Chapter 2: Laughing in The Face of Death
"Would madame care for another round?" asked the bartender, spotting Phantasma as she staggered over to the crowded bar of the "Golden Room" lounge. The room was packed, and not just because of Phantasma's impromptu performance on the room's grand piano. There was some sort of convention going on at the Hotel, and already busy staff had their hands full keeping up with the patrons' demand.
"Ain't ya gonna card me, Lloyd?" Phantasma asked rhetorically, and laughed.
She'd already had five shots so the damage was done anyway. Phantasma had started the evening with a "six feet under" someone had left at the piano as a tip, then followed that with a pair of "embalmer's delights". She was taking song requests for drinks after that, even though her fingering was getting sloppy. A "Great Old One" and the "icy scythe" that followed had finally convinced her to step away from the ivory keys for the evening and try her luck on the dance floor instead.
"Gimme something to put some pink back in my cheeks, hahhhHA!" Phantasma guffawed. She'd never been anything but blue her entire existence, seeing as she was a phantom rather than a proper ghost. She'd never been alive to begin with, not that she felt she was missing out on anything. Who needed to keep track of all that breathing, and pumping blood around your body, and that nasty business with the waste excreting? Not this phantom! Phantasma had her friends and she had her drinks and she had her music, and who needed more from an unlife than that?!
"Your playing was singularly exceptional, miss. I had quite a few patrons asking if you were available for a private party after you finished in the lounge."
"Huh? Was I talking out loud again?" Phantasma asked, punctuating the remark with a violent hiccup that released a gin-flavored bubble to float in the air over the bar. Lloyd the bartender didn't comment, merely continuing to stare at her from across the bar with professional indifference.
"Class act all the way, Lloyd. That's why you're the best in the business. (Hic!) So where was this private party at?"
"They left this, miss." Lloyd slid a business card across the polished oak, on the back of which written a room number. '732'. Phantasma studied it carefully, forcing her eyes to focus.
"Thanks, Lloyd!" Phantasma grinned, showing entirely too many teeth. But why shouldn't she be happy? This could be the big break that everyone was always talking about. That's what this concert tour was for, right? Play enough abandoned churches, dusty mausoleums, dingy cemeteries and lonely old mansions and eventually you get 'discovered'. This could be her one chance to impress some bigshot underworld producer!
If only she weren't so drunk!
By the time Phantasma had made her way through the sea of ghosts, specters, phantoms, wraiths and spirits socializing at the Overlook, the young musician had convinced herself that she'd been able to shake off the effects of the alcohol. She was young, she had a strong constitution. Stopping in the hallway outside the room, Phantasma found a mirror and double checked her appearance.
Her usual blue and white pompadour had been grown out and styled for the tour, curls of hair artfully spilling around her shoulders. Silver jewelry adorned her elegant neck and hung from her ears, accenting a touch of purple eyeshadow (she had Sibella to thank for that). The strapless dress showed a lot of back and all of her shoulders. Phantasma didn't think she had the body to pull it off, but her friends had supported her every step of the way. Now that she had several shots of courage in her, she finally agreed with them. Bony? No! her torso was *elegant*. Her contours sharply defined perhaps, but that's just the sort of classical Victorian beauty Phantasma was gifted with. So what if she wasn't rocking the D-cups like Sibella or Elsa? Phantasma preferred to see her breasts as "pert" or "perky". And besides, a good bra and a little padding in the front of her dress had worked wonders to present the illusion of cleavage.
"Okay Phantasma, you can do this," she told herself, psyching herself up. She crossed both her fingers, bit her bottom lip and whispered "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice," for luck. Then she knocked on the door.
"Hi!" Phantasma greeted in her cheeriest voice. The tall, grey-skinned giant that had opened the door remained unfazed. "Is this the private party? I'm the... entertainment?"
The doorman lurched aside, ushering Phantasma into the room. She crossed the threshold with some trepidation, double-checking that the number on the door matched '237' as she'd been instructed. Yep, this was definitely the place alright... but it wasn't at all what Phantasma had expected.
The dress code for the party appeared to be black leather, of the skin tight variety. Except where it wasn't. Random segments of pale flesh were left exposed through the fetishy gimp-suits, leaving a breast exposed here, a buttock there, a roll of flab with more piercings than a shower curtain hanging out in places that made even less sense. Phantasma knew she was staring, but she couldn't help it. Someone brushed past her and she nearly screamed from the brief contact with their clammy, sweaty flesh.
