The Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations

 

Four years ago, back in 2017, I started writing the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series. The first book, Nightmare in Agate Bay, was published in January 2018.

I’d been watching the first season of The X-Files, and thought how cool it would be to mash-up the Cthulhu Mythos with The X-Files. And just like that, Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena was born.

The Pierce Mostyn series was an immediate hit, and it’s been my annual top seller since its introduction.

What is it about Pierce Mostyn and his cohorts that readers like?

I’m not big on surveys, questionnaires, and the like. To tell the truth, I’m just not big into data. But to answer the question, I took a look at what readers put in the reviews.

Here are some of the things that stuck out:

“entertaining and action packed”

“a charming, easy to read, creep-fest”

“contemporary and action-packed”

“keeps the reader on the edge”

“fun and exciting”

“non-stop action”

“tautly paced and elegantly plotted”

“The character development is detailed”

“fast-paced and the tension is great”

“all kinds of scary fun”

From those snippets, what stands out is the action, the suspense, and the fun factor. Those are what make Pierce Mostyn a top seller.

The fun factor kind of surprised me, but then I asked, Why?

The books are doggone fun to write. Apparently, my having all that fun writing comes right through the page and grabs the reader. Which is what we writers and readers want, isn’t it?

Well, the eighth Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation is live — and only 99¢ through the end of March. Now it’s your turn to get in on the fun, if you haven’t already.

In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness

Only 99¢ on Amazon!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness

 

Pierce Mostyn is back in an all new adventure! A creature feature extraordinaire: In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness.

I’ve been sharing snippets with the folk on my mailing list. If you want to get in on sneak peeks and exclusive never-before-published content, sign up for my VIP Horror Readers Club. Plus, you’ll get the exclusive novella, “The Feeder” — which is not available in stores.

And if you haven’t yet discovered Pierce Mostyn, take a look at the books and pick your monster!

This time around, Mostyn and his team are sent to Antarctica to investigate why a Russian base has suddenly gone silent. Once they find out why, Dr Rafe Bardon, the director of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, sends them off to the subglacial Gamburtsev Mountains, also known as The Ghost Mountains. Because Dr Bardon thinks they fit the coordinates of the infamous Mountains of Madness.

Those familiar with the stories of HP Lovecraft will immediately recognize where the inspiration came for my story.

Lovecraft welcomed other writers to write in his Cthulhu Mythos universe. And many took him up on the invite, and many more continue to do so today.

I enjoy working in the Mythos. It’s a walk in a world where we are not at the top of the food chain. It’s a world where there are forces at work much bigger than we are. Beings to whom we are not unlike the ants on a sidewalk. Blithely stepped on without a second thought.

The universe of the Cthulhu Mythos puts humans in a place where we are not only not equal with nature, we are less than nature. It’s a universe that makes me stop and think about all of our petty squabbles. It makes me realize how, in the big picture, our troubles and problems are truly insignificant.

I’m looking at the 25th of March as the launch date of In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness. Stay tuned!

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

For the Weekend 3

One of my all time favorite authors is Robert E Howard. I think the general quality of Howard’s writing is superior to that of HP Lovecraft’s. At the very best I think they are about equal. It all depends on which style you prefer. At their worst, I think I would take Howard story over Lovecraft.

And of all the characters Howard created, my favorite is Solomon Kane. IMO, he is more intelligent than Conan, and the atmosphere of the stories is far more dark and spooky.

Why there hasn’t been a movie series or a television series based on Kane is beyond me. The original stories themselves would make for rousing dark fantasy action/adventure with a splash of horror video viewing, and would be a great base for other writers to build on.

There was a movie some years ago entitled Solomon Kane, but it was at best mediocre. I can understand why whoever produced the movie was reluctant to continue the saga. However a better writer would’ve done the movie justice. Hopefully some producer will get the idea to reboot the series and actually base it on Howard, at least to begin with, and then they might see some bang for their buck.

A marvelous one volume edition of all of the Solomon Kane stories was published by Del Rey some years ago, and is still in print.

