The Murmurs (The Annie Jackson Mysteries) - Softcover

Malone, Michael J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1914585828 ISBN 13: 9781914585821

Publisher: Orenda Books, 2024

Synopsis

A young woman starts experiencing terrifying premonitions of people dying, as it becomes clear that a family curse known only as The Murmurs has begun, and a long-forgotten crime is about to be unearthed…

`His biggest smash hit yet, an assured paranormal thriller in which the paranormal isn’t even the scariest part … A tale that leaves our interest piqued throughout, with the tension and foreboding reaching fever pitch´ Herald Scotland

`A tense, creepy page-turner´ Ian Rankin

`A master storyteller at the very top of his game, Michael J. Malone weaves the most exquisite tale … mesmeric and suspenseful´ Marion Todd

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In the beginning there was fear.

White-hot, nerve-shredding fear.

Terrifying premonitions of deaths.

And then they started…

The Murmurs…

On the first morning of her new job at Heartfield House, a care home for the elderly, Annie Jackson wakens from a terrifying dream. And when she arrives at the home, she knows that the first old man she meets is going to die.

How she knows this is a terrifying mystery, but it is the start of horrifying premonitions … a rekindling of the curse that has trickled through generations of women in her family – a wicked gift known only as 'the murmurs'…

With its reappearance comes an old, forgotten fear that is about to grip Annie Jackson.

And this time, it will never let go…

A compulsive gothic thriller and a spellbinding supernatural mystery about secrets and small communities, about faith, courage and self-preservation, The Murmurs is a startling and compulsive read from one of Scotland's finest authors…

________________

`Poetic and beautifully crafted, this is a chilling and compelling read´ Caro Ramsay

`A fine, atmospheric chiller couched in Malone's customary elegant prose´ Douglas Skelton

Praise for Michael J Malone

`A gothic ghost story and psychological thriller all rolled into one. Brilliantly creepy … a spine-tingling treat´ Daily Record

`Prepare to have your marrow well and truly chilled by this deeply creepy Scottish horror … A complex and multi-layered story´ Sunday Mirror

`A beautifully written tale, original, engrossing and scary… a dark joy´ The Times

`A deeply satisfying read´ Sunday Times

`A fine, page-turning thriller´ Daily Mail

`Unsettling, multi-layered and expertly paced´ CultureFly

About this title

About the Author

Michael Malone is a prize-winning poet and author who was born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country. He has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and Markings. Blood Tears, his debut novel won the Pitlochry Prize from the Scottish Association of Writers. He is also the author of A Suitable Lie, House of Spines, After He Died, In the Absence of Miracles and A Song of Isolation soon followed suit.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue
MOIRA MCLEAN – A MEMOIR
Scottish Highlands 1818