"Uhh..." Phantasma squeaked, searching desperately for a piano or organ to play. Anything to give her a sense of purpose for being in that room, before somebody came around and gave her a new function. But everywhere she looked, there were people in black leather skirts without tops, mesh tops without bottoms, and hooks piercing flesh. It was then that Phantasma noticed the other guests, strapped in to harnesses and bound against pillars, writhing in place while the black-leather types tended to them.
"Welcome," spoke a deep feminine voice, oddly distorted. Phantasma nearly swallowed her tongue in surprise. Thankfully she didn't (that would've been awkward) but did managed to turn and force a smile for her hostess. The first thing she noticed were the pins in the woman's neck holding the flaps of her vertically split throat in place, her vocal chords visibly vibrating like an excited vulva whenever she spoke. It was only a second later that she realized the woman was completely bald, but really that seemed like a secondary concern by that point. Phantasma gulped awkwardly, but her hostess remained nonplussed.
"You look tense. Can I offer you a refreshment?"
"Yes!" Phantasma jumped at the offer, grabbing a tumbler of dark green liquid off a platter the hostess gestured towards. So much for sobriety. She gulped it down, the pleasant apple flavor bringing some much needed calm to her jittery nerves.
"This way please," her hostess gestured, leading Phantasma deeper through the maze of twisted pain and pleasure. Phanty had met ghosts who still carried the wounds of their deaths with them before, like an axe protruding from their chest or a noose still dangling from their neck. But she'd never before seen anything so *deliberately* self-inflicted. Or made to be so blatantly sexual.
"one more for the road," Phantasma giggled, throwing another drink down the hatch. Weird fashion aside, these people at least had excellent taste in liquor. And it was doing the trick, too. The first had calmed her, the second loosened Phantasma up enough that her usual bubbly personality was coming out again. She *wanted* to play music for these people. She wanted to sing! She was gonna be a star!
"What a wild party!" Phantasma said aloud, drifting into the air and floating through the room rather than walking. The hostess paid her no attention, as long as she was generally following along behind her.
Phantasma drifted over to one of the spirits bound tightly to a bed. She goggled openly at the girl, probably younger than herself even, thrashing about and howling under the expert treatment of the fetishists. The girl came down from her insensate state just long enough to be annoyed at Phantasma eyeballing her, and snarled. "Your mother sucks cocks in HELL!"
"Naw, my mother sucks cocks in Rhode Island. You must be thinking of someone else." Phantasma snickered back at her, impervious to her meager attempt at an insult. She felt a tug at her ankle and noticed the hostess had plucked her from the air and was pulling her along like an errant helium balloon. "Oops, gotta go," Phantasma waved goodbye to her new friend, "I've got a recital to give! (Hic!) HeeehahahohoHA!"
"The entertainment has arrived," the hostess announced her as they stepped into a side room a little less crowded than the first. Phantasma managed enough clarity of mind to realize that the man waiting for her here was the guy in charge and the one she needed to impress, so she stifled her laughter and planted her feet on the ground. At least until she got a look at him.
He was tall and equally as bald as the women, but his entire scalp and even most of his face was strewn with inch-long spikes that had been systematically inserted into his flesh. It would have been impressive if it wasn't the most ridiculous thing Phantasma had ever seen. She clapped both hands over her mouth to keep from bursting out into a laughing fit on the spot.
"So. You are here to... play," the pin-riddled man said in a flat monotone. Phantasma nodded, not yet daring to remove her hands from her lips. "How wonderful. I so look forward to hearing the sounds you shall produce."
Not seeing a piano or other musical instrument set up, Phantasma started to wonder just what he was expecting her to do.
That's when the Pin-head gentleman handed Phantasma a curious little music box of polished gold and brass. She didn't want to admit that she'd never learned how to play one of these before, but he must have sensed her hesitation. With a slight incline of his head he seemed to say, "give it your best try."
"Okay, I'll give it a shot," Phantasma shrugged, her drink-numbed fingers fumbling over the surface of the puzzling box. She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth (that always seemed to help when concentration was required), knitted her brow and prodded every little catch that her fingers could find.
