The Man in Black: A Gothic Romance (Crookshollow Ghosts) Read online

  The Man in Black

  A gothic ghost romance

  Steffanie Holmes

  Bacchanalia House

  Contents

  The Man in Black

  Copyright

  A Taste of What's to Come

  Prologue: Eric

  1. Elinor

  2. Eric

  3. Elinor

  4. Eric

  5. Elinor

  6. Eric

  7. Elinor

  8. Eric

  9. Elinor

  10. Elinor

  11. Eric

  12. Elinor

  13. Eric

  14. Elinor

  15. Eric

  16. Elinor

  17. Eric

  18. Elinor

  19. Eric

  20. Elinor

  21. Eric

  22. Elinor

  23. Eric

  24. Elinor

  25. Eric

  26. Elinor

  27. Elinor

  28. Elinor

  29. Elinor

  30. Eric

  31. Elinor

  32. Eric

  33. Elinor

  34. Eric

  35. Elinor

  36. Eric

  37. Elinor

  38. Eric

  What’s new from Steffanie Holmes?

  Excerpt from Witch Hunter

  Support me on Patreon

  About the Author

  Other Books By Steffanie Holmes

  The Man in Black

  A Crookshollow Ghost Story

  Steffanie Holmes

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to real persons, living or dead, found within are purely coincidental. All characters are consenting adults above the age of 18.

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Copyright 2015 Steffanie Holmes

  http://steffanieholmes.com

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  ISBN: 978-0-9941339-2-2

  Created with Vellum

  A Taste of What's to Come

  Elinor moved her hand, so her palm lay flat against mine. It was so odd to see her fingers nestled right inside my body, and even odder to feel them there, not as fingers usually feel, but as a hot ball of energy, emanating heat to a steady rhythm.

  It took me a few moments to realise the rhythm was Elinor’s heartbeat.

  I stepped forward, my hand shifting against hers, her fingers dancing inside mine. I pressed my other hand against her back, my palm sinking into her flesh. If I were alive at this moment, I would push Elinor against my body, and relish the warmth of her, the shape of her, against me. But I couldn’t do that, so instead I folded myself in closer to her. The front of my jacket brushed against her chest, sending waves of pulsing heat through my whole torso.

  “This is amazing,” Elinor breathed, her bow-shaped lips parting slightly. I didn’t trust myself to reply, so I smiled back at her. I started to sway, pushing my right hip forward, moving the warmth through her leg. Elinor sensed the movement through her skin, and she moved backward, turning her body with me. I stepped again, and again we slid across the floor, our bodies sweeping and dipping with the music.

  With my next step, I pushed myself closer, bowing my head slightly, so that my face hovered inches above hers. My eyes locked on those bow lips, ripe and delicious like the first berries of spring. God, I want this woman—

  “I like the music,” Elinor said. Her voice wavered. She sounded nervous. I wondered if she was speaking because she sensed what I wanted to do, and she was trying to fill the space between us, to stop me from doing something I couldn’t take back.

  “Mmmm,” I shifted my fingers in her hand. The heat flickered, thrumming through my body with a quickened pace. She was nervous. Interesting.

  “I love the … distortion. The way it crackles right through my whole body.” Elinor breathed. “It’s almost as if the music is mirroring the sensation when we touch.”

  “This piece is originally written by the composer Niccolò Paganini, a Greek violinist in the early nineteenth century.” I murmured. If she wanted to talk, I could at least impress her. “He was known for making liberal use of the diabolus en musica, the devil’s tritone, which creates that haunting dissonance you hear in the piece. Of course, Paganini’s composition has been sped up and updated, and accompanied by the electric guitar, bass guitar, double bass, and drums, it’s quite the feat of modern gothic rock.”

  “Who is playing the violin in this piece?” Elinor asked, her lips barely moving, struggling to form the words.

  “I am, on Isolde. Ghost Symphony is my band.”

  “Eric …” Elinor’s face turned up to me.

  I leaned closer, I could practically taste the sweetness of those berry-red lips, feel the warmth of her mouth against mine. The air between us crackled with electricity. Elinor shifted her weight against mine, falling into me as she leaned forward, her lips pursed, waiting.

  I brushed my lips against hers. It was like no other kiss I’d ever experienced before. The heat leapt through my body, twisting from my mouth right through my core. I felt as though I’d swallowed a hot coal, and though it burned me deeply, it was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. I leaned forward, my weightless body pressed against hers, my lips parting to devour her heat as our bodies hummed with pulsing energy.

  Prologue: Eric

  I woke up inside the floor.

  That whole concept was weird. For starters, to say I woke up wasn’t quite accurate. I don’t really remember how my eyes came to be open, or indeed what had closed them in the first place. My consciousness seemed to rise up from within me, like a diver emerging from the depths. I had been swimming in the murky water, and then, suddenly, I was exposed to the sunlight again.

