Book of Paul Guest Post
Please enjoy
this excerpt from The Book of Paul, a nail-biting
supernatural thriller by Richard Long. Then read on to learn how you can win
huge prizes as part of this blog tour, including a Kindle Fire, $300 in Amazon
gift cards, 5 autographed copies of the book, and a look into your future
through a free tarot reading performed by the author.Monsters: An Excerpt from The Book of Paul
by Richard Long
You tell your children not to be afraid. You tell them
everything will be all right. You tell them Mommy and Daddy will always be
there. You tell them lies.
Paul looked out the filthy window and watched the little
girl playing in the filthier street below. Hopscotch. He didn’t think kids
played hopscotch anymore. Not in this neighborhood. Hip-hopscotch, maybe.
“Hhmph! What do you think about that?”
Paul watched the little black girl toss her pebble or
cigarette butt or whatever it was to square number five, then expertly hop,
hop, hop her way safely to the square and back. She was dressed in a clean,
fresh, red-gingham dress with matching red bows in her neatly braided pigtails.
She looked so fresh and clean and happy that he wondered what she was doing on
this shithole street.
The girl was playing all by herself. Hop, hop, hop. Hop,
hop, hop. She was completely absorbed in her hopping and scotching and Paul was
equally absorbed watching every skip and shuffle. No one walked by and only a
single taxi ruffled the otherworldly calm.
Paul leaned closer, his keen ears straining to pick up the
faint sound of her shiny leather shoes scraping against the grimy concrete. He
focused even more intently and heard the even fainter lilt of her soft voice.
Was she singing? He pressed his ear against the glass and listened. Sure
enough, she was singing. Paul smiled and closed his eyes and let the sound pour
into his ear like a rich, fragrant wine.
“One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door…”
He listened with his eyes closed. Her soft sweet voice rose
higher and higher until…the singing suddenly stopped. Paul’s eyes snapped open.
The girl was gone. He craned his neck quickly to the left and saw her being
pulled roughly down the street. The puller was a large, light-skinned black
man, tugging on her hand/arm every two seconds like he was dragging a dog by
its leash. At first, he guessed that the man was her father, a commodity as
rare in this part of town as a fresh-scrubbed girl playing hopscotch. Then he
wondered if he wasn’t her father after all. Maybe he was one
of those kinds of men, one of those monsters that
would take a sweet, pure thing to a dark, dirty place and…
And do whatever a monster like that wanted to do.
Paul pressed his face against the glass and caught a last
fleeting glance of the big brown man and the tiny red-checkered girl. He
watched the way he yanked on her arm, how he shook his finger, how he stooped
down to slap her face and finally concluded that he was indeed her one and only
Daddy dear. Who else would dare to act that way in public?
“Kids!” Paul huffed. “The kids these days!”
He laughed loud enough to rattle the windows. Then his face
hardened by degrees as he pictured the yanking daddy and the formerly happy
girl. Hmmm, maybe he was one of those prowling monsters after all. Paul
shuddered at the thought of what a man like that would do. He imagined the scene
unfolding step by step, grunting as the vision became more and more precise.
“Hhmph!” he snorted after a particularly gruesome imagining. “What kind of a
bug could get inside your brain and make you do a thing like that?”
“Monsters! Monsters!” he shouted, rambling back into the
wasteland of his labyrinthine apartments, twisting and turning through the maze
of lightless hallways as if being led by a seeing-eye dog. He walked and turned
and walked some more, comforted as always by the darkness. Finally, he came to
a halt and pushed hard against a wall.
His hidden sanctuary opened like Ali Baba’s cave, glowing
with the treasures it contained. He stepped inside and saw the figure resting
(well, not exactly resting) between the flickering candles. At the sound of his
footsteps, the body on the altar twitched frantically. Paul moved closer,
rubbing a smooth fingertip across the wet, trembling skin and raised it to his
lips. It tasted like fear. He gazed down at the man, his eyes moving slowly
from his ashen face to the rusty nails holding him so firmly in place. The
warm, dark blood shining on the wooden altar made him think about the
red-gingham bunny again.
“Monsters,” he said, more softly this time, wishing he
weren’t so busy. As much as he would enjoy it, there simply wasn’t enough time
to clean up this mess, prepare for his guests and track her down. Well, not
her, precisely. Her angry tugging dad. Not that Paul had any trouble killing
little girls, you understand. It just wasn’t his thing. Given a choice, he
would much rather kill her father. And make her watch.
As
part of this special promotional extravaganza sponsored by Novel Publicity, the
price of the Book of Paul eBook edition is just 99
cents this week. What’s more, by purchasing this fantastic book at an
incredibly low price, you can enter to win many awesome prizes.
The prizes include a Kindle Fire, $300 in Amazon gift
cards, 5 autographed copies of the book, and a look into your future through a
free tarot reading performed by the author.
All the info you need to win one of these amazing prizes is
RIGHT HERE. Remember, winning is as easy
as clicking a button or leaving a blog comment--easy to enter; easy to win!
To win the prizes:
About The Book of Paul:
A cross-genre thriller that combines the brooding
horror of Silence of the Lambs with the biting humor of Pulp Fiction.
Get it on Amazon or Barnes &
Noble.
About
the author:
Richard Long is the author of The Book of
Paul and the forthcoming young-adult fantasy series The
Dream Palace. He lives in Manhattan with his wonderful wife,
two amazing children and wicked black cat,
Merlin. Visit Richard on his
website, Twitter, Facebook,
or GoodReads.
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