Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

It was just supposed to be a bit of fun...

An out of hours visit to a remote funeral home. A depraved undertaker whose predilections go beyond a desire to resurrect the dead. A murdered girl bonded to the fiend who stole her life. And a desperate son on the verge of discovering a terrible secret about his missing mother�

When the dead rise.

It doesn’t take long to prove the building is haunted, but there is more to fear than the unfortunate souls trapped within the borders of the Toliver House.

It’s time to run.

Preview

It wasn’t the first time that Morden had stood at the edge of this huge crater anticipating the events ahead. Previously, whenever he’d made late night sojourns to this spot, he would take time to admire the eerie solitude of this bleakly beautiful landscape.

Not tonight, though.

Behind him, two figures moved through the darkness, their bare feet unsteady in the mud as dampened soil bubbled up and lodged between calcified toes; further slowing their crippled and faltering stride. They came to a stop just short of Morden’s shoulder.

A solitary flash of lightning brightened the night, revealing the two forms behind him. Patches of rain-washed skull glinted through thin coverings of hair layering pitted crowns. Unkempt strands hung loose about bony shoulders, and across faces � with impossibly wide mouths � that resembled masks of decayed lint. The two creatures � which may once have passed as feminine � did not look out of place amid this landscape of forlorn desolation.

As he heard them shuffle to a stop, Morden shivered. This damn storm had inflicted a raging headache. How he loathed inclement weather and the way it affected him. Morden’s head felt muzzy, and this in turn made him want to puke: his limbs felt heavy, what the hell was happening? A tingling sensation had begun prickling his arms, the unpleasantness running to the tips of his fingers. Could there be some problem with his heart?

His lips curled to a smile. This seemed doubtful.

He recognized that he was no longer the man he once had been, and he realized the labors of reaching this place had exhausted him; but nonetheless, he’d had little choice other than to make this journey: Needs must.

“Please, don’t do it!�

The Cheerleader’s desperate plea once again flashed into his mind, but this time her words served only to lighten his mood. Her constant interference, and attempts at curbing his actions, made him regret the night which first brought them together. Although, by contrast, the knowledge that his ways so distressed the girl warmed the very core of his being. However, Morden currently had neither the time nor will to contend with thoughts of the girl’s constant whining, and so, for what seemed the umpteenth time over these past several years, he closed his eyes and willed her to be gone from his head. Standing motionless, waiting to see if he had succeeded in banishing her, he considered that maybe their coming together had in fact been a curse placed upon him by some higher power, mocking him, intent on disrupting the course of his greater quest.

The girl continued to be a bane to his existence.

Once he succeeded in quieting his mind, his thoughts returned to the task in hand. He turned up the velvet-trim collar on his overcoat, in a feeble effort to gain a modicum of comfort against the wet and cold. Staring into the depths of the pit below, he considered that this one was probably the largest, and hence likely the most prosperous of the Emerson Slate dig sites. With almost thirty acres of quarry pits, it was difficult not to appreciate this place without making comparison to a moonscape. Usually, even beneath the light of a half moon, each inky concave, in turn pitted with smaller shadow-splashed excavations, gave an impression of impact craters on a scarred celestial body. But on a night such as this, with the landscape blackened by low hanging clouds, featureless and with a wind chill capable of shrinking your face even as bullets of rain punished you, it occurred to Morden this would be a fitting habitat for the dead. This was a desolate and grim wasteland, and for those burdened by the clarity of their situation; that the life they spent so many years bemoaning and the rigors their mortality presented them, this was as good as it was ever going to get. Then, surely, would this not be a suitable panorama for such discarded and troubled souls?

It was a truth he had realized on the night Mary died. And, although there was no logical reason why, or even how, a child might come to know such things, it was this revelation which had initially led him toward this future path. He was only nine years old when tuberculosis stole her away from him, and the trauma of such a loss, it had scarred him deeply. He reached inside the waist pocket of his coat, gently stroking Mary’s favorite silk-scarf, which he kept on his person always, neatly folded and close to hand. He was burdened by the knowledge that the dead faced a future of regret and disappointment � of this he was certain. So, as a younger man he had felt it his duty to give the deceased as good a sendoff from their best years as was possible. His career choice of funeral director, without doubt influenced by Mary’s untimely passing, might almost be considered a calling.

Of course, he had barely been in the job a matter of weeks before he realized the dead held a far more intimate fascination for him. One that, although he hadn’t perhaps realized at the time, first stirred within him on the day he visited Mary’s open casket. And this, in turn, had led him on toward far darker quests.
Inspecting a jagged pile of slate on the ground beside him, he considered the amassed weight of the mainly triangular strips of stone. The dead girl they had brought in that afternoon, Casey Fisher, it was doubtful she weighed more than a hundred soaking wet. Estimating there was perhaps eighty pounds of slate at his feet � it would have to do. Nobody was going to notice if a coffin was twenty pounds light. Damn it. He much preferred cremations; they proved far easier for his purposes.

Morden took a sharp intake of breath, a sudden fluttering of excitement beating his chest. His head still felt fuzzy, and his body continued to tingle unpleasantly, but the thought of what was soon to be enjoyed; it thrilled him.

He turned to the solemn figures behind him, and set his companions about their labors.

End of preview

I hope you've enjoyed this snippet from The Bones of Morden Gray. It's a dark little tale about why you should never go sneaking around in (supposedly) deserted buildings late at night. Sure, it was always going to end well, right?
The Kindle eBook is slated for a June 1st release, and can be preordered for the promotion price of .99c/.99p.




The paperback is already available on Amazon, and this is priced $ - It's unfortunate, but I've had to restrict any wider distribution on the hard copies in an attempt to combat the ever-inflating costs of printing.




Finishing off writing this novel has taken a long time, and that has been for a myriad of reasons: the majority of which haven't been good.
Suffice to say, on a personal level it's been a tough twelve months, just as it has for others I love and care about.

My appearances on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ have been sparse for a while. So, as well as dedicating this book to my family and loved ones, it is also for you, dear readers. Thank you for sticking with me, and for continuing to read and support the books during my absence.

Most of all though, this one is for Michael.
Sleep well, brother. You will always be missed.