The first serialized installment of of the book 3 in the Ravencrest Saga is coming soon.
“Midnight. The witching hour. Watery echoes in an empty building. The grand indoor pool at Ravencrest Manor babbles and gurgles as chlorine-scented water pumps, flowing like cool blood in veins and arteries. The moon, full and high above the arched glass ceiling, shines its light into the cobalt pool, casting splintered rays across the water, picking up golden highlights as it hits the constellations, the planets, and their moons set into the bottom of the pool.
The statues surrounding the water are alive with moonlight and reflection. Poseidon, enthroned at one end, frowns over his Kingdom, alabaster eyes flickering with moonbeams. Across the long spanse of water, a jovial Dionysus is surrounded by his Maenads, who shimmer and shimmy in the moving glow of the moon.
Elsewhere, all along the blue-and-star-tiled floor bordering the plunge, marble sylphs and nymphs watch from the shadows. Where the pool narrows to a river, turning and weaving like a snake behind the main body of water, only to return again, a clutch of Muses titters at anyone brave enough to venture so far from the main room.
A phantasmic sound. A spring and thunk from the tall diving board that obscures the darkened dressing rooms beyond. Then a splash as someone dives in, and somehow, water explodes into the air. The sound ebbs and flows with movement.
But if no human ear is present to hear it, no eye to see it, can these sights and sounds be real? Or are they merely tricks of light and sound, magic courtesy of Mother Nature?
Something white and serpentine slithers and stirs beneath the water like glistening cold silk, there and gone again in an instant.
And then, music, faint but unmistakable, rises and echoes. Eddie Cantor. If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie. Oh, oh what a girl.
Laughter. The sounds of a party, of voices, of glasses clinking.
A cloud passes before the moon, and the stage goes dark and silent but for the gurgle of water. No statue moves. The music is ended, if it was ever there at all. And then…
Chanting, soft and sinister, from somewhere nearby. An echo. Malignant minor-keyed singing – something reminiscent of the Dies Irae, but warped rather than tragic, disturbing rather than sorrowful. Day of Wrath and Doom Impending. We welcome your darkness; we bathe in your shadows.
The cloud passes, moonlight filters through the arched glass once more. The water is still now; there is nothing except, perhaps, the faint agonizing sound of a scream.”
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