PART FIVE

The storybook building must have been quite imposing when it had first been built.

Given how long the place had been abandoned he would have expected it to have been in an even worse condition. For comparison, a house in Grayson’s old neighborhood would have been in ruins if it had lain empty for even half as long. The windows would have been smashed, the front door hanging off its hinges, while the kids used it for their drugs and whatever else they got up to away from prying eyes, but this place was pretty much untouched.

“So, what, you think this is some kind of shunned place?” Louisa asked from somewhere behind him.

“Given what we’ve just walked through ... nothing sounds good about that, does it?” Shunned houses were usually the places that were haunted, or at least had the stories of hauntings and ancient evils woven into a legend around them. That was why people kept away. A dead zone was something else entirely. It was almost a haven within the haunted neighborhood. “I mean, what could be so terrible even the ghosts are afraid of coming here?”

“When you put it like that,” she said, and made the sign of the cross.

Ahead of them, Daphne, Harris and Maggie Carlisle slowed as they walked up the stone steps to the house’s grand porch. Zack walked quickly to catch up with them. He was at the steps before they reached the front door.

The old actress made a show of pausing, drawing a deep breath as though summoning the inner strength needed to cross the threshold, and took the final few strides up to the old green door. There was a huge brass ring in the center. She reached for it and rapped three times. No one answered her call. She turned to look directly at Grayson’s camera, making sure he had the right angle for the shot as she pushed the door open.

If there wasn’t, the footage would be cut and discarded, and that was a waste. It almost meant coming back to get the shot again, and it’s never as good second time.

“Are we going to need to break in?” Zack called up to her.

Maggie’s answer was to reach out and take hold of the handle beneath the brass knocker. It turned easily, and the door offered little resistance as it swung open on groaning hinges.

The actress led the way.

Louisa narrated the scene. “Maggie’s just gone inside with her man, Harris. We’ve got no idea what’s waiting for us inside, but you can feel the weirdness in the air. It’s positively electric.”

Which was a lie. It was the only place in the entire town that hadn’t felt fraught with at least a slight charge, but that didn’t make as good television, did it?

She followed the psychic in. Grayson was the last across the threshold. The creak of the old floorboards followed every few footsteps. The light streaming in to the old house over their shoulders trapped the dust motes dancing in the air that had barely moved for years. The motes danced to the eddying shifts in air temperature as they ventured into the hallway.

“It’s surprisingly warm in here,” Zack said, opening the first door he reached and entering what appeared to be a living room overfilled with heavy furniture. Nothing was out of place. The books in the bookcases were arranged in size and color order, offering a glimpse into the way the old owner’s mind worked. There was a second door in the corner of the room that Louisa assumed was a cupboard or storeroom. She said as much, again narrating their path through the house. “We’re in what must have been the living room. Everything is so neat and organized, but look over here,” she said as she walked towards the books. “Have you ever seen anything like it? All of the books are arranged by size and color, not by author or genre.” She shook her head like it made no sense. “And it’s warm in here. Warmer than it was in the hall. Grayson, can you turn on the thermal imaging, see if there are any hot spots?” She walked across the room towards the door and tried to open it. “It’s locked,” she said, pointing out the obvious.

The remains of a fire lay in the grate, a stack of logs in the basket beside the fireplace. There were a series of small ornaments lined up on the mantelpiece.

She crouched down and held a hand over the ash and charred wood. “The heat’s not coming from here,” she said.

“Do you feel anything strange?” Grayson asked the room. That was how they did things when they were filming. They didn’t talk directly to each other half of the time, rather just throwing statements like that out there so that the viewer would immediately assume they felt something strange and were looking for confirmation from the others.

Zack turned to find that the three of them were alone in the room.

“Where are the others?”

“Checking the rest of the house. Well, do you?”

He shook his head. “Not me, but then that’s not really my field.”

“Louisa?”

The other woman nodded. “For a house that’s supposedly the only unhaunted house in town this place gives me the creeps.”

They met the others at the bottom of the staircase.

“Anything interesting?” Louisa asked, earning a shrug from Harris and a slight headshake from Daphne.

“Depends what you call interesting, my dear,” Maggie Carlisle said. “I can feel a sadness in this place. It’s in the very fabric of the house, as though the walls themselves are in mourning for whoever it was they lost.”

