Title: Sliding
Beneath the Surface
The St. Augustine
Trilogy
Book 1
By Doug Dillon
Synopsis
In old St. Augustine, Florida, fifteen-year-old Jeff
Golden’s recurring dream of being stabbed in the chest and bleeding all over
his bed is driving him crazy. It’s causing him to lose sleep and giving him
severe headaches. When his psychically gifted friend Carla and an ornery Native
American shaman named Lobo try to help, Jeff is inundated with terrifying
paranormal experiences.
Reaching out of Florida’s distant past, something
increasingly entangles Jeff in tentacles of danger that threaten his sanity and
eventually his life. But the harder he tries to understand, the deeper he gets.
When comprehension finally dawns though, time has almost run out. Lobo does his
best to prepare Jeff for what he must face in order to survive but it may be
too little and too late.
It’s at this point that both Jeff and Carla find themselves
swept headlong into an alternative reality from which they may never return. If
they don’t quickly and fully adapt to this situation, all hope is lost. From
Lobo they know how it might be possible to change what is happening but the
question is, can they? Repeatedly, Lobo has told both teens, “You create your
own reality whether in this world or in another.” If acted upon properly, that
advice just might save their lives and end suffering on an even wider scale.
Blurb
A new resident of America's oldest and most haunted city,
St. Augustine, Florida, fifteen-year-old Jeff Golden suddenly finds himself up
to his eyeballs in frightening paranormal experiences. At the end of his rope
in trying to figure out what is happening to him, Jeff decides to rely on his
friend Carla Rodriguez, and Lobo, an old Native American shaman, for help.
Despite this guidance, things get even worse. Jeff's spine tingling encounters increase in number and intensity at an alarming rate, scaring him even more. Eventually, he makes the startling discovery that unresolved circumstances involving a bloody event directly out of Florida's distant past threatens his sanity and possibly his life.
Finally, overwhelmed by forces he cannot understand or control, Jeff's world shifts from frightening to downright terrifying. In desperation, and on Lobo's advice, he leaps headlong into the unknown in order to save himself. What Jeff discovers though is that he has entered a level of reality he is completely unprepared to handle while unwittingly dragging Carla with him.
Like all the books in THE ST. AUGUSTINE TRILOGY, the premise for Sliding Beneath the Surface is simply this: You create your own reality.
Despite this guidance, things get even worse. Jeff's spine tingling encounters increase in number and intensity at an alarming rate, scaring him even more. Eventually, he makes the startling discovery that unresolved circumstances involving a bloody event directly out of Florida's distant past threatens his sanity and possibly his life.
Finally, overwhelmed by forces he cannot understand or control, Jeff's world shifts from frightening to downright terrifying. In desperation, and on Lobo's advice, he leaps headlong into the unknown in order to save himself. What Jeff discovers though is that he has entered a level of reality he is completely unprepared to handle while unwittingly dragging Carla with him.
Like all the books in THE ST. AUGUSTINE TRILOGY, the premise for Sliding Beneath the Surface is simply this: You create your own reality.
Excerpt 1
I shut Lobo’s door behind me without putting on my jacket
and took a big breath of cold air. Standing there for a second, I felt like I
had been running hard. God, my heart pounded so hard I thought it might split
wide open, and that stupid headache throbbed even more. I hated leaving Carla
like I did, but the time to get out of there had come.
Being away from Lobo was such a relief. With my eyes closed,
I took another deep breath and let it out slowly. All that had gone on that
afternoon rushed through my mind like a flooding river. Instantly, those
panicky urges to turn around and run away while walking towards Lobo’s place
with Carla popped up in my head. I opened my eyes again only to see that
everything had gotten a lot darker than it was seconds before. A massive fog
bank had somehow moved in over Matanzas Bay and already covered most of Lobo’s
dock. As I watched, the rest of the dock disappeared into all that gray stuff
as if it had never been there. Rapidly, a smaller wave of fog rolled over the
tip of the peninsula and headed right for me at a speed fog should never move.
It all happened so fast, I had no time to think or act. Long fingers of mist
reached for the porch, and before I knew it, a cold wetness surrounded me.
“What the hell?” I whispered to myself. Talk about freaky.
Yeah, it scared me—so much that I even turned around to go back into the
house. Believe it or not, right then, facing old Lobo seemed better than
dealing with that awful, weird fog. When I turned around though, I couldn’t
find the house. All I could see was fog in every direction. Even so, I knew the
front door had to be there directly in front of me, right? I mean I hadn’t
moved more than a couple of feet away from it, so I stretched my arms out and
slowly stepped forward.
After walking maybe five or six steps, I still hadn’t found
the door or any part of the house. I know what you’re thinking. You’re sure I
must have been hallucinating all of that or something. I don’t blame you. To be
perfectly honest, I thought the same thing at first, but that cold, wet fog was
very, very real.
“Carla!” I shouted, but my voice sounded muffled. “Lobo?” I
yelled. At any second, I expected one of them to open the door and answer me.
No such luck. I kept shouting anyway.
When I finally gave up yelling my lungs out, the absolute
silence startled me. Like a thick blanket of insulation, the fog no longer
allowed any sound in from the outside world—no birds chirping, no noises from
boats out on the bay or traffic in the neighborhood. Nothing but total silence.
