Horror Novel Temporary Anne Blog Tour

Please WELCOME Braine F. Pagel, Jr!

This is DAY SIX of the release tour for my newest book, Temporary Anne.

Temporary Anne is a horror story about a woman so desperate to avoid Hell -- the fate for the evil she's done during her life -- that she makes things infinitely worse after her death.

To celebrate the release, I'm doing a blog tour in which I'm writing a short story, LIVE, with your help!  At each stop, I'll do an installment of the story and you can suggest where it goes next!

Below is PART TWO of the story.  PART ONE appeared on Tina Downey's Life Is Good, PART TWO on Andrew Leon's Strange Pegs, and if you didn't catch either, click here to read PART ONE and HERE to read PART TWO. Then Part Three was on Laws Of Gravity,  Part Four was on Rusty Carl's "The Blutonian Death Egg," and Part Five was on my own story blog, lit.

HERE IS PART SIX!

________________________________________________

My body shudders.

My body shakes.

My body jitters.

My body breaks.

I'm not even kidding.  I'm just about to black out and then suddenly my body falls into pieces, and I see it happening.  My legs, from the knees to the feet, drop off, and my thighs, and my arms, and my torso and my head, all drop off into pieces. My head rolls away onto the web, and I can see one arm, still clinging to the grappling-hook Kindle.

Somehow, somehow I am still alive and that is the worst thing about this.  I am still alive and laying in pieces, pieces which are now dropping through the bits of the web, except for my head, which is just stuck there, on its side, staring kind of up and kind of to the left.  If I glance right, I can see the abyss below me, the howls of the Beast growing dimmer and dimmer, and if I glance left, I can see the tiny speck at the top of the abyss, the light that represents the world I left behind when I didn't listen to the Drum Major, who herself is falling into the pit below me.

I start to scream as I realize that I am a disembodied head left in the dark of the pit.

"Stop screaming!" whispers a voice behind me.  "This is no time to go...to pieces."

I can't turn my head and look, but I don't have to in order to know who it is.

It's me.

I recognize my own voice, and I am even more afraid.  Suddenly, a hand picks up my head by the hair, wrenching it, and turns me around so that I am staring into my own face.

And I look mad.

"What the..." I gasp.

"Pleased to meet me," I say back to myself, and with a sneer I begin to laugh at my disembodied head.

"How..." I manage to say, and then I realize that I have breath again and I glance down.  My own body is growing back.

I look around quickly, and realize that the other pieces of me, even the arm on the grappling hook, are growing, too, growing more and more mes, and I realize that the me holding me must have been the torso part that landed behind me.

All this takes about a second -- I mean, I'm pretty smart -- and then I look back at the me who is still laughing and sneering at me.

"I'd like to stay around for the reunion," he says, "But I've got a world to conquer."  And he flings my still-partial body aside, jumps across a gap in the web to the wall and grabs the arm-plus-part-of-me off the Kindle grappling hook (TM!).  In just seconds he has flung the hook up even higher and I see him climbing away from me.

From us.

Around me are the still-forming other mes that have begun growing, like me, out of the parts of the body that fell apart.  But I have more serious concerns: two of them, to be exact:

First, the web is still burning, and 

Second, so is the spider, which is somehow still alive and still trying to get to me.  Its legs wave, weakly, but I can see the venom dripping from its fangs and the two eyes it has left look evil (which to be fair all spider eyes look evil but this one did try to kill me or whatever, so...)

And, third, I guess, I don't have legs yet.  They haven't grown in.  The other two parts of me that are still on the web have now grown heads; the rest of the me is somewhere down below, the pit, where the roars of the Beast almost can't be heard.

"Guys!" I say to me.

Two heads turn to look at me.  

"We've got to get out of here."

"No kidding?" I say to me.

"Doesn't take a Nobel prize winner to know that," I also say to me.

"No time for smart comments!" I snarl back at mes.

"Heads up!" I hear from above, echoing down the pit in my own voice.  I look up and wish I hadn't, as a rain of soldiers' heads, still in their helmets, decapitated and thrown down the pit, begin to fall all around us.

"I don't think we're all very nice," one of me says, as an evil laugh booms down from above.

"THIS WORLD WILL BE EASY TO CONQUER!" my own voice howls down at us.  We hear gunfire, and shells exploding.  There is a metal crash, then silence, then my voice says "TANKS for the weapons!"

"You need the antivenom," a voice says behind me.  Behind mes.  We all turn to look.  There, standing behind the spider, which seems to have given up, and amidst the soldier-heads, is a bearded man clinging to a rope that stretches up into the distance. In his other hand, he holds a bagpipe.

"My daughter was using her accordion," he says, which makes no sense at all. All of me just goggles at him.

"Quit goggling and get moving," he orders.  "We have very little time." Gesturing, he says "Look," and we all look down, where a light has started to grow in the bottom of the pit.  In  the glow of the light I can see other pieces of me not much farther down, stuck to another web (which has a gaping hole from where the Beast crashed through.)  Below that are more and more webs, further and further down. 

Each of them has an egg sac on it.

"You've got, I'd say, ten minutes," the man says.

"Before the egg sacs hatch?" one of me says.

"Before the poison paralyzes us?" another of me says.

"Before that guy" -- I gesture up -- "Gets away?" I say.

"Yes," says the Bearded Man.  "And also..."

____________________________________________________________

Your turn! What happens next?

7. Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, Speculative Fiction Author 9/30

8.  Jess' Book Blog 10/3

9. Lara Schiffbauer's Motivation For Creation 10/7

10.PTDilloway.com 10/10

ABOUT THE BOOK:

"Amazing to read. The man just oozes cleverness. And his descriptions of the demon world are the best I've ever read anywhere. Creepy as hell." Speculative fiction Author Rusty Carl.

 "It's fascinating. If you like horror, this is definitely a book worth reading."-- Fantasy/Spec fic author Andrew Leon

"Another chilling tale from the author of The Scariest Thing You Can't Imagine. ...Pagel's style reminds me a lot of Vonnegut's work in that while the narration seems jaunty with its humorous asides and such, there's a lot of hidden depth to that narration."-- Author PT Dilloway.

THANKS to everyone who's following the Temporary Anne blog tour!  

TEMPORARY ANNE is just $0.99 today!

If you didn't already get it click this link to download this excellent horror story.

OH, AND ONE MORE THING: For being so great and all, I am going to as an added bonus, let you get a complete book of horror stories, FREE, today.  "The Scariest Things, You CAN'T Imagine" is full of demons tormenting kids, dead wives coming back from the grave, catacombs full of bodies, angry babies stolen by gargoyles, and more.  NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.  Get it free today by clicking here!