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

by Steffanie Holmes

  All the noise on the stage faded away, becoming nothing but a backing track for the true virtuoso. Eric poured everything he had into the music, his hurt and his anguish flowing out through every soulful, heart-wrenching note.

  Never before had a piece of music gripped my heart and squeezed it as tightly as this. It felt as though a vice had been placed around my chest and was tightening with every scrape of Eric’s bow. I held my hand over my heart, tears streaming down my face as I stood in that crowd of surging, cheering people. I am standing with you, Eric. There is one person here who knows the truth.

  I assumed I was the only one who heard Eric’s beautiful music—I thought he was playing for himself and for me, and no one else. But as I glanced around me, I saw a few heads in the crowd turn toward the house, and then a few more. One by one, the people in the VIP area stopped cheering, their eyes trained on the attic window where the exquisite sound came from.

  Soon, the whole audience had grown silent, even the photographers ceased their constant snapping. The air was filled with trembling, wrenching notes as the two violinists duelled for our attention. Allan spun across the stage, sweat pouring down his face and his clothes clinging to his body as he attacked the neck with the bow, stabbing at the notes as though he wished to murder them, too.

  Fear clutched at my stomach. The air around us crackled with tension. It wasn’t just me. People exchanged worried glances. The security guards moved closer to the stage. Everyone could sense that something was about to happen.

  One of the speakers emitted a loud POP. No one in the crowd seemed to notice, but the sound tech on the side of the stage scrambled behind the speaker wires. When he emerged again, he was yelling something into his walkie talkie. Allan played on.

  I smelled something in the air. Fire. Something was burning. All around me, people were whispered to each other, gazing around anxiously, sniffing the air. My stomach twisted with fear.

  The second speaker exploded in a shower of sparks.

  People in the front screamed and scrambled out of the way as flames licked along the front of the stage. Finally, Allan looked up and, seeing the wall of orange flames leaping from the edge of the stage toward him, dropped the violin and ran offstage.

  People stampeded to the marquee exits, vaulting over the barriers and tearing through the velvet ropes. I tried to move my feet forward, but they were glued in place. The woman behind me shoved me roughly, startling me out of my stupor. I scrambled down the aisle towards the exit, glancing around me to try and find my friends. I saw Cindy and Damon up ahead, standing under the eaves of the house. Cindy’s face was crumpled with fear, Damon just looked bored.

  I reached them just as the flames took down the lighting rig. It crashed into the stage, bucking the metal supports. Lights burst, sparks flew, and the wooden planks of the stage flew in all directions. The fire licked at the edges of the marquee. Any moment now it would go up in flames.

  The crowd scattered in all directions, celebrities, goths and paparazzi fleeing around the sides of the house, over the hedge, or down the path through the forest. Sirens wailed in the distance. Someone had called the fire brigade.

  And above the chaos, Eric’s final solo raged, wave after wave of bariolage rising into a soaring vibrato. The attic window was directly above our heads. Cindy yelled at me over the din of the music and the terrified crowd. “What’s going on? Who’s playing that music?” I shook my head. There was no point explaining. We had more important things to worry about.

  “Elinor, I found you!” Bianca crashed into me, grabbing my hand and trying to pull me toward the side of the house. “We have to get out of here. The marquee is going up in flames.”

  I barely heard her. My mind was on Eric’s body, inside the coffin in front of the burning stage. If someone didn’t get his body out, we wouldn’t even have a chance at restoring him to life. And suddenly that mattered to me more than anything else in the world. I took a step toward the burning tent, but then I saw something that stopped me.

  Helen Manning came running through the orange flames devouring the marquee. Her makeup ran down her face in rivers, and her pale skin was smudged with filth, making her appear like some kind of zombie clown. Her skeleton dress flapped around her legs as she strained to push a heavy object through the cloud of smoke. Eric’s coffin. She was wheeling Eric’s coffin across the grass on its brass stand.

