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COMING 2025
The Secret Cuckoo Cabaret Club
CHAPTER ONE
SOMETHING SLEEPS
1
Out here in the quiet, something sleeps. Tweaks, shifts, fidgets. Snores occasionally. Breathes, dreams.
Out here, something sleeps just like things out there sleep. Limbs folded around torso, senses scouring — a jigsaw puzzle of dreams and reality pieced neatly together. It realises its surroundings. It knows itself.
While something sleeps, things continue. The water beneath it foams and tickles against wooden pillars. Beneath the water, life congregates: fish, crabs, mussels, bacteria. A hum of movement and beyond the water, yet more. Houses, vehicles, street lamps, life. The heartbeat is a thick, pounding vibration. Changing in tone. Changing in frequency. The souls travel from one place to the next, busy but not busy. Laughs, cries, screams, whispers.
The world out there is vivid, even in the dark. It is alive. But here, something sleeps.
2
Two teenagers enter the water. Splash, crash, holding, pulling. Voices rise higher and higher. And something shifts.
They get closer, heading for the pillars. The pillars are thick and green and slippery with weed, but they want to get there. They want to touch them. One teenager wins the race and pulls the other in. They kiss. They bob. Waves gets louder, and their reality gets heavier. Pushing them, without luck, to a dream.
3
The heartbeat from land grows louder on the wind. Vibrations ripple. Teenagers shout. Water coughs. And something listens. Its neck twists and its ears open. One second, two seconds, three. Sleep could easily be dipped back into. But not this time. The world is too loud. Even out here, where things are quiet.
Below, two teenagers make a decision. They kiss once more, then return back from where they came. But something is listening now. Something has a heart which beats faster. Something stretches and cracks. Something moves, swallows, blinks.
Out here in the quiet, something wakes.
OUT NOW
SEEING DEAD
Edgar D Jackson’s debut novel Seeing Dead dives into the dark, eerie world of Gealblath, a fictional town in East Scotland.
It was on a foggy day in 1988 that Charlie Cooper made his way to the bus stop for the last time.
Ten years have passed since then and what remains is a town scarred by faded missing person posters. An empty seat in the local police station. A father who has become an unwanted ghost, sipping cold ones in the corner of a woodland tavern.
And apart from that, there is a girl. Amee Florence is thirteen, with mousy hair and a cool, pale complexion. She’s starting her first day at school, but she’s nothing like the other children. There’s a secret behind her eyes that she keeps hidden. A secret that could help unfog that day in 1988, and reveal the real reason Charlie Cooper never came home.
Complete with mystery, horror, humour, emotion, and a fiery finale unlike anything that’s been done before, this is a mesmerising tale that questions what we know about death. You just have to see it to believe it.
Seeing Dead is out now in paperback and ebook!