Pale Shadow

II.

Later, she woke, or seemed to wake. It was like dreaming that you have awakened. For a moment, Tara could not recall what had aroused her from her rest. And then it came again, that touch of an impalpable hand, combing through her fiery mane. It was oddly soothing, and strangely, she could not actually feel the brush of invisible fingers combing through her curls. It was like the insubstantial caress of the breeze, combing long meadowgrass . . .

Something was lying atop her, a ghost of weight: cool, moist, softer than any softness she had ever known. Now those incorporeal fingers were at her bare breasts, fondling, fingering . . . she looked down in vague wonder to see the tender flesh of her breasts indented by the grasp of hands she could not quite actually feel. . . . Then a cool moistness caressed her breasts and captured her thrusting nipples like a ghostly mouth. The warmth of desire flickered through her loins; her thighs parted.

The strangest element in this uncanny visitation was that Tara felt neither fear nor alarm, still deep in the spell of that dreamy lassitude. Something like cool fingers entered the core of her being, then an eager moistness like a phantom tongue. She gasped, moaned, yielded ...

Some sense of strangeness had roused Evalla from her rest, too. She went to the doorway of the room that would not permit her to enter in, and cried out faintly, for a pale shadowy shape lay atop Tara’s naked body, like a wraith of cool mist. Tara turned her head sleepily to observe the child cringing in the doorway.

“Do not . . . come in . . . darling,” she whispered. “Everything is . . . all right ... go ... to sleep ...”

Evalla shrank back, shuddering, then returned to her little room to crouch in a corner fearfully, helpless to intervene. From the other chamber there came to her hearing panting moans, soft cries of pleasure, as Tara’s passion mounted under the moving moistness of that pale shadow that made phantasmal love to her body.