  Helen saw me watching her, and tried to say something, but all that came out was a dry, hacking cough. Her eyes shut and she toppled over the end of the coffin, collapsing in a heap on the grass.

  “No!” I cried, breaking free of Bianca’s grasp and flying toward her. But before I could reach her, two of the security guards swooped in and scooped her up. “Take her to the ambulance,” One barked at the other, and he ran off with Helen, while the first guard dragged the coffin away.

  Eric’s coffin was safe for now, and I heard the sirens screaming as the fire brigade pulled into the driveway and started unrolling their hoses.

  “Get away!” someone screamed. “The fire’s moved to the house. The house is burning!”

  And suddenly Bianca was beside me, pulling me away, her voice coaxing me back to safety. I walked slowly, in a daze, not really registering that I was moving. My vision blurred, and I felt oddly detached from the whole situation, as if I were standing behind myself, looking down on the burning tent and scattering crowd. Fire-fighters rushed passed us, yelling instructions to each other as they dragged their heavy hoses across the new lawn.

  “Is there anyone still inside the marquee?” A fire-fighter called out as he rounded the corner of the house, hose in hand.

  “We don’t think so,” said the security guard wheeling Eric’s coffin away. “And the only people inside the house were the catering staff, who are all accounted for.”

  But there was one person who hadn’t been counted, because he was assumed dead. And I hadn’t read enough of Clara’s book to know what happened to a shade if it was touched by a fire. Eric had felt real enough when he’d touched me in the bathroom earlier, and if he was real, he could burn.

  My ears buzzed with a strange, dissonant note. Everything around me moved in slow motion, the sounds dulled and muddy, as though I were moving through water. Thoughts wandered through the veil of my mind. Where were Ghost Symphony? I hadn’t seen any of the band members since they ran offstage.

  I swirled my heard around. I couldn’t see Allan anywhere, but I had an idea where he might go.

  “I’ve got to get into the house!” I yelled to Bianca.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Elinor! The house is on fire. We’ve got to get to the driveway, where it’s safe!”

  “No, you don’t understand!” I wrenched my hand from hers, and pushed my way through the stampeding crowd. I pushed over the velvet rope stringing off the area, my heels clattering across the back porch. I flung the door open, sending a billowing cloud of smoke into my face. I coughed as I took in a great gulp of acrid fumes.

  Behind me, I could hear someone yelling, but I didn’t turn back. I pressed my hand over my mouth, and plunged into the dark, smoke-filled house.

  My eyes wept as the smoke stung them, and the smoke blinded me completely. I closed my eyes against the stinging, placed my hand on the wall and shuffled along the hall toward the staircase. “Eric?” I choked out, but my words dissolved into coughing.

  My mind swirled in the blackness, struggling to think rationally. All my thoughts, my memories, were filled with that music. Eric’s song pressed against my temples, the strike of the bow against the strings like a bell tolling his death. I didn’t know if I was hearing the music for real, of if it was just the memory of it in my smoke-filled mind.

  Get to Eric before Allan does, get him out.

  My hand brushed up against a large, moulded frame. I recognised it as the portrait of Alice Marshell in the entranceway. I turned right, and stepped into oblivion, my hands fumbling forward for the staircase. Through the dimness of my m
ind I remembered the fire drills at the London office, where we were constantly told that if the building was filled with smoke, we should drop to the ground and crawl. Smoke rises. Get on the ground where the air is clearer.

  My foot hit the bottom step. I dropped to my knees, and crawled on my hands and knees up the staircase. The stairs widened out into flat, threadbare carpet. I had reached the first floor landing. Coughing violently, I crawled toward the right hallway, but I overestimated the distance and banged my head against the edge of the table. I felt woozy, sick, but I had to keep going.

  Eric, where are you?

  A siren rang, but it was far away, separate from the world of smoke and darkness. Sound seemed different here, distant, muddy. The siren rang out again, but this time it faded into a high screaming in my ears.

