𓄹 🎀. 𝑔𝑒𝓃𝑒𝓈𝒾𝓈 . 𖥻 ༝

You walked through the hallways, that were startlingly still.

The air itself seemed to hold its breath, a thick, dusty silence that swallowed the sound of your own footsteps on the worn parquet. Your flashlight beam cut a wavering path through the gloom, illuminating motes of dust that danced like agitated spirits. The dictaphone in your other hand felt both absurd and necessary, a tiny, plastic tether to the rational world you’d left beyond the iron gates.

“Log entry… seven,” you whispered, your voice hushed not just for recording but out of a deep, instinctive reverence. The house demanded quiet. “Time, approximately 10:47 PM. I’ve entered the main hall of the property known colloquially as the abandoned L’Estaque Manor. Initial impressions… the decay is theatrical. 

Deliberate. 

It feels less like neglect and more like a stage set waiting for its principal actor.”

You panned the light upwards. A grand staircase swept into darkness, its banister adorned with intricate, cobwebbed carvings. The wallpaper, once a rich burgundy damask, peeled in long, languid strips, revealing the skeletal lath beneath. It was cold, a damp chill that seeped through your jacket and settled in your bones. Yet, there was no malevolence in it. Not yet. It was the cold of emptiness, of a vast space long devoid of warmth.

“No standard paranormal signatures yet,” you continued, moving slowly toward a pair of towering oak doors. “No EMF spikes, no temperature fluctuations beyond the ambient chill. But the atmosphere… it’s heavy. It isn’t threat, maybe expectation?.”

You pushed open the doors to what must have been a music room. A sheet-draped grand piano dominated the space, a hulking white ghost in the center. Tarnished candelabras sat on the mantle. 

Your light glinted off the glass of a large, gold-framed portrait above the fireplace, but the face within was too shadowed to make out. You stepped inside, your boots whispering on the Persian rug, its patterns faded into vague, blood-like smudges.

“This room,” you murmured into the recorder. “There’s a… resonance here. Auditory? Maybe. A memory of sound. If I listen…”

You stopped. You closed your eyes, letting the silence press in. And then, beneath the sound of your own nervous system, you heard it. 

Or felt it. It wasn’t quite a melody, but the echo of one. The faint, phantom vibration of a piano chord—a minor, unresolved, hanging in the air like a question. Your eyes snapped open. The sheet over the piano was perfectly still. No dust had been disturbed.

“Did you hear that?” you asked the empty room, the dictaphone catching your quickened breath. “A chord. C minor, perhaps moving to… no. It’s gone.”

But it wasn’t. 

As you moved back into the hall, it followed you. It wasn’t only just a sound, but a presence. The back of your neck prickled. The air, once uniformly cold, now seemed to stir with a faint, impossible current. 

You entered a long gallery, portraits lining the walls, their subjects’ eyes seeming to track your progress from faces blurred by time and shadow.

Then you felt it. A breath. Not on your neck, but inside your ear. A cool, gentle exhalation that carried with it the faintest sound—a wordless, melancholic fragment of tune, the same one that had haunted the piano chord. It was intimate, paralyzing. You froze, your blood turning to ice water.

“Who’s there?” you breathed, not daring to turn. The dictaphone, still recording, captured the tremor in your voice.

There was no answer. Only the returning, absolute silence, now feeling like a held secret. 

You forced your legs to move, driven by a compulsion that was equal parts terror and desperate curiosity. 

The master bedroom was your goal. In these old houses, it was often the epicenter of residual energy.

You found the door ajar. Pushing it open, you were met with a spectacle that stole what little breath you had left.

The room was vast, dominated by a canopy bed whose curtains hung in tattered shreds. But it was the far wall that commanded attention. 

The enormous windows were naked, their curtains ripped away or decayed. 

They were thrown wide open to the night, and the wind poured through in a silent, powerful river. 

The moon, nearly full, cast a slab of pewter light across the floorboards, illuminating the dust swirling in the turbulent air. The curtains that remained on the sides billowed and snapped like the sails of a ghost ship, soundless in the vacuum of the room. 

The night itself seemed to be invading, a cool, black ink flooding into the tomb of the house.

You stepped into the lunar wash, drawn to the windows, to the view of the overgrown gardens and the skeletal trees. The wind played with your hair, kissed your feverish skin. This was it. The heart of the strange stillness. You raised your dictaphone.

