Wrong Side of the Tracks

Author's Note: I wrote this story for the Beyond the Wall of Sleep Gothic horror story event, a rare but gleeful dip into the genre for me. Thank you to blackrandl1958 for inviting me to participate, and to Etaski for the mutual beta/proofread. Hope you enjoy!

*

Pittsburgh, 1958.

The slightest tremor shivered the floor under his feet as the train went thundering past, outside. The wheels chanted over the tracks: follow me home, follow me home, follow me home.

Some part of Mason Locke registered the vibration through the soles of his shoes, but that part didn't bother troubling the rest of him with the mundane. When the clatter of passenger cars faded, the pelting of rain on the windows out in the hallway took its place.

The rest of him sat with furrowed brow at his desk, gooseneck lamp making a cone of yellow light over the insurance application in his hands. The legibility of the applicant's handwriting made him squint and frown. The only other light in the room came from outside, through the frosted glass pane that took up the top half of his office door, but visibility was not the problem. This man's chicken scratch was.

Mason coughed again and put a fist to his mouth, even though there was no one else in his office to offend. If this kept up, it would be a trip to the drugstore on the way home. And of course, he'd forgotten his umbrella, because why should he remember a thing like that when it had been raining on and off for days?

'Byrne', the chaotic scrawl in the Applicant field seemed to spell. 'Edgar Byrne', if Mason was making any sense of it. He was going to have to get this Mr. Byrne on the telephone and clarify some of what was on this form, if there was any hope of offering the man a legitimate rate, at all. If he could make out the phone number.

He set the form aside and rubbed at his eye sockets with his fingers, elbows resting on the desk.

There were footsteps in the hall. The lightweight click of heels that wasn't male; a more intentional staccato to the quiet, vast rhythm of the rain.

Mason reached for the receiver of his telephone just as the steps halted outside the barely-ajar door to his office. An eye flicked to the sound just as a blurred shadow fell over the glass.

The door swung inward and there was a woman, unfamiliar. Black skirt to her knees, white blouse, dark hair. Surreal, perfect red lipstick that was the only bright color in the room. Mason's train of thought was still switching tracks while she shut the door behind herself.

"Can I help you, Miss?"

Hadn't he seen her in the building? Perhaps on another floor, at least once or twice in the last few weeks? And where was her jacket in this weather?

Most visitors came with paperwork in hand, but she carried nothing and moved straight for the end of his desk that pointed at the door.

"Miss?" He tried again, swiveling his chair to give her full attention. "Is there something I ca—"

She'd stepped right up to him, right into the air he was breathing. Her eyes were huge and dark, as though they welled over with stories. Motion never stopped, and she went from standing to kneeling, her stockinged knees on the floor as he scrabbled back out of the way, shoes propelling the wheels of his chair until the back rest met a filing cabinet with a metallic clunk.

"Miss, wha—"

The woman closed the gap and was between his panicked knees. His eyes shot to the closed door and back, and he gripped the arms of the chair.

"What are you—Miss!"

Her hands were on his belt! Fingers working the buckle!

He moved to swat her outrageous reach aside, but she brushed away his stammering and frantic hands, a sea washing over drowning screams. Languid. Indifferent.

She had his shirttails out, his fly apart, all while his mouth was open in horror. The urge to grab narrow shoulders and push her away broke on the shores of astonishment. She had his briefs down, and her head bent.

"Miss, I don't kn—oh!"

He was in her mouth!

Knuckles white on the chair arms, blood rushed to what must have been the hottest furnace in the building. Asleep and soft, his cock twitched and plumped awake. Filling that wet cavity.

The woman showed no signs of anything but forward momentum, and Mason could no longer make words. He could barely make his lungs go.

She was—!

He was—!

Oh god, and she sucked him like she was starving for it! Red lips in a wider 'O' now, as his prick didn't know a fifth-floor office from a motel room and had risen all the way to the occasion.

Mason tried to breathe, but it came out a choked groan and his eyes rolled back. His chair wheels made metallic little squeaks over the floor in time with the bob of her head.

The door wasn't locked. Someone could come in at any ti—

"Mi—hunnh!"

And what the Christ was she doing to his balls?

He dared a look and could hardly handle it. Her cheeks hollowed with her work, one manicured hand clutching him around the base. She fed him past full lips and a busy tongue again and again, dark eyes rising to meet his.

