(Author's Note : My entry for the inaugural Romance Short Story Smackdown, Round 2. Prompts : Group 3 The song you must incorporate is 'Demon Speeding' - Rob Zombie -

'Below, you'll find a list of six musicians, three male and three female, with one common denominator. They're all dead.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story in which two of those listed musicians fall madly in love with you from beyond the grave in a supernatural romance of 4,000 - 8,000 words.'

Male musician - Dimebag Darrell

Female musician - Stefanie Sargent)

Speeding Demons

I first met Dimebag Darrell when I had just turned eighteen. Not that I realised who he was at the beginning, I mean, only one of the top ten guitarists of all time as voted by readers of Guitar World Magazine! No, to be honest, when I first saw him I thought he was some old bikie guy, perving at us through the windows. Long bushy hair, a straggly beard that looked as if it had been coloured red with that fake spray that comes in a can, blue tatts up his arms and a leather jacket complete with ripped sleeves. What else was a girl to think?

I was in the Cosmos, an old building our band had found to practice in. It had been a cinema in a former life, then a second hand furniture shop until the GFC put an end to that phase, and it had been on the market for the last couple of years when we found it. The ground floor was boarded up for protection, but Dylan had found a way inside through a door at the back of the building. The vast echoing space was useless for our purposes, we would have been heard over in the next block, but the basement was perfect. Half full of junk, some of it dating from cinema days, we hauled and shoved until we had an almost sound proofed space in the middle. As long as we kept everything at half volume, you could hardly hear us from outside. We checked. And as an added bonus, it was really hard to tell where the faint noise was coming from unless you were standing right outside the grated windows at the back of the building.

As I was saying, the first time I saw Dimebag, it was just a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. At first I thought he was peering in at us through those windows, although he would have to have been lying flat on his stomach to do so, as they were at ground level. It took me a full second to register that I was looking at a mirror, not the windows.

Amongst all the furniture stored in the basement, we had found an old dressing table, like one my grandma used to have, with a space for your knees to go under when you sat down to brush your hair or put on your makeup. Attached to the back was a huge mirror, only slightly cracked, which we dragged into our practice space so we could check out how our performance would look to an audience, if we ever got one.

Suddenly it dawned on me that if I could see his reflection, he must be in the basement with us. Adrenaline kicked in and I spun around, looking for the intruder. I couldn't see anyone except for Dylan, Jenna and Zak.

"What's wrong?" asked Jenna, lifting her hands from the keyboard.

"Someone's in here! I saw his reflection in the mirror!"

The others clutched their instruments protectively and looked around.

"Where?"

"He must have been behind us."

"What did he look like?"

"A bikie. Long hair, tatts. Fat."

The others looked alarmed. Maybe someone else was using our basement as a squat.

"Is anyone there?" called out Dylan bravely.

Silence.

"Maybe he's gone," offered Jenna.

"How did he get in?" Zak asked, frowning. "The door's locked and I've got the key." Once we had started using the basement on a regular basis, he had bought a sturdy padlock, precisely for this purpose, to stop anyone else from cashing in on our find.

We spent the next ten minutes looking around the basement but we couldn't find anyone, or even a sign that anyone else had been here.

"You must have imagined it," concluded Dylan.

"No I-" I opened my mouth to protest but I could see that the others agreed with him.

That was the end of that practice session, everyone felt too unsettled to pick up where we had left off. When we left, I walked around the Cosmos twice, hunting for a second way into the building. Nothing.

Maybe they were right, I must have imagined it. A trick of the light. The image had seemed so clear, but ... I put it out of my mind.

Until the next time I saw him, in my bedroom.