Leona Charles: Silent Falls Adventures

Hello to all of the hopeful followers I'm going to gain with my little blog of adventures.

Well, it's been a long year so far. A week after turning 23, and after having 23 years of adventures with just Mum and me, I had to say goodbye after she died in February.

It's been hard taking on the world alone, but I can at least say Abigail Charles didn't raise no fool. She knew I could take care of myself.

So for my entire life... Mum was working on a book. She never once let on to me what it was about, or what it was going to be, but when Mum was working on it, she would disappear for days on end, working right through the night. She used to say that when the ideas were there, she just had to get them down on paper. She'd lock herself in the little office she'd made for herself in the attic.

I was never allowed to go in. To be honest, I really thought she had just been writing the day that I found her dead in there. She'd had a heart attack, just dropped dead while she was writing at her desk. I figured she wouldn't mind me looking at her work now.

That's how I discovered Silent Falls. At first I thought that she'd made the place up, that it was just a fake town, where she was setting her book, and there were all of these scary stories, murders, ghosts, kind of imaginary friends lingering all over the town, preying on the residents. The stories were scary, that's for sure. I was impressed, especially since it was so hard to convince Mum to even watch a scary film.

And then... I found the newspaper clippings. The stories about the murders and the weird disappearances that happened there. IT'S A REAL PLACE. Why was Mum researching it? Had she lived there at some point, or just stumbled across this information one day?

I had decided I was going to visit. I was going to finish Mum's research, and finish her book. She'd worked on it for all of these years. I wasn't about to let it go to waste. This could be my big break as a writer, I realised.

I was just about to qualify as a teacher, and I wondered if I'd even be working as a teacher for long really. I was already convinced that this book was going to be a best seller. I finished my course, and waited for my first placement to come through. Well... today, it did.

I've been placed in Silent Falls Primary School. It has to mean something. It's got to be a sign from Mum. She wants me to finish the book.

So, this is hopefully the first of many posts here. In a few weeks, I'll be a Silent Falls resident, and I'll finish off what Mum started. I am going to find out what's wrong with Silent Falls.