The
Secrets of Hawthorne House
by
Donald Firesmith
Genre:
Teen Paranormal Mystery
Matt's
life changes forever when a family of druids moves into the
dilapidated Victorian mansion next door. The story of an unlikely
friendship, the clash of two completely different cultures, secret
magic, and a search for the lost Hawthorne treasure.
Fifteen-year-old
Matt Mitchell was having the worst summer imaginable. Matt’s misery
started when a drunk driver killed his mother. Then his father moved
him and his twin sister to the small town of Hawthorne in rural
Indiana, as far as his grieving father could take from the ocean that
Matt's mother had loved. At the new high school, three bullies are
determined to make Matt miserable. And to top it off, Matt learns
that the recluse who lives in the 'haunted house" next door is
none other than Old Lady Hawthorne, the town’s infamous witch and
murderer. Matt’s terrible summer is turning into an awful autumn
when something quite unexpected happens. Old Lady Hawthorne’s niece
and her three children arrive, and Matt meets Gerallt.
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By the final week of October, the tall oaks lining
Hawthorne Drive had reached the peak of their colors, and the first yellow
leaves slowly tumbled down to lie on lawns and sidewalks. All along Hawthorne
Drive, the modest one- and two-story houses had been turned into happy
Halloween haunts. Throughout the neighborhood, bright orange lights framed
windows and doors, and small fluttering ghosts hung from the branches of many
of the smaller trees in peoples’ yards. Black plastic spiders sat on the
cottony cobwebs that shrouded every bush, while jolly Jack-O-Lanterns stood
silent guard at every porch. Front yards had become grave yards, and the
occasional inept witch hung where she’d crashed headlong into a tree or the
side of a house.
Yet the morning of Halloween had arrived with no
change to Hawthorne House, making it appear decidedly underdressed with no sign
of Halloween decorations.
“So Gerallt, doesn’t your family celebrate
Halloween?” Matt asked as the Hawthorne children joined Tina and him at the bus
stop. “You haven’t put up any decorations, and I haven’t heard you mention it
all month.”
“Of course we observe Halloween, only we call it
Samhain,” Gerallt said, exchanging cautious glances with his sister. Unlike
Wiccans, who pronounce the holiday as Sow-in,
Gerallt pronounced the Gaelic word meaning the end of summer as Sahm-wan. “It’s just that for us, the
holiday doesn’t start until dusk and we always wait until then tah decorate.”
“Tonight is very special tah us,” Gwyneth added
solemnly.
“It’s our new year,” Gerallt continued. “We have a
feast tah welcome the spirits of those who will be born in the comin’ year and
tah celebrate the lives of those who have passed in the previous year. Tonight,
we’ll celebrate the life of our fathah and welcome his spirit when he visits us
from the Spirit World…”
Before Matt could decide how to respond to Gerallt’s
unexpected expectation that his father’s ghost was going to visit him, Gareth
said, “Samhain ‘s my favorite holiday. I love trick-or-treatin’ and all the
candy. Can I go with you and Gerallt tonight? Please? I promise not tah be a
bothah or anything. Please, Matt?”
A
geek by day, Donald Firesmith works as a system and software engineer
helping the US Government acquire large, complex software-intensive
systems. In this guise, he has authored seven technical books,
written numerous software- and system-related articles and papers,
and spoken at more conferences than he can possibly remember. He's
also proud to have been named a Distinguished Engineer by the
Association of Computing Machinery, although his pride is tempered
somewhat by his fear that the term "distinguished" makes
him sound like a graybeard academic rather than an active engineer
whose beard is still slightly more red than gray.
By
night and on weekends, his alter ego writes modern paranormal
fantasy, apocalyptic science fiction, action and adventure novels and
relaxes by handcrafting magic wands from various magical woods and
mystical gemstones. His first foray into fiction is the book Magical
Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore written under the pen name Wolfrick
Ignatius Feuerschmied. He lives in Crafton, Pennsylvania with his
wife Becky, and his son Dane, and varying numbers of dogs, cats, and
birds.
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