Something spilled out of her then. It doused him, slicking down confusion and panic. Some cool, settling thing that made his shoulders drop and his tailbone shift lower on the seat. Mason stopped fighting and offered his cock. Gave it to her, she could do with it whatever she wanted.

Against all reason, what this woman wanted was to suck. He spread his knees wider, trousers webbing tight under her moving wrist. The surreal held his entire focus.

Slick and stiff, his organ disappeared into her mouth, over and over. Her tongue played scalding tricks, shifting and squirming over taut flesh, darting to taste the hole where he pissed, dipping to tag his sack.

His right hand had shifted to cover her left on his thigh. Did he remember making that move? Her fingers curled and nails dug into his trousers, Soft, moist sounds from the work of her mouth were a private solo over the rhythm of the rain.

The woman didn't stop when Mason's grip laced into her hair. Dark curls, crisp with hairspray, gave at the back of her head to the ruin of his palm. Twin lines of eyelashes fluttered down, intent, and he held her to the task.

What part of him was this? He didn't ask women for favors like this, let alone grab them while they were at it. He could barely look the girl at the train ticket counter in the eye.

But now he was grunting. Making low noises while a feminine brow, a cheekbone, a pearl earring bobbed in a nursing loop over his crotch. Mason wanted this. The sight, the scent, the control. The little hums from the back of her throat.

His fingers curled into a fist. She met his eyes.

Mason pushed her onto his cock. Held her.

After some quiet glottal noise, he let her off, but aside from a fine string of saliva lolling from shaft to lower lip, the woman bent, undeterred, and circled him again in that perfect red pout.

Down and down she went, her face too pristine, too beautiful to be anywhere near the nest of coarse hair, the musk of a huddled scrotum. He palmed the back of her skull and stuffed himself in to the root. Claimed that hot, sucking hole.

There were wet clucking sounds, sputtering as she gagged around him. Her hands did nothing to fight it, though, and Mason, a different man in the moment, fucked up into that sticky, bucking throat like he was in the middle of a Roman orgy and not an office with an unlocked door.

She could only hold on now, hands gripping his thighs while he rode her pretty face. His backside bunched in steady time to the quiet squeaks of his chair, base instincts to feed the meat upward, to scrub himself past tongue and teeth and plumb deep to where yielding tissue kissed and squeezed.

He could feel it building in his balls. Would she squeal if he shot it down her throat? Would she cough, and her face turn red?

Both hands guiding her now, and the woman accepting. Clinging as she let him violate. So good, so good, and he just. Needed—

Steps in the hall. Male. They stopped at the door, along with Mason's heart. His pumping.

Don't come in here.

She took up for him, reckless, swallowing him down to the base. Mason ground his teeth against every small, wet sound that might warrant unwanted attention, while his eyes rolled back at her vigor, at the fear prickling his skin.

The man in the hallway was talking to someone else, the bass in his voice a murmur. A threat.

Please, don't come in here.

Her hand was on him again, jerking his cock from the base, coaxing, milking. Shoes shuffled outside, mere feet away from where Mason sat, balls-deep in some strange woman's mouth on company time.

Christ, don't com—

Everything seized.

GOD!

And then pulsing, scalding light.

He wanted to turn inside out. Parts of him were trying. A mouth worked, ceaseless, and he spurted into it, biting his lower lip nearly in half to keep from loosing the roar in his lungs. Oh god. Oh god, she kept sucking! Swallowing! Tugging! He was sure some small thing might burst inside his skull, or he might stamp his foot on the floor from having to keep silent.

Too sensitive! Holy shit!

The footsteps outside ventured off, and Mason let out a shuddering breath. The labor in his lap slowed and became gentle. Soothing. He stared at the ceiling, head on the back of his chair, jaw slack.

While he slumped in a haze, soft lips and tongue cleaned the guilty member in his lap. Lungs resumed some normal pace beneath his ribs, and he only lifted his head when he felt the small jerks of leather that meant she was buckling his belt again.

Mason stared at the woman, who moved to stand, palms on his thighs for support, painted red lips impossibly unsmeared. Dark eyes searched him, and the first question rose is his throat, but she was at the door. Through it. A glance over a shoulder as she slipped away down the hall.