You can get The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane in e-book from Amazon or Apple, or in paperback, or as an audiobook. The cost of the e-book is $13.99. I refused to pay that money to the German conglomerate that owns Del Rey, and bought a used paperback instead. But you might not have my hangups.

If you like action/adventure stories, or dark fantasy, or horror, then you will like Solomon Kane — and I encourage you to pick up a copy of The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. A great way to spend your weekend!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

To Build a World

Worldbuilding, while often thought of as something only fantasy and science fiction writers need to do, is actually something all authors engage in.

The New York of Nero Wolfe isn’t exactly the New York that actually exists. It is a carefully constructed version that suits the storytelling of Rex Stout.

My Justinia Wright series is set in Minneapolis. But it is not quite the same Minneapolis that currently exists. The Minneapolis of Justinia Wright is a fictionalized version that suits the needs of the story.

The Pierce Mostyn series, although set in the present day, is a fictionalized version of today. The world building is much more subtle, than say Neverland, or Oz, or Barsoom, or Pellucidar, or any of the Star Trek worlds, but it is still worldbuilding.

This is because fiction is, well, to be honest, a lie. Stories are not reality. They’re entertainment. And to be successful entertainment they need to be lifelike, but not real life.

Take “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. The setting is small-town America of the 1940s (the story was published in 1948). But it is no small town that actually existed then. What small town annually stoned to death one of its citizens? Jackson created a world that was mostly normal, save for that little part that wasn’t. Superbly horrific worldbuilding.

For Pierce Mostyn, while there is much that is “normal”, there is much that is not. There is much that is made up or borrowed from the Cthulhu Mythos.

Kathy Edens, in World-Building 101: How to construct an unforgettable universe for your fantasy or sci-fi story (published by ProWritingAid), gives us three rules of worldbuilding:

1. Creating a new world goes way beyond mere setting
2. Use other author’s worlds to inspire your own
3. Don’t make new world your story’s focus

In Pierce Mostyn, the setting is the contemporary world. However, it doesn’t stop there. Monsters exist. Weapons and devices exist in Mostyn’s world that don’t exist in ours. Geography is manipulated to suit the needs of the story. Pierce Mostyn’s world is one where monsters and terrifying aliens are alive and bent on our destruction, unbeknownst to the population at large.

To build Pierce Mostyn’s world, I borrowed from The X-Files and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos — and then added stuff from my imagination. The world may look a lot like our own, but it is as fantastical as Oz.

And while Mostyn and his team hunt monsters to save us from annihilation or enslavement, the stories ultimately deal with people and the larger issues of life. Cthulhu is as important as our reaction to him.

There are now 7 books in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series, with an 8th in the works, and a 9th on the drawing board.

I hope you enjoy reading about Mostyn and his world as much as I enjoy writing about them.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

The Paranormal

Van Dyne’s Zuvembies is live! The seventh book in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series. And it is off to a good start.

Each Pierce Mostyn investigation is a stand alone story. So you can read Van Dyne’s Zuvembies today — and read the rest of the series later.

Interest in the paranormal is high, and paranormal fiction is hot.

But what is paranormal fiction? When I was kid, back in the 50s and 60s, there was no paranormal fiction: it was called occult or supernatural fiction. Sometime between then and now, those terms fell out of use in favor of paranormal.

To understand these 3 terms, let’s see what the Merriam-Webster dictionary says.

Occult (noun) — matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them; used with the

Supernatural 

1) of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe

2a) departing from what is usual for normal, especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature

2b) attributed to an invisible agent (such as a ghost or spirit)

Paranormal — not scientifically explainable: supernatural

So we can see all of these terms basically mean something that is not within normal or natural experience.

Therefore it doesn’t really matter what we call the genre, because paranormal, supernatural, and occult fiction cover the same subjects: myth, fairy tales, legends, cryptids, ghosts, monsters, the fae, and the like.

