- Publisher: Dual Crows Press
- Available in: Ebook, and paperback
- ISBN: 978-0-6453400-2-0
STRANGE MURMURINGS (Volume Two) is the second book in Brent McGregor’s short story series, a collection of horror tales that delve into the supernatural and the weird. In these 4 tales, a bored housewife runs afoul of a malign cleaning product (“DreamSparkle”); a couple receives a potentially cursed garden gnome as a housewarming gift (“Gnome”); a woman is kidnapped by a deranged cultist (“Idol Hands”); a school group goes missing from an Australian National Park (“Darker Skies”). A fascinating exploration into the world of the terrifying and the macabre. Read if you dare!
A chilling collection of frights, easily read over a dark evening or two.
Here’s an excerpt…
Proverbs 16:27 Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece
Slowly working my way back to consciousness, buoyed on an ocean of endless night, I become aware of my own body again. My skin is alive with the pricking and tingling of a thousand pins and needles. Nausea. Confusion. I feel the polished, concrete floor beneath me. My head is pounding. I taste vomit but manage to hold it down.
Where am I? I think to myself, smacking my lips, the corners of my mouth all gummy. Blinking a few times I clear my blurry vision. I’m already sitting upright.
I reel back and let out a shriek. Several paces away there’s a face, passive and emotionless. I realize it isn’t real. It’s just a mannequin. I laugh at myself but the laughter dies on my lips. There are in fact rows of mannequins: some of them hanging from racks; others on stands and in various stages of completion, without heads or hands—all of them naked. The mannequin in front of me is missing its arms like a grotesque Venus de Milo.
I must be in a basement or warehouse of some kind, a room about the size of your average Denny’s restaurant. The otherwise darkened space is illuminated, all around, by rows of burning candles, like a Sunday mass, and the air is fragrant with the aroma of burning incense. By the dim candlelight, I make out detail from the clutter: bags of plaster; boxes filled with packing Styrofoam; a bin filled with discarded fiberglass legs, arms, and hands. In the shadows, there is a wall taken-up by a blinking, humming machine. Over by a workbench is a half-done clay sculpture. Fashion clippings and magazine cutouts are pinned to a corkboard above the workspace. And there are the mannequins, rows of inanimate bodies, expressionless faces, watching, mocking…
