The Man with the Devil's Tongue: Chapter 1 Preview

Today I present to you the opening chapter of my upcoming novella The Man with the Devil's Tongue. The story will be available August 5th and acts as a prequel to Death's Good Intentions (coming September 9th).

I hope you enjoy!

On the night of April Frausini’s twentieth birthday, her dead boyfriend came to her room with a knife in his mouth.

This wasn’t altogether uncommon. Brett often visited April after his motorcycle accident a year ago.

The knife was new, though.

April pulled the bed sheets closer as Brett passed through her door. Across the room, her roommate Cary slept on, oblivious to the paranormal visitor.

It was about eleven years ago that April woke to a fright—her first period and her first vision of a ghost in her room.

The ghost that particular day had been that of her grandmother. Old granny seemed so happy that her little girl was a woman now. April, meanwhile, had screamed her head off until her parents rushed to her room and granny finally disappeared into dust.

There had been many ghosts since then, most of them silent and not unkind, but April was still prone to frights now and then.

Her parents had treated her as a child with a broken brain. They took April to doctors. The doctors sent her to specialists. The specialists put her on drugs. When the drugs failed to stop the visions, the specialists zapped her brain.

After that, April told them the ghosts had gone.

She lied.

Those years of confusion had left their toll on the Frausini family unit. Their broken child was fixed but the home had developed many cracks.

In the divorce April was given the choice to pick which parent to live with. Her Mom and Dad had spent weeks coaching her, telling lies about one another, trying to paint the best self-portraits of themselves and the cruelest caricatures of the other.

April didn’t want to choose either of them after that, but she chose Mom. Dad didn’t talk to her much after that. Once she got to college, though, it didn’t matter much; she hardly talked to Mom either. The bird was out of the nest, let her fly far. She had enrolled in classes with the intention of becoming a psychologist, believing that if she learned how to help others she may one day learn to help herself.

There were many ghosts on campus. Most of the time, April paid them no mind, but if a ghost detected her eyes upon them, they often sought her out.

She told her boyfriend Brett about it. He believed her, or at least he said he did.

Visiting her after his own death, he had no choice but to believe her now.

As Brett approached her bedside, he took the knife out of his mouth. His spirit was translucent and a dark shade of gray, looking more like an outline, and lacking the finer details of the human face. April had come to learn that a ghost’s shade of gray determined their ‘mood.’

And Brett was in a foul mood.

April tried to control her breathing. The knife wasn’t real, she told herself. But an angry ghost was a very real thing. Had Brett grown restless and agitated while trapped on the mortal plane? Did he mean to vent that frustration on the only one capable of seeing him? April brought her left hand underneath the sheets and searched out her crucifix which she kept at the side of her bed for nights such as this.

Brett said, “I want to kill your roommate.”

April almost shushed him, then remembered that only she could hear his words. She couldn’t speak loudly, though. Her roommate Cary thought she was weird enough already.

“You can’t kill my roommate,” April said in a whisper. “You can’t kill anybody. Go back to bed, sweetie.”

“I can’t sleep,” Brett said. He ran his hands through his hair, revealing the part of his scalp that had been stripped away during the accident. “I only dream of memories. I don’t want them anymore. They hurt worse than dying.”

“I’m sorry,” April told him.

“I want to get rid of my hurt, give it to somebody else.”

“You can’t.”

“She’s sleeping,” Brett said, playing with the knife in his hand. “She won’t feel a thing.”

“They’ll think I did it,” April said.

“Well. . .”

“Didn’t think of that, huh?” She whispered, “Besides, like I said, you can’t do it, and I don’t mean in the sense of the moral argument. I mean, you can’t do it. You can influence the world if you want to but not with a knife you made up with your head.”

The knife changed into flecks of dust that floated down to the floor. Brett frowned. His color lightened, his details became clearer. April thought she saw tears in his eyes. She put the crucifix away.

After a long silence, April said, “You can always move on.”

“It scares me,” Brett said. “I don’t know where I’d go.”

“You should have nothing to be afraid of.”

“We judge our own lives differently, less honestly, than others judge us. And if there is a God, and He’s been watching everything I did, how can I expect a kind judgment?”

April had no answers for him. Brett wept quietly until his spirit disappeared from the room.

April knew without even trying that she would not get back to sleep.

For a long time now, ghosts had been making things difficult for her. They had split up her family, made her into a mental case in the eyes of her parents, and ruined her chances at a normal college life.

April dressed for the day and left her dorm. She met up with some night owl friends at a local bar. She was underage and felt the need to obey the law, for fear of what potential ghosts waited for her in lockup. More than that, though, if she started screaming about dead men in a jail cell, the police might never let her leave.

