Book Spotlight | The Devil's Mountain by Jack Harding

Today the spotlight is on The Devil’s Mountain by Jack Harding!

This is a chilling horror novella about a couple venturing into an abandoned location and finding something unexpected. The good news: the book is available for free from the publisher! The link is below, along with the synopsis and excerpt:

Genre: Horror
Publication Date: 25 April 2022
Author: Jack Harding
Publisher: Darklit Press

Synopsis

Deep in Berlin’s Grunewald forest, lurking in the silent winter fog, lies a man-made hill forged from the ruins of World War 2. On top of the hill stands an old spy station that’s been empty since the fall of the Iron Curtain nearly 30 years ago.

Dylan and Nikki are a young, adventurous British couple who have just one more sight to check-off their abandoned Berlin list before they head home. Journey with them as they explore the darkened halls and corridors of a Cold War mausoleum caught between the past and the present- frozen in time. Journey with them to The Devil’s Mountain, a place that will change their lives forever…

Excerpt

A thick, ethereal mist had settled down on the woods, smothering the gnarled limbs of a thousand bare conifers with a cold, inexorable pillow, suffocating the surroundings. The ground shone white with snow, though the lead-grey glare of the winter’s afternoon did everything it could to break the stringent bank of mist and dim the forest landscape. It was almost as though the scene had been printed in greyscale.

The couple walked slowly along the vague and jagged path, edging deeper into the heart of the woods and closer to their strange destination. The ground squeaked underfoot, the path itself on a slight but noticeable ascent: frozen but not slippery, its sides covered in thick sheets of blinding, month-old snow that stretched out all around and blended into the fog. As they walked, their heavy boots beat a scratchy tune into the firm mud. It was the only sound that could be heard for miles.

“So, what’s this place called again?” asked Dylan, skipping clumsily over the whitened antler of a fallen branch and onto the crusty snow, pink hands scrunched into numb fists in his coat pockets. He had never felt so cold in all his life.

“Teufelsberg,” said Nikki, her breath frosting in the air. “It’s German for The Devil’s Mountain.”

“Sounds a bit ominous,” said Dylan, turning to his small and slender girlfriend of four months. “I hope you’re not taking me up there as some sort of a sacrifice. If I’d known I’d be bumping uglies with Satan, I’d have put on some decent aftershave.”

“You have decent aftershave?” she frowned, humour glinting in her grey-blue eyes.

Dylan screwed up his face and curled his lip in a silent laugh.

“Nah,” she scoffed. “Sounds like way too much effort. Plus, my Nazi death cult don’t really go in for short-stacks like you, babe.”

Dylan let out an audible and sarcastic laugh this time, removing a hand from his coat and batting it in the direction of Nikki’s backside. She squealed and made a half-hearted attempt to block his icy attack, curling her spine and seizing his wrist with a gloved hand. She countered with a playful jab to his ribs, and they continued up and along the path laughing.

It was a little after three in the afternoon and the young, besotted couple had been trudging through Berlin’s Grunewald Forest for the best part of an hour. In stark and pleasant contrast to the bleakness of the weather, Dylan and Nikki were both head-over-heels in that warm and sickly stage at the start of any good relationship: the honeymoon period.

The flirtatious, hot-blooded phase where you start to wonder if the person you spend the vast majority of your time thinking about might just be the real deal. They were off to an incredible start, and their first trip away together was exceeding all expectations. Neither were exactly mining uncharted territory; both had been away with partners in the past, both knew all too well that it was often a test of sorts: a telling milestone and, more often than not, an example of just how well a couple could function as a unit under the stresses of travel.

But, so far, the newly formed duo had come through unscathed. They were good together. Real good. Dylan was perhaps a little more excited by the buoyancy of their blossoming relationship; thoughts of asking Nikki to move in with him had already begun to take root in his mind. He had never met anyone quite like her. She was different; offbeat, blunt and viciously funny. Intelligent and ambitious yet considerably laid-back at the same time. The kind of girl who would be just as happy chasing pipedreams around the globe as curled up in front of Netflix all weekend with a face-full of chocolate. She was well-balanced, well-rounded. Guileless. A huge movie buff, plus she had—quite possibly—the greatest ass Dylan Hyde had ever seen.

Though he was, by some stretch, the more excitable of the pair, Dylan’s infatuation for Nikki had actually taken a back seat over the past few days. He’d spent considerable portions of their city break in a kind of trance—a wistful half-state of sombre bewitchment. He’d visited historical cities with his parents when he was younger—places like Paris, Rome, New York and Barcelona—but never anywhere quite like Berlin.

There was a darkness about it that Dylan found not just overwhelming but alluring; there was an air of danger, a kind of tangible trauma that was extenuated by the biting cold and Dylan’s strange delusions of brooding fanaticism. For the past few days, he’d felt as if he were some kind of spy in a moody Cold War adventure. Nikki had taken him all over the city and told him everything she knew about its complicated past and, as a result, Dylan was genuinely awestruck by the city’s rich and chaotic history; he was fascinated by the remnants of the Berlin wall and the surviving artefacts and relics from the days of the GDR.

As the couple crunched unevenly through the forest, they relived the morning’s trip to Hohenschönhausen, the city’s old Stasi prison, and discussed all manner of things from Nikki’s obsession with the Oscar-winning drama The Lives of Others to Dylan’s irrepressible hate for James Corden.

The trees made muffled chittering noises, their withered trunks and limbs dwindling by on either side as the hill gradually steepened. The great slope was being caressed by a light breeze curling out of the east. The temperature seemed to dip with every hard-fought step but in spite of the cold creeping into every one of his joints, Dylan’s legs felt warm and swollen and they made a point of stopping every now and then for the occasional breather and, of course, a quick photo together. Their infrequent breaks also afforded Nikki the chance to check the sacred compass on her Tripadvisor app to make sure they were on the right track. They were.

Cover photo by Andreas Kind