He blinked into the vacuum she left. One reality had derailed into another, obscene and ludicrous, and then jerked back into line again so fast it might have been a hallucination.

But he shifted to sit upright, and his cock was still damp in his pants.

"What the fuc—"

A new round of coughing seized his dry throat. Worse than earlier, and he pounded his chest with a fist. There was a watercooler at the end of the hall, but Mason bent double, his shoulders quaking over his desk, eyes burning. That deep trill in his chest with every bark.

And something was in his mouth, making it worse. On the back of his tongue, some wet wad.

Between hacks, he forced fingers between his teeth. Reached while his throat still convulsed and found the offensive something. When he slid it out over his tongue, he could only squint, lip curled, at the wet thing plastered to his fingertips.

Amid subsiding coughs, he brought his hand into the light from the desk lamp. A dun-colored triangle; serrated on one edge. He rubbed it between finger and thumb.

Newsprint?

How ...

He peeled the thing up and turned it, but there was no print on either side. Only a thin, watery streak of blood that stuck the inexplicable paper scrap to his thumb.

Mason exhaled, long and deep.

Mystery women. Bloody pieces of paper. Clients' handwriting he couldn't read.

He needed to get out of there. It was close enough to five o'clock; no one would hassle him. Edgar Byrne, or whatever his name was, could wait until tomorrow. Mason flicked the scrap of paper into the wastebasket.

Lamp switched off, hat and coat collected from their hook, the besieged actuary left his office behind.

At the end of the hall near the elevator, another door stood open, and a lanky blond man sat inside at a similar desk to Mason's. He'd rolled his shirtsleeves up and was scanning through a pair of horn-rim glasses back and forth between a life table and some other densely printed sheet of paper.

Mason stopped at his door. "Say, Wynn."

"Yeah, Locke." The other man didn't look up from his work.

"You seen a new girl in the building?" He re-draped his coat over his forearm. "Dark brown hair? Big eyes? Maybe down on the third floor, or something?"

Wynn swiveled his focus to his colleague. Pale blue eyes blinked at him. "No. Not that I can think of," he said. "There's that blonde down in the lobby, but ..." The man shrugged, acknowledgement that the description didn't match. "Why?"

"Eh." Mason vied for indifferent tones. "Saw her passing in the hall. Wasn't sure if she was a secretary, or ..."

"No idea." Wynn turned back to the tables.

"Well," said Mason, "have a good night."

"Night."

He coughed again, waiting for the elevator.

Had that woman even been real? The things she'd done, kneeling in his office, had felt real enough. But why? Who was she? Where had she come from?

You didn't do a damn thing to stop her, either. Just sat there like a pervert. Grabbed her hair.

And that scrap of paper?

Mason Locke did not enjoy dealing in unknowns.

He enjoyed it even less when they came from himself.

*

Every squeak of his office chair as Mason shifted at his desk throughout the day was another uncomfortable reminder of the woman and what she'd done. The Incident, as he was now mentally referring to it, had occurred a full week ago, and yet here was his prick, still jumping at every tip-tap of high heels that went past his door.

He'd seen neither hide nor hair of the brunette since, other than on the backs of his eyelids while he alternated between furious masturbation and shame, each night. And on Friday, both of those things at once in the fourth-floor washroom, just after his lunch break.

The clock to the right of his office door told Mason it was nearly six, which suited him just fine. There had to be some demarcation to his recent daze of work-eat-sleep. Even the coughing had become background noise. Since the Incident.

At least he hadn't hacked up any more strange little pieces of paper.

How was a man supposed to concentrate on actuarial tables and insurance rates after a thing like that?

His inquiries around the building had produced no results. He'd probably been less circumspect than he would have liked, but that mania, that desperation to make sense of it, had him in a grip. No one had seen a woman of that description. Not in the typing pool, not among the switchboard operators. Not even—heaven forbid—among the sometime-visiting wives of the executives.

If Mason had imagined the whole thing, well then ... then he was going to have to go see a doctor about a lot more than this cough.

As if summoned with the thought, tissues in his throat rubbed together, dry, and he barked into a fist. There was already an empty bottle of cough syrup in the wastebasket. He'd have to pick up another on the way home.

That's three this week.

