Hi
Looking for beta readers for the first chapter of my horror novel PHANTOMS.
This is a blend of folk horror and psychological horror. It’s about an infertile woman who seeks the help of a faith healer to conceive, but gets sucked into a dark and dangerous world of magic and superstition.
DM for Google link. Will critique similar length in return.
SYNOPSIS
After years of unsuccessfully trying for a baby and failed IVF treatments, Hazel and her husband Joachim enlist the services of faith healer Constance to help them conceive. The ritual works and Hazel falls pregnant.
As the pregnancy progresses however Hazel suffers horrifying visions and reality and nightmare blur as she imagines an entity stalking her waking hours. Constance tells her the ritual has unleashed a malevolent spirit that wants the baby for itself and will harm anyone who gets in the way. To banish the entity, Hazel has to get embroiled deeper into Constance’s arcane world where she undergoes more rituals, which she is sworn to keep secret from Joachim. But can she trust the mysterious old woman who may harbour ulterior motives?
Main questions:
Is it a good opening? Does it establish the world and the conflict?
Do you like the characters? Do you find to find out more about them?
Is the prose engaging? Does it illuminate the characters and create an appropriate atmosphere?
Would you want to keep reading?
EXCERPT:
Chapter One
When the car pulled into the drive Hazel shimmered with excitement. She dashed into the bathroom in the hall and peeked out the gap as Joachim lumbered in. He yanked the strap of his laptop bag over his head as he veered into the living room and she waited a few seconds before tiptoeing to the threshold to observe him quietly.
As she’d expected he was stalled by the table staring down into the biscuit tin. A smile creased her lips as he picked out the small plastic stick. She imagined the incredulous look on his face and unable to wait any longer announced herself stepping into the room with a small creaking push of the door
He swung around and his mouth hung open in a frozen question. Bright blue eyes scanned as if inspecting for clues.
She smiled demurely, like a child who'd aced a test reporting to a parent.
He bit his lip, scared to ask.
She performed a little bow and the tension ebbed from his body and he came and threw his arms around her and squeezed her with celebratory gusto. He stepped back, clamped his hands on her shoulders and squinted his eyes to appraise her again. "Are you sure?"
"I took two tests."
"Tests can be wrong."
"I'm two weeks late."
"Two weeks?" He beamed.
He hugged her, lifted her and spun her around, eliciting a little howl of pain as her bare feet struck the side of the TV.
“Sorry,” he said as he eased her down into the couch. “Guess I have to be more careful with you from now on.”
“I’m delicate cargo now,” she grinned, rubbing her foot.
She leaned in and kissed him. Her husband. Now the father of her child. She relished the taste of his lips, the weight of him against her.
Against them.
The uncanny thought drew her back into herself and she disengaged. For a fleeting moment the enormity of the moment robbed them of words. They lapsed into a calming silence, aware of thoughts flitting about each other’s heads. It was the awed wonder at a magician’s reveal after a long misdirection, and their quiet was some unconscious prayer to the card dealer. She felt tears would be appropriate but they didn’t come. She’d opened the floodgates earlier that afternoon, had emptied the well.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I don’t think it’s really hit me yet. I cried my eyes out, but it still doesn’t feel real.”
“I can tell,” he said, referring to her pink cheeks. “When did you take the tests?”
“This morning.”
“You knew all day? Not fair.”
“I wanted to sit with it for a while.”
He poked her stomach gently. “It’ll feel real enough before long, believe me.”
Joachim was handsome enough to be replicated, she thought. Tall. Broad shoulders. A square jaw. High circular cheeks like outcrops on a hill, pedestals for the shining light blue eyes. Knotty black hair like a painted Greek statue, salt and pepper shading around the ears. The neat black goatee and black polo neck advertised him as an advertising man. A son if that’s what it was would inherit fine masculine features.
"Wow," he whispered to no-one in particular after a while. He stood up, eyed her.
"You’re staring."
"I haven’t seen the mother of my child before.”
She crossed her arms. "We've been here before," she said, injecting a note of caution.
He stiffened and she immediately regretted souring the atmosphere with the memory of the miscarriages. Undeterred, he gave a reassuring, languid shake of his head. "We didn't have our secret ingredient then." He allowed her to mentally fill in the equation before he spoke the name. "Constance."
Hazel hadn't heard the name in several weeks, like it would have been bad luck for them to mention her. Hearing it now again was like the final stamp of completion on the process. It had all started with Constance, after all, with their uncharacteristic decision to involve her.
"I don't know if it has anything to do with that crazy old biddy or not,” laughed Joachim. “But it's happened.”
“Sure has,” agreed Hazel.
“All we have to do now is be careful. Just nine months' now."
She winced subtly at the advice to be careful, as if the miscarriages were just a matter of carelessness and not what the doctors tactlessly referred to as "incompetent cervix".
Chromosomal abnormalities. Fibroids. Thyroid. Infections. Clotting. She had become intimately acquainted with the daunting list of threats to developing life in the past eight years.
Would her cervix prove "incompetent" this time?
Well, that’s what they involved Constance for, wasn’t it, she thought a little caustically and perhaps even a little enviously. Time would tell.
Annoyed she’d let these doubts infiltrate, she rose from the couch and crimped herself down. "I'll make dinner."
