The Seventh Layer
New Adult Scifi/Paranormal
(Released – August 17, 2012)
Blurb:
As if growing up Amish wasn't hard enough, Sarah Miller
receives information just before her eighteenth birthday about a childhood she
can't remember. Accompanied by long lost friends and a few unlikely relatives,
Sarah learns of her supernatural destiny and the race to piece together the
jigsaw of her life begins. Amidst the whirlwind of unanswered questions, one
stands prominent: will the world meet the foreshadowing doom that lingers
in the near future, or will Sarah complete the puzzle in time to save her
people and ensure the continuance of mankind?
Author Bio:
Somewhere amidst her forty-hour job and playtime with her
three-year-old, Rachel finds time to walk the streets of worlds only existing
on manmade paper. She resides in small college town Northwestern Nebraska with
her young son, just across town from her parents. She enjoys socializing with
adults, sipping strawberry wine, and head banging to music that doesn't carry a
beat worth the effort of rock star hair slinging.
BUY LINKS:
AUTHOR LINKS:
TRAILER:
Excerpt:
Prologue & Chapter 1 (also available on Wattpad and
Scribd)
It crept down the window like an
epileptic spider, jittering from side to side, pausing ever so slightly before
continuing its descent.
The rain.
It always fascinated me. I often
sat on my bed at night watching it shatter against my window, then travel
slowly out of sight, dancing a sorrowful waltz with the low light coming from
the oil lamp on my bedside table. It mattered little if I had to be up at dawn
to start my daily chores with Sister. Nothing truly mattered when it rained.
“Sarah, is
everything alright?” Mother stood in my bedroom doorway. She was a plain woman,
light brown hair lacking radiance, dull gray eyes, and thin pale lips that
almost matched the color of her near-white skin. Her cheekbones curved high
beneath her eyes, the lines sharp. Almost too sharp, almost masculine. But she
was a kind, gentle woman. No one could deny her that. “Sarah,” she said again
when I didn’t reply right away. I looked over my shoulder at her then, grinning
briefly.
“Everything is
fine, Mother. I was simply admiring the rain.” She smiled, but there was a
flash of sadness in her eyes. I knew that sadness, but we never spoke of such
things. Sadness in our community was often seen as a weakness of faith. Mother
sat next to me on the edge of my bed. She smoothed down her skirt until it lay
perfectly across her thin frame. Folding her hands in her lap, she let out a
soft sigh.
“It is a
beautiful sight to behold,” she said quietly, gazing out the window. When she
turned to me again, her eyes were brimmed with tears. I hugged her quickly,
letting her cry silently into my hair. Three days left. That’s all we had. When
she finally pulled away, she dabbed lightly at her eyes and nose with the
cotton handkerchief she always carried tucked in her sleeve.
“I will always
remember you,” I said just above a whisper before laying a chaste kiss atop her
hand. “Though I know you’ll all forget me, in time.” She started to shake her
head, but she knew it was true. No one remembered, the human mind was too
simple to comprehend it. I had begun to notice just over the last week that
people in the community were already beginning to forget. Mainly just the ones
I wasn’t in contact with everyday, but they were forgetting just the same. It
seemed strange to a point. They were all I had known for the last ten years.
How could anyone be in your life for so long and so quickly forget who you were
entirely? Yet, somehow I knew and understood it. No one ever had to explain it
to me, I just knew.
Mother tucked a strand of hair
that had fallen out of my braid behind my ear. Her hand cupped my cheek, warm
against my skin. I watched her study my face, trying to memorize it before
kissing my forehead and leaving my room. I stared at the empty doorway, my
heart heavy. Three more days.
Just three more days.
~~~
“I had the dream
again,” I told Sister as we scrubbed the kitchen floor.
“It’s so strange
to me that you dream so much, Sarah.” Her tone was almost spiteful, maybe even
jealous. I’d noticed over the years that either no one spoke of their dreams,
or no one really dreamed. I was never really sure which was more accurate. She
shook her head at herself. “I apologize. Perhaps I’m not as prepared for you to
leave us as I’d convinced myself I was.”