“The master bedroom. The windows are open. There’s a… a violent peace here. The wind, but no sound. The moon, is so creepy. I feel…”

You felt watched.

The sensation was so intense it was a physical weight between your shoulder blades. You slowly, so slowly, turned from the mesmerizing night.

He stood in the doorway.

You hadn’t heard a thing; footfall or rustle of cloth. He was simply there, having coalesced from the very shadows of the hall. Your mind, trained to document and analyze, short-circuited, overwhelmed by sheer aesthetic shock.

He was beautiful. It wasn’t in a modern way, but like a painting by a Romantic master who believed in the tragic allure of the sublime. Tall and imperially slender, he was dressed in an anachronism of elegant decay: a white poet’s shirt of fine linen, its ruffles at the chest and cuffs pristine, the top buttons carelessly open to reveal a expanse of pale, smooth skin that gleamed like marble in the low light. 

It was tucked into tailored black trousers that emphasized his long legs, and over it all, a sweeping black velvet cloak rested on his shoulders, not quite touching the floor. His hair was a cascade of raven-black waves, stirred by a wind that didn’t touch you, framing a face of heartbreaking symmetry—high cheekbones, a strong jaw, lips that seemed carved from something both soft and cruel. 

His eyes were the most alive thing about him, a burning, intelligent dark brown, with a glimmer of mischief in them.

And he was opaque, but only just. You could see, faintly, the outline of the doorframe behind him, the subtle suggestion of moonlight passing through the solidity of his wrist where he held the doorjamb. A ghost. A spectacular, gorgeous ghost.

Your legs gave out. The dictaphone clattered to the floor, but you didn’t hear it. The world tunneled into those dark benevolent eyes, and then into black velvet nothingness.

Consciousness returned without a jolt, but as a slow, cold seep. You were on the floor, but not on the hard wood. 

You were cradled in an impossible chill, a sensation like being held by a statue carved from winter moonlight. Your head rested against the crisp linen of his ruffled shirt, and through the thin fabric, you registered a profound, deep cold, the utter absence of living heat.

“Open your eyes.” The voice was a melody all its own, low, cultured, vibrating with an old-world accent and a current of simmering anger. “I did not grant you the courtesy of my solitude only for you to escape into unconsciousness.”

Your eyelids fluttered open. His face was above yours, inches away. Up close, his beauty was even more devastating, and more unnerving. His skin had a faint, pearlescent sheen, and the cool air around him smelled of old books, dried lavender, and something metallic, like distant ozone.

“You…” you croaked.

“I,” he agreed, his tone icy. With a grace that was both effortless and unsettling, he shifted you, helping you to sit up. His hands on your shoulders were like brands of ice, a shock that cleared the last cobwebs from your mind. He didn’t release you. He knelt before you, his stormy eyes pinning you in place. 

“Now. You will explain. Why do you trespass in my home? Why do you shuffle through my halls with your little machine, speaking to the silence as if it owes you answers?”

He was furious. It was not the rage of a monster, but a deep, personal offense of a scholar whose library has been invaded and ripped up by a vandal.

“I… I’m a paranormal investigator,” you stammered, your professional pride flickering weakly. 

“This house… it’s famous. I thought it was empty.”

“Thought it was empty?” He released you as if burned, rising to his full height in a fluid motion. The white ruffled shirt he wore, flapped in the wind.

“You thought. Or you assumed? And on that assumption, you violate my peace? For twenty years I have curated this silence. Twenty years of moonlit rooms and echoing chords, and you believe you can simply… walk in?” He turned his back to you, a gesture of supreme disdain, looking out at his billowing curtains.

“Your world is so loud. So bright. It forgets what lurks beyond it. It bulldozes. And now it sends its curious little children to poke at what it has forgotten.”

You scrambled to your feet, your legs still unsteady. The dictaphone lay at your feet, its red recording light a tiny, accusing eye. “I meant no disrespect. I’m just… trying to understand.”

He turned his head, his profile a sharp cut against the moonlit window. “Understanding is not yours to take. It is mine to bestow. And I am not inclined to be generous.” He faced you fully again, his anger seeming to settle into a colder, more calculating resolve. 

“However. You are here. You have seen me. That… complicates things.”

A new kind of chill, one of primal fear, trickled down your spine. “What are you going to do to me?”

