Even fictional ghosts can be insistent, but coupled with a hauntingly pushy muse, it was wise for me to surrender to their combined energies and time-slip away these past 18 months to complete a particularly tricky manuscript. No-one warned me how difficult summing up a trilogy was.
Sensitive children often take unintentional words uttered in haste to heart. In my novels: ‘The Unthinkable Shoes’ and ‘Snow Behind the Door’,time-sensitive responsibilities, guilty secrets, and an overwhelming sense of duty motivate the ghosts of a boy and girl, Finn and Snow, respectively, to haunt and taunt, and set themselves free.
Finn and Snow taught me that words have the power to imprint a child for life and beyond, and that haunting is never a childish whim.
Regardless of age, ghosts never haunt without just cause. And they never give up hope.
FINN
Finn Cleary lost his new shoes when he drowned in the Titanic disaster after taking his ‘Mam’s words to heart that she’d skin him alive if he so much as scuffed them.
‘The Unthinkable Shoes’ – https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01E4Q95A6 shadows the spirit of Finn Cleary – a boy victim from the ‘Titanic’ disaster. To atone for a dark secret and a wish made in haste, Finn chooses to remain earthbound as the invisible childhood friend of the girl he’d been destined to marry.
Snow, the child ghost of Bede Hall, took the Hall’s words to heart as well. ‘Begin your story anywhere that shows up, child,’ the Hall said. ‘The order isn’t important. It’s the sum of all one’s beginnings that matter.’
‘Snow Behind the Door’, is a work-in-progress, scheduled for release in May 2021. As the prequel to the ‘Bede Trilogy’, it documents the multiple time-slip memories of an abandoned ghost-child named Snow, in search of the family she glimpses in dreams and the dusty mirrors of Bede Hall – a stately home that has sheltered earth’s time portals, guarded by an ancient line of royal Egyptian cats for thousands of years.
In books one, two, and three: ‘Twinter’, Time Falls Like Snow’, and ‘Tomorrow Again’ ( live on January 18th, 2021, here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TGZS6J7), the disgruntled Hall, in the north of present-day England, recruits Snow, and a pair of telepathic twins at odds over logic and metaphysics, to save it from being sold to unscrupulous developers, fulfill an ancient prophecy, and save the planet.
THE AFTERLIFE RULES
Under the laws of reincarnation, both Finn and Snow willingly sacrifice themselves in order to save the ones they love. Both children were locked in time at nine-years of age. Both ghosts narrate their woes from page one:
FINN: “I drowned three times. First, in the relentless rain of Ireland, second, in the deep gloom of mourning that settled over my mother, and third, in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic”.
SNOW: “I died a very long time ago or was it yesterday? …I think maybe both. My new name is Snow – a name that suits me even though there are days I wish it didn’t.”
Finn wants to win his mother’s affection. Snow wants to be reunited with her troubled father.
For seventy years, Snow runs in vain, barefoot through fields of lavender in her nightgown to meet the childhood friend who abandoned her. Finn journeys far to find the shoes that floated free of him when he was pulled from the Atlantic.
As close fictional companions of mine, I feel their pain.
May we all run barefoot this summer without wearing masks, reunited with family and friends.
Veronica Knox 