Excerpt (No.1) from "STORMS"

A friend of mine ask me to publish an excerpt from the book I'm working on. This is a conversation between the woman who raise him and the main character, Story Cazaunoux who is the Voudou (leader) of a sect of voodooism. He is preparing to face an unknown foe to protect his family. The book is fiction but has historic fact through out. Julia Brown was a real voodoo queen who was believed by many to have caused the 1915 hurricane that destroyed Manchac. She was documented in a New Orleans newspaper at the time. I hope you like it.

“You grow stronger.” Lynn said and watched him raise his eyes from the cup to her face. He smiled and nodded.
“So do you.” He said.
“I fear for you Story and then I realize that there is no need; not from paranormal beings or situations anyway.” She said watching him. “When you grow hard and quiet I know you are building your strength and dominance. It is a physical feat that energizes and changes the space around you. I can feel the shift in the pressure of the air.”
He nodded again. Lynn reached out and took his left hand. She could feet the bones and tendons in it. She turned his hand over and studied the palm wondering why there was no mark or sign of what he could do with these hands. But these were merely the instruments that channeled his supreme strength from the hidden dark center that lay deep inside him near the very core of his being and that manifested into acts which she was at a loss to explain. She wondered as she always had what it must be like to be Story; if he realized fully what he was, what he was capable of doing, how he was so different from other people. She supposed that he did for she had watched him struggle with that difference in his youth; trying to control it, to understand it, to accept it, to manage it, trying to conform to please Will, his adoptive father. But even for Will he could not deny what he was. She touched the band that he still wore on his third finger.
“Where is the other ring, Story?” She asked.
“Tia (Story's daughter) has it. She does finding spell to get.” He answered. “The beka use who I love against me and she helps it. It not easy to be me.” He said, still reading her thought from a few seconds ago. “Never was. It not a thing I can compare to other people. I have no experience with any other way to be. I am only me.” He said with his unusual use and placement of his words.
She knew that it was true and that he had no deep understanding of the so called normal existence. For Story the mystic, paranormal, supernatural with its various creatures, it’s realms of time and space was where he was most comfortable. The so called normal was much more difficult. She knew that his hardest struggles had been with human relationships; with understanding human wants, desires, emotions and cruelty. His inability to recognize the wickedness in humans had lead to most of his pain through the years. But what was he to do about the desire for love and acceptance that had always driven him?
Story watched her face and she knew that he was reading her thoughts as clearly as if she had spoken them.
“Perhaps all want what not need or understand.” He said. “I cannot live with only the creatures of other worlds, Lynn. It not enough.”
“I know.” She said.
He picked one of the blue candles that stood on the table and with his fingernail began to carve symbols into the wax. Her mind went to another time when that hand was badly burned while trying to save Sarah. The infection had very nearly killed him. Story had been sixteen years old at the time. For months he had disappeared, lost and sick roaming the swamps of Larosa until Will, who had never given up on finding the boy had returned home with him. He had found Story in the middle of a hurricane, and she wondered if the hurricanes were all related. There was that hurricane, the Great West India of 1915 that destroyed three Manchac communities and was said to be called up by Julia Brown who was Story's great, great, grandmother and a Voodoo queen. There was Hurricane Katrina which had taken Story's wife Sarah. Did the power of the storms affect the future?
“You will be protected, Story. Either by the god you do not know or the ones you serve. Maybe both.” She said. He finished carving on the candle and placed it back into its holder. Lynn stood up and put her cup into the dishwasher, then walked to where he sat, put her arm around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. Then she turned and left the room. Story sat in the kitchen and watched as the light outside faded and even then he did not rise to turn on a light. He heard Lynn and Will upstairs and was comforted by their presence. He thought of Sarah and Tia and of their part in what was coming, of Donita Di Di and how the distant past had the ability to reach out with cold fingers and touch the present. He thought of the beka and what effect its evil presence would have on the future. He sensed a more immediate future; dark shapes moving in the middle distance between his chair and the wall at the other side of the room. Story could see them gathering forces and the time between the past and the present giving their dark shapes substance in the physical world, driving events that would surprise everyone but him. Unlike others, most of which believe that the supernatural and reality run on two parallel tracks, Story realized that the illusion of convergence in the distance was no optical illusion after all.

Copyright by CJ Murray 2010 All Rights Reserved