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James finally fell asleep, sitting against the wall in his cell. It was a fitful sleep, and he started awake more than a few times. And every time he opened his eyes, there was Miranda. Or, rather, the husk of what had been Miranda, staring at him with her empty eyes, bullet hole clearly visible in her forehead. The corpse was situated in the cell with him, in its crude box, to torment him.
Wretched nightmares plagued him when he finally managed to drift away again.
But then, he was suddenly in the Hamiltons' dining room in London. Thomas was absent, but Miranda was there. She was still pale, deathly, the red stain still there on her forehead. But she was standing on her own and smiling her sorrowful smile.
"You yet live?" James asked. He was dressed in his old uniform, he noticed, but Miranda was wearing the unassuming dress of Mrs. Barlow.
"I do not", she replied, her mouth not moving as she spoke. "But I may live again, if you help me. When you wake, embrace my body. Make love to me."
"I could not..." James stammered. "Your corpse?"
"Do it, and I shall cease being just a corpse. I will return to you, James."
James started awake and was greeted again by the empty stare of Miranda's unseeing eyes.
"Make love to me!" said a voice somewhere, and echo of the Miranda in the dream.
It had been different from the other nightmares, he thought. It had felt so real. Had it really been her spirit talking to him?
He sat there for a while, his battered body heavy and groggy, debating the depraved thing that the dream apparition had told him to do. The instructions had been clear, but it would be truly evil to follow them. If he did it, and his vision had been just a nonsensical dream, he would be desecrating a corpse. The earthly remains of the woman he had loved.
But if he did not do it, and the dream had indeed been true, he would be denying Miranda a chance to live again. He would be effectively killing Miranda, as surely as the guard's bullet had killed her. It was no choice at all, not if there was even the smallest chance it was true.
James pushed himself up from the cold floor and walked to where Miranda was stood, in a wooden box, almost upright. Gently, he picked up the rigid body, and he laid her on the dirty straw on the floor of the cell. It was still the middle of the night, he thought, and no one would come here before morning. He gathered Miranda's skirts in his hand and gently pulled them up.
She was dead. There was no denying it. Her entire body was stiff, her skin grey, her eyes glassy. James sighed and gritted his teeth, then leaned to close her eyes. Now, it was at least possible to imagine her having closed them in her pleasure, concentrating on the feelings in her body.
He dropped his trousers and tried to see her in his mind as she had been. Joyous, intelligent, so uninhibited. The things she had taught him, the experiments they had done together. He rubbed himself as he thought of Thomas, hot and desperate in his need, and of Miranda, slow and insistent. He managed to get hard.
She was cold when he knelt between her stiff legs and positioned his cock on her lower lips. She was not wet like she had always been in these moments, and he had to spit on his cock, wanking it a little to stay hard despite the grim desperation that was driving him to do this. Finally, he repositioned himself and started to push in.
It was different from any other time with her, not only because of the terrible circumstance or of the cold stiffness of her limbs and torso. The inside of her was stiff too, cramped, slippery only from James's own saliva. It was not hot and pulsing like it usually was, but as James pushed in, he felt a terrible guilt at enjoying the rigidity of her muscles, the unnatural squeeze of her dead cunt.
Her body jerked as he started to thrust, the rigidity keeping her head from lolling and her limbs from flopping. The corpse was moving as a whole, in time of his reluctant thrusts. But there had been no time for intimacy during their journey, hardly even a private moment to relieve himself, and James found himself hard and frantic now, fucking into the dead body of his lover with increasing urgency. As the act went on, he was no longer just performing a ghastly ritual to save her. He was pleasuring himself, taking his joy in the cold dead body of the woman he loved.
The saliva ran out a few times and he had to wet himself more, her cunt unable to produce any wetness now. But the tightness never abated, and he could stimulate himself more by changing the angle of his thrusting slightly, and the heat of his cock was starting to warm the insides of his deceased lover so that she was no longer distractingly cold.
After only a few minutes, James could feel his pleasure rising, shamefully hot considering the terrible act he was committing. He made long, slow thrusts inside the coolness of Miranda's insides. Then he had to increase his pace, moving in fast, jerky thrusts. Finally, the stimulation was too much, and he felt his loins tightening, heating. And he spilled inside the corpse, his release pumping out in pleasurable spurts, the sweetness of this joy momentarily occluding the desperate situation he was in.
When his pleasure faded, he leaned his wearied head against Miranda's shoulder, slumped against her unmoving body, and wept.
A tender hand touched the back of his neck, petting him.
"Hush", Miranda said softly. "There's no need to cry."