"Uh... Hmm... Maybe? Nope..."
She was beginning to think this little box wasn't for making music at all!
"Aha! (Hic) Got it!" Phantasma cried out in triumph. The music box unfolded itself in her hand, revealing such intricate inner workings that she didn't even notice the room growing dark and the exits disappearing. Experimentally she brought the blossomed puzzle box to her mouth and attempted to blow into it, and gave a disappointed frown when it failed to produce a sound.
"Hey Pinhead, (hic!) I think you need to tune this thing- woulfff!" No sooner had she looked up than Phantasma found herself beset by chains that literally grew from the murky corners of the room-turned-dungeon. Suspended and bound in mid-air, her limbs stretched out into an "X", Phantasma realized she was caught like a fly in a spider's web.
"I like rattling chains as much as the next phantom, (hic!) but this isn't really giving me much room to perform." The pin-faced man said nothing, regarding her with a cool indifference. He lifted a wicked looking hook in his hand, touching its smooth curve against her cheek almost reverently.
"W-what's the big idea there chief?"
*RRRIIIIIIP!*
All at once the hook sliced down through Phantasma's expensive dress, tearing it in two. It caught her bra too, and Phantasma's modest bosom was suddenly freed. It was a sobering moment. The chains slithered across Phantasma's flesh, pulling the shreds of ghostly fabric away from her and leaving her in nothing but her white boots and bikini briefs. Phantasma was not the curviest girl, a bit of a twig really, but left to dangle there in all her glory she was grateful she was wearing one of her more flattering pairs of Phanties.
"Sheesh, you could at least buy me dinner first!" Phantasma said, mildly annoyed. "Look, I get it. This is showbiz, I gotta show a little skin, maybe take a tumble on the (hic!) casting couch. But don't you even wanna hear me sing?"
"My dear, tonight you will make such sounds the like of which no device is fit to record," Pinhead deadpanned, fixing her with a menacing glare as the hooks inched towards her smooth blue flesh once more.
"Just as long as they go platinum, haheheheha!"
"I don't think she fully grasps the gravity of the situation," the bald hostess remarked to her pin-headed companion.
"I shall remedy that," he spoke back, raising the hook to slash at their captive's belly. His arm swung down, the deadly metal hook making a wide arc before impacting Phantasma's ethereal body.
"HAHAHA!"
"Ssppbbttth-S-sorry, but that REALLY tickles!" Phantasma laughed, as the meathook poked around through her sensitive ribs. As sharp as it was, her otherworldly flesh simply wasn't capable of being cut. Pinhead tried again, with similar results. With each stab Phantasma's skin stretched and warped like blueberry gelatin before snapping back in place unharmed, eliciting a fresh peal of laughter.
"You did remember to sharpen our instruments, did you not?" Pinhead asked his second in command, to which the hostess gave a hurried, fearful nod. He turned back to the cackling, nearly nude Phantasma with a weary sigh. "We may need to take more drastic measures."
"H-hey, HAHAHAHA, c-cut that out, you scamps!" Phantasma scolded the living chains that continued to torment her middle with unsuccessful swipes at her nubile form. Each slash was painless but made Phantasma's ribs vibrate with laughter, her pert breasts jiggling with mirth. All this attention had made her nipples perk up as well, which the demonic chains didn't fail to notice. But the hooks were no better suited for piercing her nipples, succeeding only in pinching and pulling Phantasma's ice-blue tips to full stiffness.
"Fresh!" Phantasma giggled, then hiccuped another gin-bubble into the air.
That such a fragile, delicate thing could exist in their presence seemed to drive the chains mad. They thrashed about, flailing against the impervious form of the phantom girl. Pinhead empathized. "None of my instruments have been able to penetrate her flesh..." That sparked a thought. If he could not tear a hole into the girl, then he would use one she already had. He turned to the hostess.
"Bring me... the incubus."
Pinhead approached the squirming phantom girl anew, grabbing hold of her lithe blue legs as they kicked spastically in the air. Her boots had long since fallen off her feet, leaving her bare feet vulnerable to the chains' tickling torture. Phantasma continued to writhe and cackle, and he took a moment to marvel in her form. It had been many, many years since he had last held such a pure, untouched canvas. It held a beauty that appealed to him, if only in the potential it represented. Oh, the things he would do to her...
