Alden Cross

I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by forgotten things.

Not in some poetic way—literally. I’m a licensed auctioneer. I’ve stood in barns with floors half-rotted out. Dug through boxes in storage units that hadn’t been touched since the '80s. Sold rusted clocks, strange carvings, photographs nobody remembered taking, and relics that still felt charged with something.

Most people just see junk. I see memory. Layers of it.

Growing up in Indiana, I was always drawn to the stuff everyone else passed by. I’d hold something in my hand and wonder: Who owned this? Why did they let it go? What if it never let go of them?

That curiosity—along with a deep love of antiques, storytelling, and the emotional weight objects carry—is what eventually pulled me toward auctioneering. For me, it's never been about the sale. It’s about the story. Every item is part of somebody’s history. Sometimes tragic. Sometimes hilarious. Sometimes both.

When I became a licensed auctioneer, I thought I was just stepping into a trade. But the longer I worked, the more I realized I was stepping into something else entirely: a kind of hidden folklore. The way people talked about their stuff. The reverence. The secrecy. The stories that came out only when the gavel fell.

At some point, I started writing them down.

Not literally—at first. But sketches. Little imagined stories. What if this thing was haunted? What if that photo held someone else’s memory? What if this clock ticked backward because it didn’t want to forget?

Those “what ifs” grew teeth.

They turned into the foundation for The Shadow Auction Series.

The Clock That Tick-Tocked is the first book in that series, and while it’s fiction—yes, there are memory-reactive relics and secret auctions and time-warping effects—it’s also rooted in something very real: the fear of forgetting. And the deeper fear of remembering something you can’t do anything about.

The world of the Spiral, relics, and vaults is built from everything I’ve felt walking through an auction house or sorting through the remains of someone’s life. You find a child’s clock in a sealed tote and wonder, Why does this feel like it remembers something I don’t?

In my books, that question gets literal. Relics remember. They don’t just exist—they echo. And if you touch the wrong one, it doesn’t just take you back. It takes you in.

I write because I think memory is powerful. I think trauma is more than a scar—it’s a map. I think the most dangerous things we carry aren’t cursed objects—they’re the things we’ve refused to feel. And I think grief can be a doorway if you know how to turn the key.

I don’t write to teach anyone a lesson. I write because it keeps me grounded. Because I still wonder why certain things linger. Why certain stories won’t let go.

And maybe—like the relics in my books—they’re not supposed to.