it might try to leave her. “I have been walking these paths for you.”

Julia did not startle at the sound of her own name in a locked place. She studied my face with the calm of someone who had already decided to stay.

“Walking is a generous word for a locked cemetery,” she said. “I brought this because it warmed when I thought of being seen. Are you going to see me, Elias, or only tend the stones?”

I took the last steps between us and laid my cold hand against her throat, where a fine porcelain line already marked the skin. She did not pull away. The hunger in me, which was the only way I still knew how to love, rose so sharply I could taste iron.

“I can only love you by feeding,” I said, my thumb resting on that seam. “If you try to keep me I will vanish. If you let me occupy you, you may not leave this ground.”

Her gaze held mine without flinching. “Then occupy me while you still can.”

I turned her until her back met the marble of the mausoleum, the stone holding the night’s cold the way my hands did, and I opened her coat with a patience I had not felt when I was alive. Julia helped me. She drew her dress up her thighs herself and set one heel on the low step of the tomb, and the invitation was so clear that the hunger in me made a sound I did not recognize as my own voice. I went to my knees on the frozen gravel and put my cold mouth on the inside of her thigh, then higher, and when I dragged my tongue through the heat of her cunt she shuddered hard enough that her fingers found my hair and stayed there.

She tasted of salt and living blood and the perfume she had put on her skin before she climbed the wall. I licked her open with slow strokes and I felt her clit swell under the flat of my tongue while she breathed my name into the dark. I sucked at her until her hips pressed forward into my face, filthy and eager, and I pushed two cold fingers into her cunt and curled them while I kept my mouth working.

“Your mouth is freezing and I still want it deeper,” she said, and she pulled me in by the hair as if I were a living lover she had every right to use. I fucked her with my tongue and with those two fingers until the wet sound of it carried along the avenue of graves, and I felt her thighs begin to shake against my ears. The distress in her breathing was the terror of wanting a dead mouth this much and knowing the night would not last. I sealed my lips around her clit and sucked in a steady rhythm while my fingers found the place inside her that made her cunt clench, and she came the first time with a broken sound that belonged in a church and not among the dead.

I did not stop. I lapped at her through it, drinking what she gave me, and the feeding made my hands a little more solid against her hips. A thin thread of warmth ran from the seam at her throat, and I rose enough to put my mouth there too, tasting iron as if the cemetery itself had opened in her. She held my head to that line and let me have it.

When I stood she put her palm flat on my chest, where no heart moved, and then she went down to the gravel with the same decision she had used to enter the grounds. Julia opened my trousers herself. My cock was cold and already hard from the feeding, pale in the lamp-light, and she looked at it the way she had looked at the glass in her hand, with interest and without shame. She wrapped her fingers around the shaft and stroked once, slowly, as if to confirm that I could still be used.

“You are colder than the stone,” she said, and then she put her mouth on me.

The heat of her was a shock I had no right to. I braced one hand on the mausoleum and the other in her hair, and I watched her lips stretch around the head of my cock while her tongue worked the underside. She took me deeper, the wet of her mouth a living thing around something that had not been warm in a long time. I could feel her throat when she chose to, and she chose to. She sucked me with a filthy, elegant concentration, saliva shining on her chin, and when she pulled back it was only to say my name around the head of my cock before she took me in again.

I told her she was beautiful like this, on her knees among the names of people who could not see her, and I felt her smile around me rather than hear it. She used her hand at the base and her mouth on the rest, and every time she swallowed around me I felt the hunger recede a fraction, as if her throat were a door I was being allowed to enter. I fucked her mouth in shallow thrusts she invited with a pull at my hip, and I watched tears stand in her eyes from the depth of it, not from refusal.

When I drew out of her mouth a string of spit connected us for a moment, obscene and bright. She licked her lips and looked up at me as if we had all the hours until morning, which we did not.

I lifted her because I could, because the feeding had given me that much weight, and I put her back against the mausoleum with her thighs around my waist. Julia reached between us and set the head of my cock at her cunt herself, and she held my gaze while she sank down onto me, taking the cold length in one slow, deliberate slide until I was buried in her to the hilt. The heat of her around me was violent. I made a sound against her mouth and then I kissed her, and my mouth was still cold, and she kissed me as if that cold were the point.

I fucked her standing. Each thrust drove her shoulders into the marble and drew a low noise from her that she did not try to swallow. Her cunt gripped me, wet from my mouth and from her own wanting. She hooked her ankles at the small of my back and used that leverage to meet me, elegant even with her dress rucked to her waist and my dead cock splitting her open against a tomb.

“Harder,” she said, and I gave her harder, the slap of my body into hers loud on the empty path. I got a hand under her ass to hold her where I needed her and I put my other hand at her throat, not to stop her breath but to feel the seam under my palm while I used her. The line had lengthened. Her eyes shone with a distress that was also appetite, and she turned her face and bit my cold mouth as if to keep me from leaving the kiss.

