First, I should mention that my books are on sale again for 99 cents on Amazon until next Wednesday, in case any visitor has unaccountably neglected to collect my oeuvre to date.
Next, a little digression about what I’m working on currently. It’s called The Blackthorn Legacy and is the first of four books I’ve planned in the series, which could easily wind up being called The Blackthorn Chronicles. It’s a bit of a departure for me–it presents as, loosely, a supernatural cozy murder mystery, but ultimately identifies as something more and deeper…hopefully. I’ll offer a couple of preliminary excerpts here. It’s very much a work in progress so these may or may not find their way into the finished story in this form or any other.
First, a little background. The Blackthorn family are refugees from the West Coast who wind up in New England when their crazy uncle dies suddenly and they inherit his house and lands. It develops that he has in fact been murdered, while apparently performing some kind of magic ritual. In the first sequence we join Brian and Sylvie Blackthorn, and their children Very and Dylan, attempting to find their way to Uncle Malcolm’s house:
There was still light in the sky, but darkness was welling up from the ground below, and shadows had already claimed the woods on both sides of the road. Brian drove slowly so as not to miss any of the clues that Mr. Blood had laid out for them, like a lawerly trail of very dry little breadcrumbs.
“GPS won’t do you much good out there,” he’d told them, before giving them a series of landmarks to look for. “I haven’t been there myself, you understand. The late Mr. Blackthorn always came to our office for his business. Sally Higgins gave me these directions—you may have noticed her real estate office on the corner. If you decide to sell, you can’t do better than go to her.”
“After a year, you mean,” Brian reminded the lawyer.
“Of course. After a year.”
They jolted over a stray frost heave, and Sylvie’s teeth came together with a snap. “Ow,” she remarked.
“So, what’s next?” Brian asked, slowing down again and peering ahead. Since Sylvie was navigating, she’d taken the notes.
“Let’s see. We passed Johnnycake Lane.”
“That was way back,” Very said.
“And Back Mountain Road, and Gallows Hill Road, and Old New Providence Road.”
“I liked Old New Providence,” Brian said.
“Gallows Hill was my favorite,” Very said. “That must be where they hung the highwaymen. And the witches.”
“And,” Sylvie went on, “we went past the place where the dead tree overhangs the road.”
Dylan remembered that vividly. The tree had seemed still alive, to him. Probably it was just pretending to be dead, for reasons of its own. But it didn’t hide a face in the rough folds of its bark, like many of the other trees they’d passeds. It reached out over the road hungrily, but blindly, and he was glad it didn’t seem to be able to see them.
“Check.” Brian nodded.
“And we haven’t come to…let’s see…’the break in the woods where lightning started that fire last year and burned down a lot of the older trees’. Which is good, because that would have meant we’ve gone too far.”
“Okay…”
“And we also haven’t seen any ‘Class Six Unmaintained Road’ signs, which we would have if we’d missed that place where we needed to bear left, ‘which is easy to do unless you keep a sharp eye, and if you forget and go straight, the road will take you right up the mountain, and you won’t be able to turn around for half a mile or so’,” Sylvie quoted. “Wow, Sally must be a good real estate agent. Very detail oriented.”
“What mountain?”
“The mountain, is all it says here. We’ll have to find out what its name actually is.”
“Okay…so what should we be looking for?”
Sylvie folded up the piece of notepaper. “That’s actually all the landmarks. Now we’re looking for Hill Road, which she just says is ‘a ways further on.’ It will be a right turn.”
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The second sequence is when the family is settling down to sleep on the day they learn that Uncle Malcolm has in fact been murdered:
The silence seemed even deeper tonight, a well of still darkness. Cocooned in his bed, eyes already closed, Dylan imagined himself looking up at the autumn stars. They were cold and bright and far away. The only sounds he heard, now and then, were creaks and faint groans, the house talking softly to itself as it settled into its own time of dreams.
He thought of Charlotte, who had smiled at him a couple of times, and then of Sheriff Greenlaw. He’d liked the sheriff, whose face was friendly after he’d taken off his sunglasses and you could see his windows (of the soul, his father had said that once a long time ago, and anyway windows were eyes too, wind-eyes, that’s what his mom had told him).
Dylan fell asleep still wondering why so many people did that, hiding their eyes, hiding their faces behind masks. Did they get tired of seeing things? Or were they just afraid of being seen? He felt he was getting close to the answer…in two more of his slowing heartbeats, he’d have it…or at most, three…
What Very saw through her closed eyes was the moon—such a moon as she’d never seen rise, huge and orange, even though outside, in the night, it was a new moon and Dylan’s stars held the sky. And she and Charlotte were flying together—not clutching broomsticks, not riding dragons or griffins or flying horses, but just flying. It seemed to Very that she’d always had the knack, but kept forgetting about it until something happened to jog her memory.
She and Charlotte rode the wind, swooping down to touch the trees, then spiralling up toward the moon, which seemed out of reach, but only just. And then with Charlotte flying ahead, looking back over her shoulder to make sure she was following, Very felt the winds fail and the air, suddenly still, caught and held her. She almost opened her eyes with the surprise of it, but instead of falling she began drifting down, like a leaf, rocking gently back and forth.
When the bough breaks, she heard her mother’s voice singing, but she thought sleepily the bough doesn’t break, the leaf just lets go. And she did.
Sylvie had more trouble getting to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Uncle Malcolm dying just upstairs. If it had been their bedroom, she would never have agreed to sleep there. But Brian (and it was his uncle, she reminded herself) hadn’t seemed to be bothered by it, and Sylvie didn’t want to make a fuss about mere proximity to death. Every old house has seen people die.
It reminded her of a time she was driving, and when the traffic slowed, found herself stuck behind a truck for a company that made coffins. A bad omen, maybe, if the truck had been following her (there was an old folk belief about that, she remembered), but as it was, just a funny anecdote.
And besides, she thought, that room wasn’t really so close. It was far, far above them…wasn’t it? Yes. The tower, in her mind, had risen into the sky. And something about that high room was drawing her. She opened the door, she walked up the spiraling stairs that seemed endless as the night. But she came at last into the room with its high windows.
She hardly remembered Uncle Malcolm’s death now. It was the stars that mattered, the high, cold stars…she could begin to see patterns in them, they formed a picture, filling the sky with some huge meaning she could just begin, now, to grasp…
Brian fell asleep quickly, but it was the kind of sleep that comes over you like a trance, and feels like being paralyzed. He knew he was asleep, but he felt himself locked in his own body. Within him his spirit stirred, and stretched, and shifted from side to side, testing the limits of this self-prison.
But he didn’t struggle enough, quite, to wake himself up. Still, in a short while, there was a blur of confused images and then he found himself out.
He was standing in front of the door to the tower stairway. There was a faint light from somewhere. It took him a moment to realize it was coming from the crack underneath the door.
Of course, he thought, his uncle must be up there. Working late, as he often did. In fact now Brian could definitely smell the smoke from Uncle Malcolm’s pipe. He remembered now that his uncle was always smoking that pipe, and as a child he’d loved the aromatic scent.
He heard the sound of the knob being turned, and the door began to swing open.
Brian jolted back into his body as if shot out of a cannon. He sat bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding. Sylvie was sleeping deeply next to him. The house was completely still, holding its breath.
But even though he was wide awake with sleep now hours away, he could still smell the scent of his uncle’s tobacco, hanging heavily in the air.