“Sister,” I
paused my work to sit back on my heels and look at her. She turned her youthful
face to me, looking me straight on with those enchanting brown eyes. “Sister, I
can’t imagine it’s easy for anyone to be prepared for what is to come this new
moon. How can you, knowing they will use meidung so that no one suspects? That is not a simple slap on the
wrist, Sister. I know I can never come back, and it’s not because of meidung. But it seems to give this whole
situation a certain omen, does it not?” Her face was dark as she shook her
head.
“The Devil’s
work, they will say. Cast you out like a rabid dog. Why can we not just say you
left of your own volition? Is that not satisfactory? It would be truth! I do
not condone this lying for you, but the elders say that God will forgive us.” I
smiled then. She had been born into the community and raised according to their
beliefs. Not everyone understood why meidung was going to be enforced, not truly. Sister was still young
at the ripe age of sixteen. And she was female. Two strikes against her in the
community, which meant she was only told that which was required of her to
know.
I went back to scrubbing the
floor, falling into the silence that awaited us. It welcomed me, embracing me
like a long lost child come home. It was short lived. Sister was never
comfortable in such an embrace.
“Tell me again
about the dream, Sarah. I think I need a distraction this day.” I studied her
for a moment. She looked very much like all the other women in the community.
Her usual white blouse was fastened up to her neck, the long sleeves shoved to
her elbows to avoid the soapy water. Her black cotton skirt billowed down to
her ankles even as she knelt on all fours on the floor. Her black bonnet helped
tame the runaway strands of her blacker hair, the rest trailed down to the
small of her back in a tight braid. She was slightly rounder than the other
women, full of hips and breast. Many whispered behind her back that she was the
Devil incarnate, come to tempt all of the men into transgression. I knew she’d
simply been better blessed, radiated upon by someone watching over. She puffed
a strand of that obsidian silk out of her vision, glancing in my direction.
“It was no
different than it has ever been. I stood in an open meadow. Larger than any
meadow I have ever seen, covered in the brightest wildflowers, as if they’d
been freshly painted on canvas. There was nothing else in sight, just meadow
and wildflower and clear blue sky. The sky was cloudless, all except that one
cloud just above me. It cut out most of the sunlight, leaving the world in a
gray haze. Everything seemed totally gray, lifeless. Until I laid eyes on the
wildflowers again. There was a loud sound overhead, like thunder clapping. The
air itself became thick, so thick it seemed I could spoon it up and eat it.
Then I looked up at that one lonely cloud and it split in two. Only it wasn’t a
separation of cloud, but an opening. Like a door to somewhere else, Heaven
maybe? And there I saw a face, shining at me. So bright was that smile, like
sunlight after a spring rain. And a hand descended, coming toward me, growing
larger and larger the closer it came. I felt warmth radiating down upon me.
Such heavy warmth, it made me feel disoriented. Like how Mother describes the
men from the city after they’ve left a brewery. The meadow vanishes and I am
wrapped in white light. I smell spices and fermented grapes. Wine perhaps. And
smoked meats, such wondrous aromas! But I cannot see past the blinding light.
In the distance are voices and laughter…and music. I’ve never known such joyous
music! I feel my body rising from the earth, toward where I had last seen that
singular cloud. And in a heartbeat, I am surrounded by the blackness of my
bedroom, only my racing heartbeat to accompany me.”
Sister had stopped scrubbing, her
bristle brush soaking in the sudsy water pail. She gazed at me with dreamy eyes
just as though she were witnessing the dream for herself. Out of the corner of
my eye, I saw Mother walk into the house, dirt dusting the hem of her skirt and
tipping the toes of her shoes. She tramped across the nearly clean kitchen
floor, purposely stomping dirt where we’d just scrubbed. ‘Twas our punishment
for stopping before the chore was fulfilled. Sister shot me an apologetic look.
