|
Amazon
Del Rey Books
Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN-10: 0345423380
Pages: 352
Copyright: Sep 26, 2006
In a bookshop specializing in rare volumes, an avid fan of horror fiction seizes a tome too valuable and too incredible to fathom. Now the unthinkable has happened. A rift has opened in reality and Something has gotten in.
Only one man can stop it...
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
Colin woke lying on one of the leather sofas in his second-floor library, heart rabbiting in his chest, a thin film of icy sweat on his skin.
Dreaming. Again.
He'd been having too many of those lately, and, like all the others, this one did nothing to edify - only terrify. There were no discernible omens, no prescient revelations. It was simply a dream of frustration, of loss ... of condemnation.
Too late.
Its very meaninglessness scared him so much that he allowed himself to pretend there must be meaning, if only he could divine it.
He sat up, swung his legs off the sofa, planted his feet firmly on the floor, and ran long, thin fingers through his riotous hair, trying to force sense into the dream.
The Scholomance had appeared out-of-proportion. Well, of course, it had. It assumed terrifying proportions in all his dreams — as it did in waking memory.
He and Lilith had been trapped in its labyrinthine bowels. And why not? The Scholomance had devoured them in their time, just as it devoured a new "class" of students every seven years. In its long history, only Colin had come to it out-of-season, fetching up nameless and alone on its forbidding shores, malnourished and speaking a language that no one understood.
The sense of pursuit was a horrific dose of reality in Colin's dreamscape. Then, he had been pursued by the Scholomance's Headmaster. Now... God, now he wasn't being pursued so much as he was being stalked. Stalked by a predator far more devious than the Headmaster and infinitely more merciless ... and whose motives were impenetrable.
At least he'd known what the Headmaster wanted with him.
|
