Get this: You and your partner are on a European tour of banging each other—hashtag eat pray fuck. The blue-green moor has sprawled around you for hours, so you reach the rusty gate of your English Airbnb rental as the sun sets and not a minute too soon. You’re both randy—you haven’t done sex in, like, twelve hours.
You drive past rank gardens and park your Prius behind a decrepit manor. Definitely not as described. Your partner pulls up the listing titled “Rustic Bohemian Getaway Amidst English Gardens! Complimentary Cake Included” and rates it one star.
“Are you ready to get boinked like you’ve never been boinked before?” you ask. Rooks gather as you read the Airbnb instructions, which just say, Strike the brass bell with the hammer, then proceed down the darkened passage.
Inside, finding yourselves alone, you guys start seriously making out with each other. You know, you’re doing Frenching and nipple play and everything, when you hear heavy breathing and the echo of footsteps. You freeze. “Who’s there?” your partner says, trembling. The only response is silence… and then a wild cry. Do you:
* Follow the noise to find out what’s going on? (Go to 1)
OR
* Run like hell back toward the exit? (Go to 2)
(1)
You follow the noise of the footsteps. In the dim passage, you are startled by a pale man with shitty teeth—the porter. “Room’s upstairs on the right,” he cackles, handing you the key. You pull up the collar of your North Face jacket and follow his instructions. (Go to 3)
(2)
You tear back through the dim passage. When you’ve almost reached the exit, you smack into a figure that appears out of nowhere—the porter, a pale man with shitty teeth. “Room’s upstairs on the right,” he cackles, handing you the key. You pull up the collar of your North Face jacket and obey his instructions. (Go to 3)
(3)
The stairway is draped with a fine lace. Dust glimmers above it, and green velvet coats the steps. Your partner slips, and you realize it’s not velvet but a living carpet of moss and mold, and what you took for lace is just layers and layers of cobwebs. Something faster than anything human scrabbles down the walls and disappears.
Under the flickering sconces, you come to a door crawling with large black beetles, which scatter as it creaks open. A mist floats through the room, revealing a banquet table laid with cobwebs, a great rotting cake, and a stack of fresh guest linens, like the pins on your “conscious clutter” Pinterest board. There’s a fire roaring in the hearth. “OMG, I love their staging,” your partner says, taking off their limited-edition Toms. “Now let’s do sex together on all the furniture that will bear our weight.”
You schtupp furiously. You’re enjoying each other so vividly that you almost don’t notice a new shadow joining yours on the floor. You hear low laughter and look up to see the veiled specter of a woman, with hair indistinguishable from the cobwebs towering above you. A silk bridal gown hangs from her body like tattered cathedral banners.
“Well don’t mind me,” she says in a grimly playful manner. “I’d like to watch you play.” The woman steps closer to you, one foot clad in a decaying stocking, a little white shoe on the other. Do you:
* Let her watch, because YOLO! (Go to 4)
OR
* Stop immediately because facing your own mortality is kind of a mood-kill? (Go to 5)
(4)
You and your partner continue fornicating, while your host watches. You’re naked and writhing in the cobwebs and your own wetness like horny little houseflies. After about a minute, your host walks over to the vanity and starts drawing on her eyeliner like a boss. Is she bored by your hot yuppie sex? (Go to 6)
(5)
You stop noodling each other and watch as your host walks over to the decaying vanity and starts drawing on her eyeliner like a boss. (Go to 6)
(6)
You put your clothes on and cautiously walk over. “Who are you?” you ask.
“Give me your hand,” she says, and places it on her chest. “What do you feel?”
“Your heart?” you guess.
“No. It’s my boob,” she says. “And it’s still firm and great, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to wax or a skeleton, because I’m only in my forties. I keep my shit tight with an exercise routine I call ‘walking in circles around the banquet table.’”
She turns away from the mirror, wearing fabulous theater-style eyeliner. Her dress is torn open to the navel, revealing her powdered breasts. A faint bolero plays. “You may call me Miss Havisham,” she says. “I’ll let you commoners in on a little secret,” she continues, rising from her rotting chair. “My whole life was ripped away from me once, by the two idiots I trusted most in the world. So I did what anyone would do.”
“You hired a good therapist?” you ask.
She cackles. “No. I adopted a little girl. I thought, I’ll be damned if I let the patriarchy use her as human property. So I taught her to play the game. And she’s damn good at it.” She picks up her crutch-headed cane and runs her fingers along its smooth, knobbed end.
“Of course, when Estella left, I found other ways to occupy my time.” She absentmindedly lifts her skirt, revealing a shredded pair of silk panties. You could call them crotchless.