I simply smiled at her.
Chapter 1
I don’t remember much of my young
childhood. I can recall vague details of things Sister and I did together, but
everything seems to begin around the age of nine. Mother says something
traumatic must have happened that no one is aware of, and it’s an instinctual
defense mechanism that my mind has been using all these years to protect me. I
don’t know about all that, I’m no brain doctor. I do, however, have dreams
about things that are unrealistic. Sure, I suppose anyone who dreams can have
an imagination wild enough to conjure up some fairly ridiculous things. My
dreams, however, are too real to me. I can feel everything as if it were flesh
and bone, and I can see more clearly in dreamland than I seem to while I’m
awake. When I was younger, I tried explaining them to Mother, but she’d laugh
until she cried, and then I’d cry because she was laughing. I learned very quickly
not to divulge too much to anyone after that.
When I started dreaming of the
face in the cloud, I had to tell someone. Sister seemed to be the only one
willing to listen, regardless of whether or not she believed it could be real.
She’d tell me more often than not that maybe it was a sign that God himself was
going to bless me. Somehow I knew that God, her god, wanted absolutely nothing
to do with me.
It seemed so strange that I felt
no connection to the god that everyone worshiped. The one everyone in the
community said was the one and only god. It never felt right to me, but I knew
better than to verbalize my feelings. Feelings in general, not just sadness,
were frowned upon. Feelings meant a detachment from God. Detachment meant
rebellion. Rebellion was a sin; one of the darker transgressions, and
punishment tended to match the level of sin.
When I turned fourteen, Mother
had a heart-to-heart talk with me. At first, I thought it was going to be the
birds and the bees conversation that I’d heard the older girls whisper about.
Instead, it was to inform me that I was not her blood. Mother was not my
mother. When I was eight years of age, a very old, very crippled woman had
knocked on Mother’s door. She said nothing at all, simply handed Mother the end
of a rope that had been tied around my neck like a leash, then turned and
disappeared.
Back then, Father was still
alive. I don’t remember anything about him, and only know his face from the few
framed pictures of him that remained in the house. All I know about Father is
that he never seemed to smile, he was a very handsome man, though he would’ve
looked better with a beard, and Sister was a spitting image of him.
As difficult as it was at first,
I accepted the news with grace. In a sense, it was a relief to know that I’d
not been born into the community. It had never felt like home to me, nor was it
reality. I appreciated that they had taken me in under no known circumstances
of my past, but they lived in a very strange world all of their own creation and
I knew deep down that it would never be home. Many things quickly fell into
place then. I finally understood why it secretly bothered me that Sister’s hair
was black as coal and mine was the color of wildfire as it licked through a
dying forest; why she had silky chocolate morsels for eyes and mine were the
oddest shade of purple-blue. We were opposites, Sister and I, but she had
always been my best friend.
Six months ago, I had received a
letter from a small corporation in California that claimed to have known my
biological father. My first instinct was to burn the letter and run from the
unknown. After much discussion, Mother convinced me that it couldn’t hurt to
write back. I couldn’t remember my past so if it was just a hoax, I wouldn’t
really be losing anything. When another letter came, hand written by someone
within the company, I knew I had to collect more information. It wasn’t the
detail given in the letter of my life before the community that convinced me to
inquire, but more the penmanship of the individual who wrote the letter. It was
strangely familiar to me, along with the name signed at the bottom. Ambrose
Alcina. My stomach flipped excitedly when I read it over and over, memorizing
the way each letter sensually curved out, like a woman’s bosom straining
against the fabric of her gown. They say you can profile someone just on their
handwriting. I knew nothing about profiling, but I did know one thing. This
man, whoever he was, knew his way into a woman's heart.
For the next several months, Mr.
Alcina and I continued to correspond through our letters. He seemed genuinely
interested in my life and was humored by the news that I'd been raised these
last ten years by an Amish community in Southern Nebraska. Humored, but not
surprised. It even seemed like old news when I'd informed him that I couldn't
remember any part of my life before or even up to coming to the community.
