My100: Original One-Paragraph Story Hooks 89 and 90--The Home Stretch
The challenge: 100 first-page story hooks in sixty days. Just the first page (or less), and it has to hook the reader to want more. I'm now into the home stretch, and it's been a very long and interesting ride.
Eighty-nine is one of those things that I just banged out (in the car on the M5 between Miskolc and Budapest, actually), but Ninety comes from the incredible palace we stayed in last night in Lillafured, in eastern Hungary. It's an old castle on a lake, with a waterfall, surrounded by mountains, and it is the perfect place for ghosts.
Eighty-nine:
“Can you hear me now,” he said, and I could, but that didn’t matter because the truck in the rearview slammed into the back of my car like a linebacker hitting a quarterback on the blindside. The phone flew from my hand and shattered against the bumper of the truck, where my rear window used to be. I thought that was bad, until I realized it was just holding me there for the other guy.
Ninety:
Kelly inhaled deeply and found that tonight, the air no longer frosted her lungs. Truly spring, then, at long last. It seemed to come later every year.
The moon crested the mountain in yellow-white slices and reflected off the lake below. The barest breeze slid down through the forest and ruffled the water. She and the dawning spring had the night to themselves.
Kelly was about to turn from the balcony and head back to her room when a white flash lit the water, sped across it like a diving eagle, and vanished in the woods on the far side. She only caught it at the corner of her eye, and it was gone before she could focus on it, so fast that she was sure she’d imagined it.
Later, she’d remember, and wonder. Much later she’d come to see this night as the end of the castle’s peace. But Kelly had no time for that now, because the moment the apparition vanished a woman’s unearthly scream knifed out from below her and echoed off the lake. Tadik whipped open the balcony door behind her, face ashen and hand shaking. “Kelly, we need you. Right now.”
~Cristof
P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100