Hydra Haunting Halloween

http://www.hydrapublications.com/

Join the authors at Hydra Publications celebrating a Haunting Hydra Halloween!  Our party gift to you, books....at 99 cents!! 
Have a howling good time!

Introducing Dearly Remembered, Book 2 in the Grave Reminders Series

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!

http://www.amazon.com/Dearly-Remembered-Grave-Reminders-Book-ebook/dp/B00OQINPEU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1413938276&sr=8-2&keywords=rachael+rawlings

 

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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Dearly Departed, Book one of the Grave Reminders series

Bones and Catacombs

Strange places: bones and catacombs

 

 

 

Deep beneath the pavement of Paris, France, older, even, than some of its more well-known monuments, lies a labyrinth of tunnels lined with stacks of bones.  These are the remains of millions of Parisians, entombed there for all time, in a place that reeks of age and time.  The tunnels are world borne, created by ancient tropical seas which left the layers of stone in their wake as they yielded up to the land.  This limestone then became a vital building block for the civilization that came after it, building great Cathedrals, palaces, and city streets.  The spaces left from the mining were vast systems of passages that became the second grave for many bodies when graveyards were closed in the city.   Now close to six million bodies lay under the city of Paris in an area referred to as “France’s Empire of the Dead”.

 

Visitors to Paris can tour the Catacombs with tour guides and lit passages.  There are reputed to be street signs carved into the walls to indicate where under the city that the visitor is located.  The area is now monitored and protected by police.  But what must it been like before it became a tourist location?  And what of the infinitely more unexplored tunnels?  What might they hold?

 

The bodies were originally moved in the early 1780’s because of the severe crowding in Paris cemeteries and church yards.  Bodies and bones were erupting into people’s cellars.  The extensive space under the city seemed to be a good alternative.  But if your loved one was tucked into one of the cold niches under the city, would you visit with a bouquet of flowers?  If you were looking for a long lost grand relative, would you wade through the tunnels of bones to pay a call?  Under the watchful eye of a guide, I might be tempted to journey into the depths to get a small taste of history, but no further.  I have a healthy respect for the dead and would ultimately want them to rest in peace.  I surely wouldn’t want to bring something back home with me!

 

If given the chance, would you go for the tour?  Would you go with the guide, or are you a more adventurous sort?  Are you the type to creep into one of the hidden entrances to brave the dark by yourself?

Would you be afraid?

 

Thanks to: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184393/Paris-catacombs-The-skulls-bones-inside-Frances-Empire-Dead.html