When Orla McCready went missing, everyone suspected her parents.

That was because the McCreadys were Christian fundamentalists whose piety was infamous. Isolated in their cottage down by Fairyhill woods, they kept Orla locked away at weekends, with the windows shuttered. She was never allowed to wear makeup, and her clothes were crudely secondhand. 

The ridicule Orla suffered at school would have been endless had she not been absent so often – whenever the curriculum was at odds with her family’s beliefs. So when she missed a week that February, no one gave it a thought.

It was only when the police turned up to interview Orla’s classmates that her disappearance became widely known. Her year teacher described Orla as ‘otherly,’ and a policeman minuted that description after a moment’s pause. The same policeman spoke to a cocky boy, Sean Mahon, who shared Orla’s route to school. What was she like? Blonde and pale. Pretty? Sean shrugged. Did he speak to her? Sean shrugged again and said she was strange; she’d float past you in the corridor; a sylph, a ghost. The policeman smiled at Sean’s imagination and said, look, she’s seventeen. Was she seeing anyone? Sean laughed. Who would touch Orla McCready and expect to get away with it?

They didn’t find a body. The case stayed open, but by April the tents had come down, the search parties thinned out and the TV cameras went home. Orla’s parents left. Theories sprouted in the space left behind. Most of the class thought Orla was beneath the cottage floorboards. Some said she’d fled the country. A woman whose garden was filled with gnomes claimed Orla was a visitation and set about building a shrine.

But to Sean Mahon, the secret lay in Fairyhill woods.

Months later, an impulse drew him there. He walked into the heart of the woods until the evening light, flickering between treetops, was snuffed out and his breath began to cloud.

He stopped. Ahead of him, dry leaves whispered and, level with his line of sight, a glowing spot swirled and evolved into a human form. It was Orla.

But it was not the version of Orla he remembered. Orla's blonde hair now flowed past her shoulders and was topped by a tiara of bark and cones that shone silver-blue in the half-light. Her lips were the red of wild strawberries; her eyebrows thick and shaped. She wore a chainmail dress that was incongruous with the Orla he’d known; it barely reached her hips and exposed long, pale legs, mottled with stains from moss and soil.

Orla looked at Sean with a thoughtful gaze that overcame him with an urge to shed his clothes. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled down his trousers and pants as if obeying an instruction. He had an erection that rose steadily between them like it was taking aim.

Orla came forward and kneeled. In one motion, she locked her fingers around Sean’s cock and began stroking.

She looked up. “It wasn’t a world for me, you understand,” she said. Her voice was richer and deeper than before, though her lips barely moved. “And now I’m going to suck the life out of you, Sean Mahon.”

Sean’s cock jumped at her words. Orla’s lips caught the frilled edge of his foreskin and kissed it before she took the tip of him in her mouth. Her rouged cheeks drew inwards; her tongue twisted glassily across a cock that was raw against the whites of her fingers. To Sean, it felt beautiful – too beautiful, and he clenched his fists to prolong the sensation.

Yet it could not last. Orla knew it too. She drew away: a sagging thread of saliva was the reminder of the severed connection between his cock and her lips. She rose to her feet, still looking at Sean, and pushed him with her open palm. Off-balance, he fell backwards onto dry leaves. Orla stood over him, arms akimbo, straddling him at his chest.

Sean looked up between Orla’s legs. She was bare underneath her dress. Her pussy punctuated the join of her limbs like an exclamation mark.

She held that position for a minute. “You wanted me like this, didn’t you?” she said, in that rich voice. “You shouldn’t have tried to hide it.”

Orla teased up the hem of her silvered dress with her fingertips, held it there for a torturing moment, then twisted it over her head. Her exposed breasts were firm and shadowed, yet helplessly out of reach. Naked, she lowered herself, squatting above him. Her gaze never left him. Her thighs, white and glistening, felt cool when they finally rested against his chest. She slid down his body until Sean’s cock pressed against her from behind. She adjusted herself to allow it to find its way to her entrance. When it slipped inside her he was lost.

It was perfect, the way she sheathed him, the way she bucked and swore and built up a rhythm that accelerated into abandonment. He wanted to tell her, but he was mute; he wanted to ask so many things, but he couldn’t. He tried to reach her, to grasp her hips at least, but she was so dewy to the touch that she slipped away. Still, they fucked and fucked.

It was so gloomy now. Darkness was close. Orla’s torso had become a shadow above his. Her nipples were black discs that evaded his mouth as they passed back and forth. He was left with sounds: her frantic breath – or was it his? – that was high and rasping; the crude claps of their bodies coming together.

His legs buckled, twisting to the side, but she rode him until eventually he found his voice.

“I’m going to shoot,” he whispered. But Orla wasn’t listening. She was already falling away from him, well before his release finally triggered, exploding, shotgun-sharp, in a thousand fragments.

They heard the noise across the village. In one garden, a gnome toppled over.