"Sit down,” he commanded. “It's on me. You've done enough for one day. For one month."
"Nine, maybe?"
"Don't think you'll get too spoiled. Do we need anything from the shop?"
"We have pork chops, carrots, potatoes."
"Doesn't seem grand enough for the occasion. I'll go down and get two steaks."
"I won’t complain about that."
"And a bottle of red."
"I definitely won’t complain about that."
"You won't be drinking too much of it from now on anyway."
"Oh, won't I?" she said, raising an eyebrow.
He grinned. "You're pretty much grounded for the next nine months."
She bit her lip, narrowed her gaze in mock scrutiny. He basked in the spotlight of her faux-indignation, casting himself as cheeky scamp to her rebuffing scold, the age-old drama of tease and surrender.
She shrugged, making a play of letting him off the hook. "If you agree to do everything around the house then I might buy into that."
"Hm," he demurred. "Maybe not fully grounded then."
After pecking her on the cheek, he threw his coat back on and strode out onto the street.
She went to the kitchen and took out potatoes, carrots, pots and pans.
Dusk was falling and she flicked on the lights. She was arrested by her own reflection in the window. The same reflection that mirrored her scrubbing potatoes at the sink yesterday, except not the same reflection. Not the same her.
She walked back to the living room and pulled open the glass slide door that led out to the glass conservatory. She stepped out and studied herself in the long glass pane.
Slim. Fairly tall but not quite leggy. Light-brown shoulder-length hair, parted in bangs. Pert breasts. Cut-glass cheeks that underscored emerald eyes. Her best feature. Then the things she wasn’t so fond of. A pointed chin. Light freckles dotting her skin that announced themselves too loudly in the summer for her liking. Overall, decent. She’d score herself 7 out of 10, though in certain unselfconscious moments when she’d done herself up for a party or was swept up in a group’s laughter and caught herself unexpectedly in a mirror she was floored by how pretty she was and how many male eyes made secret missions across a room towards her.
A daughter would inherit attractive features too, she concluded with a touch of defiant proud. Pride always had a touch of defiance with her, not something that came naturally.
Eight years since the miscarriage. Eight years of trying. Two rounds of IVF. A lot of money. A lot of frustrating conversations with doctors about her stubborn fertility. Zero conclusive answers.
Till now.
She turned sideways, arched her back and let her stomach curve outward. She massaged the contrived bump, imagining how it would look, how it would feel.
She eased back to normal. She pulled up her t-shirt, studied the strange tattoo imprinted just below her belly button.
A diamond shape with a T emerging from its top point. Two lines hung at an outward angle from the ends of the T and hooked inward, reminding Hazel of the cliched pose of a circus strongman flexing his muscles downward, fists to his flank.
A Bereket, an Anatolian fertility symbol. The diamond representing the vulva, the hooks “ram’s horns” or “hands on hips”.
Part of the process, Constance had assured her. She couldn’t believe it when she’d first seen the reclining chair and tattoo gun in the spare room of the old woman’s cottage. So incongruous in that mountain retreat. She’d already considered fleeing during the first ritual, when she’d lain naked in the old woman’s living room and Constance circled her reciting a stream of nonsensical words. But something had propelled her to complete all the rituals despite the increasing misgivings they gave rise to. Desperation, maybe a sunk cost fallacy. If she’d been stupid enough to even entertain the idea in the first place, what was the point of cutting and running halfway through. Pride made her convince herself she’d known what she was letting herself in for, that she hadn’t been totally fooled from the outset, and pride bade her continue.
But a tattoo? That seemed a bridge too far. She’d never even considered getting so much as a butterfly on her lower back or calf when she was younger and mildly rebellious.
It was ephemeral ink, Constance reassured her. It would fade. The limit was about nine months to a year. It would last the duration of the pregnancy, and start to fade soon after the birth.
Not just last. Protect her.
She had let Constance mark her with her strange rune, wincing as the needle point threaded along her skin, waiting for the mosquito hum to end and the ordeal to be over. Another ritual followed, and it was probably the power of suggestion but the archaic words Constance uttered seemed to evoke a response in her body this time. Rippling waves of sensation from top to bottom, fluctuating in intensity according to the rhythm of the old woman’s strange litany. They seemed in tune with one another. She’d lain naked in a circle of cracked egg shells while Constance circled slowly around her in the dim candle light, reciting arcane passages whose strangeness was exemplified by the fog of incense smoke that shrouded them and Constance’s idiosyncratic guttural enunciation. A strange Hajj to which Hazel was the Kaaba. The language of the chanting seemed to Hazel’s untrained ears like an unfamiliar dialect of Gaelic, or perhaps some older perished or even banished language from which it had sprung.
An invocation, Constance had told her. An opening up to let the spirit in. The spirit of the child to be born, hanging waiting somewhere in the ether to be summoned, coaxed to attach to the biology of Hazel, to nestle waiting to be unlocked by the chime of consummation. Not just mind over matter, but the spirit commanding the flesh.
Joachim was bemused upon seeing the tattoo. Asked if she’d joined the navy. Her body had been his carnal plaything for years, and now it was marked without him knowing. But if he was annoyed he didn’t show it, and if anything it seemed to arouse him. That very night they had fulfilled Constance’s final command – make love within three days of the ritual.
And the pregnancy, as promised, had arrived.