Excerpt from ‘SNOW BEHIND THE DOOR’, the prequel to the ‘Bede Trilogy’, in Snow’s words:
[The first beginning I remember was arriving at Bede Hall with my father on a bitterly cold, snowy English day in August of the year 2020. Hadrian’s Wall was gone completely, buried under several feet of snow. My name was Ani, then, and I was wearing sandals.
The Hall looked like a low building with a blue door set into a row of small windows because its vast ballrooms and kitchens, and the red library, lay deep underground. Years of snow had covered the Hall up to the entrance of the Winter Room’s attic door. Father said the blue door was a true liminal threshold since it separated the worlds of opposite realities. He often said strange things like that. Mother said it was the magic in him speaking, because my father was a famous Egyptian alchemist, and people respected his knowledge even when it made no sense.
I slip unnoticed into times that overlap and fade into each other, so, I’m never quite sure when it is until I see my friend Beryl who can be my age or a teenager or an old lady dozing by the fire.
There are days when all that greets me from the other sides of mirrors are white mounds of furniture covered in sheets, when the dust lies thick as time and it’s my turn to comfort the house. It’s not easy being a child of many beginnings or a great house after you’ve been abandoned.
But on the golden days, when the gardens are in bloom once more and the maze and the old Saxon tower reappear, I play hide and seek with the topiaries and run wild through the Green Lady’s forest.
And so, I came to England to haunt the wintry days of 2020, when the Hall was frozen, and the winding staircases had collapsed into a rabbit warren of crushed rooms dripping with icicles.
I’ve learned two things since I arrived here in the House of Reincarnations: My friend, Parks, the old head gardener, who used to be the King of the Trees, is a ghost like me, and that fairies are dreadful gossips.]
‘SNOW BEHIND THE DOOR’, is ‘almost definitely’ scheduled for launch in May of 2021. It will be available here with my other books: https://www.amazon.com/V-Knox/e/B0094K0Q7Y
Veronica Knox 