A ghost of a smile, bitter and beautiful, touched his lips. “The traditional tropes? Frighten you to death? Haunt your dreams? How pedestrian.” He drifted closer, his movement so smooth on the rotten floorboards. The cold around him intensified. 

“I am a man of intellect. Of passion. Trapped. For two decades, I have been a curator of memories, a prisoner of sensation I can only recall. The taste of wine. The warmth of a fire.” His eyes raked over you, not with lust, but with a desperate, hungry curiosity. 

“The touch of a living hand.”

He stopped an arm’s length away. You were captivated, utterly. The fear was still there, deep in your veins, but it was subsumed by a terrifying fascination. He was a masterpiece of sorrow and anger.

“I will let you go,” he said, his voice dropping to a intimate murmur that seemed to reverberate in your very bones. 

“I will unlock the doors and watch you flee back to your noisy, bright world, and I will return to my melodic silence. But you will have given me something in return. A… experiment.”

“An experiment?” you whispered.

“A confirmation,” he corrected, his gaze holding yours. 

“A sensory recollection,” he added, with a whimsical tone.

“I have wondered, in my long solitude, if the memory of pleasure is a lie the mind tells the soul. If the mechanics of passion are lost to a form such as mine.” He lifted a hand, and his fingers, pale and slightly translucent, hovered just beside your cheek. 

You felt the chill, a thrilling ache. 

“I wish to know if, after twenty years, I can still… feel. In the most primal sense. I wish to know if I can still make a living woman sigh, and in doing so, remember what it was to be a mere mortal man.”

The meaning crashed over you, not in a wave of horror, but in a surge of electric, reckless understanding. He wasn’t asking for your life. He was asking for your body. As a test. As a sacrament. Your mouth was dry. Your heart hammered against your ribs. You should run. You should scream.

You looked into his eyes, saw the centuries of loneliness, the artistic fury, the haunting, fragile hope. 

You saw the pale column of his throat above the open ruffles, the elegant line of his shoulders under the worn white shirt. His hair fell shoulder length, and was beautiful - an almost blue hue shone off of it in the moonlight. 

He was the most beautiful, terrible thing you had ever seen.

“Yes,” you heard yourself say, the word leaving your lips on a cloud of breath in the cold air.

His eyes widened, a flicker of surprise, then a dark, triumphant fire. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

The word hung between you, a pact sealed. The anger in him seemed to transmute, melting into a fierce, focused intensity. 

He closed the distance. Where his body met yours, there was no solid impact, but a gradual, chilling immersion, as if you were stepping into the shadow of a glacier. 

His hands came up to frame your face, and the cold was piercing, exquisite. He leaned in, and his lips met yours.

They were soft, and colder than anything you could imagine, but not inert. They moved with a practiced, desperate skill, and a strange thing began to happen. 

As the kiss deepened, a sensation bloomed within the cold—a memory of warmth, a phantom heat that seemed to generate from the very friction of your living spirit against his spectral one. 

A low, shuddering sigh escaped him, a sound that was half moan, half sob, and it vibrated into your mouth.

The dictaphone was forgotten. The investigation was forgotten. There was only the Maestro and his experiment.

He pushed you backwards, his mouth never leaving yours, until suddenly he was gone. All that was left was a whisper of the feeling of him on your lips. You brought your fingers up to your lips immediately, missing the touch there. 

All of a sudden he appeared behind you, as if by magic and grabbed your other hand and pulled you onto the bed. 

With unseen force, the tattered remnants of the bed curtains fell away completely. He laid you down on the cold, silken coverlet, following you down, his form settling over yours with a weight that was more pressure than mass. His cloak enveloped you both, a dark tent against the moonlit room.

“Tell me you can feel that,” he murmured against your throat, his lips trailing icy fire down your pulse point. His fingers, deft and chilling, worked at the buttons of your jacket, then your shirt. “Tell me I am not just a dream touching you.”

“I feel it,” you gasped, arching into the shocking cold of his hands on your bare skin. It was a paradoxical feeling—the cold was so intense it burned, and within that burn, pleasure sparked, sharp and shocking. 

“You’re real.”

You nearly yelped at the force in which he pulled off your jeans.

He made a sound, a raw, hungry thing, and his own clothing seemed to dissolve into mist and shadow at his will; revealing the pale, sculpted plane of his chest, the elegant taper of his waist. He was slender, graceful, beautifully made, and glowing with that faint inner luminescence. 