  I reached the bottom of the attic stairs. I tired to call Eric’s name, but my throat was so dry. Nothing came out except a dry, racking cough. This is bad, I realised, though the fog of my fading mind. I can’t—

  Then everything went black.

  Eric

  Fire-trucks screamed down the drive, rolling out their hoses and soaking the marquee to quench the flames. There was no one left in the back garden, so I set down the violin and folded my arms across my chest, watching and waiting to see what happened next.

  You want me, Allan? Come and get me.

  My hands throbbed with a strange kind of energy, like boiling water bubbling through a radiator. The fire of my anger burned inside me, brightest of all.

  I don’t know how I’d done it, exactly, but I just knew I had started that fire. I’d been playing, giving everything I had to that song, attempting to drown out Allan’s butchery of my most precious composition. And suddenly my hands were burning, and this white hot energy flowed out of me and into the violin … and that was when people had started screaming.

  Elinor had run across the lawn below me, her red dress trailing behind her. I’d seen her flee the marquee and then disappear under the eaves of the house. At least I knew she saw safe, she was OK.

  I hoped no one was hurt. Well, no one except Allan. I hope he had burned alive under the spotlight. That was my spotlight, and my song. It was my life he had stolen, and now it seemed as if he was attempting to make himself over as my protégée. Burning to death in front of the cameras was more than he deserved for what he’d done to me.

  I glanced back toward the door of the attic. Smoke was curling through the cracks, reaching long tendrils across the room toward me. I sniffed the air, and could smell the dry poison of it. Below me I could hear the fire-fighters storming across the porch.

  They’re heading into the house. But why? That means the fire’s reached the house.

  The anger quickly turned to fear. I had grown up in this house. It held many painful memories, but some wonderful ones, also. This was where my father and I played concertos together. This was where my mother taught me to read and balance the books. If it burnt to the ground, that would be the last straw, the final piece of my life-that-was torn away from me.

  Another thought occurred to me as I sat, frozen, by the window, watching the smoke curl across the room. I couldn’t leave the house. The invisible barrier of my spiritual state held me prisoner within its walls. But I didn’t seem to be fully ghost any longer. I had these strange moments of solidity. If I could touch objects and stand on the floor, did that mean I burned like a person?

  What happened when a ghost burned to death? Was I trapped in between the realms forever? I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

  I used the hat stand to push the window open as far as it would go, then I crawled into the far corner of the room, away from the smoke, and waited. Soon they’ll put out the fire, and everything will be fine.

  But I didn’t hear any footsteps pounding up the stairs, or any hoses washing down the walls. The air in the room was now thick with smoke. I could feel it scratching against my throat. My eyes watered. This doesn’t make sense, I thought to myself as I broke down in a coughing fit. I’m a ghost. I don’t have lungs. Why does my chest feel tight with pain?

  I realised I had to get out of the room. Smoke rose, which meant that all the smoke pouring through the house was collecting in the attic. If I was struggling to breathe now …

  I tried to drop through the floor, but I was too solid. I couldn’t move through the wood. I’d have to go down the stairs and hope I could pass through Elinor’s salt trails.

  There was no time to open more windows. I crawled back across the attic floor and reached up to grab the door handle. The hot metal burned my skin, but I gritted my teeth and turned it, pulling the door open before dropping the handle in agony. It had been a long time since I felt physical pain, and I didn’t much care for it. I was a ghost. I should just be able to float through this fire.

  At the bottom for the stairs, I stepped right over the salt trail. I guess it didn’t work when I was solid. I turned right, slumping against the wall as I broke down in another coughing fit. As I dived into the grey haze of smoke, I tripped over something soft and warm lying across the hall. A body. But who was it? Who would have gone up the stairs in the house?

  I grabbed the body and turned it over, squinting through tear-streaked eyes as the face came into view.

  No. Oh, no.

  It was Elinor, and she wasn’t breathing.

  No. This won’t happen. I won’t let it. Elinor had so much to live for. She cannot become like me, floating in between the worlds, unable to be part of either. She has to live, to survive. She has to have a long, full life, even if it is without me.

