A Song Beyond Walls

By S. Escobar

A grand Victorian house has been abandoned for decades...and so has its resident spirit, Claire...

That is, until a young man named Dorian, who loves every inch of cobweb and dust, moves into the home and finds within its decrepit remains everything he

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Escobar
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735738017

Book preview

A Song Beyond Walls

S. ESCOBAR

A Song Beyond Walls

Copyright © 2020 by S. Escobar

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design and interior illustrations by Daniela Coronado

ISBN 978-1-7357380-1-7 (e-book)

ISBN 978-1-7357380-0-0 (hardcover)

Printed in USA

Contents

The Unraveled

The Flesh

A Collection

A Rapidly Beating Heart

Feminine Phantom

Dorian

Claire

Living

Limitless

Fulfilled

The Unraveled

I remember Time. I remember how clocks would measure Time with gears that grinded so that hands could turn, and that consequential click that was a reminder of its passing. I used to have a clock here—a beautiful mahogany one that chimed in the parlor. But it was one of the first things taken… along with the silver, all the good chairs, and anything else that held value. All I’ve been left with are the sofas that have crumbled under their own weight and a broken piano I once loved to play. I’m sure it would still make music if only I could touch it.

Time, though. I remember the circle of it—how the hours pass and begin again with a new day. But I am no longer bound to that single dimension. The circle became to me a sphere. What once I thought were minutes now hold their own pocket in the infinite Great Space, and in that space I linger, dissipated like a gas, spread almost to nonexistence. Purpose and reason are no longer relevant to me, but I can recall what it felt like to be possessed by the illusions of the physical world. Illusions of rules, of beauty, of worth.

The living are so confined by barriers, most of which are of their own imagining. I have seen a few of them—the living—come here into my dwelling. Their shoes groan on the wooden floorboards, leaving shapes upon the dust; their eyes glance around at the peeling wallpaper, the circle of ceiling from where the missing chandelier had been torn, and how still-more dust has caked every surface like snow. They wonder what happened here… why such a dismal place has become of what had once, surely, been a gleaming and merry house. I can only assume they return to wherever they came from and speak to others of what they have seen here… what they have judged. How this house is not clean and beautiful anymore; how it is too much work to repair. How it frightens them, a little, to feel like they are being watched.

To think I had once been bound by flesh and cloth like them… to have had a body—a shape—feet that planted upon the ground, hands that could reach out for whatever I wanted to touch. Such boundaries… such limits I was imprisoned by, that even my own corset was a cage. But if it was possible for me to want, in this dissipated form in which I am now, I would want it again. When I first became unraveled—like a cloth undone of its threads—and lost without form in this Great Space, I was terrified. I much preferred being snug in a single, moveable body.

How long since my unraveling? The sun rises and falls in an incomprehensible blur. It could have been hours; it could have been a thousand years. Fashions have changed, that much I have been able to tell by those few who have come