Gothic Mystery/Horror
Publisher: Aurelia Leo
Date Published: 08-10-2020 /
Audibook Launch April/May 2021
In the summer of 1844, Tom Lyman flees to Bonaventure, a transcendentalist farming cooperative tucked away in eastern Connecticut, to hide from his past. There Lyman must adjust to a new life among idealists, under the fatherly eye of the group’s founder, David Grosvenor. When he isn’t ducking work or the questions of the eccentric residents, Lyman occupies himself by courting Grosvenor’s daughter Minerva.
But Bonaventure isn’t as utopian as it seems. One by one, Lyman’s secrets begin to catch up with him, and Bonaventure has a few secrets of its own. Why did the farm have an ominous reputation long before Grosvenor bought it? What caused the previous tenants to vanish? And who is playing the violin in the basement? Time is running out, and Lyman must discover the truth before he’s driven mad by the whispering through the walls.
A Season of Whispers is Jackson Kuhl's debut novel of Gothic mystery, transcendentalist utopianism, and antediluvian hunger.
He
awoke engulfed in darkness. Stumbling through his mnemonic geography he managed
to raise the fire and find and light a lamp. Outside lay impenetrable black and
chirping frogs and crickets; Lyman had no conception of the hour but judged he
had missed supper at the main house. Resolution would have to abide his stomach
until daybreak. He poured himself some water from the jug and washed his face
and hands and unpacked his clothes into the dresser. The other bag he stuffed
under the bed. With log and poker Lyman built up the fire as high as it would
safely go and sat staring at it, and gradually a snowfall of calm gathered in
his hair and upon his shoulders, an accumulation of peace he hadn’t known for
weeks. Finally he was secure: ensphered in a globe of night on the edges of
civilization, as isolated as a Sandwich Island maroon, but not so alone as to
be lonely. The purest bred hound, raised on a diet of nothing except dirty
stockings and pinpricks of blood on grass, could not track his footsteps from
New York to the little stone ruin perched on the periphery of Connecticut
wilderness. He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and dozed again.
The second time he woke to the sound
of a violin. He couldn’t have been long asleep. the fire burned brightly; but
the night beyond the house had gone silent, with only the scraping of the bow
across strings. Lyman lay there a long time, icy needles stabbing him,
wondering where the music originated. There was no wind to carry it from the
house or some other building. Maybe someone fiddled while walking along the
road? An approaching visitor. Then the playing, mournful at first, kicked up to
a merry jig, and Lyman jumped to raise the lamp wick and push on his shoes.
He followed the sound from the
bedroom to the stairs and descended. It was louder on the first floor, seeming
to rise from the boards rather than out-of-doors. When he reached the basement
door, it abruptly cut off.
It so happened that the basement door
at the top of the worn stone steps, along with the front and kitchen doors, had
not been stripped of its iron and thus functioned as intended. Additionally—and
Lyman hadn’t thought this odd in the daylight, but now wasn’t so sure—the door
was fitted with a crossbar, which, as there was no direct entrance from outside
to the basement, seemed unnecessary.
He undid the bar, opened the door,
held the lamp high. Nothing but shadow—the light failed to reach the floor
below. Neither glimmer of light nor sounding of fiddle note wafted from the
darkness.
The flame of the lamp leaned and
flickered. Air brushed the hairs of his short beard: a breeze on his face.
Something moved toward him at fast speed he realized, something large, its mass
pushing the air ahead of it. Even now it noiselessly rushed up the stairs at
him.
Lyman slammed the door, shot the bar
through its cleat, threw his weight against the wood—steeled himself for the
impact against the other side.
None came. After a long moment he
looked at his lamp. The flame stood straight as a soldier.
He took a deep breath. Upon returning
to his room it didn’t take him long to convince himself he had imagined
everything, that the only music had been the cotton of a dream clinging to his
sleepy skull. He tossed another log on the fire and lay back on the mattress,
listening as the usual players outside again took up their instruments and
played him off to sleep.
About the Author
Jackson Kuhl is the author of the Gothic novel A Season of Whispers and the
Revolutionary War biography Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer. Kuhl has
written for Atlas Obscura, Connecticut Magazine, the Hartford Courant,
National Geographic News, and other publications. He lives in coastal
Connecticut.
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