Search Results for: Soundings

When Cassidy Walker stumbles into the middle of the highway, bloodied and bruised, Bard college in flames behind her, and manages to flag down a ride, she thinks the worst is over. Arriving in the nearby town of Red Hook, Cassidy tries to call her parents but the phone lines are down – no radio or television signals are being received either. The town, it seems, is cut off from the rest of the world. But that’s not the strangest thing. Not by a long shot. Nobody in Red Hook has even heard of Bard College. Furthermore, they claim that Cassidy is not a music student, but a hand at the local stable. And she has lived in a house she can’t remember, with people she barely knows, for over a year.


The world is fracturing. Cassidy just knows it – just as she knows that she is responsible. As Cassidy undertakes the ultimate road trip, through bubbles of reality, she will find that everything she thinks she knows about herself is wrong. Is she losing her mind or is the world a far more complex place than she thought?

“I’ll need your help. Come night and the Oracle again, I’m going to try the final couplet.”
“Jinian,” Murzy breathed while Dodie looked white-eyed at me. “Dangerous.”
“And fatal not to,” I said, still smiling at them all…

I wove by forest and meadow, branch and leaf. I wove by stream and pool, by river and fall. I wove by cloud and air, by thunder and sunset glow. I wove by depths of the earth, rock and gem, glittering ores and crystals blooming in the dark, old bone and new. Beside me the others wove as well…

“And all within sound of my voice or reach of the wind,” I cried, thrusting my voice like a Sending, like a magic spear, driving it upward. “And all within sound of my voice or lick of the wave, or all within sound of my voice or stretch of the soil, or all within sound of my voice where green grows and leaf springs up. Named or unnamed, silent or speaking. Let this message be brought,

By the Eye of the Star,
Where Old Gods Are!”

Oldtown is a picturesque, historic place, with a square of characterful houses nestling at its centre, and is home to retired colonial masters and friendly locals. A wealthy, reclusive sisterhood lives there too, in a large mansion, Cloisters; a group known locally as the ‘Black Nuns’, who are said to have extraordinary healing powers.

But a killer is at work in Oldtown, and a series of murders has thrown the inhabitants into blind, unreasoning terror, a fear of darkness and of strange sounds – sounds such as the pitiless beat of following footsteps.

Suddenly the town is plunged into a miasma of fear and superstition …

Rodro’s men were pushing past, were blundering with reeking weapons into the room to kill and take the princess away.



Lai half stretched up from the princess’s restraining arms. The room was empty of other life apart from Sir Fezius and the two knights now lifting their swords, ready to cut down Lai.



A popping noise sounded like a drum bursting.



A man appeared in the middle of the room.



One moment he was not there; the next he stood there, holding a bulky stick in his arm, peering about with a white face. He said something that sounded like “Skeet.”



The next instant the room resounded with an avalanche roar and a hellfire blast of scorching flame.

The public abruptly ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn’t human.

The first sounds came at midnight, a plaintive keening from an unknown voice in the vastness of uncharted space. Within hours the whole world had heard the strange, unearthly music–and the panic had begun.

Were the sounds a plea for help? From whom? From where? Or were they a command too terrible to think about? No one knew: And in billions of earth-bound minds the horror grew…

For how could man, who had not yet claimed the moon, defy a challenge from the stars?

And hours later, to the ears of a helpless world, the second message came. . .

And Earth’s days were numbered.

An intense human quietness was upon the laboratory. Annexed though it was to the rambling reaches of the Research Council Building, wherein experimental analyses from atomic power to weed-killer were taking place twenty-four hours a day, no external sounds penetrated the proofed, heavily-insulated walls…

There are new residents in the Long Island Sound . . . and they have a taste for flesh.

The first time the creatures tasted human blood, their savagery went undetected.

Thus begins Mount Misery, a terrific horror tale by writer Angelo Peluso. Located on the Long Island Sound, random attacks by unknown creatures are terrorizing local residents. The question: Who is going to do something about it?