Mason cleared his desk and retrieved his hat and coat.

At the end of the hallway, when he turned to say 'good night' to Wynn, the door was closed, the office dark on the other side of the glass. Mason hadn't heard him leave, but then he also hadn't heard much over the noise in his own head for the last few days.

He pressed the call button for the elevator and waited. His shirt and tie and trousers a shell inside which Mason felt imaginary. As though yes, his head and hands were in on the façade act but, past the seals of collar and cuffs, there was nothing else of him inside. A void. An empty recording of a beating heart.

When the car arrived on his floor and he swung the door open, however, the very real clutch of that same heart in his chest yanked him straight back into the viscera of reality.

She was there.

On the other side of the scissor gate, in a grey dress and jacket. Clutching a small purse. Smiling quietly in scarlet.

Why, when Mason had at least a dozen questions, did he want to turn and run down the hall to the stairwell?

He pushed the gate open, instead, and stepped inside the car, pulling it closed behind him. Pressing the button for the lobby out of habit.

Coat and hat like a shield, he turned to the woman, his mouth coming open before he knew what would come out of it.

"You came to my office the other day." Some mysterious part of him supplied words. "And I ... I don't know ..." Poorly.

Eyelashes fluttered to the floor as the car descended, and shy spots of color bloomed on porcelain cheeks. How did a man talk about something like this?

She was the one who did it!

He tried a different tack. "What's your name?"

Now she did look at him again, as though he were the sun breaking rainclouds. Dark eyes were huge, and she faced him.

"It's May," she said, the words full and heavy like some endearment he hadn't earned. Her lips never sealed back together, but if she had more to say, it didn't come.

There was less space between them, though whether he'd moved or she had, Mason couldn't tell. The car should be groaning to a stop in the lobby, but it rode on, descending.

Those eyes swallowed all his attention, hypnotic. He'd last seen them looking upward for approval while he'd disappeared into her mouth. The hem of her dress brushed at his trousers and the woman stood on her toes. Her lips were so red. Painted perfect. He wanted to smear them. She tilted her head.

The beginnings of the kiss carried so much weight; a boulder tipping somewhere high on a plateau. Her breath and his, drawn in together at the warmth, the spark of it again. And then the tipping point. The fall.

They were tumbling in it, his tongue in her mouth, her fingertips curling on his chest. His free hand was on the back of her neck, and Mason didn't know whether he'd let her go if she tried to pull away. Some primitive instruction written in muscle and bone told him to pry her open, to get inside where it was warm and wet.

And May yielded, sweet tongue meeting his, soft flesh, bound in brassiere and dress and jacket, pressing to him. Her purse hit the floor of the car, a dull thud against the grind of moving cables. A delicate hand was between them, fumbling at his belt.

Mason inhaled and his eyes came open. Any version of him who hadn't lived this last week would have stayed her hands, would have tried to be something of a gentleman. They were in an elevator, for Pete's sake! But the only version of him here now had suffered through several agitated, sticky nights asking 'Who?' and 'Why?' of empty rooms, and none of those questions mattered now, because here she was again, and he could have more.

More of May.

His hat and coat fell in a heap on top of her purse. His hands were about her waist in a grip, and the feminine squeak she let out when Mason spun her to face the wall went straight to his cock.

He was crowding her, hot breath in the crook of her neck like a beast while he worked at buckle and fly one-handed. Finishing the job she'd started.

The elevator descended, impossibly. They should have been on the ground floor long ago, but Mason ignored it.

His prick was out in the open air, poker stiff and in hand. He leaned in, rucking the grey wool of a skirt, the satin of a slip up over stockings, over a gartered bottom. May's hands were in the thick of it, wriggling panties past her hips.

As soon as the fabric was clear, a taut bridge between her thighs, Mason fit himself close. She braced her palms on the wall and stood on her toes, lifting that bare backside.

He didn't even look. Just aimed his cock with a fist, smeared around for that other wet mouth between her legs, and pushed.

Inside her again. Yes.

She moaned, one cheek against the wall, red lips parted, and Mason fucked her.

If her mouth had been heaven, there were no words for this. He rooted into her body over and over, spine hunching like an animal. Her dress rumpled around them, hiding the obscenity from view while her pussy took his violation with a kind of aggressive surrender a mouth could never match.