AND MIRA started as a dare. My daughter was into reading scary stories on creepypasta.com, and would read some out loud occasionally.  I thought I would try it out.  If it was successful, it might be a "cool dad thing."  

Three years later, the teen/young adult horror novel AND MIRA is now available in print and digital formats at Amazon, and through Author House. Signed and numbered collector first editions are available on eBay.  

The story features a strong female lead in a horror drama, set in the midst of American pop culture from the 1940s to the present, desperately trying to solve the mystery of the ghost that haunts her, and kills her friends.

Read the prologue for free to the right:

View the book description below:

"Death is a dagger

Concealed in a cloak.

Viewed through a mirror

Obscured by smoke."

So begins the story of Mira. For most, the war is over, but for one girl, it has just begun. Set just after World War II, AND MIRA starts out in the gentle surroundings of a nursery school in Midwestern United States. Not yet two years old, Miras dreams are filled with the image of a deformed, emaciated child she does not quite remember. When one of the children at her school succumbs to pneumonia, she cannot help but feel that it is not one of the typical deaths common to children in her day but rather somehow connected to the chalky child of her dreams.

AND MIRA is a traditional-style ghost story set against the backdrop of American pop culture from the 1940s to the present day. Unique to this story, AND MIRA follows the haunting of the protagonist and her loved ones from the beginning of her life to the very end. As she grows, so matures the ghost that haunts her dreams and memories, and his appetite for the deaths of those she cares for evolves as well. Mira must make her way through a world that does not believe in ghosts to determine the identity of this tortured phantom that threatens everyone she holds dear before it destroys them all!

You can go here to read the series on creepypasta.  

You can go here to join the Nathaniel Mirras fan page. Nathaniel only accepts friend requests from adults though.

AND MIRA

Prologue: The Chalky Child

 I am telling you this story not by my memory, but in my memory.  I must ask you to try to hear my thoughts, take whatever cues I leave, and fill in the blanks.  Like a dream you wake up and remember only part-way, and my whole life is like that.  Not quite a memory.  Not quite a dream.  Because I cannot talk, at least not in the way you would understand.  I do have language, but my spoken language doesn’t make sense yet to most people.  While I don’t speak many words, I hear them and understand what many of them mean.  I have a good sense of what has happened, but simply cannot tell you my story with the spoken word.

Because, you see, I am 18 months old.

The world turns and its happenings occur in a ruthless cycle.  It is light.  I wake up.  It is dark.  I sleep.  I process what the adults say.  I interpret what the other children do.  Yet I am unable to speak clearly about what has happened to a child I knew not long ago.  I can only remember, or dream, and hope that you too can find sense in my thoughts and my memories.  I am too young to understand whether what happened to that boy was a dream or a memory, or even real, but I hope knowing his story will help keep you safe. 

My very first memory is of a crying child.  Not the boy in my story.  No.  Another child.  The sobbing baby I remember might even be me, but I’m not sure.  I’m certainly quite unpleasant, if it is in fact me.  I don’t think it is.  In fact, I’m quite sure it’s also a boy.  I don’t know how I know, since I’m not quite sure what makes a boy, but there are boys in nursery, and this creature seems to be more like them than like me.  The howling child in this memory, or perhaps dream, is pale, chalky white, marred and miserable.  Its skin is cracked and wrinkled, but covered in a chalky film as though perpetually in a cloud made from cleaning the boards after school.  I’ve never heard such a cry! Not from myself, nor anything in this world, or from any of my friends. 

