Mickey raised his voice. "Hey, guys -- over here."
The naked pair trotted silently to the bar. The taller, a dark-blond youth, introduced himself as Linc; the shorter, a crew-cut red-head with freckled face and shoulders, as Kristopher.
Up close, Mickey could see both looked solid enough -- athletically built, and not long out of their teens. Each carried a shiny, spherical helmet under one arm.
"Not quite the conventional costume for trick-or- treating, is it? But where are my manners: what'll you have?" Mickey asked.
"You have Halloweens and trick-or-treating on this planet too?" asked Linc.
"You're not from around here?"
"Hell, man," said Kristopher, the younger of the pair, "we don't even know where here is."
"Or when, either," said Linc. "Is it still Halloween? It was when we started, but that bug-eyed monster with tentacles took so long to finish us off, and . . ." He shook his head. "I just don't know where to begin."
"Begin at the beginning, and go on to the end. Then stop," said Mickey. "That's the advice King of Hearts gave." He turned to the counter behind him, took a gleaming white vase that held a single fragrant blossom, and put it on the bar between the two naked young men. "Here, this might help."
Kristopher sniffed cautiously at the blossom, then shook his head. "Can't smell a thing, but I can sort of feel whatever fragrance the thing's putting out, and it makes me want to tell you our troubles. And one of our troubles is that we can't drink anything either. Thanks.
Linc laid his spherical helmet on the bar, "It all started with trick or treating . . . and with these helmets, too." He put one arm around Kristopher's shoulders while the red-head put his own helmet on the bar beside Linc's.
"We were riding double on my old Harley through this little town in Indiana, and Kristopher was complaining that he was hungry --"
"Did not."
"You're always complaining that you're hungry, kid. Anyway . . ."
=========================================
And as Linc -- with occasional interpolations by Kristopher -- poured out his tale, Mickey somehow found himself there, in the scene as Linc described it, steering Linc's old motorcycle with his red-haired pal sitting right behind, going slow because trick-or-treat kids were scampering across the street in the gathering dusk, remembering Kristopher saying, "Well, if we're short on money, how 'bout we do a bit of trick-or-treating ourselves, pick up some candy, maybe even some home-baked cookies?"
"Okay, okay, if it'll keep you quiet, okay," Linc sighed.
"And we can use our helmets for the loot, 'stead of those little bags the kids are carrying."
"Fine." Linc braked the motorcycle in front of an ancient, mansard-roofed house, killed the engine, flipped down the stand, pulled off his motorcycle helmet, stepped onto the sidewalk, and took a deep breath of the cool October air.
As they walked toward the house, Linc heard Kristopher say, "Well, this one sure looks Halloweeny enough -- like something the Addams Family oughta be living in. At least, it doesn't look like it's falling down, even though it's something outta the 1880s."
"If not older," said Linc as they mounted the steps. He saw no doorbell, but when his hand neared a brass, dragon- headed door-knocker, he heard loud rapping echo through the house.
The woman who answered the door, dressed in pitch-black bombazine, looked down her nose at Linc and Kristopher. "Aren't you a bit old to be playing trick or treat?"
"We're hungry," said Kristopher.
"Hungry spacemen," said Linc, suddenly picking up the Halloween spirit. "See?" He held his helmet out to her.
"And certainly not from around here," said the woman. "The locals have learned better than to -- let's see what you two really look like." She reached into a pocket, pulled out a handful of -- of something that glittered darkly as she cast it toward Linc and Kristopher.
As the darkly glittering something hit the two, their clothes melted -- no, steamed away until they both stood naked in the cool October evening. She cast another handful, and Linc felt his own cock surge to full erection; he glanced to his side, saw that Kristopher was staring down at his own stiffened prong.
"Not bad. I've seen better, but not bad," the woman said, her voice still grumpy.
"Hey, look here," said Kristopher, "that leather jacket cost me a bundle. If you don't put it back --" He brandished his helmet -- the only items of clothing he and Linc still had.
"Wait," she said.
Linc shivered, not so much from the autumn chill in the breeze that eddied around his bare torso and stiff prong as from the menace in her voice.
"Spacemen, eh? I know just the place for the two of you." She cast a third handful . . .
. . . and suddenly Linc was standing elsewhere, on bare cratered rock. A glance showed him that Kristopher stood alongside, that a battered spaceship stood a few dozen paces away, and that a squirming tangle of tentacles was surveying the naked, hard-pronged pair with two enormous, stalked, slit-pupiled eyes from within a tentacle's reach of their naked selves.
Those tentacles abruptly did reach that far; Kristopher and Linc struggled and fought, but the tentacles were too strong to escape. Linc felt one tentacle slide into his ass, saw another do the same to Kristopher. A moment later, a third tentacle was enveloping Linc's glans; still another, his red-headed pal's. The tentacle on Linc's glans -- a feeding tube, he realized -- started sucking him off, sucking him off so expertly that he cared not that he was being eviscerated at the same time -- being eaten alive from the inside by the first feeding tube while the second slowly ground up and sucked away his glans, his shaft, and then both balls, along with occasional shots of semen and sperm. And when . . .
==============================================
". . . it was all over, I had shot my load two more times more'n you did," Kristopher crowed.
"That's just because you like playing with your balls almost as much as you like working on your cock," Linc grumbled. "Anyway, after the thing finished us off, we grabbed our helmets, made our way to the spaceport here, found your place, and came on in."
"So now . . ." Mickey adjusted his clothes. Linc's and Kristopher's tale had stiffened him up too, and he felt something wet and slippery on the tip of his still-hard prong.
Kristopher said, "Like I already mentioned, we prob'ly can't drink anything, but what we sure the fuck do need is a ride back to that little town in Indiana -- Wabash, I think the name was, but anywhere near there --"
"Dolly?" Mickey called.
"Yeah, Boss?" Dolly leaned out of the entrance to the back room.
"We got some passengers. Need to get back to Wabash --"
"The town, not the river," said Kristopher.
"When?"
"Halloween -- 2004."
"No problem." Dolly studied the naked pair at the bar for a moment more, then retreated to the back room, mumbling, "If I hadn't sworn off making it with ghosts after the last three times . . ."
"Then you really are . . . ?" asked Mickey.
"Yep. Ghosts," said Linc. He faded until he was almost transparent, then condensed back to looking normal again.
"Both of us," said Kristopher. "That's how we got through your locked front door. And 'cause we're ghosts, we could feel that here's where we oughta show up if we wanta get back to where and when we came from."
Mickey said, "Dolly has a better eye for that than I do, but I sort of guessed. What are you planning to do, once you get there -- get back there, that is? We can't put you down before you met the -- well, whoever she is -- paradoxes in the time-stream and all that -- but we can show up right afterward."
"Well, either she -- that woman, not Dolly -- either she brings us back to life, or we'll settle in for some heavy-duty haunting. Long as we're dead, there's nothing she can do to us, but there's lots we can do to her."
"I can imagine. Now -- while we're waiting --" Mickey displayed a spray bottle. "-- with this, I can offer you whatever you fancy -- you can absorb from the mist as it drifts through you. So -- it's still on the house, of course -- what'll you have?"