Re: YASID: Dead child's ghost

In message <MPG.23d9a3ff442042af9896d5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Juho Julkunen <giaotanj@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
This has been bugging me lately.

It's a book I read as a kid, and can't have been written later than the
mid eighties. I read it as a Finnish translation and don't even know
the original language; probably English, though I keep thinking French
for some reason. OTOH, the fact it was translated suggests it wasn't
terribly obscure. It also might not actually be SF, properly speaking,
since juvies are allowed weird elements.

I recall very little of the novel apart from one scene. The protagonist
is a boy who has just moved to a new house with his parents. Soon he
starts to feel a presence when he is alone, like someone or something
moving about the house, and always culminating in footsteps leading
towards his room. He always closes the door on the invisible presence,
and the footsteps stop at the closed door. He then waits until he feels
the something has departed.

One day he is distracted enough with something that he fails to notice
the footsteps until they are nearing his room. He springs for the door,
but is too late to close it. He comes face to face with... something
invisible.

Gradually the boy learns to communicate with the presence, and finds
out the entity is a kid, since died, who used to live in the house
before the protagonist's family moved in. I'm not sure if the dead kid
is a ghost or a time displaced version of the kid before he died. It
turns out he was murdered.

It gets murky from here on. I think the protagonist finds the dead
kid's corpse, with clues from the latter, in a closet in the house, and
the two probably set out to discover the murderer.

Anything ring a bell?

A final though: what I remember from the book is vaguely reminiscent of
a story I saw on one of the ghost hunter shows on Discovery Bulls^H^H^H
Science. It is conceivable that the novel might be based on a ghost
legend. Or it might be a red herring.

It might be 'The Ghost of Thomas Kempe' by Penelope Lively which was the Carnegie Medal winner (for best children's book) of 1973 - its publication year. That certainly had the 'moving to a new house,' 'someting strange in the bedroom' and boy learns to communicate with ghost elements.

Jacey

--
Jacey Bedford
jacey at artisan hyphen harmony dot com
posting via usenet and not googlegroups, ourdebate
or any other forum that reprints usenet posts as
though they were the forum's own

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