Alone - A Supernatural Mystery
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All things must end.
Recovering from a recent accident and faced with the prospect of spending another Christmas alone, Jessica accepts the invitation of an old flame to spend Christmas with him and his aged aunt at his manor house in the midst of the Brecon Beacons.
Feeling her arrival is unwelcome, Jessica awaits her reunion with a face from the past, while a snowstorm postpones his arrival and renders her trapped within the house. Behind the silence, something dark is lurking.
Left with little choice, Jessica finds she must face the secrets the old house hides. Yet what she may come to learn is that nothing haunts us more than the secrets of our own pasts, and that burying them does not make them forgotten.
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Read on for a sample below:
December 16th
The gentle trickling of a glittering melody drifted on the air, creeping into the ears of the sleeping woman who lay on the bed in the corner of a sparsely furnished room. Her skin was deathly white, the only sign of life the water vapour escaping between her delicate lips as she breathed.
A shadow crossed her face, a slight creasing of anguish in her expression. There was something troubling about the sight of seeing innocence vanquished in something as subtle, like the moment a child suffers the loss of believing in magic. Worse still was that there was no one to witness the sight. Emptiness swirled around her clammy skin, dancing a Viennese Waltz with the silence that fell like frost in the wake of distant music that wasn’t quite alive.
Jessica awoke, her eyes drifting over the high ceiling. From her memory she grasped vaguely at what had woken her. A metallic tinkle. She listened to the dense blanket of night. The sound of being alone.
She rubbed her heavy brown eyes and sat up. Her unfinished glass of Irish Cream whisky sat on the bedside table, beside the candle that still held the ghost of its extinguished flame. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders, looking to the window, the landscape aglow even in the black of night.
She closed her eyes and touched her face. If she tried hard enough it was as if a hand reached from memory, fingertips brushing over her fingers, grasping her hand, lips bowing to graze her skin.
She shivered involuntarily. She had a feeling she could hear music, faint and distant, like bells carried on a still wind.
Her toes were cold. She flexed them on the worn carpet. Her feet were weary as she stood, crossing slowly to the window, watching the sky and the snow covered earth, the stars glowing beyond and the desolation of the stretch of beacons. She was lost, a lost girl nearing the end of her journey.
Turning from the window, she found the owner of the metallic tinkle. She stooped, a silver chain grasped in her fingers as she withdrew her hand. She felt the beads grasped under her cold fingertips, squeezing them as the crucifix fell across her palm. She felt the weight of her soul on her heart, sinking to her knees and bowing her head to her hands.
All things must end. And this was how it began.
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Merry Christmas!