“Are you getting a name?” Louisa pressed. That was how it usually went; Maggie would make contact with the spirits, and offer up all sorts of secrets and forgotten facts about the buildings they explored. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she assumed it was because Harris was feeding her titbits he’d researched beforehand, to make it look as though his boss really was communing with the spirits.

“Not yet, my dear, but there is so much pain here. So much pain.”

“Upstairs?”

“That is the heart of the house,” the old actress declared.

They climbed one after the other, Harris one step behind the old woman, the others bringing up the rear. Close to the top, the driver said, “Where did the dwarf go? I don’t see him?”

Zack shook his head. “He wasn’t with us when we came in.”

“But you were talking to him as we walked up the hill from the granite monolith,” Harris said. “I saw you.” Zack nodded. “So where did he go?”

“I don’t know. Maggie was doing her thing on the threshold, and when I looked around he was gone.”

“Frankly, I don’t like the sound of that.”

They reached the top.

“Do you feel anything, Maggie?” Louisa asked, steering them back to the exploration. That was always the most popular part of an episode. Audiences lapped up the stuff where they moved from room to room trying to freak each other out. Of course, they wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much if they knew that most of the time it was bullshit. But the fact that some of the time it wasn’t was enough to keep her cashing the pay checks.

“It’s colder up here, don’t you feel it? It’s like we’ve moved into another zone within the house. There is no love here. Not like downstairs. Downstairs was a family space. I could almost hear the children opening up their presents come Christmas morning, and smell the heady smells of cooking. But up here, this is private. This is his place.”

Zack gave a sigh that made everyone turn to look at him.

Maggie shot him a glare that silenced him.

“There are several doors up here, and another staircase. It’s a huge house,” Louisa narrated as they opened the first of several doors. “There are all sorts of little twists and turns, nooks and crannies and other places to explore in this storybook house. It’s like something out of a Disney fairy tale. There is a little side staircase here that leads up to a single room set into the eaves of the roof, and another staircase there that goes up to another room that I think must be in the turret.” Beside her, Zack nodded.

“Storybook architecture was a charming, often whimsical school of building that created a lot of one of a kind homes, where the only constraints were the designers’ imaginations. Houses built in this style can differ massively from one to the next, making the style itself hard to define. Think witches’ cottages and like you said, Disney princesses. And if you look here,” he indicated one of the walls in front of them, “you’ll see that the building is actually sloping, and there’s a slight curvature to the wall?” It was hard to see in the green light of the camera, and harder in the dark, but no one was arguing with Zack as he painted his mental picture of the house’s past. “Most storybook houses are deceptively small, it’s all about peekaboo doors and hidden rooms off the main passageways, little tricks of architectural design that delight the people who choose to make their homes in them. John Ruskin, the British writer and philosopher, famously said: Old buildings are not ours. They belong, partly to those who built them, and partly to the generations of Mankind who are to follow us. The dead still have their right in them ... and it does not pass away with their death. I think there is something to that, don’t you?”

“Given the nature of our show, yes, I rather like that,” Louisa agreed as she opened another door.

There was little remarkable about the room beyond save for the fact that it seemed incredibly well preserved.

She went in, running her fingers across every surface.

There was a film of dust covering everything, and more than a few cobwebs, but otherwise, the room, like the rest of the house, seemed to be trapped in time.

“Anything?” Zack asked when she was finally out on the landing again.

She shook her head.

“Maggie?”

The actress turned to the camera, pursing her lips and shaking her head ever so slightly.

“So, this is a waste of time then?” Daphne asked. “It really is just a dead zone. A normal old house in an anything but normal town?”

“Waste of time?” Maggie growled. “Of course not. Just because the house is quiet at the moment does not mean that it will remain so. We are a long way from the witching hour. We need to spend the night here. The whole night. Give the old place a chance to offer up her secrets.”

They said nothing for a while as they moved from room to room, familiarizing themselves with the peculiar layout of the house.

Louisa climbed a narrow staircase where each step seemed far more worn down than the last until it finally opened up into the turret room. It was some sort of reading room, the only window offering a view of the monolith down the hill. There was a candle on the window ledge that burned halfway down to the nub, with wax gathering all around the brass dish it was set in. The flame flickered momentarily in the draught from the window, casting shadows across the wall of books that, given the illusion of the moonlight and the skeletal limbs of a tree in the yard outside, looked eerily like an old man rummaging through the stacks. The illusion was banished almost as quickly as it appeared, answering, she thought, one of the questions she’d had about the house from outside.

