Guard Rail

By Paragonas Vaunt

“Will you be ready for me when I come, little one?”

Innsbruck, 1875. For Charlotte Beaumont, a new job working on an Alpine railway seems just the ticket. But even before night falls on her first day working for the mysterious De Mons Institute, she finds herself in peril, confronting a waspish teacher and her wayward students, while beset by strange voices that whisper to her from the shadows and plant lurid thoughts into her mind.

What should have been a routine expedition soon becomes a journey of sinful self-discovery as one by one the maidens she has been employed to protect surrender their innocence to the dark spirit that dwells in the mountains.

As the night crowds in around her and the girls she has sworn to defend take turns to debauch themselves eagerly with a supernatural force she can neither see nor comprehend, Charlotte comes to the dreadful, inescapable realisation that the price she must pay to defend her young charges may be the highest price of all...

Guard Rail is the latest standalone adventure in the Gothic Follies series, a darkly erotic tale of angels and demons, nervous governesses and eager young maidens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paragonas Vaunt
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005705671

Paragonas Vaunt

Transgressive fiction with a dark & detailed undercurrent.The hottest stories. The twistiest tales.Whether you like your stories long and langorous, brief and breathless, or dark and dirty, come with me on a journey into the crooked world of filth maven Paragonas Vaunt.

Book preview

~Guard Rail~

Paragonas Vaunt

Copyright © 2022 Paragonas Vaunt

All rights reserved

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Reader Advisory

This is a work of erotic fiction, and a very rude one at that. Intended exclusively for an adult audience, it graphically depicts scenes of a highly sexual nature, and may include some dark moments or themes. It is not intended as a guide to healthy or even realistic sexual practices. If you do decide to delve in, I hope you enjoy this story, and I'll see you at the other end.

~PV~

Cuntent Advisory

Cunt Quotient: 8

Fuck Factor: 13

Cock Contingent: 6

Table of Contents

Overture

Chapter One – Charlotte’s Appointment

Chapter Two – Jungfräulichbahn

Chapter Three - If The Mountain Won’t Come to Charlotte…

Chapter Four - Impiety

Chapter Five – Charlotte’s Wet

Chapter Six – Squeaky Couplings

Chapter Seven – Idle Hands

Chapter Eight - Stockholm

Chapter Nine - Intermezzo

Chapter Ten – Offering

Chapter Eleven - Ministration

Chapter Twelve – Assuming The Position

Chapter Thirteen – An Unusual Situation

Chapter Fourteen – Lust's Pivot

Chapter Fifteen - Devil Take The Hindmost

Coda

Author’s Note

Hatching Now…

Connect With Paragonas Vaunt…

Overture

The most curious thing about the advertisement wasn’t the fact that it gave notice of a vacancy for a railway guard serving a private line all the way in far-off Austria-Hungary, nor even that it specified the successful applicant would necessarily be a woman. The railway in question was a private concern, after all, and was free to make its own employment rules. Besides, in the years immediately following the Austro-Prussian war it was not unheard of for women to find work in all manner of fields previously reserved for the men who had gone to fight and all-too-frequently failed to return.

No, what had struck Miss Charlotte Beaumont – spinster of the parish of St. Martin – as most odd was that the notice had been placed in the Situations Vacant page of the Domestic Gazette usually reserved for recruiting governesses, nannies, boarding school house-parents and the like. At first she assumed the placement was an error, but when the next edition carried the same notice, in the same section, and coincidentally she happened to find herself one time too many on the receiving end of her housekeeper’s lashing tongue, she decided her current lowly situation as under-governess in a Kensington household had run its course and she resolved herself to make an application.

And thus Miss Beaumont found herself in quite an unusual situation.

Chapter One – Charlotte’s Appointment

A little after dawn, on a fine cold day early in 1875, I found myself at a tiny private railway halt snuggled somewhere in the Alpine foothills north of Innsbruck, wondering if perhaps I had come to the wrong place.

The station, if it could be called that, consisted of a low platform of dour, weathered stone, with no signage and no amenities, sporting neither seat nor shelter save for a tiny wooden station master’s shack. The line itself, a single old and twisted piece of narrow-gauge, appeared from a cutting to the north and meandered unevenly past the platform before disappearing out of sight round a shoulder of scrub-covered rock to the south, in a manner that suggested it was in no hurry to get to wherever it was going.

