Don't Fade Away

Don't Fade Away A Ghost Story Natalie Pearce Description For Elle, haunting a share house comes with a unique set of challenges. Living tenants come and go, leaving her with nothing to fill her days except a crush on longstanding housemate, Dean, who literally doesn't know she exists. Talk about unrequited love. Just as she despairs at being stuck halfway to the other side for the rest of her afterlife, the newest resident sparks hope for something more than the humdrum of everyday death. As far as mediums go, Ethan barely knows he is one. He just wants a place to knuckle down and finish his medical degree. But as soon as he moves in, he senses a presence. He tries to ignore it - but Elle is insistent... The more Ethan uncovers about Elle, the more he suspects her death was no accident. Can he help her move on, or will greater forces intervene? Don't Fade Away is a spooky contemporary ghost story with a few scares and a lot of heart! Don't Fade Away A Ghost Story by Natalie Pearce This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and descriptions are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 1. Edition, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by Natalie Pearce All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Cover design by Natalie Pearce www.nataliepearceauthor.com Dedicated to Huw Pearce I couldn’t have finished this book without your support Table of Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Acknowledgments Ghost of a Chance About the Author Chapter 1 It really was such an undignified way to die. In fact, if there was anyone she could actually talk to, she would probably be too embarrassed to tell them. Hi. My name’s Elle, and I’m so clumsy I managed to kill myself. Not that she remembered what happened. Not really—just the end result. Her crumpled form lying at the bottom of the goddamned stairs. She sat on that bottom step quite often these days, pondering her fate. Or sulking, as someone else might have called it, that is, if someone else could see her. She wondered if all ghosts were like her, constantly drawn to the very spot they met their demise. The fact that the step remained solid beneath her was also a plus. Unfortunately, she couldn’t say the same about the couch to her left in the outdated lounge room. At least not the one there these days. The trusty old couch she and Amelia rescued from the side of the road when they first started university was long gone. Not that Amelia took it with her when she moved out after Elle died. No, she left so quickly that she hardly took any of the cheap furniture or knick-knacks they accumulated during their student days. The poor old couch survived a couple of subsequent tenants before Michelle? Melissa? consigned the good old ‘solid’ couch back to the side of the road. Of course, the horrible pea green thing she replaced it with was also long gone along with… Melissa? Yes, it had been Melissa. Elle actually quite liked the bright red leather couch that now took pride of place in the lounge room. It was just a pity she couldn’t sit on it. It looked comfy even if it did clash horribly with the kitsch wallpaper and yellow bottle glass in the entry hall in front of the staircase. The red couch arrived along with Dean two years ago, and Elle hadn’t missed Melissa or her ugly green couch for long. Not for the couch’s sake, since she quickly discovered that trying to ‘sit’ on any new furniture resulted in her butt making contact with the ground, but because Melissa spent a lot of time with her own butt on that couch watching television. And while Elle could quite comfortably watch from the bottom step, she hadn’t always appreciated her former housemate’s taste in crime shows with their plethora of dead bodies. Entertainment options were hard to come by when you were dead, but as it turned out, Dean managed to put his couch to much better use on a fairly regular basis. While it may have felt a tad voyeuristic to start with, Elle quickly got over her prudishness once she realized watching Dean make his own entertainment with his frequent guests, was a hell of a lot more interesting than CSI reruns. What could she say? This was still her house—was she supposed to leave the room? It’s not like she followed them into his bedroom (okay, she may have followed them into his bedroom once or twice) but come on, what’s a ghost to do with so much spare time? Over the past four years, many people had moved in and, before long, out of the house. Dean was the only tenant of the admittedly dated seventies split story who bothered to stick around for longer than a year. One guy lasted all of three weeks. Sometimes Elle wondered if it was her. Not that she got up to any spooky hi-jinks, she was more of a watch from the shadows type of ghost. When it came down to it, haunting a share house proved far less glamorous than haunting one’s ancestral family home. But it’s not like she had any say in the matter. Or an ancestral home to haunt. When she shuffled off her mortal coil, there hadn’t been a light she didn’t go into, nor any familiar faces waiting to guide her to the other side. Not even a strange disembodied voice.