Sunday, January 8, 2012

Last Post from Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Don't Look Back, Agnes, Don't Look Back, Agnes
The Ice Bridge by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Hi All Goddess Fish Followers One Last Time!
This is the third and last promised post with excerpts from both of my new releases, my ghostly romantic murder mystery novel from Eternal Press THE ICE BRIDGE http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615725182 and DON'T LOOK BACK, AGNES-plus bonus short story In This House. As I said before I'm a writer of over 40 years, published for 30 of them with 14 novels and 8 short stories from publishers like Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press and now Eternal Press/Damnation Books. Well, here's the two excerpts!

REMEMBER....COMMENT, LEAVE YOUR EMAILS, AND YOU MIGHT WIN AN EBOOK COPY OF EITHER MY DON'T LOOK BACK, AGNES or MY THE ICE BRIDGE!

The Ice Bridge Excerpt:
By the time they crossed the ice bridge Charlotte had to struggle with the wind to stay on her machine. She was sick they hadn’t found Hannah, and she was frightened, tired and freezing. Her body had lost all sensation. She thought she had fingers in her gloves, but she wasn’t sure.
The ice bridge was eerier returning than when they’d come, if that was possible. An early night had descended, though the snow illuminated their surroundings enough so they could see. It almost made their headlights unnecessary. The ice was lit up as if there were lights glowing beneath it. Strange noises, sounding like distant moans and cries for help, rushed by her head.
She remembered what Hannah had said about the ice bridge ghosts. In her state of mind, she could imagine misty shapes flitting around the ice behind and around them, trying to tell them something. Did they know where Hannah was? If she looked quick enough she thought she saw them with their hollow ghost eyes in their transparent ghost bodies. It seemed they were closing in on her and Mac.
Hannah believed the ice bridge ghosts appeared when someone was about to die—or had died.
She panicked as her snowmobile sped over the ice, the wind behind shoving her along, faster and faster, as if it was trying to escape something. She was practically on top of Mac as a wave of vertigo hit her. She slowed down before she rammed him.
Her machine went into a skid and barely avoided hitting one of the evergreens. She took a couple of deep breaths to push the dizziness away. Out of the corner of her eyes, she thought she saw something standing on the ice to her right, lost in the particles of drifting snow. It looked like a shadow of a woman with her arms outstretched. Then it was gone. Yet for the split heartbeat it was there, it had scared the heck out of her. It had looked like Hannah. Impossible.
Charlotte wanted to get back to her aunt’s house where it was warm and safe—where there were no spectral shapes to taunt her. She’d never been out in a pre-blizzard before. She was beginning to understand what Mac had meant when he’d said that a whiteout could be disorienting. She wondered if it could also make a person see things that weren’t there.
She kept her attention on Mac’s silhouette when she wasn’t looking for a lost snowmobile and its rider. She didn’t want to see anything else. About three-fourths of the way to the other side, with land and trees in front of them, her eye caught unevenness in the snow a little ways off the secure path. Something in the air behind her, or was it in her head, whispered to stop. Look.
After honking the horn and blinking her lights three times, she swerved closer, but not too close, to the rough patch. She cut the engine and dug out a flashlight from the saddlebag to examine the irregularities. In the glow, she saw there were spikes in the blanket of snow covering the ice.
Had something gone through the ice there?
She was on her knees, with her face in her hands, when Mac joined her with another flashlight. He gently brought her to her feet and guided her to her snowmobile. He walked back to the rough patch. He examined it, getting as near as he dared. He directed his flashlight at the mound. Charlotte could tell by the way his shoulders slumped that he’d found something he hadn’t wanted to find.
He returned to her. The wind had died down to a whisper after the roar.
“Something’s gone through the ice in days past. It’s been broken and refrozen.”
“Hannah?” she breathed.
“Could be. It’s too early to know. Sometimes something goes through and crawls out, wet, scared and cold—but alive. It happens. Maybe a deer or a bear. There are bears on the mainland; did you know that? Every once in a while they wander onto the ice. Anyway, the unevenness doesn’t necessarily mean something is down there...doesn’t mean it’s Hannah, either.”
Mac put his arm around Charlotte’s shoulders. “Let’s go before the storm gets any worse and we get lost, too. When it passes I’ll get men out here to see if there’s anything down there. Come on.”
He drove beside her to shore, both of them staying so tight to the evergreens they clipped a few. She wanted to reach the woods, the solid ground of the island. She wanted to get off the ice bridge and leave what she feared she’d seen on the ice—the ghosts—behind them. ***
ETERNAL PRESS LINK: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615725182
YOU TUBE BOOK TRAILER: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28HZqu-my1gAmazon Buy Page: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Ice+Bridge%2BKathryn+Meyer+Griffith&x=15&y=18