Popular subgenres include: cosmic horror, the ghost story, the Gothic novel, werewolf and other shapeshifter fiction, vampire and zombie fiction, and the like.

The paranormal story has been with us for a very long time and down through the ages has been called many different things. But in the end, they all refer to the same class of story.

At base, the Pierce Mostyn books are cosmic horror set in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos universe. However, I’m not averse to stepping outside the cosmic horror subgenre to give readers a taste of a different class of monster.

Horror stories generally operate either viscerally or intellectually.

Visceral horror is horror that focuses on an emotive reaction, often resorting to the gross out. This is the in-your-face blood and guts horror.

Intellectual horror appeals to the mind. It is usually subtle, and often challenges our understanding of how things ought to be by showing us how things actually are.

Intellectual horror flips aside the curtain; it is taking the red pill.

While there’s plenty of action in the Pierce Mostyn stories, I definitely strive for an intellectual horror approach. Because at the end of the day I think that type of story is truly terrifying.

Comments are always welcome! Until next time, happy reading!

A Matter of Style

My whole career is based on the idea that the formula doesn’t matter, the thing that counts is what you do with the formula; that is to say, it is a matter of style.

—Raymond Chandler

I’d seen Raymond Chandler’s name, and that of his most noted creation, Philip Marlowe, around for decades before, I actually read anything from Chandler’s pen.

All I can say is that I’m glad I made Mr. Chandler’s acquaintance.

The first story I read was Chandler's first published story, “Blackmailer’s Don’t Shoot”, back in February 2018. However, over a year passed before I picked up another Chandler story. That story was “Killer in the Rain”, which I read this past Christmas Day. I followed it up with “The Curtain” on the third of January of this year, and six days later finished The Big Sleep, which is a fix-up novel put together from “Killer” and “Curtain”.

What captured my attention and stirred my interest in Chandler is his style. Quite simply put: it is beautiful. Almost poetic, it is perhaps the most lyrical prose I’ve read. Murder mysteries elevated to the level of literary fiction.

And this is directly related to Chandler’s approach to the art of storytelling. He wasn’t overly interested in the plot. Chandler strove to give the reader interesting characters with believable behaviors, and an emotively moving atmosphere.

What HP Lovecraft emphasized as most important for supernatural horror, the atmosphere of the story, Raymond Chandler also emphasized for the murder mystery. Characters and atmosphere — not plot — carry the day.

Erle Stanley Gardner wrote that the problem with the murder mystery was the utter simplicity of the plot.

A murders B, but the police think it’s C, until the detective gets C off the hook, and pins the deed on A.

The simplicity of the murder mystery plot is undoubtedly what drove Chandler to emphasize characterization and atmosphere over plot.

When I read Chandler, I’m caught up in the mood of the story that the atmosphere produces. I’m caught up in the dilemmas of the very lifelike characters. I’m sucked into the story by the descriptions of the people and places.

Raymond Chandler was an artist using words instead of paint and brush.

As a writer, I am inspired by what he did with the written word. Chandler showed writers and continues to show writers that the most formulaic of genres can be turned into glorious art. That we writers can transcend the confines of our genres and produce not only entertainment, but timeless literature.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading (and great writing)!

The Empty Quarter

One of the most lonely places on the planet is the Rub’ al Khali, or the Empty Quarter — that vast expanse of towering sand dunes that has an area greater in size than the country of France.

A few Bedouin tribes live on the edge of this immensely beautiful wasteland. Virtually nothing lives in the desert interior.

The Empty Quarter is part of the greater Arabian desert, which is the eastward continuation of the Sahara. And it is the setting for the newest Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation adventure.

For quite some time now I’ve been fascinated with the Empty Quarter. I’ve never been there, and at my age may never get there. But I have been to a place that will give you a little taste of the Rub’ al Khali. And that place is Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.

The dunes look like a great big pile of sand that some giant left behind. The sand covers about 30 square miles and are the tallest dunes in North America, towering upwards of 750 feet. They give one a hint as to what’s in store for them should they visit the Empty Quarter.