"Why dontcha slip these off and see the main attraction?" Phantasma suggested, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively and looking pointedly at her panties.
The clingy material of her bikini briefs slid down Phantasma's narrow hips, the delicate fabric moist with sweat. Her lovely labial lips were revealed, smooth and naturally hairless, parted just enough that her inner lips of deeper blue protruded slightly, teasingly. Her hips bucked, thrusting her pelvis forward, eager for more contact.
"C'mon! (hic) Show me what you got, big guy!" Phantasma challenged, her sex wet and ready. "I showed you mine, now you gotta show me yours! That's the rules. My friend Sibella told me so."
"I will show you entirely new worlds, girl." Pinhead snapped his fingers and the slithering chains coiled around Phantasma's legs, locking her thighs open in a spread eagle pose. More hooks appeared, and went straight for her waiting pussy.
"Oh, having a good look are we?" Phantasma laughed, her malleable flesh still invulnerable to the pain a human girl would have felt having her vaginal lips forcibly stretched apart. "EeeeeheheheHAHA! This had better get me the centerfold spread, haha!"
Despite her flippant attitude, Phantasma's azure-toned inner flesh was dripping ectoplasmic excitement onto the floor. She could scarcely wait for what was coming next.
"The incubus," announced the hostess, returning bearing a frightening phallic artifact of inhuman proportions. In proportions it was a closer match to a horse's member than a human's, in manner it looked closer to a medieval weapon crafted from the fever dreams of Spanish Inquisitors. Phantasma's eyes lit up.
"Gimme!" she grinned, her pussy squelching wetly in anticipation.
"...you're really taking all the fun out of this," Pinhead complained dryly.
"Awww, don't be like that nailface!" Phantasma said sweetly. She twisted around in her chains, turning her back to her captor and presenting her cool blue rump to him, demonstrating definitively that she could escape her bonds any time she truly wanted to.
"C'mon, show a girl a good time!" Phantasma hooted drunkenly, shaking her cool blue butt with back arched. Grabbing a pair of the living chains she forcibly clipped them onto her eager nipples, stretching her chest out to equally inhuman proportions. "You too, fellas. Just cause I don't have huge gazoongas doesn't mean a girl doesn't appreciate a little nipple play!"
Pinhead cast a dismayed look at his female counterpart, who had only a helpless shrug for him in reply. He took a deep breath, steeling his resolve, and readied his implement of torture. It was his duty to see this through to the end, come Hell or high water. "Prepare yourself, waif," He said, his slate-cold voice lacking much of it's usual menace. "I'm going to tear your- te- TEAR YOUR SOUL APART!"
"Yeah yeah, I'll (hic) believe it when I see it!" Phantasma complained, planting her hands against the opposite wall and waiting impatiently for the promised penetration. "Quit yer yappin and get it IN there!"
Red-faced and furious, Pinhead drove the monstrous phallus into Phantasma's receptive quim with the force of a charging rhinoceros. It got about halfway in before Phantasma's delighted shriek made Pinhead, and everyone else, stop what they were doing and clutch their ears in pain.
"-EEEEEEEEAAAAaaaaahhhhh~ hey, why'd ya stop?" Phantasma complained.
"Child, WHAT was that NOISE?!"
"Oh, yeah, heheheh, I can be kinda loud in bed. Sorry. Heheeee!" Phantasma giggled like a maniac for a moment longer, her body vibrating with mirth that her tormentors didn't appreciate. Thankfully the incubus' barbed exterior kept it from being dislodged from Phantasma's depths, instead merely flopping about between her thighs like a demented tentacle. "Ahhhh, okay, I'm getting bored again. You gonna 'finish me off' or what? C'mon Pinhead, 'nail' me! Aaahhahahahaha!"
The dark lord of the labyrinth wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow, suppressing a growl of deepest frustration from escaping his throat.
"Deeper! Heeheehee-HAHAHA!" Phantasma cheered, urging more of the evil pillar into her cunt. Something was building within her. A delirium brought on by the dizzying alcohol, the tickling hooks tugging at her skin, the delicious pleasure of being stretched from the inside out by that monumental device between her legs. At some point it hummed to a life of it's own, vibrating and whirring as hidden gears and clockwork set the teeth of the thing churning up Phantasma's insides. Phantasma's head was spinning (at times, quite literally), her whole body tingling. She was as well acquainted with orgasms as any modern woman should be, but what was building now was something wholly DIFFERENT.