  But being inside the floor … that part was accurate. I could see beams running along either side of my head, and a giant horizontal void strung with glimmering spider webs. My body seemed to emanate light, for around me I could make out the scratches of rodents against the wood, and the electrical cables winding through the space, but deeper into the floor was all blackness.

  The first thing I did was look down at my hands. As a musician, my hands meant everything to me. They were the instruments through which I channelled my thoughts and moods. They looked the same as always; long, strong fingers, the distinctive calluses around the pads marking me as a violinist. They might’ve been a little paler than usual, but nothing to be worried about.

  Now that I knew my hands were OK, I had to figure where I was and how I’d managed to get stuck inside the floor. I took a deep breath, and fell.

  I cried out as I dropped through the ceiling, flailing my arms to catch something, anything, to prevent me falling on my back and hurting myself. I watched the chandelier on the ceiling hurtling away from me as I plummeted through the air. Only I didn’t land. I fell right into the floor and kept going, passing through a basement, then plunging through a wooden floor into a crawl space, and finally into the dirt below. A worm crawled in front of my face.

  And that was when panic seized me. Is the house falling down? Was it an earthquake? How had I ended up down here? I opened my mouth to scream, but then clamped it shut again, realising that I’d just fill it with dirt, and then I wouldn’t be able to breathe …

  But I shouldn’t be able to breathe anyway. I’m buried in the dirt bene
ath a house. I should be suffocating.

  The worm inched across my vision.

  What is going on?

  I tried to move my arms, and found it quite easy. I held my hands in front of me, watching the way the dirt fell through them, as if my hands weren’t really there at all. I waved my finger at the worm, and my finger passed right through its body. The worm continued its travels, oblivious to my presence.

  This was no natural disaster. Something was seriously wrong with me.

  I lifted my hands over my head, and as I did so, my body shot up again. My head popped out from the dirt, but before I could get a good look at the crawlspace, I found myself in the basement. I brought my hands down again, and that stopped my descent. My body still seemed to be emanating a slight glow, and I could see some of the objects piled around me. Old toys, stacks of books, a couple of microwaves. Boxes labelled with loopy handwriting. Something about the stuff looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it ...

  I pointed my hands toward the basement steps, and, without moving my feet, I flew toward them. But instead of hitting the wooden stairs, I flew through them, feeling only a faint tingle in my limbs as I passed through the solid staircase.

  OK, so that explains why I’d fallen into the dirt. I didn’t seem to be able to touch anything anymore. I needed to get to a hospital, maybe they had a pill to fix translucency. I stretched one arm out in front of me, and used it a bit like a conductor’s to direct my hovering body. I floated up the staircase, flew through the door, and ended up in a very familiar kitchen.

  Dark oak benches, grey marble tops, delicate china cups lined up in the dresser, a collection of ceramic cats crowding the windowsill. I’d recognise those cats anywhere. I’m in my mother’s house. That was why it felt so familiar, despite the strangeness with my body. And now I was levitating in my mother’s kitchen. I floated over the counter and sat near the chandelier, gazing down at the old-fashioned gas-fired stove that she’d used to over boil every vegetable until it ceased to be anything but an unpalatable brown goo. I’d never seen a kitchen from this angle before. It looked strange, otherworldly, like the deck of a spacecraft.

  From my vantage point, I noticed several strange things. I noticed that the ceramic cat collection my mother kept on the windowsill was out of order. My mother was very particular about those sorts of things, so the fact that the orange cat was not next to its mate and the striped cat was on the end instead of being near the middle was a little disturbing.

  I also noticed the body on the floor.

  It was a woman, wearing a floral dress and frilled apron. A cupboard was open beside her, and a wheelchair was on the floor behind her, tipped on its side. She’d bent down to get something – a cupboard was open – and hadn’t got up again. The woman lay sprawled on her back, her face staring up at me, double-chin held proudly aloft, eyes wide and unblinking, skin a strange mottled colour.

  It was my mother, and she was dead.

  I knew I should feel some emotion, some sense of sadness or loss at discovering her demise, but I did not. I felt oddly detached from the whole situation, as if I were watching a movie, instead of something in real life.

  My mother is dead.

  She’d been a bitter and hard woman, and had shown little love toward me. “You’re just like your father, a useless dreamer!” she would scream at me when I came home from my music lessons. I’d left her as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, and I only came to visit her only out of obligation. In recent years she’d developed Alzheimer's, and oddly, the disease had actually bought us closer. She seemed convinced I was a seven-year-old boy again, and that Dad would be home any moment. She couldn’t seem to remember that in her eyes, I was the spawn of my father; the ungrateful, lazy folk musician who’d left us twenty years ago. Instead, she wanted to bake cookies and play soldiers with me.

  But now she was dead.

  A woman dressed in a nurse’s whites bent over the body, her eyes wide with fear and shock. She reached down and lifted up my mother’s wrist, pressing her fingers against the skin to feel for a pulse. “Oh, no, oh no,” she kept mumbling as she tried to puff air into my mother’s lungs. But it was no use. The nurse’s saliva dripped onto my mother’s floral dress.

