The Troll at Christmas
If you are a regular reader of this blog, or my facebook and twitter feeds, then you won’t have been able to miss that, this year, I wrote and published a trilogy of thriller novellas called THE TROLL. What you might not know is that the first story in the series is a Christmas story. Perhaps not quite so full of cheer and goodwill to all men as some, but nonetheless, set at Christmas.
All of my novellas are on promo for the next few days. And, in the spirit of Christmas, I’m going to give y’all some extracts of the first story to read on this blog for free.
So here is the very opening of the first book; a kind of prologue. Tomorrow and the day after, I’ll publish chapters one and two.
You can buy all three novellas for £1.98 on amazon here 🙂
Happy reading and Happy Christmas, folks. Much love for a fantastic 2016.
Niki
Extract from THE TROLL, book 1, The boy with the sliver of ice in his heart
Long ago, which is always a far off land, there lived a young boy with a sliver of ice in his heart. The ice had always been there, ever since he was born. His mother noticed it right away. She tried to melt it by keeping him warm and wrapping him in blankets. She tried to cure it with help from the doctor, and consulted a witch, but nothing worked. In the end, she accepted that her little boy would always have a sliver of ice in his heart and she loved him just the same.
The boy grew tall and strong, in spite of his heart. He got on wonderfully with other children. There were two girls and a boy who were his best friends. They played children’s games together and, when they got older, they played different games. One day, the four children got lost in the woods. Sitting by a tree, one of them crumbled green buds into white paper. Another carefully removed small paper squares from a film wrapper; each had a tiny picture and looked a bit like a stamp. A third child opened a bottle that said Thunderbird on it, and poured the liquid into her throat where it burned her insides. The fourth child looked on, and didn’t stop any of them. After a while, he joined in.
They ate and drank all of the potions they had brought with them and the magic was set. One of the girls was transported to an enchanted grotto, with lights wound tightly around the trees like vines, and frogs that talked. It was a place she’d read about in a book. The boy with the ice lay in the grass and stared at the sky, and he could see the future and all it held. The other girl fell so deeply into her own mind that she forgot where she was and she stayed there, under an enchantment, for hours and hours. But the fourth child went to Hell. The fourth child was in Hell for a very long time.
The other three children lived happily for many years. Then there was a troll. It hid under the bridge and watched for them. The troll knew that the children would need to cross the bridge one day. And so it waited. Silent. Patient. But poisoning the air with its breath so that the children knew, deep inside, that it was coming for them and had bad dreams that they could never explain…
nicola monaghan 