The Summoning by Catherine Mays
1490. Luke Maudlin has been brought back to life, but he’s degenerating fast. So a girl is summoned from far in his future to visit him for five days every month. The first time is traumatic. When nobody believes her story, Claire finds herself caught in the nightmare of not one time, but two.
SEPARATED BY TIME. JOINED BY BLOOD.
The close of the 15th Century. The modern world is stirring from the troubled sleep of the Dark Ages. In rural, feudal England, handheld guns are beginning to appear. The nature of warfare is changing. The nature of religion is changing. Man is becoming more powerful than his creator.
Luke Maudlin doesn’t know it, but he’s not the miller’s son. He’s the result of a coupling between his desperate childless mother Hannah and the creature in the ruined manor overlooking their village. A monster that used to be a man. A thing they call Quelch.
Maybe Quelch was the spawn of the devil. Maybe he descended from angels. Whatever his origins, over the countless years of his immortality he has forgotten his own humanity. Now he’s just a foul beast, scrabbling in the filth, preying on strangers.
Damned or holy? The villagers can’t decide. They hate him, fear him, and protect him.
When recruiters raid the village, looking for boys for a foreign war, Luke’s killed defending it. He returns to find himself alive — and as cursed as Quelch. The village banishes him to the manor where he’s doomed to share his father’s fate. Becoming corrupted. Turning into another beast.
So Hannah summons Claire Knott, a 13-year-old girl far in her future, to come to Luke for five days every month. To give him a connection with the world of the living. To remind him who he was.
But already he has begun to degenerate, and the first summoning is brutal.
Is it too late for him? And for her?
The Summoning is a time-travel adventure, a folk horror nightmare, and a thriller of psychic shock and all too real damage.
93,000 words : 374 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B071F32CR4
Buy at Amazon US : $7.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1731253907
Buy at Amazon US : $14.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £12.99
Read my post about The Summoning here.
EXCERPT
Jacob landed in the drift, yelling in shock. He scrabbled around. Whatever had shoved him away was as strong as he was.
He saw Luke and gasped.
The boy was squatted on his haunches, staring down at Claire. She was flopped on her back in the leaves with the chemise jammed in her armpit and the horse blanket tangled around her waist.
‘Luke,’ Jacob breathed. He moved forward little by little, scuffling at the drift. ‘Luke, do you remember me? Little Jacob, remember? Little limping Jacob?’
It wasn’t true. Luke and he were the same age. He had never been little, as far as Luke was concerned. But it might trigger an association.
Luke peeled back his lips and snarled. The way he was crouched over Claire, it looked as if he was about to tear off her exposed breast with his bare teeth.
She lay helpless beneath him, panting in fear.
The snarl told Jacob all he needed to know. Whatever Luke had been was gone.
He gathered all his courage and bolted for the horse.
Luke leaped over her. Claire watched him half running like a man, half loping like an animal across the drift. She saw him draw something from the belt of his leather breeches. Something that caught the dappled light and gleamed cruelly.
Jacob had reached the horse and was scrabbling to climb on its back. But the horse nudged away in distress.
Then Luke careered into Jacob and slashed the knife back and forth.
Claire still smelt him on her. The familiar wild smell of Luke Maudlin.
Her breath whooped in her chest. Harder. Slower. It whooped and whooped. Gaining control. Gaining strength. Fighting the paralysis.
She broke out of it with a start, flung herself over onto her stomach, found legs beneath her, and dived into the forest.
Claire crashed blindly through the undergrowth.
Her arms were stretched out ahead of her, groping at slivers of sunlight.
The vast trunks of trees punched out of nowhere, crowding her passage. Bushes flung themselves in front of her, snarling at the chemise. The ground dropped suddenly into hollows full of stinking, rotting leaves.
The forest was a whirl of blinding sunbeams and impenetrable shadows, disorientating her.
Something banged against her legs. She reached down and tore it away. The knots tightened around her thigh, then the black ribbon snapped. Like blood thrown to a wolf pack, she thought as she flung the sodden padding behind her. It might slow them a few seconds.
If he was more animal than man it would slow him. But if he was more animal than man she was dead.
All of a sudden Luke was right in front of her.
She screamed, lost her footing and tumbled. He grabbed her by the throat and flung her brutally at the nearest tree.
She slammed into the trunk, flopped backward. He grabbed her again and hurled her across the small clearing at another tree. Again she hit the trunk hard and was bounced off.
He caught her even as she rebounded, swung her around and threw her into another trunk. Through the dazed whirl of nausea and pain she heard him snarling with rage.
This time she hit with her head first, felt a crack bright with sparks and fell near insensibly forward.
He came scrabbling after her. She hit the ground, mumbling leaves into her mouth. He snatched her up and hurled her forward with incredible strength.
She skidded into a bank of leaves, hit stones and was dragged over them by her own momentum. Then she’d propelled herself up and was running again. Running in the shrieking horror of her own blood. Running before the pain incapacitated her.
There was a howling behind her. Luke howling to provoke terror in his quarry.
And then, over to one side, an answering howl. A howl that chilled her to the bone.
Sunlight erupted over her. She plunged out of the forest into a wide space carved out of the peak of the hill.
Apart from solitary oaks that dotted the undergrowth, the space had been cleared of trees. Only low scrub remained. She scrabbled through it helplessly.
She could hear him behind her, battering through the undergrowth, gaining on her with every second.
She stumbled out onto a wide earthen thoroughfare, close-packed over a bed of stones. The Roman road, she remembered. The road that led to London. The mud was deeply rutted and chewed up by horses.
She moved dazedly across the road, unable to make a clear decision. Follow the road to left or right, or head on into the forest?
The forest was death. The road was also death.
Luke robbed her of the decision. Even as she stumbled over the road a hand grabbed her hair and jerked her head back to expose her neck. She was too exhausted to scream again.
The something else was smashing its way through the undergrowth toward them. She prayed he’d kill her before it arrived.
Luke raised his knife. Blood was smeared on the rusty blade. Jacob’s blood.
Tears ate hot lines on her face. So it was over at last.
The knife slashed across her throat.
At the same moment the forest bulged, distorted, and was flung apart. Lights shot up around her like fireworks, whizzing hot burning embers that poked skewers in her skin.
There was a terrific screeching. Something bore down on her, flaring bright. She tumbled, fell. Hit tarmac that stripped the flesh off her face and arm.
Cars burst at her like demons, swerved, screamed past.
A lorry hurtled toward her. Its grill was wide as the morning. It seemed to fill all three carriages of the road.
Claire summoned the last of her energy and raised herself up in front of it, so that when it hit her it would hit her hard.
93,000 words : 374 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B071F32CR4
Buy at Amazon US : $7.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1731253907
Buy at Amazon US : $14.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £12.99
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