"There are some TRULY terrifying
features, and characters, in this story. So I finished it this morning, in
daylight--and I'm STILL scared!" Mallory Anne-Marie Haws (Mallory Heart
Reviews)
"Cavendish brings ghostly ancient legends of the land back with her gothic tale."- Oh! For the Hook of a Book
"Cavendish brings ghostly ancient legends of the land back with her gothic tale."- Oh! For the Hook of a Book
"Run
and hide, far and wide,
Run
and hide from the Scottish Bride.
Don’t
turn your head,
Lest
it be said,
You
saw the lace,
On
her blackened face.
Don’t
you stumble,
Or
take a tumble.
Don’t
catch her eye,
Or
you’ll surely die."
Have you ever been so scared your soul left your body?
All her life, Lesley Carpenter has been haunted by a gruesome nursery rhyme—“The Scottish Bride”—sung to her by her great grandmother. To find out more about its origins, Lesley visits the mysterious Isobel Warrender, the current hereditary owner of Linden Manor, a grand house with centuries of murky history surrounding it.
But her visit transforms into a nightmare when Lesley sees the ghost of the Scottish bride herself, a sight that, according to the rhyme, means certain death. The secrets of the house slowly reveal themselves to Lesley, terrible secrets of murder, evil and a curse that soaks the very earth on which Linden Manor now stands. But Linden Manor has saved its most chilling secret for last.
Excerpt:
Have you ever been so scared your soul left your body?
Don’t laugh, or mock me. One day it could happen to you, for I am just like you. Or I was, before I laid eyes on her. Before I set foot in this cursed place.
Ten years ago, I was plain Lesley Carpenter, mature
student of history. College was out for the summer and I had decided on
my research project—the real history behind old folk rhymes.
Not for me, the usual nursery rhymes like “Ring a
Ring o’Roses”. No, they’d been done to death. I picked something
different. A grim rhyme my great-grandmother used to sing to me when I
was a small child. My mother hated it. Only later did I discover the
real reason why.
“You’ll give the child nightmares,” she
would say, but Great-Granny just smiled and chanted it all over again,
swinging my hands up in the air as I giggled with glee. I loved
Great-Granny Davies. Even in her eighties she knew how to have fun.
She’d been a flapper in the twenties and I don’t suppose she ever came
to terms with being respectable. I remember the heady aroma of pot all
over her house when we went to stay once. My mother and Great-Granny had
a row about that and I was never allowed there again.
Great-Granny died just weeks after my eleventh
birthday. I still miss her, and that damned rhyme that would spring into
my mind when I was least expecting it. The tune was infectious. It went
round and round in my head. A simple little hummable refrain that I
thought every other child knew, until I found out that no one had ever
heard of it before. Well, no one I went to school with, anyway. Of
course we lived two hundred miles away from our Davies relatives and it
turned out to have strictly local connections. That’s what got me
intrigued. That’s why I decided on my research project. And that’s what
took me to Linden Manor.
Now I have to tell you, so you’ll know and keep
away from the place, and from me too because, you see, I just don’t
trust myself anymore.
(Copyright © 2017 Catherine Cavendish)
New edition - out now from Crossroad Press
Available from:
Amazon
Also out now!
Four hundred years ago, ten convicted witches were hanged on Gallows
Hill. Now they are back…for vengeance.
Also out now!
Laura
Phillips’s grief at her husband’s sudden death shows no sign of
passing. Even sleep brings her no peace. She experiences vivid,
disturbing dreams of a dark, brooding hill, and a man—somehow out of
time—who seems to know her. She discovers that the place she has dreamed
about exists. Pendle Hill. And she knows she must go there.
But as soon as she arrives, the dream becomes a nightmare. She is caught up in a web of witchcraft and evil…and a curse that will not die.
But as soon as she arrives, the dream becomes a nightmare. She is caught up in a web of witchcraft and evil…and a curse that will not die.
Available from:
and other online retailers
Can the living help the dead…and at what cost?
When Alex Fletcher
finds a painting of a drowned girl, she's unnerved. When the girl in the painting
opens her eyes, she is terrified. And when the girl appears to her as an
apparition and begs her for help, Alex can't refuse.
But as she digs
further into Grace's past, she is embroiled in supernatural forces she cannot
control, and a timeslip back to 1912 brings her face to face with the man who
killed Grace and the demonic spirit of his long-dead mother. With such
nightmarish forces stacked against her, Alex's options are few. Somehow she
must save Grace, but to do so, she must pay an unimaginable price.
Available now from:
Don’t hurt Jane. You may live to regret it.
Bullied by her abusive
father, Jane always felt different. Then the lonely child found a friend in a
mysterious dark lady who offers her protection—a lady she calls her “angel”.
But that protection carries a terrible price, one to be paid with the souls of
those Jane chooses to suffer a hideous and eternal fate.
When Jane refuses to
name another victim, the angel reveals her most terrifying side. Payment must
be made in full—one way or the other.
Maddie had forgotten that
cursed summer. Now she’s about to remember…
When Maddie Chambers inherits her Aunt Charlotte’s gothic
mansion, old memories stir of the long-forgotten summer she turned sixteen. She
has barely moved in before a series of bizarre events drives her to question
her sanity.
The strains of her aunt’s favorite song echo through the
house, the roots of a faraway willow creep through the cellar, a child who
cannot exist skips from room to room, and Maddie discovers Charlotte kept many
deadly secrets.
Gradually, the barriers in her mind fall away, and Maddie
begins to recall that summer when she looked into the face of evil. Now, the
long dead builder of the house has unfinished business and an ancient demon is
hungry. Soon it is not only Maddie’s life that is in danger, but her soul
itself, as the ghosts of her past shed their cover of darkness.
*All titles previously published by Samhain Publishing
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