His skin, when it met yours fully, was a shock—a deep, penetrating cold that made every nerve ending sing a desperate, alert song.

He explored you, focused, like a connoisseur rediscovering a lost art. His mouth, a brand of ice, traced the lines of your collarbones, the curve of your breast, his tongue swirling in a pattern that left behind a trail of goosebumps and fire. 

Your voice gave out, the sound swallowed by the billowing curtains and the silent night. Your hands clutched at his back, feeling the powerful muscles shift under skin that was smooth and cold as polished alabaster. 

You could fully feel him now, the reality of his form, even as your fingers sometimes seemed to sink into him a fraction too deeply, meeting a core of thrilling, empty cold.

“I crave the warmth between those legs,” he breathed, his voice ragged with wonder. He was between your legs now, his storm-cloud eyes holding yours, his dark hair cascading around his face, stirred by his own spectral energy. 

“You are... A delicious, living thing. Something I have not been close to as of late. Let me… let me remember this.”

He prepared himself by using his index finger to rub the precum on his cock, and then entered you in one slow, relentless glide.

The sensation was beyond anything you could have conceived. It wasnt the friction of flesh, but something stranger, more profound. It was a bone chilling cold, a possession that reached into the very marrow of your bones and clawed up to your heart from below.

It was like being touched from the inside out by a icy winter river, shocking and pure and terrifyingly intimate. 

Another choked and wordless sound of shock and overwhelming pleasure came from you; your back bowing off the bed, crazily, as if you were possessed. Maybe you were.

He stilled, his face a mask of agonized ecstasy. “Ah… it is… better than I remember….the memory is true. It is… worth the waiting.” 

He began to move, and each movement was a study in contradiction—the solid, rhythmic pressure of him, coupled with the eerie, chilling diffusion of his essence spreading through you. 

The feel of him became a drug, a stimulant. It sharpened every sensation, made every nerve raw, every pleasure point on the edge of falling apart.

You felt everything with a hyper-clarity: the silken slide of the coverlet beneath you, the rush of the moonlit wind over your heated skin, the exact, perfect angle of his hips as he drove into you, seeking his own forgotten culmination. His rhythm was diabolically good, you did not know that these feelings could overcome your body.

He was not silent within this endeavour. He whispered in a mix of broken words and song, fragments of poetry, curses, prayers. You couldn’t tell what was which - your brain unable to concentrate for the unbelievable pleasure coursing through your veins.

“Warm — you are so extraordinarily warm — I had forgotten — god, the scent of your skin alone is enough to have me—" He stopped. The sentence didn't finish. For the first time since you had met him, the Maestro had run out of words.

His hands were everywhere, icy points of contact that ignited wildfires under your skin. The juxtaposition of this feeling in your brain was hard to comprehend. 

One hand tangled in your hair, tilting your head back to expose your throat to his marauding, freezing kisses. 

The other gripped your hip, his fingers pressing in with a desperate strength that should have bruised, but only left a thrilling ache. You were unraveling, your own moans and pleas becoming a constant, ragged soundtrack to the act unfolding in this old gothic home. 

The pleasure built not in a warm wave, but in a cryptic crescendo, a pinnacle of sensation so sharp and cold and brilliant it felt like nothing you’d experienced before..

“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice guttural, his form seeming to flicker with a stronger inner light. “Look at me when you fall from the precipice.”

You forced your eyes open, meeting his. They were no longer just stormy, but lit from within by lightning, wide with a shock of feeling so long denied. 

The sight of his beautiful, haunted face, hovering over you in the throes of a passion both otherworldly and devastatingly real, was the final trigger. 

The world dissolved into a ridiculous gothic black and white film. You felt like you’d fallen through the bed and into a whole other dimension - your body experiencing such extreme sensation it had never felt before. 

Your climax was not a release of heat, but a vacuum of sensation, a pulling inward of all the cold and the pleasure into a single, singular point of absolute zero ecstasy. You convulsed around him, a wordless scream trapped in your throat.

It triggered his own orgasm. He threw his head back, the veins of his pale neck standing out in stark relief.

His climax was silent, a seismic event contained within the shimmering outline of his form. He grunted mercilessly at first.

A visible shudder wracked through him, a wave of distortion that made the moonlight behind him bend and warp. 

His head still thrown back, his mouth opened in a soundless cry of pure, unadulterated release, and for a moment, he became almost fully transparent, a mere sketch of a man lost in feeling.