In writing Demons in the Dunes, I tried to give the reader a picture and feel for what it is like in the Empty Quarter. My main source book was Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger, who crossed the area twice in the late 1940s.

Of course, Demons in the Dunes is fiction. A Lovecraftian-flavored adventure yarn that is perhaps closer to something Robert E Howard might have written than HPL. Regardless of influence, the story draws upon the legend and mystery of the lost city of Iram, adds a dollop of the Cthulhu Mythos, a bit of seasoning from The Mummy, and a whole lot of sauce from my overactive imagination.

You can get Demons in the Dunes here — and I truly hope you enjoy it. I’ve been told it’s the best Mostyn yet, and that makes me very happy.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Demons in the Dunes

Next week Pierce Mostyn and the OUP gang ride again, in another terrifyingly action-packed tale of cosmic horror.

The Rub’ al Khali, or the Empty Quarter, is a fascinating place. I find it almost as intriguing as Antarctica.

What makes the Rub’ al Khali so interesting? It is the largest sand desert in the world. It covers some 250,000 square miles of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The desert is larger than France and somewhat smaller than Texas.

This vast expanse of sand is home to the lost city of Iram, which is mentioned in the Qur’an, and may have been an important city in the ancient frankincense trade.

The Empty Quarter is the setting for Lovecraft’s story “The Nameless City”, and is also the setting for Demons in the Dunes, Pierce Mostyn’s newest adventure.

Did Lovecraft’s story play any part in the origin of Demons in the Dunes? It did. HPL’s story gave me the idea to set an adventure in the Empty Quarter, with Iram as the focal point.

However, the Nameless City of Lovecraft’s story is clearly not Iram. Consequently, the story line of Demons has no direct influence from Lovecraft. Although it is Lovecraftian to a degree.

Little is known about the actual city of Iram. It may have been located on the frankincense caravan route. Legend has it that it was built by giants to challenge God by creating a paradise on earth greater then God’s paradise. God, of course, destroyed the giants and the city.

Iram is called Iram of the Pillars, but we don’t know why. One Internet source, attributed mystical connections to the city. According to this view, Iram actually occupies several planes of existence, and, in accordance with the mystical position, an alternate reading of the city’s title is Iram of the Old Ones. No self-respecting Cthulhu Mythos aficionado can walk away from that tidbit of info and not have the cogs whirring in his brain!

Out of those seeds, Demons in the Dunes grew. I had great fun writing it. I hope you have great fun reading it.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard

Reading has been a huge part of my life. And quite frankly still is. Long before I developed an interest in music, I was reading.

Don’t get me wrong. I very much enjoy music. But I was a reader long before I was a music aficionado.

When I was a kid I frequently got to spend the whole day at my grandparents’s place. My grandmother used to insist that my brother and I take a nap in the afternoon. I suppose she just wanted us out of her hair for an hour or two.

I’ve never been a napper, and I used that “quiet time” to read. I’d rummage around in my uncle’s books and find something to occupy my time. Some of the books, maybe most of them, weren’t age appropriate. But they were there and nobody said I couldn’t read them.

One of the books I treasured was Groff Conklin’s Omnibus of Science Fiction. The book was published in 1952, the year I was born, and has some absolutely fabulous stories within its covers. And it was in the Omnibus where I discovered HP Lovecraft, through his story “The Color Out Of Space”; an amazing tale of sci-fi horror.

Years later, I picked up the Beagle Books reprinting of the Arkham edition of HPL’s works and discovered HPL in full.

My introduction to Robert E Howard occurred somewhat after my purchase of the Beagle HPL paperbacks in the early 1970s.

A friend of mine at the time mentioned that he thought one of the scariest stories ever written was Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell”.

Intrigued, I went out and bought the Lancer paperback The Dark Man and Others, which contains “Pigeons from Hell” and 14 other fantastic journeys into the weird.

I fell in love with Howard. “Pigeons from Hell” is not only an excellent example of Southern Gothic, it is indeed one of the spookiest stories I’ve ever read.

