Excerpt:
Autumn, 1907: late one morning, some kind of torrid, invisible beast seemed to wrap itself all around Fingal T. Smyth’s body. Each one of his toes twitching fiercely, he exited the castle and scanned the distant, Scottish Highlands. Go back where you came from. As the entity wrapped itself tighter all about his person, Fingal blinked back his tears. I’m melting, I am. Aye, it’s the heat of fusion.
Gradually, the beast’s heartbeat became audible—each pulsation. At the same time, too, the illusory heat of transformation emitted an odor as of oven-roasted peppercorns dissolving in a cup of burnt coffee.
Over by the gatehouse, Fräulein Wunderwaffe appeared—the little German girl wearing a plain-sewn robe and square-crown bowler. In that moment, she no longer seemed to be a sickly child of seven years: her inscrutable expression resembled that of a wise, indifferent cat.
Perhaps even some kind of lioness. Fingal cringed, and he recalled a fragment of conversation from three weeks earlier.“She suffers from a most unnatural pathology, an anguished, maniacal obsession with cats,”
Doktor Hubertus Pflug had explained. “Ever since the poor girl was a baby, she has always regarded it her fate to one day metamorphose into a glorious panther, for she believes herself to be ein Gestaltwandler. Do you know this word? It means shapeshifter and refers to someone who possesses the power to take the form of anything in nature.”
The heat radiated up and down Fingal’s spine now, and his thoughts turned back to the present. Aye, it’s a change of phase. I’m melting into a chemical compound. Despite all, he greeted the girl and willed himself to flash a grin.
Fräulein Wunderwaffe did not return the smile. Hand on heart, the little girl drew a bit closer.
Then, as the hot, animalistic presence undulated all across Fingal’s body, the little girl’s eyes grew wide. Until the little girl’s expression turned to that of a vacant stare.
A moment later, her feet pointed inwards, she removed her hat and undid her long, flaxen hair.
Again, he cringed. “If you’ve noticed something, ignore all. This hasn’t got anything to do with you.” A third time, he cringed.
A most ethereal, lyrical, incomprehensible hiss commenced then: from the other end of the winding, decorative-brick driveway, each clay block shining the color of blue Welsh stone, a sleek Siamese cat with a coat of chocolate-spotted ivory had just appeared. And now the creature raced toward his shadow.
As he looked into the animal’s big, searching, blue eyes, the chocolate Siamese studied the off-center tip of his nose. Then the animal turned away, as if to compare the peculiarity with that of some disembodied visage hovering in the distance.
Out upon the loch, meanwhile, a miraculous rogue wave suddenly arose—and now the swell crashed against the pebbly strand.
Not a moment later, a cool flame crawled across Fingal’s throat. The strange fire rattled, too—not unlike the sound of fallen juniper leaves caught up in the current and dancing against the surface of a stone walkway.
Crivens. By now, the alien, pulsating presence held him so tight that he could barely breathe.
Before long, he fell to the earth, and as the dreamlike flame continued to move across his throat, he rolled all about—until the illusory sensation of cool warmth wriggled and twisted and dropped into his neck dimple.
He crawled over to the little girl and grabbed her ankle. “Get on up to your physician’s room, eh?
Please. Go on and wake Doktor Pflug and tell him what’s happened.”
M. Laszlo's Halloween Party Playlist #SciFi #HistoricalFiction #MagicalRealism
Halloween Party Music Playlist by M. Laszlo
‘Moondance’ by Van Morrison
‘Shadow of Love’ by the Damned
‘Bela Lugosi is Dead’ by Bauhaus
‘I Love the Nights’ by Blue Oyster Cult
‘Phantim of the Opera’ by INXS
‘Spellbound’ by Siouxie and the Banshees
‘Tubular Bells’ by Mike Oldfield
‘Andy’s Chest’ by Lou Reed
‘Lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby’ by K. Komeda
‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by Linda Kendrick
‘Little Demon’ by Adrian Zmed (from the soundtrack to ‘Bachelor Party’)
‘Joan Crawford’ by Blue Oyster Cult
‘People are Strange’ by Echo and the Bunnymen (with Ray Manzarek)
‘Terror Couple Kill Colonel’ by Bauhaus
‘Dance of the Vampires’ from the soundtrack to ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’
‘I Put a Spell on You’ by CCR
‘Halloween Main Theme’ by John Carpenter
On the Threshold
M. Laszlo
Genre: SciFi, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism
Publisher: Awesome Independent Authors Publishing
Date of Publication: February 2024
ISBN-10 : 1922329584
ISBN-13 : 978-1922329585
Number of pages: 342
Word Count: Approximately 90,000 words
Cover Artist: Rose Newland
Tagline: Obsessed with solving the riddle of the universe, Scotsman Fingal T. Smyth conducts an occult-science experiment during which he unleashes a projection of his innate knowledge.
Book Description:
Obsessed with solving the riddle of the universe, a Scotsman named Fingal T. Smyth conducts an occult-science experiment during which he unleashes a projection of his innate knowledge.
Fingal aimed to interrogate this avatar to learn what it knows, but unfortunately, he forgot how violent the animal impulses that reside in the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind can be. The avatar appears as a burning man who seeks to manipulate innocent and unsuspecting people into immolating themselves.
With little hope of returning the fiery figure into his being, Fingal must capture his nemesis before it destroys the world.
M. Laszlo is the pseudonym of an extreme recluse who lives in Bath, Ohio. Rumor holds that he derived his pen name from the character of Victor Laszlo in the classic film Casablanca.
Website: https://www.mlaszlo.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Matthew99610035
AIA Publishing: https://www.facebook.com/AIAPublishing
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