There was nobody to be seen, save for a wizened old station master, and I only knew his profession because his moth-eaten peaked cap asserted the unlikely claim. From the rest of his clothes I would have pegged him a farmer, and one who had perhaps fallen over a few too many times in the cow shed at that. He cackled and gibbered at me in impenetrably heavily-accented German, but for all that he seemed entirely unperturbed by the sight of a primly-dressed English under-governess standing with suitcases and hatbox on the rough pedestal of his railway halt. Since he continued to prattle on regardless of what I said in return, I decided presently to ignore him and concentrate instead on watching the rails to see if anything happened along.

I drew out the many-folded letter.

It had arrived by return of post. In a rounded, flowery hand it congratulated me on my successful application and directed me to make my way here, to this spot, on this day, the morning of February 15th, to assume the requisite position. Folded up inside the thick, creamy paper had been a series of tickets, for various cross-channel steamer, train and stagecoach journeys, together with a money order, a generous advance on a salary I hadn’t even begun to earn.

I read the letter again.

I was at was the right place. I had arrived at the appointed time.

And now it was two hours past that time.

If this was some kind of hoax, for a purpose I couldn’t fathom, it was an expensive and long-winded one. For I had promptly cashed the money order and bought a number of new dresses, and one or two rather fetching hats, since it wouldn’t do to arrive to a new position in my existing threadbare under-governess’s weave. Or so I’d told myself by way of permission for my pecuniary excess. So whatever was the game here they weren’t going to get their money back save by stripping the shirt from my back, so to speak.

That all said, I wasn’t entirely sure what would constitute appropriate attire for a lady train guard anyway, and secretly I hoped they might provide me some sort of uniform. Something with a nicer hat than the train guard’s frayed old cap would be most suitable, I decided. I watched my breath mist in the cold air as I imagined that prospect, blowing out my cheeks and pursing my lips to send out little puffs of steam.

With a start, I suddenly realised I had unthinkingly imitating a chuffing train, sound and all, and I glanced guiltily towards the station master, hoping he hadn’t seen. I put my hands behind my back and rocked to and fro on the balls of my feet, idly stretching, trying to appear nonchalant.

The sun was well up now, but it was still cold, and there stubbornly remained only me and the station master in sight.

I didn’t relish the prospect of trying to find my way back to civilization. The driver of the mail coach I’d ridden up in had made clear he only came this way once a week, and the closest even he had got to this spot was a lonely road junction a four mile trudge away. My boots might be stout but I was carrying enough baggage to make the return journey more than bothersome. Besides, I couldn’t see signs of any villages or farms nearby, let alone anywhere large enough to sport a lodging house or inn.

Still, I was nothing if not resourceful. The daughter of a French father and an English mother, my father’s role as a minor diplomat to the various courts of Europe had meant a childhood in a dozen cities across the continent, from London to Lisbon, Paris to Pest-Buda, and I could add Portuguese, German and Hungarian to the mother tongues of my two parents. I was apt to find my way in most settings, although I would have to admit a deserted halt in the Alpine foothills was new ground for me.

So what should I do now?

I gazed around.

Snow-capped mountains marched from horizon to distant horizon across the southern vista, their lower slopes densely forested, their shoulders gloomy. Not that way, then, but I couldn’t see much in the way of signs of habitation to the north either, even if the landscape looked more forgiving that way, the going slightly easier.

Well, we were still in the tails of winter, the day wouldn’t last forever, and if I was going to find shelter before dark I would need to start making plans. I was just steeling myself to try to engage the signalman in conversation, somehow make him understand I needed to know where to find shelter, and certainly not – please and thank you – in his snaggle-timbered hut, when I heard a distant whistle.

The unmistakable sound of a steam whistle, echoing from foothill to foothill, and presently the cutting to the north filled with smoke and the clanking, chuffing sound of a steam locomotive.

The locomotive in question presently appeared, a small black-painted engine with a covered footplate, a tender almost as big as it was and a curious kind of plough arrangement on its front that put me in mind of the cow-catchers I had seen adorning the covers of the Wild West Penny Dreadfuls my sister liked to read. It travelled slowly, no doubt because the twisted state of the rails made it clank and creak and rock even at the pace of a gently trotting pony, let alone anything more brisk.

Outboard of its iron-spoked driving wheels, a curious set of smaller, cogged wheels spun slowly in mid-air, doing nothing useful. I could well imagine how they might feel, doing nothing useful, and their intended purpose was beyond me.

Behind the engine and its tender, the train consisted of two passenger carriages, their timbers thickly-lacquered in black, with a gold monogram on the doors at either end. The design was of a shield, bearing at its centre an arrow pointing downwards. Surmounting it, and seemingly gathering itself to plunge in the direction the arrow pointed, was a curious shape like a large tadpole, its long, writhing tail sporting a forked tip.

The hindmost carriage had an additional door at its forward end, a square sliding shutter fully seven