A curse is a difficult thing to master. Like weaving a piece of lace from spider silk, moonbeams and a desperate sense of hope. A pause in the wrong place, words too close together, or spend too long on the utterance of a vowel sound, and you risk the magic shifting, the intention being warped and the target changing.
   Such were my learnings at my great-grandmother, Jeannie McLean’s knee, a woman who lived well into her hundreds – a woman who had the power to defy death itself. It was said that Jeannie was the only surviving child of the last witch to be burned in the whole of Ardnamurchan. It was also said she had watched as the local people had dragged her mother, and her older sister and brother, twins Isobel and Andra, from the house towards a smoking pyre. And then she was forced to listen to their pleas for mercy before they were strangled and their bodies thrown onto the flames.
   Isobel and Andra, Jeannie told me, had blue eyes, white-blond hair and a beauty unmatched in the country. In the days before the murmurs started, they were tall, slim and strong.
   How could children be so beautiful, people asked? How could they be so clever? For they were both well ahead of their peers in the local school.   
   They had good, kind hearts, Jeannie asserted, but they had no need of anyone else, such was their connection. And there lay the seed of their destruction.
   It was unnatural, the local gossips opined. A boy and girl, related, being so independent of everyone else. They had to be up to something ungodly. They had to be giving in to their most base desires. Why else would they be so indifferent and different to everyone else?
   And so the sullen stares became whispers. Hands that had curved over mouths to hide evil conjecture became pointed fingers. Unease grew into a murmuring that wouldn’t fade, and suspicion followed them like their own personal haar.
   First, it was the turnip crop that failed. Then the oats.
   Every ship sent out into the Sound of Mull returned without landing a single fish.
   A lamb was born with two heads.
   A white-tailed eagle swooped and snatched a child from its mother’s arms.
   That was nonsense of course, Jeannie said. Who’d ever heard of an eagle doing such a thing? But repeat a lie often enough and it becomes as solid and as unwieldy as fact, she added.
   It’s a sad truth that the gossip was led by people from our own family – and who else, these self-anointed judges opined, but the McLean twins could make such things happen?
   Fire and prayer were the answer.
   Fire would cleanse, and prayer would see that the land and sea would turn back to health and prosperity.
   And if the twins had to be sent back to hell, so would the wretch who gave them life.
   The pain of it all had settled in Jeannie’s eyes and informed every look, every gesture. And so, as soon as she was able, she’d relocated to this glen, away from the clan that had treated her and hers so abominably.
   Jeannie paused in the telling, her eyes gleaming with the light from the fireplace. ‘Of course, they had no idea how wrong they were.’ Satisfaction warred with something else in her expression. Another emotion I had difficulty naming, at first. Could it have been humility? ‘The twins didn’t have the gift.’ She paused and looked deep into my eyes as if searching for something. ‘I did. And you have it too, I’m sure.’
   I felt fear burrow into my heart. ‘I do?’
   ‘Don’t fret, child. I’ll teach you how to use it wisely. For the good of your family.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘And to protect you from the sanctimonious.’ She grabbed my hand with the power and strength of someone much lesser in years. ‘But I shall teach you and you will be wise to it all.’
   And here and now, the past had come back to hurt me and mine, and I was desperately glad that Jeannie was long dead and unable to see what had become of her sanctuary.
   Having lived a life almost as long in years and pain as the fabled Jeannie, I sneaked back up to the village of Anlochard – carried the last five hundred yards on the strong back of my great-nephew Archie. Now I was knee-deep in the waters of a near-frozen stream that ran through the village down to Loch Suinart, with loam under my fingernails, my white hair loose around my shoulders, and a crown of sage and rosemary on my head.
   Pain, Jeannie had warned me, was the key to an efficacious spell. Emotional or physical. Preferably both. Hence, the bone-seeping chill of the river that ran past our erstwhile homes.
   With a barely stifled sob and a heart near breaking I took one look over my shoulder at the homes that had housed my family for generations. Flames still licked at the sky from the timber and thatched roofs lit by the factor and his men after they had thrown me and mine out onto the cold moor and destroyed everything we owned.
   It was happening all over the country, I knew: lands being cleared of humans for the more profitable sheep and lambs. But I also knew that in our case the motivation wasn’t that simple.
   A sin other than greed was our undoing, and it came from family – the same family line that pointed the finger and accused poor Jean, Isobel and Andra around a hundred years ago, and that made the betrayal cleave even more deeply through my soul.
   Head thrown back, arms wide, throat bare, and eyes staring sightless at the countless stars, I threw words in the old tongue into the night sky. Words of power and meaning. Words that fired my mouth as they slipped out into the frigid air.
   Words scour, they scald, they lacerate, they leach into the deepest recesses of the mind. They shame. They rob of you the will to live, and to love.
   The words I hurled into the night sky were such words. I prayed that they had the ability to reach into the future, causing more harm than any mere fire or sword. The woman I targeted, it was her and hers that set off the whispering – the murmurs that started the agony for my family. And maddening, agonising, unceasing murmurs would be the instrument of my revenge.