She crossed to the window, and thought about snuffing the candle out, but didn’t. Instead she stood there for a full minute, looking down the hill towards the ancient granite monolith. There was still no sign of the Welsh soul murderers out there, though equally she couldn’t see the dwarf, either.

She looked around the room one final time, taking in the battered old leather arm chair and the book still open on the small table beside it. The spine was well creased. It wasn’t in English, she realized, looking at the spine. L’antechambre. French. She hadn’t studied French since High School, and even then hadn’t been very good at it. The only thing she could make out from the jacket copy was something about the streets of Manhattan and the promise that the story within this book was quite bizarre, with a universe peopled by phantoms. She set the book aside, knowing how the lead character, Sam Feary, felt living in a world inhabited by ghosts.

She went back down to join the others.

“So, is that it? Have we looked in every room?”

“There’s a door in the lounge downstairs,” Zack said. “I’m guessing it goes down to the cellar.”

“Well at least this isn’t a creepy fucking house, eh?” Grayson said, grinning. “I mean, middle of the night, sneaking down into the cellar of an abandoned house. You know if this was a horror movie one of us would die down there.”

“Jeez, you’re a cheerful soul,” Harris said, shaking his head.

The others looked at him, but no one seemed overly happy at the idea of forcing their way down into the cellar. Even Maggie wasn’t saying anything about how it would be good TV, and that was always her mantra in situations like this. Still, the cellar was always the place they left for last, because even if they were only playing at ghost hunting they were the absolute least pleasant places in any house, ghosts or no ghosts.

Indeed, Grayson was the only one who ever seemed to enjoy their journeys below the surface, and that was only for the challenge of shooting the scenes. He would curse for days about just how damned difficult it was to get a decent shot in those cramped confines. Really, what he wanted was Louisa and Daphne to pat him on the back and say what a great job he was doing, she knew that full well. Louisa smiled toward the cameraman. He still had it perched on his shoulder, but for once the tell-tale recording light was off.

That was unlike him. Normally he kept the cameras rolling. Of course the camera he was using today was a hybrid, part traditional film, part digital streaming the signal back to the RV, so maybe he was preserving film for later in the investigation?

They were all falling into their natural roles.

Zack’s job was to prove that there was always a rational explanation for the stuff they encountered, like the light that never burned out and the ghostly silhouette of the man up in the turret room’s window—which she’d already figured was an illusion conjured by the bare branches of the tree limbs and the moonlight—while Maggie Carlisle’s was to show that there wasn’t.

Harris was a new addition, which, Louisa assumed, had more to do with what Maggie had been through back at the pond than any desire to put himself into the picture. The man was not one for being the center of attention and seemed far happier behind the wheel where he didn’t have to talk to anyone.

Daphne was their easily spooked scream queen. She hadn’t exactly volunteered for the role, but after a dozen investigations the boys had worked out exactly how to spook her, and she played it up for the camera. As Maggie said, ratings, darlings, it’s all about the ratings.

That was how the show worked and if something worked, why fix it?

“The cellar can wait. Let’s bring all the equipment inside and get everything set up before midnight. I want everything in place for the witching hour. Any kind of anomaly, we’re capturing it,” Zack said.

She nodded. “There is something really strange about this place. I don’t know what it is, but in a town full of ghosts that’s happy to put on the kind of show we saw on the way here ... this dead zone feels like a black hole at the heart of it all.”

Before Zack could agree there came a sudden clack, clack, clack from somewhere above them. Maggie Carlisle raised a finger to her lips, but no one made a sound save for the faint click as Grayson turned his camera on.

“You were in the turret room,” Zack said, looking at her.

She nodded.

“Was there anything up there?”

She shook her head. “A reading room. Lots of books. A candle in the window—”

“The light from outside?” Daphne asked.

She nodded again. “It was just the stub of a candle. I didn’t see any matches. I don’t know how much longer it will burn, an hour, maybe two.”

“Assuming it is a candle and not the memory of one,” Maggie offered. “Old places like this, they contain echoes ... they’re not ghosts, per se, but trace memories.”

“A light that won’t burn out?”

“Maybe it was important to the house? Part of a ritual? The owner could retreat at night to the comfort of the reading room, light a candle, settle down in his favorite armchair and read a few pages of a beloved book. There are worse things for a building to remember than those little happinesses,” the old psychic said.

“Was there anything up there that could make that sort of noise?”

She thought about it.

“No.”

“How many turrets are there? Do you remember?”