I told her I had wanted the person under the photographs, not the pose, and I felt her cunt flutter around me at that, a living answer. I fucked her through it, deep and relentless, my forehead against hers. She came again like that, standing, impaled, her mouth open on a sound she tried to make quiet and failed to, and I kept moving inside her through the clench of it. The feeding brightened me. For a few strokes I almost had a pulse.

We went down because she asked for the ground. Julia got on her hands and knees on the frozen earth between two leaning stones, her coat still on, her dress still up, and she looked back over her shoulder with a composure that made the request more terrible.

“Use me as if I were already buried with you,” she said. “I want that. I want you to take me the way you would take a woman who is not leaving this ground.”

I covered her with my body the way earth covers a box. I put my cock back into her cunt from behind in one thrust that seated me fully, and I set my chest along her spine and my mouth at the seam of her throat, and I began to fuck her into the dirt. My hand went to the back of her neck and pressed her cheek toward the soil, and she went with it, breathing the leaf-rot and the frost, her fingers digging into the gravel. I told her she was already in here with me. I told her the stones knew her name now. I told her that if she let me occupy her completely the gates would not open for her in the morning, and I felt her push her hips back onto my cock as if that threat were a vow she wanted kept.

I licked the porcelain line while I drove into her, and the seam opened under my tongue with a thin, bright welling of blood that tasted like the gates and like her. She made a wounded sound that was not pain in the living sense. I lapped at that opening and fucked her in the same rhythm, my hips slamming her forward into the earth, my cock stroking the soaked clutch of her cunt, and I felt her start to shake in a way that had nothing left of elegance in it.

“You want me,” she said into the dirt, and the words were not a question. “The dead want me. Do not stop.”

I did not stop. I used her as if we were already under the marble, as if the frost were a lid. My hand stayed on her neck. My mouth stayed at the open seam. She came with her face in the cemetery earth and my cock buried in her and my dead mouth drinking from her throat, a long, wrecked climax that pulled at me so hard I nearly followed her over. She was sobbing and still pushing back, still taking me, still asking with her body not to be left among the living alone.

I lasted long enough to feel her go loose and then tight again, and then I came in her with a violence that had no heartbeat behind it until, for a few seconds, it did. Heat ran through my hands. Color stood in my nails. I spilled into her cunt in thick pulses, filling her, and I heard myself make a living sound against her skin. Julia reached back and caught my wrist and held it as if the pulse there might stay if she refused to let go.

I stayed inside her while the warmth lasted. I kissed the opened line at her throat with a mouth that, for those breaths, was almost kind. She turned enough that I could see her face, dirt on her cheek, eyes wet, and she looked at me as if I were a man who might walk her home.

“You looked alive,” she said. “Do it again. Stay long enough to do it again.”

I moved in her slowly, the mess of my come making the slide filthy and easy, and I felt the living color already beginning to leave my hands. I told her that I would thin when the sky changed. I told her that loving me was a feeding, and that feeding always ended, and that if she tried to hold the pulse I had stolen she would find her arms empty and the gates still locked. She listened. She kept me inside her anyway, rolling her hips in a small, stubborn circle, as if pleasure could be an argument. I put my forehead to her hair and breathed a breath I would not get to keep, and I fucked her in those last warm minutes with a tenderness that hurt us both.

When I finally withdrew, come slid down the inside of her thigh, pale in the thinning dark. I wiped it with my fingers and put those fingers in her mouth, and she sucked them clean with her eyes on mine, claiming the evidence.

Dawn came the way it always came for me, as a thinning. Julia sat up among the graves and pulled her coat around her, and I could already see the gravel through my own wrist when I reached for the glass eye where it had fallen from her hand. I put it back into her palm and closed her fingers over it. The portrait-doll stare looked out from between her knuckles, still faintly warm.

“There is a deconsecrated convent behind the brick hospital in the north of the city,” I said. “You must not go there.”

She looked at me the way she had looked at the locked gates, already deciding. The hunger had not left her. I could see it in the way she touched the opened seam at her throat, which had lengthened in a clean, terrible line, porcelain and blood together, a cost she would carry out of this place. I was already less than a man kneeling in front of her. The frost showed through me. She leaned in and kissed the air where my mouth had been, and I felt it as a last feeding, small and insufficient.

“You told me not to keep you,” she said. “I am leaving anyway. That does not mean I am done.”

I could not answer with a body anymore. The dawn took the rest of me the way it always did, a fading from the edges inward, the stones remaining, the work remaining. Julia stood. She walked the closed path toward the wall she had climbed, the glass eye in her fist, the open seam on her throat, the convent’s name already seated in her like another kind of heat. She was in love with someone who could not stay, and the hunger went with her.