Chapter 1
Annie – Now
  
She was underwater. The world reaching her ears through a muffle, gurgle and splash.
   At first, it was nice. The water just how she liked it. She was on her own. No annoying sibling or parents demanding anything.
   Then.
   Pressure and a weight on her head.
   Strong.
   Firm.
   Determined pressure.
   She kicked furiously. Screamed, ‘Help!’ But as she opened her mouth it filled with water. She spat it out. Panic sparked bright, increasing her need for oxygen.
   Desperately trying to scream while not taking in any more water.
   ‘Help.’
   Shaking her head, fighting to get away from the pressure. Fighting to get a hold of the fingers holding her head. Struggling to get purchase that would help her push up out of the water. But her heels slipped furiously against the floor of the bath.
   And no matter how much she fought, and struggled, and screamed, she was stuck. Always stuck.
   Lungs desperate for air.
   Breathe, breathe, BREATHE. But she couldn’t open her mouth because it would fill with water again.
   In silent desperation she pretended she’d drowned. Went limp. Waited for the hand to move. Then she could shoot up out of the water onto dry land.
   But the pressure never let up.
   Until, blessed relief, she shot up from her pillow, hair sweat plastered to her forehead and her quilt wrapped so tightly around her legs it took several moments to get free.
   That Annie had the dream on the night before the next big change in her life, having not had it for a long time, made her query her choices. Was she doing the right thing? Going for the right job? Was the dream some kind of warning?
   ‘Did I nearly drown as a kid?’ she’d asked her brother Lewis after the first dozen times the dream visited her.
   ‘Pff,’ he snorted. ‘I can barely remember what I had for dinner last night, and you expect me to remember something like that?’
   ‘Godssake,’ she countered. ‘Surely you’d remember something like your favourite sister nearly dying?’
   ‘Only sister.’ He grinned.
   ‘Well, what the hell is this dream all about then?’
   If she’d had parents, she could have asked them, but they both died when she was in her teens. Her mother in a car accident – that she was also supposedly in; no memory of that either – and her father ten months later, of a broken heart.
   ‘Great that he loved his wife, and all that,’ she’d said to Lewis during a teenage Buckfast session in the local park. ‘But suicide? Really? Couldn’t he have loved his kids a wee bit more? Save us having to live with those losers.’
   Those ‘losers’ were the McEvoys, childhood friends of their father – church elders, who applied to adopt them when their father died, to save them going into the system. A fact that Mrs McEvoy reminded Annie of after every teenage huff.
   They were good people, Annie was able to freely acknowledge when she grew up, realising that her petty rebellion was a complication of her grief and anger at being left so young without parents. They could have had so much worse, and Mrs McEvoy had become a friend to her now, as an adult.
   As she finally shook off her duvet and sat on the edge of the bed, ready to get up, her phone pinged an alert. It was said lady wishing her good luck on the first day of her new job.
   Teenage rebellion had not only led Annie to distrust her carers – and get her belly-button pierced – it had fuelled her anger and a resolution that she didn’t want to take an active part in the world. Consequently, education was for stiffs, and work was for the enslaved. And while Lewis got himself a good degree and a well-paid job, as an accountant, for God’s sake, she huffed and puffed from one arts course to another. She was self-aware enough to know that she needed to keep busy, and doing something in art would satisfy that need without kowtowing to The Man and becoming a good little sheep.
   But whether she agreed with it or not, she was living in a material world, and that meant she had to have some stuff – like a roof over her head, some clothes, and possibly even a television. And that meant earning a living. Selling tie-dyed T-shirts and leggings from a stall was not going to bring in enough to give her independence; that required regular income, and that meant an actual job.
   Mrs Mac – as she now affectionately called her – had advanced her a small loan against future earnings, meaning that for the first time Annie could rent a place of her own.
   ‘It’s not that we want rid of you, dear … ’ Mrs Mac said while all but wringing her hands against the thought that Annie might feel unloved.
   ‘But it is time to grow up,’ Mr Mac said with his trademark gruff honesty. An honesty that was always delivered with a halfgrin and a twinkle in his grey-blue eyes. Such was his charm, Annie had always felt unable to be offended by the man, even as she railed against his wife.
   What neither of them said was that it was time she grew up, like her brother. And she appreciated that. All through her school years that was the attempt at encouragement her teachers had thrown at her. They were twins for goodness’ sake, how could they be so different? He was a top student and athlete. If he wasn’t her brother she would have hated him.
   That the McEvoys realised this and never compared the two siblings was one of the reasons why Annie grew to love them.
   Annie looked down at her phone, at the message from Mrs Mac wishing her good luck, and with a little lift in her heart replied with a simple thank-you – and:
   Feeling a wee bit of first-day nerves, tbh.
   Mrs Mac came straight back with:
   You worked for this – you deserve it – now go and do what you were born for. Love you, doll.
   She wasn’t one for displays of affection, but Annie pictured Mrs Mac in her living room right then, among her china ornaments and doilies, wiping away a tear as she typed out the message on her new tablet, and then doing that thing she did every time her emotions threatened to spill over. A little cough, a shake of her head and an upward tilt of her chin, as if that was enough to reset her brain.
   Annie fetched her breakfast, and while she spooned cereal into her mouth she watched the TV news.
   An item snagged her attention. A man and woman stood side by side, in the background a small hotel, and beyond that a glimpse of mountain and loch.
   ‘It’s been fifteen years,’ the woman said, her expression an essay in grief.
   Annie stilled her spoon and bit her lip.
   ‘She just disappeared,’ the man said as he put an arm over the woman’s shoulder. ‘Surely somebody out there knows something.’ In response the woman moved even closer to the man.
   Annie noticed the woman was holding a framed photograph of a teenage girl. She held it up and the camera zoomed in on it while the mother spoke.
   ‘We’ve never given up hope that our girl is still alive,’ she said. ‘If you’re watching this, honey, come home. Please. Come home.’
   That face, Annie thought; it was so familiar. Who was that girl, and how did Annie know her? She became aware of a pressure just behind her right eye. Pain built and bloomed across her forehead. She screwed her eyes tight. Not today, please. Not today.
   She looked at the screen again, diving into memory and finding nothing. Who was that girl, and why did Annie suddenly feel certain that her parents’ prayers would never be answered?

Edition details

• Publisher: Orenda Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1914585828
• ISBN 13: 9781914585821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276