I am pleased to invite my readers to take a quick glimpse of my newest published novel, Dearly Remembered. This is the second in a series, but may also be read alone. The book is a paranormal mystery romance set in a little town in Kentucky.
Enjoy a nice spooky story, perfect for Halloween!
A hot splash of panic hit my system half a second before my
heartbeat drove out the foreign sound.
It was just too freaking dark to see anything beyond my nose, and the
streetlights out the windows were almost nonexistent. I was left in the dark, so dark that the
shadows of furniture had melted into an inky stain against the white
walls. I sat up in my bed and threw the
covers back, swinging my bare legs over the side of the bed and grabbing the
tennis racquet resting against the bedframe.
My pounding heart had lessened slightly, and I strained to hear the
sound, the sound that had driven me from my mundane dreams of home. Again I heard it. It wasn’t the sigh of the door, the click of
the knob as it turned. Not that. And it wasn’t the footfalls of someone
creeping outside my door. It was more
terrifying than that. It was a whisper,
softer than the breeze, begging and straining, wanting and beckoning me to do something
and go somewhere that I had never been and never wished to be. I was pretty sure Death had come calling,
and I was trying to face him off with sports equipment.
At the doorway I stopped
my hand on the cool metal of the knob. I
didn’t want to open it. Out in the hall
there was more dark, more silence, and more empty doorways. The house wasn’t huge, but it was bigger than
our own little downtown apartment had been, and most of the rooms were echo
empty with warped wooden floors that would give beneath my feet, alerting
anyone who cared that I was out and about with my racquet.
I turned the knob
anyway, peeking first from the crack between the door and the frame, and when I
saw nothing, looking out into the wider gloom.
The hall spread out right and left, ending in a turning staircase at one
end of the corridor. At the dead end, a
window leaked spare light onto the floor, moonlight that seemed to suck the
color from everything around me until my own skin looked like smooth grey
stone. At the other end of that hall, at
the head of the stairs, one door stood slightly ajar, my sister’s room. I didn’t worry that she might catch me in my
black rose tee shirt and bare feet, and black painted toenails looking like
drops of blood pooled on the wooden floor.
She slept the heavy sleep of the exhausted and fulfilled, the sleep of
someone thrown into adulthood with a brutal shove.
I finally forced
myself to move, sliding the soles of my bare feet over the cool floors. The doors on either side of the hall were
closed but for my sister’s. Behind the
heavy panels were the other bedrooms, two for my sister and me, two that
sheltered dust bunnies and boogie men under the old bedframes and abandoned
dressers, and one that my sister had made up into a makeshift office complete
with cardboard desk. I wouldn’t go in
those. Whoever had come into my house
wasn’t some incorporeal spirit. He wasn’t
wafting through the heavy doors or seeping under the door jam. He was real, and he had real footfalls and real hands that
would need to open those doors to hide inside.
And that I would have heard. This
antique house was eerily quiet at rest, but put a living body in it, and it
squealed, squeaked, groaned, and protested as though inconvenienced by our
presence. I would have heard any of the
doors opening.
I was speeding up
now. I raced down the steps, the racquet
held in front of me, my hand skimming the wooden rail. All I could hear now were my own footsteps
and the house responding to my weight.
My breathing was unnaturally loud in my ears, and my heart was a more
subtle thunder. At the bottom of the stairs
I paused at the landing. To the right
was the dining room, empty but for a towering stack of boxes still unpacked
since the move and some forgotten pieces of furniture we hadn’t decided what to
do with yet. Behind that was the
kitchen, the only slightly updated room in the place, with its eighties
wallpaper and Formica countertops. To my
left was the parlor, perfect for greeting gentlemen callers a hundred years
ago, but now a little bit of wasted space until we could figure out what to do
with the room. The living room behind
that was generous for the age of the house, but the piece of carpet we had
thrown on the floor would hide any sounds of footsteps if the intruder went
there. Could that be why it was silent
now? Was he waiting in the gloom, still
enough to cover his presence with silence?
I went toward the
living room. The kitchen had a doorway
to the backyard through a mudroom, and since the kitchen and living room shared
a wall and a doorway, it was the easiest way out of the house besides the front
door straight ahead of me. If he was
still in the house, I could only hope that he was seeking an exit and was
moving toward it. I slipped into the
parlor, keeping my back to the wall and my eyes so wide that I felt blind. I followed the plaster wall, skimming my
fingertips over the uneven surface that we still meant to paint, and moved
toward the living room. A stingy glow of
light came from the back where a neighbor had an outdoor light hung on the rear
of his garage. It cast uneven shadows
across the dark floors and lighter carpet.
I stopped in the living room door and stood for a long moment in the
silence.
“Give it up,
little girl,” the whisper moved in the darkness, so close but not. A brush of something on my arm, the distinct
feeling of warmth of another human so close, and then gone. I spun like a dancer that I would never be,
racquet held out with both hands, feet set apart and firm for my stance. But I knew before I finished my turn that the
room was empty. There was no one
there. And the door never opened.
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