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EXCERPT from Don't Look Back, Agnes -with bonus short story In This House:
Exasperated, Agnes had dropped the subject but now her questions and concerns returned. If Herb wasn’t a friend of her mother’s and he wasn’t an ambulance driver for St. Anthony’s, then who was he? Why was he bothering and misleading her?
Now here he was. Again. All she wanted to do was drive away and leave him and all the problems there in the middle of the street. Yet he was persistent, and quick, and the next thing she knew he’d slipped in the passenger’s side and was sitting next to her. Just like before.
“Okay,” she announced, as she yanked the car to the side of the road and spun around to him, “who are you really? I know you’ve been lying to me. My mother doesn’t know you and you don’t work for the hospital’s ambulance service. No one knows you.”
He seemed hurt by her anger. “They weren’t all lies,” he said, bowing his head. “I had to think of something to tell you, so I could speak to you. I knew that if I just walked up and knocked on your door, you wouldn’t open it.”
“What made you think that?”
He lifted his strange eyes that appeared to have no depth and met hers. His face was shadowed, even in the car’s overhead light, indistinct, but again so frustratingly familiar. “Because I know who you are and what you went through that summer. I know how much you hate being back here and how scared you are of the woods and what exists in it.”
Fear crowded in around her and she felt dizzy. “Who are you?”
She thought the sound that came from his throat was a chuckle but she wasn’t sure. “It doesn’t matter.” Then in a much lower voice she barely caught, “And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Why is that?” Her voice just as low.
“Never mind. I’m sorry. But I do know your mother and I do take care of her cat. Sometimes. I only wanted to talk to you. See you.”
“Why?” She was becoming more suspicious every second, and a little frightened, though she sensed the man besides her meant her no real harm, that he was only hiding something. What happened if she was wrong?
“I’m here to help you.”
“Help me what?” She’d switched the car’s engine off. Outside, the night fog surged against the windows and cut them off from the world. She was alone with a crazy man.
She knew she should kick him out of the car and drive like a launched rocket straight to Ida’s. She’d be safe there. But something, the poignant begging in his gaze or the hopeful smile on his lips, kept her from doing that. It was as if he’d enchanted her.
“I’m going to help you find Lottie.”
Shocked, she exclaimed, “You’re kidding? You want to help me find the missing girl? That’s the police’s job. I have no idea where she is. Besides, she’s only missing. There’s no proof she’s even been taken or is in danger.”
“Ah, Agnes, you know better than that.” His voice was firm but melancholy. “She’s in the woods where you were and if we don’t find her tonight she’ll be dead.”
“How do you know that? Why are you doing this to me?” She realized she was infuriated with him because he was trying to make her do something she really didn’t want to do.
“Because you know where she is. You know and you can save her.”
“I don’t have a clue where she is. I’ll tell you what, you go save her.”
“That won’t work, I’m afraid. Alone, I can’t do it. I need you. You’re the one. We can’t find it. It won’t show itself unless you’re there.” He tilted his head and his dark hair, somehow longer than the last time she’d seen him, brushed against his shoulders. Tonight he wasn’t wearing a uniform or a dirty T-shirt. Dressed in an old-fashioned collared shirt with buttons down the front and frayed jeans, she thought he looked even younger than last time.
Agnes had had enough. “Herb, or whatever your name is, would you please get out of my car?”
“It’s Herb, kinda. And, Agnes, you’re never going to be able to live with yourself if you don’t try to save Lottie. I mean you tried and couldn’t save Sophie and the others and you’ve had to live with the guilt all these years. You don’t want to go through that again, do you? No, you’re coming with me.”
He reached out his hand, touching her, and suddenly the car was gone and they were standing at the edge of the night woods, the mist churning around their feet. Her mother’s house was behind them, so she knew where she was. A sliver of moon shone its silvery light above, just enough to see what was surrounding them. Thick night trees. Undergrowth and bushes. The woods. Hell. ****

You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3q9rZryFMo
Eternal Press Buy Links: http://www.eternalpress.biz/people.php?author=422
http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615725748
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About Kathryn Meyer Griffith...
2012 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS NOMINEE for her romantic horror novel
The Last Vampire-Revised Author’s Edition

Since childhood I’ve always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full time. I began writing novels at 21 and have had fourteen (nine romantic horror, one historical romance, one romantic suspense, one romantic time travel and two murder mysteries) previous novels and eight short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press, Damnation Books and Eternal Press.
I’ve been married to Russell for thirty-three years; have a son, James, and two grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live in a small quaint town in Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis, Mo. We have two quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha and live cat Cleo, and the four of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though I’ve been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably write stories until the day I die.****

Novels and short stories from Kathryn Meyer Griffith:
Evil Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984; Damnation Books, July 2012)
The Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985; Eternal Press Author’s Revised Edition 2010)
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615722327
Blood Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, February 2012)
Vampire Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, July 2011)
Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615724253
The Last Vampire (Zebra, 1992; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition out October 2010) Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615722075
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZU77j_q4S8
Witches (Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition out April 2011)
Damnation Books Buy Link:http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615723553
The Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra Anthology Dark Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011) Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615723201
The Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
Damnation Books Buy Link: http://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615725007
Scraps of Paper (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2003)
All Things Slip Away (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2006)
Egyptian Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
Eternal Press buy link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615724437 My self-made
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cogCNYKzPqc
Winter’s Journey (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011) Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615724604)
You Tube Book Trailer address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZYCs2DVhHg
The Ice Bridge (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615725182
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28HZqu-my1g
Don’t Look Back, Agnes novella & bonus short story: In This House (2008; ghostly romantic short story out; Eternal Press in January 2012)
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3q9rZryFMo
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/people.php?author=422
BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons (Damnation Books 2010)
Damnation Books buy link: httphttp://damnationbooks.com/book.php?isbn=9781615721313
You Tube self-made Book trailer with original song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0-U9c2Lwfo
The Woman in Crimson (Damnation Books 2010)
Eternal Press Buy Link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615721979
You Tube Book Trailer Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcRBvDI5G4Y
The Complete Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did the Introduction)

My Websites:
http://www.myspace.com/kathrynmeyergriffith (to see all my book trailers with original music by my singer/songwriter brother JS Meyer)
http:// www.bebo.com/kathrynmeyerGhttp://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1019954486
http://www.authorsden.com/kathrynmeyergriffithhttp://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1019954486

1 comment:

Debby said...

What a great excerpt. Makes me want more.
debby236 at gmail dot com