Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/ilQ-BfW6BRs
It’s the height of Queen Victoria’s rule. Fog swirls in the gas-lit streets, while in the parlor, hands are linked. Pale and expectant faces gaze upon a woman, her eyes closed and shoulders slumped. The medium speaks, her tone hollow and inhuman. The séance has begun.
Can the reading of tea leaves influence the future? Can dreams keep a soldier from death in the Crimea? Can a pocket watch foretell a deadly family curse? From entrail reading and fortune-telling machines to prophetic spiders and voodoo spells, sometimes the future is better left unknown.
Choose your fate.
Choose your DARK DIVINATION.
**********
An excerpt from Dark Divinations
Of Blood and Bones
Jeremy Megargee
London, 1893
Camille inhales sharply through her nose, the burning incense turning her little attic room into a dragon’s pit and she traces long, delicate fingers to match the whirling of the smoke tendrils. Rain beats against the windowpanes—aggressive and loud—as though it seeks an invitation. The gaslights along the street burn low, turning her small private space into an orange-tinted lair with a vague undercurrent of the macabre infecting the crooked walls, ceiling, and floor. One hand is balled into a tight fist, and she shakes it from side to side. The contents hidden within rattle as her sinuous figure sways from side to side like a serpent being charmed.
She sits cross-legged, lanterns burning from multiple surfaces in the room, and her shadow looms large, almost like it is not the shadow of one woman, but the shadows of a horde. There’s old Creole blood in her, traced back through a bloodline more tangled than the vines on her trestle, and it was from her great-grand mother that she learned the nature of divination. The year is 1893, and it has brought Camille nothing but a suspicious reputation in her neighborhood, and outright guffaws from those who think her a dolled-up charlatan. It matters not to her, because she knows what she is able to harness is real, even if it proves unpredictable at times.
Her right hand unlatches, fingers unleashing, and she throws the bones. Rodent teeth, rattlesnake tail, shells from the Caspian Sea, and the largest, Camille’s own fifth metacarpal, tumble out across the chalk-lined square on the pitted hardwood. She lopped off her own pinky finger with a cleaver at age twelve and that level of sacrifice won her even more trust from some of the less than cooperative shades.
She leans close, dark eyes gleaming—dark like doorways with no firm destination—and she listens with the threads of her soul. The bones can provide something akin to a portrait, but for her, it’s always an indistinct outline. The voices fill in the blanks and her open mind and heart do the rest. She has nothing to compare the experience to but that infernal creation Edison is responsible for, the kinetoscope, where a person can stare through a peephole and see people and pictures in motion. It’s sort of like that, but not exactly. Her brain hinges on the framework of the bones and the sights and sounds form there, grainy at first, but gaining traction with each passing moment.
She’s staring hard, so hard she has forgotten to breathe, and the stump of her pinky finger itches beneath the rawhide covering. A bad omen. That stump always itches fiercely when something malicious is stirring in the bones and deep inside she knows what she hunts for is the worst fiend of them all. But hunt she must, even if each reading slices through the meat of her sanity, presenting it like a thin cut in a butcher’s shop window. It feels like that window always swarms with flies and the search is wearing Camille down, taking an irreversible mental toll.
But she won’t stop. She’s too damn stubborn for that. Her sister, Babette, chose her trade. She chose to lift up her petticoat and spread her thighs on that bug-infested mattress for each john with a pocket full of coin, but she did not choose to have her brains beaten from her ears in her scummy flat on Sutter’s Lane. She didn’t invite the terrible savagery of that night, and Camille still breaks out in gooseflesh when she thinks of rushing past the constable, screaming herself hoarse, wanting to embrace any tangible part of her sister, even if she was nothing but a red ruin.
She remembers falling to her knees—a traumatized heap of sorrow—as the crowd outside looked on from the crude wooden sawhorse barriers, gazing into that open door frame like vultures scenting carrion. She hated humanity more than anything at that moment. She detested the human race so deeply, because it was the human race that spawned the hard-hearted beast who opened her sister up like a sack of soft and wet parts.
The memories start to fade and she refocuses on the bones, shells, and curios. Her teeth grit and her eyes narrow. She’s starting to hear, starting to see…
Sideburns. Long, tangled, almost lupine.
A cane with a silver tip and the polished head of a vulture skull.
Boots that no self-respecting gentleman would wear. Boots with spurs, boots that clang, boots that like to make an entrance.
A top hat with a wilting tulip in the brim.
She sees the rabid bastard tipping that top hat, saccharine sweet, and when he grins, you almost overlook the fact that his canines are just a bit too jagged to trust…
To read more, go to: Amazon.com or order the special edition, signed copy with hand-painted tarot cards at HorrorAddicts.net
All images on this post provided by HorrorAddicts.Net Press