"Aha, hah, Aaaaah! Ha ha ha! Ahhhhh, yes, YES MORE PLEASE!" Phantasma screeched. The throat-slashed hostess winced at the distasteful sounds of mounting *pleasure*. "Oh wow, m-my PUSSY! Aheeheheeehehee! It's spinning and whirling and- and its'- aaahhhh YEAH!"
"Break, damn you! By Leviathan, you will break!" Pinhead swore, shoving the infernal device so deeply into Phantasma's vagina that her slender belly was stretched out in a rough outline of the phallus within. His ears throbbed with the sounds of her echoing laughter, but he would see this task completed. And then...
"It is done," Pinhead announced, defeated. The awe-inspiring mass of the Incubus was fully lodged inside the spectral schoolgirl. For the first time, Phantasma's delight vanished.
"What? No! There's gotta be more, there's just gotta be!"
Checking between her thighs Phanty confirmed the awful truth. The base of the artifact protruded past her lips by a mere fraction of an inch. That tantalizing, dizzying sensation she was chasing remained just out of reach.
"You are free to go," Pinhead admitted with shame evident on his face.
"Like Hell I am!" Phantasma snapped back. Her eyes were wild and unfocused. She slipped easily out of the grip of the chains, marching (well, waddling) straight for her captor.
"What are you- offff!"
Phantasma shoved the immortal torture-lord to the ground, straddled his hips, and planted her ass firmly against his pelvis. That did the trick; the grotesque metal prong inside her was wedged a centimeter deeper, and Phantasma edged equally closer to her goal.
"Grab my titties!" she demanded, and Pinhead was quite surprised to find himself palming her baby-soft B-cups. "Harder! twist 'em off if you can!"
"Haha, yeah! That's it! Now you're getting it!" Phantasma laughed convulsively. Her hips slammed down against her former dominator, using his pelvic bone as a hammer to nail the hellish dildo home into her womb. The others watching gasped at the spectacle of it, and even worse that it seemed to be *working*.
"Yes, yes, yyyyYYYYEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHH~!"
Phantasma's swollen, slippery labia closed up around the incubus, at last swallowing it whole into her tunnel. Her moment had finally arrived. And with it she kissed Pinhead right on the lips, drew back, and LAUGHED.
The ground shook. The walls bled. Every piece of glass present shattered in musical harmony. A flood of ectoplasm gushed out across Pinhead's leather-clad chest, and his female companion suffered a spontaneous nosebleed. Phantasma's laughter can still be heard faintly echoing through the halls of the Overlook hotel to this day.
"My word, miss, are you quite all right?" Lloyd the ghostly bartender asked with concern.
Phantasma had left the Gold Room lounge the picture of wraithly elegance. The young woman who walked back down an hour and a half later was wrapped tightly in black latex too crass for the most brazen of streetwalkers. And what's more, she looked like death warmed over.
"Yeah, Lloyd, I jus'... huh. Wow. I think I'm all laughed out, y'know? Had a helluva time up there." Phantasma carefully made her way up to the bar and took a seat, sitting down unusually gently. "Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure I even went to the right party."
"Can I get you anything? A little hair of the dog perhaps?" Lloyd asked, trying to be helpful. The teenage phantom was looking a little greener than her usual blue hue.
"Nah," she said weakly. "In fact... I'm really not feeling so hot. In fact... in fact I... oouhh, hhhlllpph!"
Before the bartender could scramble to grab a bucket or rush his patron into the ladies' room, Phantasma heaved directly onto the bar.
But rather than a mess of half-digested liquor, up came four inches of an obscene metal cock protruding from Phantasma's gullet. She coughed and the thing dropped onto the pristine bartop with a CLANK, laying there amidst a small pool of Phantasma's saliva. Lloyd looked at it, up to Phantasma's much relieved face, and back down at it again.
"Wild party," Phantasma gulped out, and collapsed forward onto the bar. Lloyd grabbed a rag and got to work cleaning up.
"They don't pay me enough for this shit..."