I spent the festive period in my home town with my family, but now I'm back in Scotland and ready to continue work.
It was amazing catching up with Mum and Dad, cousins, aunts and uncles and most of all my elder daughter who is away at college.
I managed to devour six books that I will review over the next few days:
The Weird: compendium
Heathcliff, by Sue Barnard
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by JK Rowling
Coffin Road and Runaways, by Peter May
Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman.
Today will be spent finishing the first draft of Ribbons. I'll be looking for beta readers for that one in a month or so.
Ribbons is the fourth book in the Starblood series. All four novels will be released by Vamptasy publishing, part of CHBB. Starblood came out in December, Psychonaut will be released in March, Black Sun in June and Ribbons in September.
I am writing a short story with the working title Underground. It's a ghost story set in London. I thought I'd share a short excerpt of the first draft here. Let me know what you think in the comments.
It was white above ground. The snow had frozen until it was treacherous underfoot and gave the stone steps that descended steeply ahead a glass-like sheen. Allan clung to the rusting handrail, pulling pieces from it with his leather glove each time he shifted his grip. Despite the cold, the street behind him was crowded with people enjoying their work parties and drunken revelry. Sliding from bar to bar as gracefully as Torville and Dean compared to Allan’s tentative steps. His hip ached from last year’s injury as if frost had wormed its way beneath his clothes and flesh and was stabbing the bone with sharpened icicles. He hated this weather, but a job was a job.
In his right hand Allan clutched the tools of his trade. The sports bag was full of monitoring equipment, a heat sensitive camera, a sound wave monitor, an electrical thermometer, his trusty dictaphone and dozens of replacement batteries, carefully packed so as not to connect and cause an explosion. He considered himself a mobile one-man science lab. Others referred to him as a ghost buster, but he didn’t like that term. He didn’t believe in the supernatural. All he had encountered over the last decade could be explained by science, even though some of the theories he relied on might seem as “out there” to others as the idea of earth-bound spirits was to him.
He’d had cases like this one before. He had proven, to his own satisfaction if not everybody’s, in each case that the presence of low frequency sounds, inaudible to humans, could and did cause hallucinations, and he doubted this one would be different. It paid the rent on his one bedroom Camden apartment and that’s why he indulged the ramblings of believers rather than challenging them outright. Science would prove to them their wrong headedness. His job was to make recordings and show his clients they had nothing to fear. And, in this case, get the striking workers back on the job as quickly as possible. He would record sounds, smells, changes in temperature and the quality of air in the ghostly hot spots and use this as the basis for his investigation. That was the brief he'd agreed with the high level managers and that was the work he was due to start tonight.
Hauntings on the underground were hardly a new phenomena. Every person who had worked on or near the tracks had tales to tell. It was only the number of people who claimed to have been attacked by angry ghosts and the resultant refusal of workers to stay there after dark, forcing the Whitechapel station to close after 4pm, that made London Underground engage his services.
They wanted him to disprove the ghost theory, of course. That's why they'd hired someone who was first and foremost a sceptic. But whatever the outcome, they needed the station reopened as quickly as possible. Which was probably why they gave him the leverage they did and agreed to his demand for all areas access.
He knew primitive minds could be easily manipulated by both imagination and external forces. Once one person saw something it didn't tend to take long for another to report the same thing. People who worked closely together often developed hive minds. Or more likely were affected by the fear they could smell in each other’s sweat.
It was with a sense of relief that he entered the tunnel. The tiled floor was sheltered and the ice didn’t reach further than the mouth. He could walk with confidence again as he approached the locked gate to meet the security manager, the one member of the team willing to stay on tonight.
‘Richard Grantham, but call me Rich,’ the man said extending a hand.
Allan placed his leather covered palm against Grantham’s bare skin and shook hands.
‘Thank you for meeting me, Rich. My name’s Dr. Allan.’