Then he solidified again, collapsing forward, his weightless form half-covering you, his face buried in the tattered pillow beside your head.

You both lay there, entangled in the wreckage of pure sensation.

You could feel the echo of him inside you, a fading, delicious chill. His skin, where it touched yours, was no longer just cold; it was thrumming with a low, resonant vibration, like a plucked cello string.

He was the first to stir. He pushed himself up on his elbows, looking down at you. The storm in his eyes had calmed to a dazed wonder. He looked… younger. The lines of ancient despair had softened.

“The hypothesis,” he whispered, his voice scraped raw, “was correct. I’m still able to make a woman come undone.”

A breathless, hysterical laugh bubbled in your chest. “Glad I could be of service… for your research.”

The ghost of a real smile, less bitter now, touched his lips. He traced one icy finger from your sternum down to your navel, making you shiver. 

“Service implies a transaction completed. I find myself slightly… unsatisfied. The experiment had a singular parameter. Intercourse. It was a blunt instrument.” 

His gaze drifted lower, down the trembling plane of your stomach. “I wish to get closer.”

The air, still crackling with the aftermath, grew thick with a new, focused tension. “Closer?” You asked.

“I want to taste you,” he murmured, his voice dropping to that intimate, bone-resonating register. “I felt your heat before. A glorious, enveloping feeling. But I was a clumsy guest, storming the gates.” He began to move, sliding down your body with a serpentine grace that left a trail of gooseflesh. 

The silken coverlet whispered beneath you. “I wish to map the source. To taste the joys of your pleasure. To see if I can elicit the same symphony with my tongue as I did with… other means.”

He settled between your thighs, at the edge of the bed, his broad shoulders pushing your legs further apart. The moon cast him in stark relief—the fall of his dark hair, the elegant line of his back, the pale curve of his buttocks. 

“I wish to break you open, in your pleasure. Make you question everything you have ever known about your sensory receptors in your body. It needs to be precise”

He was kneeling on the floor, and as he did, you saw his hand move. He took himself in hand, his length already stirring again, impossibly, from the aftermath. 

It was graceful like the rest of him, and he gave himself a slow, thoughtful stroke, his eyes fixed on the apex of your thighs with the concentration of an artist contemplating a fresh canvas.

“You are watching me?” he said, without looking up. His thumb swept over the head of his cock, a slow, circular motion. 

He sniggered at your lack of response. 

“Good, I suppose. This is part of the process. The anticipation. The visual study.” He stroked himself again, a long, languid pull, his breath hitching with a soft, frosty sigh. 

“I am reminded that women of this day like to watch solo performances…. However, you’ll be so overcome you won’t even remember I am touching myself too.”

The sight was mesmerizingly obscene. This beautiful, beyond the living man, kneeling in worship between your legs, casually pleasuring himself as he prepared to devour you. It shattered any last pretense of a normal encounter. This was a ritual. Unlike any intimate moment you had shared with a partner before - it was as if they never even existed outwith this moment.

He leaned forward then, and his breath washed over you first—a cold, damp gust that made you jolt and gasp. He didn’t touch you with his mouth yet. He nuzzled, his cheek and the bridge of his nose sliding through your curls, inhaling deeply.

“Extraordinary,” he breathed, the words a vibration against your wet cunt. 

“The scent… alive. Musk, salt, sunlight trapped in flesh. I have missed this more than wine, more than music.” He finally looked up, his black thunder-cloud eyes glinting in the dark. 

“Tell me to stop if you are frightened?”

You couldn’t. Your voice was gone, stolen by the spectacle of him. You could only manage a frantic shake of your head.

A dark, pleased hum escaped him. “Then we continue.”

His tongue was not like a living man’s. It was cooler, smoother, and yet impossibly deft. He didn’t attack; he was calm and slow when he devoured you. 

A long, slow, flattened stroke from bottom to top of your centre, soaking in the feel and taste of you. You cried out, your hands flying to your mouth to cover the obscene sounds coming from you.

“Such a pretty and shy girl,” he murmured against you, the words almost indistinct, felt more than heard. 

“Let me hear you,”

He continued to just marvel at your sex; you looked down at him, bewildered that this could even be really happening.

“The texture… the give… the heat is not a wall, it is a tide. And it welcomes me.”