  I didn’t even stop to think if it was the best idea or not. I pushed my arms underneath Elinor’s body, and lifted her against me, cupping her knees and torso. I rose to my feet and plunged through the thick smoke toward the staircase.

  I overestimated the distance, and banged my foot against the balustrade, sending a sharp flare of pain through my thigh. My foot searched the ground below me, and finally it found the first step. My stomach convulsed as the smoke filled my lungs. At any moment I expected to black out, or Allan to leap out of the shadows and finish me off.

  I didn’t even look at where I was treading, I just flew down the stairs two at a time. My face streamed with tears, and the smoke scraped my throat. I was dimly aware of my chest convulsing, but I didn't stop.

  As my foot landed on the rug in the entrance hall, I saw a white square of light through the haze. The front door was wide open. A shadow moved across it, growling larger as it approached me.

  The smoke grew thinner. My eyes adjusted to the light, and I saw the shadow was a fire-fighter. He stepped back as I emerged from the staircase, and he fumbled with the thick hose in his gloved hands.

  “Take her!” I cried, stumbling towards him and thrusting Elinor’s limp body into his open arms. “Save her, please.”

  The fire-fighter nodded. I could see through his helmet that his eyes only briefly registered my presence. His gaze was focused on the task before him—saving Elinor’s life. He turned and lifted Elinor as he ran through the open front door, leaving me standing alone in the wet, smoked-out wreckage of what had once been my home.

  Elinor

  I woke up in an ambulance. A rather handsome paramedic smiled down at me as he adjusted a bandage over my temple. “Hey, there.” he said.

  “Hey,” I tried to say, but it came out as a croak. My throat flared with pain.

  “Don’t try and talk, Elinor.” The paramedic said, patting my arm. “You’ve inhaled a lot of smoke. It’s inflamed your lungs and throat badly. You’re lucky, another minute inside and you might not have made it. So just lie back and let us take care of you.”

  I nodded, too stunned to attempt to form any other kind of non-verbal response. I felt tired all over, as if I hadn’t slept for days. Behind me, a machine beeped periodically, that constant rhythm a reminder of how close I’d come to death.

  I had no idea what happened inside. I remembered reaching the botto
m of the attic stairs, and then nothing else. I assumed one of the fire-fighters had found me. How lucky was I that they had been in the house when they were.

  “There you are!” Bianca stepped up into the ambulance. She fumbled for my hand against the mattress and clasped it in her own. Her fingers felt warm, reassuring. “I was so worried about you. What on earth did you go back into the house for?”

  I was too tired and sore to answer, and even if I could have, I didn’t even know how to begin to explain. So I just smiled weakly back at her.

  “But don’t worry, you’re going to be just fine. We’ll make sure of that,” Bianca said. “I was just talking to the fireman who pulled you out, and he said that when you’re better again you’ll have to thank the man in the black suit who pulled you out. He said the guy was an idiot going into a burning house like that, but he was also incredibly brave. Who was it, Elinor? Did you see his face?”

  I nodded again, and closed my eyes. I was so tired, so very tired ...

  They kept me in hospital overnight for monitoring. The doctor treating me reiterated how lucky I was—there was no long-term damage done. I knew I wasn’t lucky. Eric had saved me. He’d carried me down the stairs and handed me to the fire-fighter. And the fire-fighter had seen him.

  Despite my short stay in hospital, my room was still bursting with flowers. Cindy and Bianca had both brought bunches from Tesco’s. Duncan sent some beautiful white lilies that I suspected might have been recycled from the funeral. And Allan sent some blood-red roses and a big box of Bewitching Bites chocolates. I turned his arrangement to the wall so I didn’t have to look at it. I ate the chocolates, though. Chocolates should never be wasted.

  Cindy went to town and brought me some clothes to wear. She said no one was allowed in the house while the police and fire department investigated, but my clothes were probably ruined, anyway. I didn’t think dry cleaning got the burnt smell out.