I swear, it was so quiet I actually heard my heart beating. As I listened
though, I noticed a darkness creeping into the fog. I’m telling you, it just
got darker and darker as I stood there frozen in fear, with my head still
aching. In less than a minute, I was in total blackness with only the feel of
cold, wet fog all over me. Strangely enough, I also smelled something like pine
needles. Pine trees. Pine needles. Something like that.
I didn’t know what to do. Lobo’s words about spirits and
danger still swirled through my weary brain, reviving the memory of that deep
blackness I had seen at the bottom of his carved ivory ball. For a moment, I
wondered if I was dreaming somehow, but the feel of that cold fog all over my
body told a different story. I turned around several times, hoping to see or
hear something, anything. When that got me nowhere, the panic really started to
build. Even in the cold, I could feel sweat trickling down my back and under my
arms. I had never felt so alone.
Excerpt 2
“Wait. Wait a minute,” I said out loud, closing my eyes even
though there was nothing to see. “Take it easy and think.” After sucking in a
couple of deep breaths of cold air, I put on my jacket. Funny how that helped.
Doing that one little thing for myself also calmed me down a little. Even my
headache eased up a bit.
No matter what, I said to myself, you still have to be on
Lobo’s porch. All you have to do is get down on your hands and knees and feel
your way across the wood floor until you find the door. Why didn’t you think of
that before, idiot?
Listening to my own advice, I squatted on my heels and
stretched out put my right hand. Instead of wood, I touched wet sand, dirt and
what felt like a thick matting of pine needles. I pulled my hand back like it
had been burned. As I thought about it, I didn’t remember seeing any pine trees
on Lobo’s property.
“No way,” I said out loud in my muffled voice. “I’m on the
porch. I have to be.” But the feeling of pine needles did match what I had been
smelling and that gave me a tiny bit of hope, in a way. At least a couple of
things connected in all that darkness.
An owl hooted loudly somewhere in the fog, making me jump.
Strange as it may sound, when I thought about the owl and the things I had
touched, they all helped me feel better. I don’t know why exactly, except they seemed
to connect me to the real world beyond that total blackness. The owl hooted
again, but this time I didn’t jump. Instead, I wondered if maybe I had stepped
off the porch into the fog and just got lost somehow. If that’s so, I thought,
keep feeling around until you find the porch. Once more following my own logic,
I got on my hands and knees. Wetness soaked through my jeans and grit stuck to
my hands. Again, all I could feel was dirt, sand and pine needles until
something brushed my face, scaring the crap out of me at first.
When I felt around some more and found the thing, it was
nothing more than a palmetto frond, dripping wet from the fog. Following the
frond all the way down to a palmetto bush, I found a shoe. The thing is, I
hadn’t seen any trash like that at all anywhere around Lobo’s house except
inside his truck.
Continuing to crawl around and feeling with my fingers, I
found even more pine needles, then some pine cones, and what felt like rough
slivers of wood. To my sensitive nose, the scent of pine there
was really strong.
Seconds later, I found a tree about a foot and a half thick
and grabbed it with both hands. Why? It almost felt like a friend there in the
dark, at least something big I could hold onto, you know? It didn’t matter how
rough the outside was. As my fingers explored the thing, I felt places that had
no bark—spots of bare wood with splintery holes gouged out of it. Those holes
oozed pine sap, and I wondered what had caused them. Yeah, my fingers got
really sticky, but I could have cared less.
That’s when it happened. Slowly the fog all around me
started to glow. At first there was enough brightness so I could at least see
my hands, the tree, and a shadow of the tree in the fog in front of me.
The source of that illumination had to be coming from
behind.
I whipped around and there it was, Lobo’s front door not ten
feet away. Light, wonderful light from inside Lobo’s house pushing its way
through those glass ovals and making the fog glow. “Yesssss!” I shouted long
and hard, and started walking towards the door. All that brightness from inside
really made the wolf on his cliff, the moon and Orion stand out brilliantly as
fog swirled in front of them.
When I got there, I looked through the mist and the clear
glass portion of the door. The hallway and room with the fireplace and weapons
were on the left, right where they should be. I didn’t see Carla or Lobo yet,
but all I needed to do was open the door to safety. When I reached for the
doorknob though, I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t even find the door itself—the
wooden part. Reaching out with a shaking hand, I grasped one of the clear glass
sections in my fingers, which should have been impossible.
Author Bio
Doug Dillon has been writing for adults and young people
since 1984, especially in the paranormal realm. An award winning educator, he
spent many years as a classroom teacher, school administrator, and coordinator
of programs for high-risk students.
Prentice Hall, Harcourt, Mitchell Lane Publishers, Boys' Life magazine,
Learning Magazine and The Orlando Sentinel have all published his work.
Author Links:
Buy Links:
Click to Buy
E-book:
The
Book
Depository:
Australia,
Brazil,
New
Zealand,
Hong
Kong,
Ireland,
India,
Philippines,
South
Africa
Click to Buy Print
Book:
The
Book
Depository:
Australia,
Brazil,
New
Zealand,
Hong
Kong,
Ireland,
India,
Philippines,
South
Africa
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment