A Terrible Beauty

By Paula Cappa

Her wings ghosted across Whitethorn Mountain.
Datan arrives as the hills darken.
A secret love vanishes.

Charlie Crowe, a young man strong in body, tender in heart, is haunted by his lonely past growing up in the Bain Orphanage. On Whitethorn Mountain, he discovers a bat-like presence inside a long glassy object swaying beneath a dark New Hampshire sky. This presence, the menacing Datan, claims to 'eat men like air.' She communicates her powers to Charlie through a thought-noose.

Datan has never been far from the mountain and spends her nights swinging above the grassy-green knolls near the orphanage where Charlie and 'little Clare' lived as children, delighting in their puppy love as they would share cherry Life Savers and steal a kiss. Until one starless night when the autumn goldenrod wilted in the frost, Clare went missing.

Years later, as Charlie encounters Datan on Whitehorn Mountain, he still burns with the heartbreak of losing Clare. What will he learn from this menacing presence when the sun sinks? Will he finally find his Clare or will he succumb to a reality of defiant loneliness?

Lovecraftian-inspired, this tale of cosmic terror, isolation, uncertainty, and the maddening human desire will propel you into a dark winding foreverland, and bring you face-to-face with a terrible beauty.

A Terrible Beauty was originally published by Unfading Daydream in 2019 in the Possession Issue.

Paula Cappa has been termed a master of the metaphysical mystery genre...an extraordinary and original storyteller of the first rank by Midwest Book Review. She is a multiple award-winning novelist of The Dazzling Darkness, Night Sea Journey, and Greylock published by Crispin Books, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and many are reprinted as ebook singles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paula Cappa
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215666739

Paula Cappa

Paula Cappa is the recipient of the Gold Medal at Global Book Awards, the Chanticleer Book Award, and American Book Fest's Best Books Award Finalist for her novel Greylock. She also earned the prestigious Eric Hoffer Book Award, The Silver Medal at Global Book Awards, The Readers' Favorite International Bronze Medal for Supernatural Suspense, and is a Gothic Readers Book Club Award Winner in Outstanding Fiction. She is the author of Greylock, The Dazzling Darkness, and Night Sea Journey—print editions published by Crispin Books, Milwaukee WI. Night Sea Journey was featured as an on-air reading at Riverwest Radio, Fearless Reader Radio in Wisconsin. Cappa's short fiction has appeared in ParABnormal Magazine, Coffin Bell Literary Journal, Unfading Daydream, Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, Whistling Shade Literary Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sirens Call Ezine, Every Day Fiction, Fiction365, Twilight Times Ezine, and in anthologies Journals of Horror: Found Fiction, Mystery Time, and Human Writes Literary Journal. She is a freelance copy editor and writes a short story blog, Reading Fiction, at paulacappa.wordpress.com. Paula Cappa is Co-Chair of the Pound Ridge Authors Society in Pound Ridge, NY.

Book preview

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

A Terrible Beauty

About Paula Cappa

A Terrible Beauty

Paula Cappa

A Terrible Beauty

By Paula Cappa

© 2023

Cover design & ebook layout:

Craig Gibb, Story Perfect Editing

A Terrible Beauty was originally published at Unfading Daydream, October 2019, Possession issue, editors L.L. Lemke and Adelei Wade. The story is reprinted here with their permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, author, and copyright owners.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

"In a crystal we have the clear evidence of the existence of a formative life-principle,

and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal,

it is none the less a living being."

Nikola Tesla, The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, 1900.

The trap opened at sundown. Inside of a great, clear crystal swirled the presence of a bat. No; I call it a bat, but this was no flying rodent in any earthly sense. It only appeared bat-like. What I immediately learned was that this odd presence claimed she could eat men like air.

Being an ordinary man, I shuddered.

I say she, although I was not at all certain of the gender, because something about the curves and cleaves, the quivering grooves of the grim shape, reminded me of a woman. My experiences with women were quite limited in my rather over-protected twenty-one years of life, but I remained an admirer of the starlet Marilyn