the Manor at Blackmere Hollow: A Gothic Tale of Memory and Sea

The house remembers. It has been waiting eighty years for someone to listen.Cornwall, 1962. Six months after his brother Julian fell from the cliffs below Blackmere Hollow, the architect Edward Langford comes to the old family manor to settle its affairs and sell it. Julian was afraid of heights all his life, yet he went down to the sea alone, in the middle of the night, in a gale.On his first night in the house Edward hears knocking inside the wall: three, then two, then three. He smells lavender where no flowers grow. Behind a panel in the west wing he finds his brother's drawings, a brass locket with the initials E. L., and a reel of tape on which Julian asks the dark to say its name. Something answers.The parish records tell a simple story. In 1883 Eleanor Langford, twenty-two, vanished on a stormy October night. A ribbon was found on the cliff path, and the sea was blamed. Jonathan Vyne, the stonemason who had asked to marry her, was questioned and quietly driven away.But Vyne left his marks in the rock beneath the house, and a door in the cliff that opens only at low water. The deeper Edward goes into the passages his brother found, the clearer it becomes that the knocking is not a haunting. It is a signal, the one she was taught, and it has never stopped, because no one has ever answered it.The Manor at Blackmere Hollow is a gothic novel about the secrets families wall up and the debts that outlive their keepers, and about a man who learns that some doors can only be opened by the living.Some houses keep their dead. This one has been asking to give one back.