Lilly Lee
It wasn't often a song stopped me dead in my tracks. All I could do was listen.
And I was filled with feelings of peace and hope. So much I didn't want to move, just listen.
Now there wasn't a tune, a melody, or words to that song. But I was tranfixed. If I could have tapped my foot to keep time, I would. It was a catchy song, and filled my heart to overflowing with love and understanding.
A siren's song.
But not of lust and longing for carnal needs. Just simple hope, love, understanding.
And when it was over, I felt the loss of simpler times, of innocence.
I only wanted to hear that song again, to feel like that all over again.
But how? The song had stopped, and where it came from was anyone's guess.
What was left was the quiet wind though the trees and over the pasture grasses. Songbirds started up their song - or I was able to hear them again.
Everything seemed back to usual.
Excerpt:
Now I was the one that was haunted. John Earl Stark of the Ghost Hunters fame. Writer of mystery stories - where ghosts got their mysteries solved. And supernatural spirits who came to me with their own mysteries, their own problems to solve.
It's not that I was able to solve all of them, but I wrote up and published the most successful.
Yes, I'd been haunted by my own thoughts - and the people I'd helped had helped me in turn to get over those scenes.
This mystery siren I hoped would be a fluke, a mistake, a temporary scene. Hoped, anyway.
But it returned that evening, about twilight. When I usually settled down with a good paperback and studied up on classics. Made for good dreams - unless I stopped on a cliffhanger. (The trick is to force yourself to stop mid-chapter in a slow part.)
I couldn't read that evening. Because the song was in my head again.
This time with words, and a catchy beat - an ear-wig.
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Now I was really stuck. It had some off-beat rhythm, like a waltz or something.
That's all I needed, a folk ballad dance-tune.
Who was this Lilly Lee and why was she haunting me? Well, the last half of that answer I knew. It wasn't the first time a ghost had come to me for resolution.
As much as I hated to do what came next - because they'd probably all get the same ear-wig - I sat up, then stood and took a hold of the gold-streaked pendant on a woven thong around my neck. And thought of the Ghost Hunter Library.
My small cabin shimmered around me and disappeared...