There is an ongoing debate as to which of the two is the real master of weird fiction. In the circles that I traveled in, Lovecraft was acknowledged as the master. However, being the iconoclast that I am, I held out for REH. My argument was that at their very best the two were equal.

However, of the two, I argued that REH was consistently better than HPL. The overall quality of Howard’s weird fiction is higher than that of Lovecraft.

I realize my position is a minority view. And I think the debate ultimately boils down to one of taste.

When Lovecraft was on top of his game, he was the master of slowburn, atmospheric weird fiction. And there is none finer.

There’s nothing slowburn about Howard. He was the quintessential man of action. His finest weird tales are replete with action.

There’s also the differences in the main characters of the two writers. Lovecraft’s narrators often exist on the edge of sanity. They are not known for their physical prowess, and are often bookish intellectuals. Even their names tend to be unknown, or little mentioned.

Howard, on the other hand, wrote about vibrant characters. Characters that were full of life. Characters, even the women, that were physically and emotionally strong. King Kull, Conan, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Red Sonja. Perhaps this was the case because Howard wrote in series, or at least conceptualized his heroes and heroines as series characters. Lovecraft did not. His main characters for the most part make sole appearances, with the implication that they will not survive. And they don’t. We usually never see them again.

In some ways, my Pierce Mostyn series tips the hat to both of these giants of weird fiction. There is the slowburn, but there is also action. Pierce Mostyn is something of a fusion of HPL and REH. And in that perhaps he’s all CWH.

I owe a lot to HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard. The two giants of weird fiction. Both have influenced my approach to the genre, and how I think it should be written. And if Pierce Mostyn comes across to readers as a fusion of those two giants, I will be very satisfied.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

The Medusa Ritual - Installment 13

The Medusa Ritual

A Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation

by

CW Hawes

Deception and shell games. Along with a few shell companies. An ancient sorcerer, or someone pretending to be. And a game of tunnel, tunnel, who’s in the tunnel. The plot thickens, as they say.

Read on! The adventure continues!

Chapter 15

Mostyn sat at the table. Plates of sandwiches, and carafes of coffee and water ran down the center of the table. The team members, except for Dotty Kemper, were eating and drinking. Mostyn, however, just sipped at a styrofoam cup of coffee. The coffee was just how he liked it: strong with a hefty dollop of cream, real cream.

He’d listened to the the reports from Jones and Hammerschmidt, and NicAskill and Petrie. He’d told them what he’d discovered. Then the food arrived and he decided to let them eat before listening to what Stoppen and Baer had found out.

The coffee was hot. Those are good carafes, he thought. His mind drifted back to the morning before Bardon had sent Dotty and him out to attempt the capture of Tommy John MacIlhenney. Dotty had made coffee in her French Press. He liked her coffee. It was perfect. That was definitely one thing she did better than Helene. He smiled. Helene and coffee were like an airplane defying gravity after it had run out of fuel.

Dotty. Would he ever see her again? And if he didn’t what would he do? He had Helene. But Dotty was Dotty. He’d worked with her for a long time and he’d loved her for a good portion of that time.

He looked at his styrofoam cup of coffee and thought of her making coffee their coffee that morning. It was perfect. It was always perfect. She was gone and he hadn’t even told her he loved her.

They would get her back. They had to get her back. That was all there was to it.

He became aware of someone saying, “Boss!” He looked up. Jones. Jones was yelling, “Boss”, and Baker was saying, “Earth to Mostyn. Come in Mostyn.”

“I’m here. What is it?”

“Otto was telling us about his morning,” Dr Winifred Petrie said.

“Did you find out something of importance, Dr Stoppen?” Mostyn asked.

“Yes and no,” he replied.

“Okay. I’ll take the good news first,” Mostyn said.

“The buzz is that a very ancient book was purchased and brought to LA within the last year or so. The Huntington made an attempt to find who owned it, in order to make an offer to buy it. They were not successful. Two private collectors are also pursuing a purchase, but have yet to find the owner.”