The last letter I received,
around three months ago, requested that I contact him on the telephone. After
several weeks of begging and extra chores, Mother finally conceded and I ran
two miles to the closest telephone shanty.
“Cartwright and
Hankins,” a pleasant greeting rang through. I'd never had the opportunity to
learn telephone etiquette, but I'd always assumed it was no different than
daily conversation. You just had to visualize the face you were addressing.
“Yes, good day
ma'am, would Mr. Ambrose Alcina be available, please.” I hadn't fully caught my
breath, but managed to sound quite pleasant, even to myself.
“May I ask who's
inquiring?” Her voice was similar to the sing-song of the American Redstart
birds in the early morning. Maybe not quite as high in pitch, but just as
pleasantly chirpy.
“Yes ma'am, my
name is Sarah Miller. Mr. Alcina had requested I call, but I've been...indisposed
until now.” I wasn't entirely sure that was a truthful enough answer, but then
I'd never been known for always telling the truth.
“Please hold.”
There was a strange series of clicking sounds before soft violins commenced
playing. My breathing finally evened out and I'd almost forgotten that I was on
hold until the music abruptly ended.
“Ambrose
speaking.” His voice was like silk lightly rippling over smooth stones. He
carried a light accent, though I was not familiar with any of them to make any
kind of educated guess of its origin.
“Good day Mr.
Alcina, it's Sarah.” There was a quiet pause. “Sarah Miller? From Pawnee
County, Nebraska. You'd requested I call, sir. I apologize for not –”
“Sarah, yes!
Forgive me, it's been several weeks since our last correspondence. I'd almost
given up hope.” It was almost like he was singing me a lullaby. Such richness
in his tone, deep and luscious. My body warmed through all the way down to my
toes.
“Yes, I apologize
for the delay. Mother was extraordinarily difficult on the matter.” I heard him
chuckle lightly. It occurred to me then that even his voice was familiar to me.
Why did I feel like I knew this man? And why did it feel like it was a deeper
knowledge than just friends or acquaintances?
“Sarah, I must discuss
something of great importance with you.” He sounded suddenly very serious.
“Yes, of course.
Anything you'd like.” My pulse stepped up a notch.
“Sarah...” he
hesitated. “Sarah, your eighteenth birthday is approaching, is it not?”
“Yes sir, in
three months time. To the day, in fact.” There was a hushed rustling on the
other end of the phone. I pictured him shifting in his seat.
“Yes indeed,
during the new moon. Sarah, I realize that what I'm about to say to you will
come as a bit of a shock, but I need you to listen closely and I pray that you
can understand in full how serious this is.” I struggled to find my reply. His
tone was so somber, it almost scared me. What could be so distressing? “Sarah,
are you still there?”
“Yes sir, Mr.
Alcina. I'm sorry, I'm just a bit confused. What is it that has you so sedate?”
“Sarah, listen
closely. Please, please listen and understand.” That last part he said so
quietly, it sounded more like a prayer to himself than anything directed toward
me. “There is no time for explanations. On the morning of your birthday, you
will be approached by a man by the name of Nicoli. He is a beast of a man, but
he is for your protection...and transportation.” My head immediately whirled
out of control. Protection and transportation? Protection from whom? From what? And where might
I be going? Was it dangerous? Could I even trust this man I was speaking to?
How did I know this Nicoli individual was safe? So many questions and an
inoperable tongue. “Sarah?” Ambrose almost sounded as frightened as I felt.
“Why?” was all I
could muster. My thoughts were so chaotic, it was nearly impossible to send one
little thought out to make my mouth work.
“There is no time
for explanations. Go back to your home and prepare. Speak to no one outside of
your community. Mention this to no one you do not trust completely. Three
months, and I will explain everything. I give you my word.” The line died
before I could utter even a squeak.
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