Off the Main Road: A New Winslow Prequel Novella

By Amanda McCormack

Celine Richards is a young research assistant and grad student rethinking her life plans. When her boss invites her to join him on a trip to investigate claims of a cursed town, she decides that this will be the thing to help make up her mind. Dr. Jennings has been researching and theorizing about the New Winslow phenomena for years, but this time he has a contact within the town. Roman Beckett has been stuck for two years and is willing to join the experiment in exchange for potentially getting out from under the curse.

Celine doesn’t know what she expects, but this prickly twenty-three year old liquor store clerk isn’t it. Still, she’s intrigued. He might even be willing to let Celine try to use her not-so-secret abilities in order to help him. Maybe. If she promises not to blow him up.

Off the Main Road is a prequel novella to the New Winslow series, featuring familiar characters twenty years earlier!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amanda McCormack
• Release date: Dec 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215985489

Amanda McCormack

Amanda McCormack is a writer, performer, and lifelong Massachusetts resident. In a past life, she was a librarian in both public libraries and private research institutions. This led to a passion for research and writing which, combined with her love of New England’s history and culture, formed the foundation for Enfield Arts.She loves getting lost on the back roads of Massachusetts, chocolate chip cookies, and a good slow-burn romance story. She hates pears and driving in Boston. You can usually find her at home with a cup of coffee in hand and at least three pens stuck in her hair for safekeeping.

Book preview

Chapter one

I need to know that you both take this completely seriously.

Celine Richards looked up from her notebook to see Dr. Jennings’ serious expression. He was driving and watching the road still, but she saw him glance up into the rearview mirror to catch her eye. Beside her in the middle seat, Sam, the other assistant, was also looking at Dr. Jennings with an equally solemn his face.

I mean it, Jennings continued, his usually warm brown eyes staring straight into them both, then flicking back to the road. Curse or not, the phenomena in this town are real. People do get stuck there, you won’t know for how long, and it doesn’t care who you are.

They were about three miles from the town of New Winslow, a tiny community in the Quabbin region of Massachusetts. Celine had never been there before, which made perfect sense considering she’d grown up in Boxborough, about forty-five miles east, and had never had any reason to be out this way. At least until she’d started working as a research assistant for Dr. Jennings out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst last year. That was when she’d first heard about New Winslow and its supposed curse.

Dr. Nathan Jennings had been studying the unusual phenomena that kept people enclosed in the town lines of New Winslow for months now. His theory was that something in the minerals around the town impacted the body, creating a magnetic disruption in vulnerable people. It was something he’d come up with during only a few visits to the outskirts of New Winslow, and while not meeting a single person impacted. So it was shaky at best, but better than anything else he’d been able to come up with so far.

But now he had three days reserved in a bed and breakfast in town, as well as a contact who claimed to have been trapped for two years. Celine had worked as a research assistant for him for about eight months by this point and he’d invited her and Sam Derringer, his other assistant, to join.

Unlike Sam or Dr. Jennings, Celine wasn’t a scientist. She was a researcher, with a bachelor’s degree in English. She was one course into a masters degree program in research methods with vague ideas of what she wanted to do from here. But when this research position opened, she’d jumped on it. It gave her something else to keep her in Amherst and away from the awkwardness that her unique abilities brought to her childhood home. If she didn’t know anything about geology (Dr. Jennings’ expertise) or chemistry (Sam’s bachelor’s degree, which he was very proud of), at least information gathering was her specialty.

You can back out, Dr. Jennings continued. I won’t think any less of you. You both have lives and responsibilities and if you get trapped, I can’t guarantee you’ll leave.

That should have terrified her. And judging by the slightly ill expression that momentarily crossed over Sam’s face, the concept was objectively scary. But she’d signed the release form knowing full well what she was doing. And had made sure to tell the roommate she saw every two weeks that if she didn’t come back, Celine would tell her where to send her stuff. And that she could keep the nice kitchenware and all the CDs except Creed. Creed needed to be sent to Celine.

I’m going, Celine said with a smile. I understand the risks and I want to do this.

Me too, Sam added quickly.

He smiled shakily at Celine. I don’t want to leave you alone there.

She suppressed the sigh that was trying to escape, then glanced up at Dr. Jennings, who didn’t say anything in response to that. Instead, he just nodded. Good, he said. We’ll be there in about ten minutes.

The road they were driving on was long and gradually going uphill, with nothing but forest around them. A few minutes earlier, the trees had cleared and Celine saw the enormous Quabbin Reservoir spread out beyond them. She had caught glimpses of it in the past, but the true size of it took her breath away, even from this distance. She could sense the energy of the flooded valley as they’d passed, the lingering stamp of its history curling toward her.

Now her hands crackled with energy. It wasn’t a visible thing, she wasn’t sending fireballs throughout the van. But she could manipulate energy to an extent, shifting and bending, rising and lowering it. Untangling flows of energy that shouldn’t have been tangled in the first place. That was another reason Jennings had been so keen to bring Celine along, despite her lack of scientific knowledge. If it was an energy change keeping people trapped in this town, then maybe her abilities would be the key to getting them out. 

Unlike her parents, who had been deeply unsettled by the way Celine began to sense spirits and accidentally cut the electricity in the house at fourteen, Jennings was excited about it. He saw the scientific potential in everything and was interested in how her powers could manifest. She had a feeling that once this New Winslow curse was solved, Dr. Jennings would be turning his attention more fully onto her.

Sam was intrigued by her abilities, but he was so focused on his own theories about the town that he barely acknowledged her. Tall and bearded, Sam was three