He began to work in earnest, and it was clear he was, as he said, a maestro. His tongue was a precision instrument, tracing lazy circles around your clit before focusing on it with a pinpoint, icy pressure that made you see what felt like the expansion of the universe. 

He alternated—broad, lapping strokes that cooled your entire core, then sharp, flickering assaults on that one hypersensitive node. His pace was deliberate, experimental, listening to every hitch of your breath, every twitch of your thighs.

And all the while, his right hand moved on himself. You could hear the soft, slick sound of it, a counter-rhythm to the wet, hungry sounds his mouth was making. He stroked himself in time with the flicks of his tongue, a slow, consistent pumping motion, his own pleasure feeding back into the attention he lavished on you. 

It was a feedback loop of sensation, a closed circuit where his cold arousal and your burning need amplified each other.

“You taste of the world,” he groaned, lifting his head for a moment. His lips glistened. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his face flushed with a phantom of color. His hand never stopped moving on his cock. 

“You taste of summer grass and night rain and… and life. It is an addiction.” He dove back in, his hunger less controlled now, more ravenous. He added his fingers, one, then two, sliding into you with that same shocking, perfect cold, curling upwards as his tongue lashed at your clit.

You felt obsencely overestimulated, the deep, filling chill of his fingers, the maddening, icy pinpoint of his tongue, and the visual, audible proof of his own mounting pleasure as he stroked himself faster, his breath coming in short, frosty pants against your skin. 

You were babbling, pleading, pulling his hair, your hips rolling uncontrollably against his face. 

The cold was no longer just a sensation; it was the fuel, the catalyst that made every nerve scream twice as loud.

“Is this the way?” he asked, his voice muffled, desperate for confirmation. “Tell me, my living beauty… does this path lead to the same peak?”

“Yes—God—yes, please, don’t stop doing whatever you’re doing, please—” you sobbed. “I am so close”

He redoubled his efforts. His tongue became a blur of cold, relentless motion. His fingers pumped, crooking just so, and his thumb pressed hard, circling your clit. His other hand was a piston on his own length, the rhythm frantic now, the soft slapping sounds filling the air. He was chasing it, chasing your climax with desperation; starving for proof of his own existence.

The build was different this time. Not a shatter or a falling apart that you’d have been used to, but a slow, inexorable melt. The cold he was pumping into you seemed to meet the core of your heat and create a thermal reaction, a swirling vortex of sensation that pulled everything you were into its center. 

Your muscles locked. Your breath stopped. The world narrowed to the freezing, brilliant point between your legs and the sight of his beautiful, obsessed face buried there, pleasuring himself as he drove you mad.

It broke silently, a vast, wave-like submersion. Your climax washed over you profoundly, a drowning release, a slow-motion unfurling of every tense wire in your body. 

You pulsed around his fingers, a long, shuddering series of contractions, a silent scream locked in your throat.

He felt it. He let out a choked, triumphant cry against you and his own rhythm stuttered, then broke. His back arched, a perfect, taut bow, and he spilled over his own fist with a ragged, gasping groan, his release pearlescent and faintly glowing in the moonlight, striping his own pale stomach and the dark coverlet beneath him. 

He trembled violently through it, his mouth still pressed against you, drinking in the final aftershocks of your pleasure as his own wracked him.

Slowly, he pulled away. He looked wrecked, glorious. His hair was wild, his lips swollen and slick. His eyes, when they met yours, held a look of stunned, satiated reverence. 

He looked down at the evidence of his own pleasure on his hand and stomach, then back at you, as if he couldn't quite believe either.

"The data," he whispered, his voice utterly spent. "Is... overwhelming. The hypothesis is not only confirmed... it is expanded upon. The variables are infinite."

He moved then, fluid and weary, coming to lie beside you. He didn't pull you into the full, chilling embrace of before, but he slid an arm beneath your neck, his body a line of cool pressure against your side. He was still stroking your hair with his other hand, his touch now almost gentle.

"You have," he said to the canopy above, "given a ghost a memory that does not hurt to hold. That is a rare gift, little trespasser."

You turned your head on his arm. The dictaphone was still on the floor, its red light a steady, distant pulse. The investigation was over. Something else had begun.

"What now?" you asked, your voice hoarse.

He was silent for a moment, watching the curtains dance with the night. "Now," he said finally, a new, contemplative note in his voice, "we discuss the parameters of further... experimentation. And you tell me your name. One should know the name of a beautiful, living creation, should one not?"

fin