The Ferry That Only Crosses In Winter - Sam

Twelve passengers crossed. Thirteen footprints climbed the ghat.

Insurance auditor Mina Sharma has come to a winter ferry over the Koshi to check a simple hull claim. The manifest lists twelve passengers, two crew and 800 kilograms of freight. The cooperative’s own photograph shows thirteen people wading ashore - and the draft marks say the ferry grounded carrying one adult more than her licence allows.

The tariff board at Belsot Ghat is exact about everything else. Adult: one crossing. Schoolchild: half. Bicycle: by negotiation. Goat: by temperament.

In the old paper log, the thirteenth line is blank except for a tick and one word written until the pencil tore the page: WINTER. On fog mornings, when a bell rings from mid-river although nobody touched it, a man at the bow asks the question no manifest has ever answered: "Is a man written down if another man carried his basket?"

The rules of the ferry are painted under the shelter. Count passengers before cargo. A name is not freight. Do not pay another man’s fare.

With German engineer Elena, who counts what rivers hide; Sanjay Majhi, a ferryman with two filing systems and faith in neither; Sarita Devi, who sells tickets paper-first from a biscuit tin; Budhi Man, who still counts passengers in pebbles; and Phul Kumari, waiting twenty-one years for a husband the log called cargo loss only, Mina must put Jit Bahadur on the right side of the ledger - before the new booking app files his grandson under freight kilograms.

A cozy-dread Himalayan folk horror novel of quiet psychological dread, haunted manifests, river fog and the names that bring people home. Low gore. High atmosphere. The dog survives.

The Ferry That Only Crosses In Winter is Book Five of The Thin Places. Each book is a standalone haunted-place mystery, connected by the places the world forgot to finish counting.