Mostyn nodded. “The bad news?”

“My contacts are of the opinion the book is just a legend at best, and a fake at worst.”

“But we know the book is real, otherwise Bardon wouldn’t have us looking for it.”

“So what do we do now, Boss?” NicAskill asked.

Mostyn took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled. “I think we know four vital pieces of information. First, the book is real. I don’t think there is any other way to explain the strange cloud formations. Second, the management companies and Ching Wo are fronts for whoever we are after. Third, the fact the properties owned by Ching Wo are above an underground tunnel system seems to me to be intentional. And finally, all legends are based on truth. Consequently, we are either dealing with Wing Lee himself, or someone who has appropriated the legend. And in either case, the person commands great power. He is, for lack of a better word, a sorcerer of tremendous ability.”

“That all makes sense, Boss, but what do we do with the information?” NicAskill asked.

“I think it’s time we do a turn at urban spelunking, because my gut is telling me that’s where we’ll find the book.”

“Aw, man,” Jones blurted. “We’re not going underground again? Tell me we’re not.”

“Were you listening, Jones?” Mostyn said.

With a smile on his face, Baker said, “You used the word ‘spelunking’. That has a few too many syllables for Jones.”

“Fork you, Mr Camera Man,” Jones said. “I know what the word ‘spelunking’ means. I may have blonde hair, but I’m not dumb.”

NicAskill punched him in the arm. “You just don’t want to get cobwebs in those golden locks, right?”

“Shit,” Jones muttered. “Fine. Back to being mole people. I love being a mole.”

“You enjoyed K’n-yan,” Mostyn said, with his best poker face.

Jones threw his hands up. “Alright, alright. When do we take the tunnel tour?”

Mostyn’s phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. When he was done reading, he put it back.

“The report on Ching Wo Company, Inc. came back. It’s a shell company, owned by another shell company, that is also owned by a shell company, et cetera, et cetera. However, it seems the end of the line is a company in Taiwan. The Mo Yan Corporation. It is privately held, but no owners or officers have been found at this point.”

“Is this relevant?” Dr Stoppen asked.

“No,” Mostyn replied. “I think it safe to say that Wing Lee, or his imposter, is the owner. And does the information alter anything for us? I don’t think so. If anything, a Taiwanese company tends to re-enforce the legend.”

“Do you believe we’re actually dealing with this Wing Lee?” Petrie asked.

“Yes,” Mostyn replied. “I’ve heard the voice. It was ancient sounding. Like a whisper emanating from a distant tomb.”

“So where are we going to access the tunnel system?” NicAskill asked.

“There are two entrances that I’m aware of, and there are probably more. One is in the Hall of Records. An elevator, in fact, takes you there. There is also a bar that was once a speakeasy located in the tunnels. The access point is in the basement of the bar. We’ll try one of these first and go from there. Any further questions?”

No one said anything.

“Finish your lunch. We’ll move out in forty-five minutes.”

Chapter 16

Dr Dotty Kemper opened her eyes. The light was dim, barely holding at bay the Stygian blackness. She felt cold and realized she was lying on concrete. The surface was pitted and rough. She sat up and saw that she was chained to the concrete wall. An iron manacle was on each wrist. They were connected by a chain. Another chain ran from the concrete wall to the chain connecting the wrist manacles.

“Where the hell am I?” she said.

“You are in the tunnels below the city.”

Dotty looked in the direction the voice came from and saw a man sitting in a chair on the edge of the darkness.

“Tunnels? Tunnels below LA?”

“Yes,” the voice said. “They are old. Very old. Many sections are barricaded because they are in poor condition. Other sections are lost to memory because they were here long before the tunnels dug by men.”

“Who are you?” Dotty asked.

“My name does not matter, Dr Kemper. I am to watch you and make sure you are okay.”

“Well, I’m not okay. I have a headache and I ache from lying on this concrete and I’m cold.”

“I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do to alleviate your pain, or provide you with warmth.”

