For her tour stop at DeRaps Reads, I asked Ms. Kahlan to share a bit about a nightmare that she's had. As many of you know from previous posts, I have nightmares almost every night. In fact, I just had a horrific one last night, based on a book I'm currently reading. I'm glad to report that it wasn't as terrifying as Ms. Kahlan's, which you can read about here.
My Nightmare
“It’s dark and the streetlamps emit little light. I’m crouched behind a car, hiding. I’m alone. The street is eerily quiet and deserted, the houses on either side are abandoned. I don’t know how I ended up here all by myself with not a single living soul in sight. I’m catching my breath, thinking maybe I’m safe for a while. I’ve been running all night, running and hiding, running and hiding. Am I doomed never to see the light of day breaking over the horizon, the sweet chorus of birdsong, the rattle and clink of the milkman? I can hear a distant rattle and clink, but it’s not the milkman making early deliveries of bottles of milk. This is the rattle and clink of something else, something that may have once been human, but any humanity it once had has been lost for an age and it has no recollection of what it was like to be human.
The dreaded sound is distant, but I won’t be fooled by that. They almost had me before – yes, there is more than one, more than ten, perhaps twenty or more. I did not stop to count each contorted, disfigured being as they defied their stuttering gait, their misshapen limbs, and robot-like seethed across the fast dwindling space that separated them from me. I begin to move, slowly at first using the parked cars as my shield, then quicker as a glimpse of a rotting arm from the other side of the car. I begin to run. They’re closing in on me. Their guttural cries, their agonised moaning, their strange wheezing, the rattle and clink of the chains that once held them dragging across the ground, it all becomes louder. I run into an abandoned house, hoping to find help, but there is no one there, no weapons, nothing I can use to defend myself. I hear the shuffle of footsteps scraping across floorboards. They’ve followed me. I stifle a scream, my hand stuffed in my mouth, my heart beating so fast I think it might explode...”
And this is when I hope to wake up from the nightmare! Sometimes I do, sweating and panting and clutching at the duvet, other times the nightmare continues...
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And that's just a sample of the quality of Ms. Kalhan's terrifically terrifying writing. The Long Weekend is sure to have you feeling disturbed--even the most jaded of readers will have some heightened sense of fear or fright!Ms. Kalhan is giving away one copy of her book to one lucky commenter. You have one week to enter this INTERNATIONAL giveaway (closes March 4th). Please leave a comment reacting to Ms. Kalhan's nightmare or describe one of your own. Make sure to leave an email where you can be reached if you are the winner.
