Category: Fantasy Publisher: Martyn Croft
ISBN-10: 0955987245
Type: Fiction
Pages: 245
Copyright: Feb 2009
ISBN-13: 9780955987243
A tale of mystery and imagination set in 1970's East Anglia where nothing is what it seems. Ed is six years old and he knows things he's not supposed to know.
There was a history of strange phenomena in young Ed Compton-Jones' family. He was not a normal boy. He had strange powers and sometimes he seemed to be in another world. He knew things that he wasn't supposed to know. How would he use those powers? Would it be for good or evil? A disturbing tale of dreams and fantasy set in and around a sleepy East Anglian seaside town in 1970's England.
Excerpt
EXCERPT
1
Memories
Little Ed could see things; things that no one else could see; things that
didn’t even exist – in the real world. Ever since he had been a baby, he
had had ‘experiences’, like the one he only had distant memories of –
memories of his cot and seeing his ‘Uncle Eddie’ standing beside it and
smiling at him. He had realised later, by the time he was about four that it
couldn’t have been his real Uncle Eddie, who ‘was no longer with us’ to
quote his mum, but it had left him with a strange feeling that he had met
his mother’s brother after he had ‘passed on’. There had been another
occasion that had kept coming back to Ed – memories of a previous
Christmas, shopping in Fenton-on-Sea with his grandma. Confused
images of his uncle as Santa Claus in Woolworth’s came to him in his
dreams – recognised from the photograph of his uncle that hung over the
mantelpiece at home at 26 Acacia Avenue, Fenton-on-Sea, on the East
Anglian coast.
Ed was five now and it was Monday, September the 8th 1975; his
first day at Fenton Central Junior School – the school his Uncle Eddie
had started at nineteen years previously; the uncle he had never met and
the uncle that had disappeared in strange circumstances a few years
before Ed had been born. His mum, Jenny Compton-Jones, didn’t talk
much about her brother and often used phrases like: ‘God took him, dear’
and ‘He’s in a better place, Ed’, to explain his absence from her only
son’s life.
By the end of that first day in school, Ed had learned a little more
about the disappearance of his Uncle Eddie and at tea-time he had
questions for his mother.
“Mum?”
8
“Yes, love.”
“Mum, how did Uncle Eddie die?”
His mum looked wistfully at her son and nervousness was etched
on her face.
“Die? He’s not dead, dear.”
“Miss Sandbuck says he his. Says he ran away from home and he’s
in heaven now. You have to be dead to be in heaven, don’t you, Mum?”
Ed’s mum was getting tetchy. She had dreaded this moment.
“How did she come to tell you that, dear?”
“She’s my teacher and she said I didn’t look much like my uncle
and I asked her if she’d known him and, Mum …?”
“What?”
“She taught him, Mum, and she said everyone at school had been
sad when he just disappeared one day. Did he run away, Mum?”
“No, dear, he didn’t run away. It was just one of those things.
Nobody can explain it.”
“But he must be somewhere, Mum.”
Ed paused to munch on a fish finger while he considered his next
question.
“Can you go to heaven without dying?”
“I don’t know, Ed, dear – maybe.”
It was clear to Ed, even at his young age, that his mum didn’t want
to talk anymore about her brother – just like she didn’t like talking about
his dad. That had been a taboo subject for as long as Ed could remember.
He’d had to be satisfied with his mum’s simple but challenging
explanation for each oddity in his short life so far: ‘It was just one of
those things’. He almost seemed to know when people would be upset if
he mentioned certain things – so he didn’t – Ed could not only see things,
he understood things as well. He could recognise emotions and feelings
9
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