She thought about it, and was about to say one, when she remembered a second sharp point rising up from the back of the house. “Two,” she said.

“Then we need to find a way into the second tower, because that’s where this noise is coming from.”

“It’s got to be close,” Zack said. “For it to carry so clearly.”

“You’re thinking like a man grounded in the physical world,” Maggie Carlisle admonished, as though talking to a child. “Sound on the spirit plane isn’t limited by such mundanities. It carries if it wants to be heard...and this sound, it wants to be heard.”

––––––––

“Okay, we split up and look for the hidden staircase,” Louisa said, taking control for the camera. She was the hostess, after all. She needed to maintain an element of control at all times, even as the narrative threatened to get away from them. She was the one who held it all together. “It’s got to be around here somewhere. What was it you were saying about these storybook houses, Zack? They’re meant to be whimsical? Quirky?” He nodded. “Okay, so, let’s look for hidden panels, false bookcases.” Even as she said it, she realized exactly where the hidden stairway had to be. “Anything like that.”

It was important that she was the authentic one, too. Maggie could play the over the top angle, faking otherworldly possession and channeling the voices of the dear and not so dearly departed. Daphne could pretend to be scared, laying it on thick for the camera, but Louisa was the audience’s way into the show. She was their anchor. They trusted her. That meant she needed to be honest with them. When she was scared, she was really scared, and on television, that showed.

And all the time they could hear the steady clack, clack, clack.

“You think it’s rats in the walls?” said Daphne. “It could be rats, couldn’t it? Or bats? Do you think we’ve woken them up?” She was rambling, the words coming out of her mouth faster than her brain was thinking.

“I think we may have woken whatever it is that lives in this place.” Maggie Carlisle was looking straight into the camera. She’d turned and dropped her shoulder slightly to be sure that Grayson caught her at the best angle.

It was her schtick. He knew how to play the light for her. Any minute now she would pretend to touch the consciousness of whatever haunted this place, Louisa thought uncharitably. But then she remembered what had drawn them here: that there was nothing. They were in the only house in the entire town that wasn’t in some way shrieking its paranormal potential. So why did it feel like this place was the fount of it all? The nexus? Because it did. Even she could feel it, and she was about as psychic as Uri Geller.

The moment that Maggie relaxed out of her on-screen persona Grayson stopped filming and stood upright again.

“Please, dear,” Maggie said, her voice returning to its normal pitch as she placed a hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “It’s imperative that you remain in character whenever Grayson is filming. You defer to me when I offer a glimpse of the true nature of this place. That’s your job. You look frightened and rely on me to give you assurance. Beyond that, the audience doesn’t need to even know you are there. This isn’t the Daphne show, it is the Maggie Carlisle show with a supporting cast of Zack, the sceptic, and Louisa the pretty face. Understood? Everything else is ‘the suspension of disbelief’, dear girl. Now, let us find those stairs, shall we?”

“There has to be a way up to it from the reading room, it’s the only thing that makes sense. A false passage built in behind the bookcase? That was where the shadow man played with the books. I bet his bony finger stretches out to fall upon the book you need to pull out to reveal the hidden stairs.”

“Then let us go and find out?” Maggie said.

Zack really wasn’t a fan of being ordered about, and theoretical equal billing or not, Maggie acted like she was the Queen of All Things.

The camera light came back on as they started to climb the narrow stairs to the reading room.

There were whispers about a live show—a proper live one, a full night in the country’s most haunted house, as opposed to this kind of pre-recorded show edited and cut together pretending to be in real time—of course if that ever happened the world would see what a fraud Maggie Carlisle was, so obviously the Network were keen to protect their multimillion dollar investment a little while longer.

He followed up the stairs, second to last. Grayson filmed over his shoulder.

They crammed into the turret room. Zack noticed the room’s only painting, of a man seemingly falling through the sky, feathers falling away from him like he was some kind of human bird. The words I AM THE BIRD were scrawled across it. He found a note inside the book, with a few random sentences scrawled in crabbed, spidery handwriting: Tower Man. Murder Victim. Rainy Day People? Which seemed to tell a story all of their own.

There was a small framed picture of a white-bearded old man on the bookcase. When he looked closer, he realized that what he’d assumed to be cigarette smoke around the man’s head was actually the smoke of ghosts, as though the man was haunted by his own demons. It was really rather striking.

“Strange room,” he said, holding up the picture. “I assume this was the writer?”

“Writer?”