Marine biologist Katie DiNardo and ichthyologist Nick Tanner have seen the damage caused by their mystery creatures but are at a complete loss as to the attacking species. All they know is that they need to get to the bottom of this . . . and fast. While they continue to do their research, people are dropping like flies, and if they don’t figure out what’s going on, there’s no saying what this destructive species will do next.

In a similar style to Jaws, Mount Misery is a spectacular suspense novel that grips you from the first page and doesn’t let its teeth out! Fans of horror will rejoice with Mount Misery, and readers will enjoy the throwback style that made this genre what it is today.

‘Donald Thomas introduces us to the slums and fetid courtyards of nineteenth-century London and in doing so provides a sweeping portrait of the vast world that did not accept “Victorian Values”. The villainy is outstanding. It is also entertaining. The author has a practised eye for the best anecdotes and presents amazing characters, some of whom come equipped with names that sound positively Dickensian . . . a wonderful profile of Victorian London’ The Spectator

On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

When the scientists of the wandering planet, journeying through inter-galactic space, heard the sound of hydrogen atoms coming into existence out of nothing, they realized that they had accidentally discovered the birthplace of continuous creation. They had lifted the curtain and caught an instant’s glimpse of the unknowable. But to have looked it full in the face could have been no more fatal. For later, much later, they were to learn that they had also uncovered mankind’s Day of Judgment . . .

The Phantom Crusader: A skeleton figure gleamed beneath the ancient armour.

The Room that Never Was: The door had been there the night before … and now there was nothing.

The Tunnel: Faint and far beneath them, they could hear the unmistakable sounds…

Stranger in the Skill: There was someone at the door, someone strangely, frighteningly familiar.

The Stockman: Psychic justice … strange but sure …

Footprints in the Sand: There was nothing but wilderness for a thousand square miles. What had made the prints?

The Unorthodox Engineers are a misfit bunch of engineers, commanded by maverick engineer Fritz van Noon and including, amongst others, a convicted bank robber as quartermaster (on the entirely-sound grounds that he was likely to be the most capable person for the job). They solve problems of alien technology and weird planets in the future.

The Unorthodox Engineers contains:

The Railways Up on Cannis (1959)
The Subways of Tazoo (1964)
The Pen and the Dark (1966)
Getaway from Getawehi (1969)
The Black Hole of Negrav (1975)

In the Country of Tattooed Men the nights feel hollow and are full of sounds of the jungle: danger is everywhere. Tattoos hide all from the prying eyes of the world. On Murderer’s Walk the cards are dealt for the ultimate game. There can be only one loser: pray you do not hold the ace of spades. And from York to London, Northampton to Southend the boys are surfing Spanish style.
It’s exciting and exhilarating and potentially fatal.

Gary Kilworth has created a powerful and striking anthology of stories from the past, present and future.

A cool girl hunt is what the blind man wanted. He was searching for a pretty young woman, soft spoken and slender, whom he’d never seen but knew had vanished, and he was willing to pay Bertha Cool anything to find her.

The whole thing seemed impossible and sounded suspicious, but the man’s money was right – even if his motives weren’t – and given the choice Bertha always followed the dollar sign.

Only this time, the dollar sign pointed to murder and fingered Bertha Cool as a red hot suspect.

When Ivan Wright stepped out of his mountain cabin, rifle in hand, to investigate the sound of a strange helicopter, he stepped right into the middle of a galactic crisis.

For the crew of that odd aircraft were not men such as he’d ever seen before – and when he tried to oppose them, he found himself hurled uncontrollably into oblivion.

He awoke to find himself considered as a kidnapped barbarian from a backward planet in a galaxy of advanced civilizations – yet one who somehow held in his own hands the key to all their futures!

The room was quiet; the man in front of the mirror was the only living things there, and he was too horrified to utter a sound.

In the mirror, five faces stared back at him: one young and ruddy, which was his own, and four that did not belong in that place at all, for they were wrinkled, malevolent, small as crabapples and blue as smoke.

So begins Damon Knight’s ‘Be My Guest’, a story of the human race possessed by things that were – well, not exactly demons . . . but not exactly not demons, either.

It’s just one of the unpredictably imaginative tales in this fascinating collection by a modern master of science fiction.