She kept her life on the straight and narrow. She never drank, didn’t smoke, rarely drove, and only kept friends who were just normal enough for society, but strange enough to accept her, the girl who sees things.

Some of them knew what she saw because she told them. April wondered if anybody believed her, though.

Abby believed her. Abby was a calligraphy enthusiast going to school to become a painter or something. Abby also believed that she had been abducted from her bed by aliens at age eleven. This, she explained, was why she went to bed fully clothed nowadays.

Abby and her boyfriend Josh were eating nachos and discussing the merits of the last episode of The X-Files when April sat down.

“Jesus,” Josh said. He tried to avert his eyes and focused so intently on his nachos that the chips were likely to catch fire.

“I look that bad?” April asked.

“You don’t look good,” Abby said. “Trouble sleeping?”

April nodded. “Brett came to visit me.”

Josh scoffed. Abby slapped the back of his hand and said to April, “What’d he have to say?”

“He wants to kill my roommate,” April said.

Josh frowned.

“Is that normal?” Abby asked. “I mean, did he want to kill her before he died?”

“Not that I know of,” April said. She put her forehead on the table and closed her eyes.

“Should you have left your room, then?” Abby asked. “What if he tries to kill her now that you’re gone?”

“Brett can’t kill anybody. It doesn’t work that way. It’s just a cry for help. But I can’t help him. I can’t even help myself.”

April looked up from the table. The smell of nachos made her queasy in the middle of the night. The bar was mostly empty, with the exception of the sad regulars and the nocturnal students.

The chubby bartender with the accent that was impossible to determine set out a line of drinks for a few jocks in football jerseys. Gwen the waitress tried her best to politely turn down some balding old men a few tables over. And seated in his usual dark corner was the lonely, awkward genius Ronald Lime.

April blinked away the sleep from her eyes.

No, Lime wasn’t by himself. There was someone with him. That was new. His friend was seated with his back to April, so she couldn’t see who he was, but he wore all black and had wide shoulders.

Lime had joined college at age fourteen. He was brilliant and practically everybody hated him. Some of this was jealous human nature, but sometimes Lime didn’t make himself easy to like. He rarely spoke except to clarify how superior he was to those around him. April believed there was little difference between Lime and the jocks who meant to put him down all his life, except they did it with brawn and he did it with brains.

“Not usual for Lime to go out with a friend,” April said.

Josh and Abby looked back at Lime, then regarded April with confusion.

“I don’t know what you see,” Josh said, “but the Nerd King is alone.”

The dark figure turned, as if sensing April’s eyes upon him, revealing a face covered with scars and infected piercings.

His eyes were on fire.

The man in black got up from his seat and crossed the bar slowly, dragging behind him a length of chains. A smell of decay preceded him and the lights in the bar seemed to dim in his wake.

April started to shake as sweat came down her face. She gripped the edges of the table tightly while her friends looked on with concern.

She had never seen a spirit like this before.

The man walked up to her table. . .

Then he simply walked past.

April breathed out. Her face was pale and her heart was beating in a rapid chorus of drum beats.

Abby took her hand in her own. She said, “Sweetie, are you okay?”

April nodded. She pulled hair from her sweaty brow. “I’m fine.”

The lights in the bar grew brighter and brighter until they became blinding—then they shattered all at once, raining bits of glass down on everyone.

April didn’t understand it herself, but she began screaming like a mad woman. Josh and Abby grabbed her and forcefully took her outside while the other patrons hurried after them.

People brushed glass off their shoulders and from their hair, but April was still screaming. She fell to the pavement and curled up in a fetal position as she screamed at the dark sky above.

Someone asked, “What’s wrong with her? Is she hurt?”

Abby got down next to April and embraced her, then started cooing into her ear like a mother might to a frightened child.

“You’re all right,” Abby said. “You’re okay, April. Calm down.”

The world returned to April slowly. Panic subsided, giving way to reason and shame. She got up from the pavement and dusted herself off and tried not to take the weird looks she got from the others personally.

Josh said, “Was that you? I mean, did you, umm, turn out the lights?”

April shook her head. “There was a powerful spirit in the bar. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He seemed especially interested in Lime.”

“Where is Lime?” Abby asked.

April surveyed the crowd of confused bar patrons but Lime was nowhere in sight. She brushed past them, heading back to the bar.

It was dark but Lime could clearly be seen seated in his corner. 

His eyes were on fire.

Read the rest of the story on August 5th.

And keep an eye out for upcoming giveaways on Goodreads!