The Dark Between Series
Novella I
Doors To The Dead
Rae Else
Copyright © 2021 Rae Else.
All rights reserved.
raeelse.co.uk
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is fictionalised or coincidental.
His phone vibrated on the table. Theo opened the notification. Someone had updated the thread on the Ghost Hunters site:
A photo showed the neglected vineyard. The gnarled vines cast shadows along the ground like withered arms.
The place was garnering attention. The clink of glass and titter of conversation in the piazza seemed stale as the vineyard and dilapidated villa ten kilometres suffused his thoughts. He’d got to Tuscany this afternoon, found a house to rent, and set out this evening. He’d only stopped here for a bite to eat. With new photos being posted, eating suddenly seemed frivolous. The charged expectation he felt was at odds with the hot summer evening in the Piazza Grande. The other passers-by embraced the sedate pace, sampling rich wines, admiring the medieval architecture, and collecting kisses like souvenirs.
More than a few of the tourists and locals’ imaginations ran away when they caught sight of Theo’s striking features, shoulder-length sandy hair, and muscular physique. They eyed him with the same admiration with which they stared up at the duomo. But he hadn’t come to Tuscany to be eye-candy. Not for these ladies anyway. He had a date with another.
Donna con il terzo occhi … The woman with the third eye.
When Theo left the piazza, a pang of disappointment pealed like a bell through his admirers. In some, missed opportunity rang; others quivered with bashfulness at where their thoughts had strayed. What they couldn’t comprehend was that it was more than the stranger’s handsomeness that bewitched them.
An extraordinary current of life thrummed within Theo: a horde of souls to be exact. He’d lost count at a thousand. His thousandth had been a year ago, so it might even be two by now.
Theo traipsed along roadsides flanked by elegant cypresses. He headed past the chalky sandstone buildings of the hillside. The sweeping panorama of the Tuscan countryside, with its undulating hills and golden fields, was picture-postcard pretty.
He wondered how the others in his coven were doing. What number of souls were they on? He was in his final year as a fledgling mage. Two months and he would be fully inducted into the Enodia Coven. The promise of that ceremony glittered in his mind like the brightest of stars. He and his classmates would celebrate their eighteenths this Samhain and would take their place fully within the coven. They would be able to make alliances, branching out to work with shifters, vamps, or fae. The whole para world would finally be open to them.
He’d been top of his class for years. It was almost guaranteed that he would be the Enodian to tether the most souls. Yet that word spurred him ever onwards. Almost. He’d barely stopped the last few years. The approaching ceremony pushed him to practice his craft relentlessly and be forever on the move; the next tethering was always on his mind. The hope that the next one would finally bring that which he craved. The reason he’d come to Tuscany. The reason he was taking such a risk.
None of his classmates would be crazy enough to come to central or southern Italy. These regions were presided over by Enodia’s rival coven, the Triodia. Their soil was off-limits to the tethering of souls. He was taking a great risk coming here. Foolhardy is what most would call it. If caught, the Triodia would lock him up in a penitentiary.He mustn’t be caught; being locked up would mean missing the Enodian induction, something that would cost him seriously at the start of his coven career. He deliberated on what he was doing. He knew the risk. Yet he also knew one couldn’t aspire to great power without taking it.
If he was correct about what lay in the abandoned villa, its value was beyond compare.
Worth the risk.
The wind swept through the cypresses along the boundary walls of the cemetery, their feathery tips whispering. As ghostly as the breeze seemed against the backdrop of toppled walls and jagged graves, the cemetery was devoid of supernatural activity. The dead didn’t frequent arbitrary places that the living designated for them. No, human souls who didn’t venture onto the Netherworld lingered around the places they’d either lived or died.
Like the woman with the third eye.
The photos from the website flitted through Theo’s thoughts. The sandstone villa and choked vineyard surrounding it. The villa had stood empty for a year. Since the woman’s death.
He’d been in northern Italy yesterday, gathering souls from a World War One battleground when he’d flagged the listing on the parapsychology site. Most supernatural sightings were drivel. Occasionally, there was something in them. Although, the souls he’d tethered from these “haunted” places had never proved anything special.
Yet, deep in his bones, he sensed that there was more to this one. More than the overly common creepy house. The postings claimed that in life the woman had been a psychic. That's where her nickname had come from. The locals called her the woman with the third eye. Since her death, people still spoke of her. People claimed to have seen her in the garden and vineyard. Again, all this wouldn’t have brought him here, but the finer details gave it the ring of authenticity. The word that had captivated him about the spectral woman was … purple.
Souls emanated with different colours. He’d heard the hokum human term “aura”. Some humans claimed that people were bathed with them. He’d never seen auras around the living but thatwas precisely what the dead had. When one confronted a soul, they showed their essence in a display of colour. Most souls were white, grey, and black. Monochrome. Those with para abilities, that fell on the spectrum of beings like him, mages