Well, I don’t suppose I have friends, but the other children in the nursery school.  The adults call them my “friends” and I am encouraged to refer to them as such.  The truth is I do not like most of them very much.  They spend their days and mine stealing my favorite toys, and finding new ways to brutalize each other.  They cannot talk either, and their thoughts, whimpers and memories are all focused on food, their mothers, biting and tasting, and pulling hair, often mine.  Friends would not pull my hair…

But I never have heard a cry from any of those little beasts that is the same as the child in that brief early memory.  It is the cry of a trapped animal, sweet yet sad.  It is angered, frightened, yet also frightening. It evokes pity, yet implies flight.  An anguished, horrifying cry.  While you desire to extinguish the poor child’s pain, there is also a foreboding to it. Attempting any sort of comfort to this little one would certainly lead to death.  It is a fleeting memory of a chalky child in the process of having soiled pants removed and changed by an adult, who clearly hates and fears it.  Why?  Why is this little one so hated?  Who is this adult?  It isn’t Mother.  Is it simply an image conjured from the base descriptions of the few adults I know?  But then why is this adult’s fear, its hatred, so palpable in my mind?  Who would fear a baby? 

Nothing in the chalky child’s features is any clue. In fact, there are no prominent facial features at all. It’s as though the child has no face, no features, as if someone simply pressed their fingers in white clay.  It seems that I saw a similar visage along the streets one day, in front of what Mother called a theater.  Two masks, one happy, one sad, but neither betraying any individuality or humanity other than the mouths’ direction of joy or pain.  This Chalky Child reminds me of the dramatic mask of pain and sorrow.  Grief.  Despondence. 

But, memories are like that, and the fog is thick.  The grey-white skin is barely visible through the thickness of my memory.  The skin underneath the diaper is the only to have any color, red and bleeding from the apparent digestive incompetence of this pitiful thing.  Miserable…and that cry! I envision this miserable bloody mess on a small, white towel or sheet on a small table, a pair of sepia hands changing him.  In my vision the table is in total blackness save a single light from above, as though the child were a villain caught in the act by a searchlight, interrogated and sentenced.  Part of me perceives that it isn’t the pain of the bleeding skin or rash that causes this child’s pain.  No.  Rather it is the pain of having been born at all.  An abomination born into a life of torture and pity, hated by all in view.  This child will never have comfort, and will never know love. Not even from its own mother.  That thought makes me sad.  I don’t know what I’d do without Mother’s love.  Somehow, I find myself loving the Chalky Child, despite the fear and discomfort I feel.  What if I’m the only person that does?

That is all I can conjure from my first memory.  A dream from my past.  Or, a vision of the future? 

Today, I no longer see that child when my eyes close, and rarely believe it to be a memory of myself.  Left to my quietest thoughts, however, alone in my crib, and sometimes while even awake I hear the cry still. Or sometimes I hear it faintly in alone times with Mother, when she sings and reads to me in my diminutive room. Mother seemingly never hears, and never responds.   It’s as loud as a kitchen faucet’s intermittent dripping into a pan, to me, but Mother doesn’t hear a thing.  The Chalky Child’s cry exists only for me it seems.

Wait.  Did I see her eyebrow twitch in that moment?

No.  Perhaps not.

My father is, well, I don’t know.  He was a hero.  I’m not sure what that means.  I believe his job was to kill, and that he died while doing his job. I don’t know that he is actually dead, but I don’t remember seeing him or ever meeting him. My mother says he wept uncontrollably the day I was born, and that she wept uncontrollably the day he didn’t come home.  And in quiet moments she says that he adored me above all things.  Father was the love of her life, and mine.  Then he was gone.  I remember that, that feeling that love.  But of my Father, I have no actual memory or mental picture of him in my life. 

There are images, however, in my life, all around me, that I do see.  These things I am certain of.  I see a photo among our few personals in the library. It is in my immediate picture each day as I play.  It sits on the highest shelf, bookended between Christie and Mitchell, and a beautiful album adorned with two large “M’s”, the first beginning to wear on the right side. The photo is of the woman I know as mother, wearing a beautiful white dress, next to a hopelessly handsome man in a suit. I imagine that beautiful man in the photo, adoring my mother, must be my father.  The look he has, the gaze toward her, in the photo, is what I remember and feel.  Even though I don’t have a mental picture of Father gazing at me that way, I know that he has.  Somewhere, I remember.  I feel it.  The love I see in that photo is what I’m sure love is. 

That’s all I remember of my family..

But there is so much more to my story.