“That’s when the orgies began,” she continued, caressing the silk. “My pleasure, on my terms—the most liberating type of healing.” She puts the tip of her cane to her mouth and runs her tongue along it. You can feel your face flushing as you look at Havisham’s bare nipples.
She sees your hungry eyes on her. “I’m an unchaperoned woman with power and property,” she says. “People around here literally don’t know what to do with me. But I bet you do.” She beckons you both to her black velvet couch and taps it with her cane. “Now you know where to take your stations to come feast on me.”
“So, we’re invited to the orgy?” your partner asks.
“It’s optional for our Airbnb customers,” she replies. “It starts at twenty minutes to nine. The other guests are arriving now. Cake is free either way.”
Just then, there’s a sound like beating wings outside the window, and you watch in horror as a pale, bluish hand touches the glass, frost etching its way outward from the fingerprints. The sound gets stronger, and through the haze you think you see white wings flapping. A burst of cold blows in, revealing a pale blue bearded face.
“A BRIDE!” he exclaims. “It must be my lucky day!”
“Oh for God’s sake, go around back.” Havisham closes the window on him. The cold has tightened her nipples. You look at your partner. Do you:
* Stay and participate in the orgy? (Go to 7)
* Pass for tonight and take your chances on the moor? (Go to 8)
(7)
The guests begin to file in, in various states of undress, and as the couplings begin, among the ethereal moans and supernatural pleasures, Miss Havisham begins to sing an old blacksmith’s song in her low, growling tone. “Old Clem,” she sings, keeping the rhythm for the guests. “Beat it out, beat it out—Old Clem. Blow the fire, blow the fire—Old Clem.”
And the fire in the hearth rages through the night, casting your pulsing shadows on the fog. (The End)
(8)
“I think we’re going to pass,” you say. “Group sex isn’t really something we are comfortable with yet.”
“That’s cool,” Havisham says. “You can stay in one of the other rooms.”
You decide to take a walk. Just outside the house, you hear Havisham singing an old blacksmith’s song in her low, gravelly tone, keeping the rhythm for her guests. The hearth rages, casting pulsating shadows on the fog. Farther out on the moor, you look back to see what appears to be flames engulfing the estate, and then… nothing.
Mr. Wopsle checked his pocket watch and realized he’d been banging on the gate for four pages.
“WOP-SUUUUUUUUL! WOP-SULLLLLLLLL!” he yelled, shaking the gate. Estella appeared out of the gray. Disdain was painted all over her pretty fucking face.
“Shit! Okay,” Estella said, unlocking the gate. She closed it behind Mr. Wopsle before another white character could be introduced.
She drifted ahead without pleasantries, stopping only to adorn a flickering candle. He followed Estella through the labyrinth of passageways—which felt like a metaphor but never followed through. Eventually, they came to an open door. Estella flipped him off and disappeared.
“You can do it, Wopsle!” he said to himself, and entered. Miss Havisham was so reclusive it made Boo Radley look like a Kardashian. She was wearing a yellowed wedding gown. Her veil connected to the floor, mimicking the cobwebs around her. On the dusty table was a mold-covered sheet cake with Congrats, bitch! written in pink icing.
“I’m Mr. Wopsle.” He bowed.
“Ah, how neutral.” Miss Havisham remained seated, weary from being the only interesting character. She began monologuing.
“I spend most of my days frowning at Estella in different levels of darkness. Other times I just gaze upon myself in the mirror and jack off onto one of my old save-the-dates.” She nodded wearily. “My time is my own. I can take thirty pages to describe how greasy my walls are and the reader just has to fucking sit through it. But, Mr. Wopsle, I have enough characters who don’t further the plot hanging around. Why are you here?”
Mr. Wopsle balled his fists and played at courage. “I’m merely a clerk at the church. But I practice sermon on my own accord—always improving my volume. It’s important for the people in the back to hear you,” he said.
“Well, God isn’t listening, so it’s proper they can,” Miss Havisham said.
Mr. Wopsle felt his face casting to blush. “But unless the church is thrown open I will never serve as priest. I am boarding in my aunt’s upstairs room, but my dream is to serve the theater,” he said.
“You’re living in your aunt’s attic until your acting career takes off? How LA!”
“Please! You gave Pip Great Expectations? I’m hopeful you’d bestow the same generosity on me,” he said.
“What the fuck are Great Expectations?” she asked.
“It’s like inheritance,” he said.