“Yeah, Bilis said the last resident was a writer. Looking at this headshot I’m assuming the faces in the smoke are meant to represent the characters he created.”

“Or those he was yet to create still haunting him,” Maggie suggested in that freighted voice full of sinister omen she put on for the camera.

Grayson played the camera over the room, settling finally on the bookcase.

Zack saw what Louisa had meant about the shadow man. The skeletal limbs of the trees beyond the window combined with the moonlight to cast an elongated slender man shadow that reached out along the spines of the books to settle upon a single volume. He read the title off the spine: The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Flying Saucers. The gilded letters on the spine were well worn and faded. As he took the book off the shelf he heard a deep click come from somewhere behind the heavy mahogany bookcase as the whole thing swung forward an inch away from the wall, revealing a crack of darkness back there.

He couldn’t help but smile at that, a proper hidden stairway. It was the perfect whimsy for such a wonderful old place.

He moved around to the side and worked his fingers into the gap. He expected the whole thing to take some moving, but it was on a well-oiled hinge that eased soundlessly open at the barest touch.

Between the silent mechanism, still beautifully maintained, and the candle stub burning out in the window he was beginning to think they were being had, and that this was all some elaborate hoax being played out by the townsfolk to put their little berg on the map. He said as much. “You get the feeling that people are having a laugh at our expense? First, they stage an attempted drowning of Maggie and save her themselves, then the hero of the hour disappears on us as we reach the ‘only house in town that isn’t haunted’.” He shrugged. “Look around you, this place hasn’t been lying empty for the last four years. Sure there’s some dust, but it doesn’t feel empty. They’re still running the heating, for fuck’s sake. We’re being played, people. There’s someone hiding up there, waiting for us. Someone who sneaks out night after night to light a candle in that window. It’s all a big fucking game and I hate being played.”

He looked at the others, ignoring the camera. That was the beauty of the fly on the wall documentary style of shooting, these seemingly behind the scenes moments where the team let their guard down and the so-called truth won out.

“Why?” Louisa asked. It was only one word, and how he chose to answer it, be it why would they do that, or why do you think that or any of many other whys, it didn’t matter. It gave him a chance to fulfil his role in the group, to challenge, to argue against and disprove if fakery was to be found. The lighting was poor, reduced by the filter of grime on the window that added an eerie quality to the natural dullness of the moonlight.

There was a huff from Maggie, but she didn’t talk over him. She was an old pro, at the very least.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why anyone would do it. But you saw how they were around us back at the Silver Bough. The way they reacted when we said who we were. Everything changed.”

“But what about what we saw in the town itself? The children playing, the desperate father?”

He shook his head again. He didn’t have the answers. “I’m trying to keep an open mind, but there’s too much wrong with this place, an old haunted house up on the hill overlooking the town? It’s like it’s straight out of a story. Hell, the house itself is a storybook house. That’s too cute for words.”

“Okay.” Louisa didn’t agree or disagree, she was content to simply let him talk. “You think what, that this is some sort of stunt for the writer’s new book? Get the house on television, do some sort of big reveal, a grand haunted town hoax, and you get the kind of viral publicity money can’t buy?”

He nodded. “I’m not discounting it.”

“Just as you cannot discount a supernatural entity,” Maggie said, smoothly. Always there with the right word to keep the show on track.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” Zack said. “We have to follow the correct investigative methodology. Everyone knows my personal beliefs, there are no ghosts, or supernatural phenomena, but to remove the possibility that you are wrong is foolish. We learn in science by disproving the discoveries and laws of those who came before us. Perhaps it is my destiny to be the one to disprove the doubters?” He’d recited the same line, or some slight variation of it, so many times that loyal viewers had to be getting bored with it. But as far as catchphrases went, promising that you had an open mind in these situations wasn’t such a bad one to have. And it was always enough to placate Maggie for a moment at least.

Again, from up there, they heard the now familiar clack, clack, clack. There was a steady rhythm to it.

“Then I guess we need to go up, don’t we?” Grayson said.

“Maybe we should unload the equipment first, get properly tooled up before we march on up there?” Louisa offered. “We only get one shot at recording this.”

“I’ll go down with you,” Zack offered. “The rest of you stay here. Grayson, keep the camera rolling. No one goes up or down until Lou and I are back, okay?”

“Got it,” the cameraman said, stepping aside to let them go back down.

––––––––

“So how much of this do we need?” Louisa asked over her shoulder.

