Beneath the Quarry Waters is a story sure to pull at your heart strings as it stretches the limits of the traditional fantasy novel.

The tragic life of Jonathan Pallas explores the obscure yet Devine beginnings of the world; a time when the struggle between good and evil had reached cosmic proportions. Jack’s life mirrors those battles. The mystical atmosphere of the dark abandoned quarries sets the scene for a harrowing journey into the depths of blackness, blackness as different from darkness as night is to day. Those lonely, wind swept quarries act as the backdrop for the discovery of a diabolical plot to destroy the world. Yet, Beneath the Quarry Waters is a story of one person’s life, a life on a collision course that may only be an illusion.

Before the young age of seventeen, three horrible tragedies leave Jack a broken, troubled teenager. His father suffers a catastrophic stroke just after he and Jack have an argument. Several months later, Jack, while scuba diving below the dark freezing waters of an abandoned slate quarry, experiences the devastating loss of his diving buddy, eighteen year old Donald Kerns. At a depth of 80 feet, and in total darkness, they are recklessly squeezing their bodies and their equipment through a narrow connecting tunnel. One will not make it, his hose is cut, his air escapes, and he drifts lifeless into the blackness, his body never to be recovered.

There was a third tragedy, a horrible accident that, several years earlier, tore the fabric of the Pallas family apart. The accident was so devastating it caused them to move to a different town.

As an adult, Jack’s problems manifest into failed relationships, alcoholism and depression. Until one day he is presented with information that causes him to return to the tunnel where he lost his friend Donny. It turns out Donny was looking for something. When Jack discovers it, the adventure is set in motion . . . and destiny takes over.

Jack will come face to face with his grief, his guilt, and his failures. He will be presented with difficult choices that if made correctly will free him from his torment. But there are other forces at work. Forces, that if not stopped, could destroy the world. Jonathan Pallas must make the right choices? But will he?

Excerpt from: Beneath the Quarry Waters

Like every water-filled quarry hole, it was a site of decline and abandonment, a wounded spot, but so eerily still and filled with mystery that it seemed a holy place. The stubborn cliff faces gathered the silence as they gave way to crumbling slopes. And crooked trees grew precariously at the edge, ready at any moment to tear free and plunge into the black depths. An amalgam of algae and silt, continually stirred by underground springs, made it impossible to see very far down. The thought of what could be lurking in the mysterious depths made it a place most would never dare venture.

In eastern Pennsylvania, north of where the Delaware River catches the Lehigh, sits a conjured wilderness, riddled; it may seem, with the footprints of giants. In the days when men went searching for new sources of slate, test blasts were carried out, leaving behind hidden holes. If a vein was discovered, the quarry was worked until the bounty was exhausted, so the width and depth could vary from one hole to the next by hundreds of feet.

The chain-link fences, meant to ward off trespassers, were now rusted and falling apart, and the roads leading to the holes were washed out in spots or gone altogether. Although there were those reckless, foolhardy souls who claimed them as their private playground, quarry holes were nothing like that. They were places of great power—places to respect.

These abandoned slate quarries were, at one time, viable, living, breathing places of human activity, and the relentless flow of water that one day would lure naivety like droplets on a spider’s web, was kept at bay by powerful pumps.

It was at the bottom of one of those quarry holes in the earth, some two hundred and fifty feet deep or more that a cloud of gray dust arose.

The ground shuddered from the surgical charge.