“Then what the hell good are you?”

“The question has no relevance. I simply serve the master. I am to watch you and make sure you are okay. That you are in no life threatening distress.”

“I will be if you don’t get me a blanket.”

“I am sorry. I do not have a blanket for you.”

“Fine. Be that way.” Dotty stood. She turned around and pulled on the chain. Seems solid enough, she thought. Too bad for me.

She stretched the chain as far as it would go. About four or five feet of play. At least I’m not up against the wall with my hands over my head.

“Even if you were free of your shackles, you would not find your way to the surface,”

“Thanks for the information,” Dotty replied. She turned around to face the man on the edge of the darkness. “So I guess I’m not going to be the blushing bride, am I?”

“I do not know your fate. I only know that you gained the ire of the master.”

“Well, that’s just a goddamn shame, isn’t it?”

“You do not want to anger the master.”

“Between you and me? If I get my hands on that prick the only thing he’ll be master of is worm food.”

“You are in no position to make threats.”

“Threats? Listen, you mechanical dildo, that was a promise. You need to learn the difference.”

“You shouldn’t make promises you cannot keep.”

“Who appointed you to be my mother? Besides, how do you know I can’t keep my promise?”

The man stood and stepped into the feeble light cast by the electric lantern. Dotty recognized him as the older man who’d come into her suite with the masked man.

“You are in grave danger, Dr Kemper. You should not jest.”

She snorted. “I don’t believe in prayer, so that leaves me with jesting.”

“That is too bad.”

“What is too bad is that I didn’t die up there in my room.”

“That is true, Dr Kemper. That is very true.”

***

The elevator came to a stop and the door opened. Mostyn, NicAskill, Baker, and Petrie stepped out. The door closed and the elevator rose. After a couple of minutes the car returned with the rest of the team.

“Well, look at his,” Jones said. “Graffiti artists of the Underworld.”

“Have wall, will paint,” Baker quipped.

“Let’s get ready,” Mostyn said.

The team members were wearing street clothes to minimize attention and not arouse suspicion. Each one had a backpack.

They opened their backpacks and took out their helmets, equipped with an attached electric lamp, a flashlight, and a weapon. The packs also contained water, emergency rations, spelunking equipment, and a light-weight space blanket.

Jones carried the special OUP issued phone which allowed the team to maintain contact with headquarters.

“Let Sumer Base know we are in the tunnels, will you, Jones?” Mostyn said.

“Sure thing, Boss.” Jones made the call and when finished turned to Mostyn.

“They sent you a three D map of the tunnels, Boss. We’ve also gotten a lucky break. Sumer Base has started receiving Kemper’s subdermal transmitter signal again.”

“That is good news,” Mostyn said, while fishing his phone out of his pocket. When it was in hand, he tapped on it and displayed the 3-D map. A flashing green dot indicated where Dotty Kemper was located.

Mostyn studied the diagram for a moment and then called Jones and NicAskill over. “What do you make of this?” he asked.

The two special agents looked at the screen. Jones spoke first. “Doesn’t that beat all. She’s not even in one of the tunnels.”

“More likely, she’s in a tunnel that isn’t on any map,” NicAskill said.

“That’s what I said,” Jones replied.

“Yeah, right, Jones. And Einstein had marshmallows for brains.”

Mostyn studied the holographic projection of the tunnel system. After several minutes, he said, “We’re going to rescue Dr Kemper.”

“We’re supposed to look for the book,” Dr Stoppen said.

“And I’m willing to bet where Dr Kemper is, the book will be close by,” Mostyn replied. “Now get your packs on, and follow me.”

To Be Continued!

While waiting for the next installment, the entire Pierce Mostyn Paranormal series is available for your reading pleasure.

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What people are saying about the Pierce Mostyn series:

“…a fast-paced story with lots of action, yet does not neglect the characters.”

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“This series is fun…”

“…a weird tale of adventure, humor, and horror.”

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The Medusa Ritual is copyright © 2019 by CW Hawes. All rights reserved.