The Shasta Gate by Dick Croy

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About the author:

Dick Croy is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist and playwright. He was writer and director of The Fourth Dimension, a documentary series of seven 60-minute television specials on the paranormal. His novel The River Jordan, co-authored with Henry Burke, was a book-of-the-year nominee in 2001. Fugitive Slave, their contemporary drama portraying the historical spirit of the Underground Railroad, is both an award-winning screenplay and a stage play which has received readings by the Classical Theatre of Harlem and other theater companies.

What inspired you to write your book?

THE SHASTA GATE: A Novel of Ascension. TSG was my first screenplay, some 40+ years ago, and although I couldn't have told you this then, the deus ex maxima ending is in a sense an elaborate metaphor for "ascension," which is a concept all over the Internet these days on websites dealing with spiritual issues. I'm not sure exactly what it means and I'm sure as hell not sure how it's supposed to take place, but it might very well be similar to what happens to my two protagonists.

Here is a short sample from the book:

They fell silent, drifting into that light sensory hypnosis that campfires and summer evenings make so hard to resist. Something of what Eugene had been saying nagged at Catherine's stubbornly resistant mind. All this talking about feelings was starting to seem pointless to her. Although she'd known people who would rather talk about life than live it, she hadn't known them long – and she wasn't about to encourage Eugene. But she knew he was becoming emotionally involved with her. That was enough for now.
"What's wrong with a little turmoil?" she asked silkily. "Maybe you just haven't been involved with the right kind." Her smile cut through Eugene's muddled thoughts as if someone had pulled the plug on his computer. Her hand moved slowly to the top button of her blouse. That lovely warm smile was so innocently inviting. The blouse came off. Then so did the no-bra bra. Her breasts looked up at him like impudent white Persian cats, or ermine in their white winter coats: they had that sleek saucy look to them.
Except that already he was imagining them in his
mouth. Either one would more than fill it.
And they were so firm! What a joy they'd be to suck, his lips floating over the smooth, taut, slippery flesh, plump and round to fill his mouth or the cupped palms of his hands….Round: was there anything on God's earth more perfectly and deliciously round than a woman's breasts?…anything that made the mouth more want to shape itself into an urgent slavering "O"?
Her dainty pink nipples filled out and stood up like
rosettes as he watched them. It excited Catherine to see that his cock was doing the same as she wriggled out of her tight jeans and bikini pants at the same time. Her body unveiled was just simply breathtaking, embodying exquisite feminine variations on this theme of roundness and curves that can drive a man bananas. It certainly had Eugene, and she was longing to feel his in her hand and mouth and deep inside of her. But she wanted to play now.
"Come on," she said huskily. "The water will be freezing, but we've got the fire." With that, her body, an hourglass of golden sand flowing from one polished, sculpted curve into another, slipped into the darkness of
the trees. "Bring a towel!" she called back to him.
Eugene could only breathe deeply and shake his head.
In his excitement and desire he imagined that he could see his own face: a caricature of the aroused male animal. Suddenly realizing that he still just sat here, dressed, he peeled his clothes off, grabbed the single towel they'd brought with them, and thought to throw another log on the fire. Then he followed her to the gathering roar of the falls.
She was already standing in the moonlit pool, pale
and trembling against a silver curtain of water. Hunched and hugging her arms tight against her body, Catherine was shivering from excitement, the cold, and anticipation. Eugene's lean muscular body looked to her like it belonged here. The mass of hair on his chest and strong lithe legs, the dark vertical line of hair cleaving his abdomen from chest to navel, and the pubic hair surrounding his swinging, swollen penis was, in a sense, the forest's signature. He tested the frigid water with his foot, and the smooth surface of the opposite thigh tightened into a muscular topography to support his weight. The sudden metamorphosis reminded her
of that latent masculine power she loved to call forth.
"Hurry up!" she pleaded, "I'm fr-freezing!"
He could understand why. His right foot felt as though it had been quick–frozen at the ankle – or amputated, and what he was experiencing was phantom-limb pain. But now was no time to turn back. He waded boldly out into the middle of the pool, plucked Catherine from the water and, carefully negotiating the slippery bottom, carried her toward the waterfall.
"Don't you dare!" she shrieked. Her violent
thrashing succeeded only in getting them both wet as Eugene stumbled with her. But he quickly regained his balance and stepped with his wet squirming armload right into the middle of the icy fall of water. It sucked the air from their lungs as suddenly and completely as if they'd collapsed. He staggered back and set Catherine down while they both caught their breaths, then let go with a lusty rebel yell: Yea-hahhh!
"Oh Lo–ord!" she managed to get out. "Are you…c-c-crazy?"
Eugene threw back his head and roared. "G-g-goddamned right!" he mimicked her. "B-b-beat you to the towel!" He did but tossed it to her, and she applied it to her goose-pimpled skin with a vengeance while he frankly watched and enjoyed. Taking pity on his own naked, violently shaking body, she didn't keep it nearly as long as she'd have liked.
"See you back at the fire," she said, hurrying up
the trail with the exaggerated stealth common to cartoon characters and the tender-footed, as he began toweling himself vigorously. She was grateful for the additional log and added two more from the stack they'd gathered earlier. Then she put on just her panties. Her skin was tingling deliciously, and with a fire the warm night required no clothes at all. Modesty alone was responsible for the panties – that and her knowledge that she was more seductive in them than in nothing.
As Eugene finished drying himself, he was replaying their slippery skirmish in the pool. She had squirmed in his arms like an eel vibrator; the feel of her flesh had been burned into his senses: electroshock for the libido. At one point in their tussle, he'd been pleasantly startled to find himself holding her by the crotch. It wasn't intentional and had lasted only an instant as the two of them thrashed about in front of the waterfall. But now he had time to really feel her there against his outspread hand. His mind was certainly receptive to the sensation, even if it had happened too quickly for his hand to feel the full effect. What a tasty sensory salad: the scratchiness of her pubic hair, a sort of parsley texture, combined with the avocado squishiness he had encountered just inside her vagina.
He felt himself stirring – a little more and he could damn near hang the towel on it. He draped it over his shoulder instead – the towel – and the sexual energy that had been concentrating in the tumescent organ dissipated and began to rise, until his whole body was tingling with it as he crept back up the trail.