  The nurse looked up, straight up at me. Our eyes met for a moment, and then she looked away, completely oblivious to my hovering presence. She reached for the phone on the wall and dialled a number, her tone businesslike as she described the scene to the person on the other end.

  She hadn’t seen me. I was floating right above her, and she’d looked straight at me and hadn’t seen me. I was a student of the macabre, a gothic rock musician. I knew what that meant.

  I was dead, too. But now I was a ghost, a floating, see-through ghost. And of all the places I could’ve chosen to haunt, I’d ended up in my mother’s house.

  Elinor

  The train rattled through the countryside, hurtling past rolling hills and fluffy sheep that leapt back from the tracks in terror, like little clouds scurrying across the landscape. I stared out the window, my lips stretched in an epic pout that glared back at me in my reflection, while my fingers tapped out an angry text message.

  I can’t believe I have to go to hicksville for two whole weeks.

  No parties, no raves, no cocktails. Did they even have a pub in Crookshollow? How was I going to get through two weeks without setting foot inside a pub?

  Just because I’m the only one who doesn’t have a spouse, or kids, or a pet helicopter that needs walking, they chose to send me away. What about my life? What about my commitments? I had tickets to the biggest house party of the year, and instead of shaking my arse on the floor with Cindy, I’m going to be plonking it on some dead lady’s sofa. No thank you.

  And worst of all, my banishment to hicksville couldn’t have come at a worse time. This was the crucial weekend for Operation Shag Damon. I had finally been making progress with Damon Sputnik, the spunky Russian DJ who was lighting up the London dance scene right now. I had been in love with Damon ever since I first saw him behind the decks, his shaved head bobbing along with the beat, his thick muscles bulging from beneath his fluorescent vest. I even had a poster of him at home, his shirtless body decorated with a prowling tiger tattoo. I had such a weakness for tattooed men. I kept the poster on the inside door of my closet so that, on the slim chance I ever did get lucky with Damon and brought him back to my place, he wouldn’t see it and think I was some kind of crazy stalker. That, and my landlord didn’t want anything hung on the walls.

  The truth is, I’d never in a million years have gone after a guy like Damon, but after things ended with my last boyfriend Joel, I hadn’t exactly been putting myself out there the way a single nearly-30 gal should. So my pal Cindy has been pushing me to get off my arse (and to stop feeding it Wagon Wheels and Hobnobs, but that’s another story) and go after someone. So of course I walked straight into a club and fell for Damon, the most unattainable guy I could possibly have chosen.

  Over the last six months, most of my weekends had been occupied with getting Damon to notice me. It had become a kind of project for me, and like everything else in my life I attacked it with all the determination and cunning I could muster. I bought him drinks. I stood right down the front when he did his DJ sets. I was always the first person to like his social media posts. On Cindy’s advice, I got some special contact lenses for clubbing so I could leave my glasses at home, and I squeezed my not-unsubstantial arse into tiny skirts and hot pants in an attempt to lure him with the promise of flesh. I’d even offered to hand out flyers for his parties at other events, which earned me a lifetime ban from Vortex and The Crib down in Chelsea. Apparently handing out flyers for a competing gig was frowned upon in the scene. Now I knew.

  Despite Operation Shag Damon moving at a rollicking pace, Damon barely seemed to register my existence. I couldn’t find any shorter skirts on the high street, so apart from abandoning clothing altogether and just waddling around naked, I w
as running out of ideas. I was just starting to give up hope, and then last weekend happened.

  Last weekend. The thought of it still made me smile and my chest flutter with excitement. I’d been hanging out in my usual spot near the stage during Damon’s set. He finished spinning, and as he came off stage, he tossed me his sweaty towel. I caught it and draped it over my shoulder, and he’d grinned and grabbed me, pulling my body hard against his, and shoved his tongue down my throat.

  Our passionate snogging session in front of a blaring speaker stack definitely stood out as one of the highlights of my life. But I’m pretty sure Damon was so blazed it was unlikely he even remembered my name, or the piece of paper with my number on that I’d shoved into the pocket of his jeans. He certainly hadn’t called it.

  That was why going to this weekend’s party was so important—I had to make him fall for me before he got distracted by another, thinner, more-interesting girl.—

  But of course I couldn’t tell Clyde any of this. As far as my boss was concerned, I was just a plump, mousy junior lawyer who ate takeout every day for lunch and didn’t look like a supermodel squeezed into a size-0 Marc Jacobs suit. And that was exactly why Clyde called me into his office after lunch today. “Baxter!” he barked, tossing a thick file across his desk. “Do you listen to the news?”

  “What news?”

  “The news, you know. The news news. The shit that happens in the world outside of this firm.”

  I didn’t miss a beat. “Nothing much of interest happens outside this firm, sir.”

  “Atta girl,” Clyde said in his most condescending tone. “Anyway, it seems that another celebrity death hit the headlines this week. That famous violinist, Eric Marshell, was killed in a car accident.”