“Then why don’t people just say ‘inheritance’? ‘Great Expectations’ doesn’t even sound like what you mean it to mean. Anyway, I haven’t the theory why Pip carries on that way. I didn’t give him Great Expectations. I just co-signed his student loans. That shit will be fucking him for the rest of his life,” Miss Havisham said.
“Can you help me?” Mr. Wopsle’s wheezing had found him. And he was sweaty in each of his personal corners. Miss Havisham rose and touched his cheek with tenderness.
“Oh, Wopsle, I won’t start repenting for four hundred more pages. I’m sorry… this just isn’t your chapter.” She slapped him gently. “But this visit needn’t fall to waste.” She smiled with teeth like welcoming tombstones.
“It is in my service to visit a lonesome spinster.”
She slapped him less gently. “Lonely? Baby, I never put the cake away because I didn’t want the party to stop! I never wanted to get married. I just wanted to make Pinterest boards. But then I got ‘tragically jilted.’ That fuckboi gave me my freedom AND I have an excuse to ignore bridesmaid invites for the rest of my life! Do you understand how impossible it is for a woman to be free?!” She grabbed her ivory cane and hobbled to the head of the table. “This dress cost more than your church makes in a year and I don’t even take it off to shit. I just pull it over my head like I’m a silk tulip.”
Mr. Wopsle found himself flustered and pursued the woman. “The church doesn’t make money,” he said. “It’s all donation based.”
“Oh, I love Kickstarter!” Miss Havisham sat on the edge of the table. “But shouldn’t your funding window be closed by now? I mean, it’s been a while.”
Mr. Wopsle couldn’t accommodate his anger justly and it spilled into yells. “The church is not a fund. It’s a community where I hope to preach! Which I shouldn’t have to explain to the town’s shriveled oddity!” he said.
“I await your apologies, Clerk! My oddity is the liveliest thing about my condition! My strangeness makes me virile!”
Their faces grew close, shaking with anger.
“You are GRAVE, depressing—a withered leaf,” Mr. Wopsle said.
“The only thing the grave and I have in common is we’re both irresistible.” Miss Havisham stared at him powerfully and he shivered. She blew a long, dusty breath into Mr. Wopsle’s mouth and he felt his blood switch organs.
“Wopsle, would you like to touch my genitals?” she said.
He looked at his feet. “Shouldn’t we foreplay?” he asked.
“It took two hundred pages of exposition to get here. If this were the Canterbury Tales, I’d already be peeing you out!” She pulled her feet onto the table.
“I am a man of honor!” he said.
“No, you’re an actor,” she reclined.
“Yes, but if only the church were thrown open, I… I COULD serve.”
The skirt made soft cracking noises as she pulled it upward, revealing her full, personal treasure. She pointed at her labia with the cane.
“Then here is the church,” she whispered. She tapped at her clit gently. “Here is the steeple.” Her knees parted. “Throw open the doors… and take a nice mouthful!”
The cane acquainted Mr. Wopsle’s head and led him to dinner. His wheezing returned, filling Miss Havisham with vibrations.
“More nose!” she yelled.
Mr. Wopsle retreated a few inches and let his Roman nose slap great pleasure into her private fortune. His hands grabbed the gown’s hem and broke it with a crunch. He grabbed more. Crunch! More crunch! The dress crumbled in sections, littering the table.
“Preach!” she yelled. Mr. Wopsle spoke Revelation into Miss Havisham, bass tones so low they shook dust from the walls.
She was so light and frail, the pulsing from Wopsle’s tongue pushed her body away. He climbed onto the table to continue the occasion. With each glide forward, more of the dress broke off and crunched loudly like dry leaves.
“THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART OF FALL!” Wopsle yelled, stomping with his knees. He never broke rhythm, wheezing into her with quick falsettos and Great Exhalations. Miss Havisham hit the cake and started making an icing snow angel. She was so close! She started yodeling “Great Exclamations!” Her flailing arms knocked over the candles. They immediately caught on the dry dress fabric covering the table. Mr. Wopsle’s head engulfed in flame. She was even closer!
“I DOOOOOOOOO!” Miss Havisham screamed. Great Ejaculations covered the table, extinguishing the fire and saving Mr. Wopsle’s life.
He looked up. He had stars in his eyes and addressed her with dreams in his voice.
“M’lady! You… you goddess!” he said. Burns acquainted his face.
“I still got about four hundred pages before I’m nice,” she said. “Buuuuut the Uber pool I called when you walked in is only a block away now—so there’s that.”
“Corpse bride,” he mumbled, walking out.
Miss Havisham gazed at her rings and saw her smile reflected in each facet, feeling the joy of being tragically alone.