Deep in the sounds, scents and shifting rhythms of the Amazon forest, a family have lost their seven-year-old child, stolen by the mysterious ‘Invisible People’, the tribe which has never been seen.
Through ten years their agonised search for him takes them beyond the world’s last great natural frontier into the cruel beauty of the Brazilian jungle.
When at last father and son do meet – in a dramatic and terrifying encounter – it is in the emerald forest, a place where the mythical and magical powers of primal existence must clash with the cold-hearted greed of modern man.

Another spinetingling collection from the prolific pen of R L Fanthorpe!

The Frozen Tomb: Unliving and undying she waited in a casket of ice.

Sleeping Place: His thin lips curled back to display rows of sharp, white teeth.

Strange Country: “What is he doing there? How could he escape?”

Cry in the Night: The wolf cry sounded strangely human in the darkness…

The Thing from Boulter’s Cavern: Inhuman survivors of a weird, ancient race lived on in the labyrinth.

The Coveters: “Greed is a psychic disease…maybe it has a psychic cure…?”

As Miss Maggs made her way nervously home, a clock stuck one, the town’s lights were switched off and footsteps sounded behind her. She broke into a desperate run. Later the doctor pronounced that she had literally died of fright.

In a provincial town, who was there to suspect but the rowdy gang led by Nick Salter? But Nick’s young wife swore to an alibi for him and so Sergeant Brent – a trifle embarrassed as a beneficiary under the will of the deceased – must look deeper into a case in which teenagers might too easily be made the whipping boys for the crimes of others.

Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came . . . Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel – clean powerful, dependable.

But the aliens – or whatever they were – who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return. After each Moondrift comes an eerie sound, as pure as a children’s choir, heard all over the world. It mesmerises all who hear it with it’s beauty – and when it is ended, certain people have simply disappeared without warning, never to be seen again.

This is the story of one who disappeared . . .

The roar of a lion is not the kind of music one expects to hear at night in the stillness of the English countryside.

Yet in the neighbourhood of ‘Ganges’, Sir Benjamin Watson’s house, that terrifyingly wild sound is not uncommon. Sir Benjamin is rich enough to indulge his expensive hobby of a private zoo. The first time Ann Sherborne, walking at night to the gates of ‘Ganges’ on that strange, eventful visit, hears the savage roar, her courage dies and she starts to run.

But that frightening experience is just a prelude to a night charged with terror, when not only fear but death stalks ‘Ganges’, playing havoc among the guests assembled there …

L M Greenspan, the head of ailing Climactic Studios, gave producer, Barney Hendrickson, five days to get a major movie in the can – and Climactic out of it.

Impossible?

Not with Professor Hewett’s miraculous presto chango time machine, the answer to Hollywood producer’s prayer.

Nipping back to AD 1,000 with a whole film crew and two glam stars, Barney sets out to prove that the Vikings discovered America five hundred years before Columbus – and to film the event in glorious Technicolour. But it’s not as easy as it sounds, as they realise when history lets them down and their Viking Columbus fails to show up in the New World.

Patrick Joya lifted his head to scan the southern sky and saw a dark bluish shape flicker against the clouds. Growing larger and larger the object undulated like a wide piece of cloth carried along a moving current of water. He could hear the babble of voices around him swelling to a mounting groan of panic. The sound went racing like a cresting wave back toward the Terminal where the thousands there would be lifting their gaze skyward. Another Space Swimmer, Pat thought with sinking heart. It seemed as if it intended to swallow up the sky – for the brightness of day had blackened into night.

Why is the government deliberately destroying all trace of Man’s past?

Why are the laws of gravity and momentum strangely altered?

Why has the world’s population continually increased without the predicted eco-crisis taking place?

Why is there an international conspiracy to conceal the future of the human race?

These are just some of the reality-shattering questions that face Manalone, a brilliant computer scientist, when he tries to find out exactly what has happened to humanity. Manalone, outcast from society, must fight the entire machinery of a ruthless police state to discover the truth. And the truth is an awful, chilling one, that sounds only too real in today’s world.