The baggage section of the RV was chock full of travel cases and an array of tech that could quite literally monitor everything. In all the months he’d worked with Maggie he couldn’t claim a single genuine recording, though there had been plenty of times, including the house on Orchard Street, that had promised so much and delivered so little in terms of genuine paranormal activity. Of course, none of his lambasting them over that debacle made it into the final cut. The director wanted to make sure an air of mystery remained around the place. It was the same with the school they’d worked on a few months ago and the old New York Speakeasy they’d busted as a fraud. They all promised so much in the way of genuine phenomena, and they turned up woefully short of actual ghosts. Because there were no ghosts. There was no boundary between the living and the dead. You died, your energy bled back into the universe, you ceased to be. That was it. All this superstitious nonsense about evil entities, poltergeists, exorcisms and manifestations was just that, nonsense.

He’d been tempted more than once to feed Maggie Carlisle some bullshit story about a little girl lost, some child who had been stolen away before her time into the land of the dead, and offer up a made up name so that she might give herself away as a fraud on camera. He’d gone so far as to work out exactly what seed he’d plant, too, a nice little anagram that spelled out Maggie Carlisle is a fake. But, for now at least, the money was too good for him to think about biting the hand that fed.

It took the best part of five minutes to unpack the RV and haul the equipment to the house.

“Living room,” he said.

She lugged a trunk up the steps and through the door.

He followed her in with several camera bags and other equipment hanging off his arms.

It took him a moment to realize that there was something different about the room.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” he muttered, seeing a log blazing away in the grate. The flames licked up its sides, radiating heat.

“It’s been cleaned as well,” Louisa said. “And well. Look around the grate. All of the ash from the old fire has been gathered up.”

“Who the fuck’s been down here cleaning? Jesus, you give that old bat one simple instruction and she has to go and do something completely different.” Zack saw that it wasn’t just the grate that had been cleaned, either. The thick patina of dust had disappeared from the window, and moonlight streamed in without the filter of grime.

There was no way one of the others could have done that in the five minutes they’d been outside.

They exchanged a glance.

The only sound in the room was the steady tick, tick, tick of a clock on the mantel, its pendulum swinging from side to side.

It had been silent before.

“Of course it wasn’t me!” Maggie protested when they yelled up the stairs to the others. “I’ve been up here all the time. Just ask Grayson, he’s had me on camera the whole time.”

Zack said nothing. He knew what was coming. He’d played right into her hands.

“You know what this is, don’t you, Zachariah? This is evidence of supernatural phenomena. This is what you wanted. The ghosts of this place are reaching out to us, letting us know they are there.”

He shook his head. It was the last thing he’d wanted. He resisted the temptation to point out that this was supposed to be the only place in miles that wasn’t subjected to paranormal activity.

The old woman stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at him triumphantly.

“Stay there. I’m going to bring the last few crates in.” It gave him a few minutes to think without her wittering on about how the spirits were treating them to a Dickensian story. He had an idea how they’d done it; a second stairway, perhaps from behind the locked door down here up directly to the turret room, by-passing them on the landing. It was the only explanation that made sense. While Maggie had been upstairs trying to get a tune out of the long departed, whoever had been hiding in that turret room had come down and lit the fire, started the clock, and cleaned up, deliberately trying to rattle them.

But five minutes wasn’t long enough, was it?

It was if the whole town was in on the hoax.

It was a better explanation than Maggie’s ghostly fire starter.

He looked at the façade, trying to arrange what he knew about the layout of the storybook house behind the frontage, to see if there was any obvious space that could have accommodated a second stairway.

Without thinking about it, he retrieved a crowbar from the RV. He told himself it was so that he could break the door down in the living room, but there was always the added bonus that he could use it to brain any idiot sneaking around trying to make them look stupid.

“Hey honeys, I’m home,” he called as he came back into the house.

There was no response.

“Maggie? Louisa?”

Silence.

Bastards were trying to fuck with him.

He shook his head.

He looked through the doorway into the living room.

The fire still crackled away in the hearth and the clock still ticked on. The room was empty, so he went upstairs, calling out again as he climbed the risers.

There was no sign of anyone on the landing, so he continued up to the reading room, calling out again.

The bookcase was well away from the wall, the hidden staircase exposed. A bare lightbulb lit the cramped stairway up.

He called their names again. No one answered him.

He began to climb, the hairs in the nape of his neck prickling against the collar of his shirt.

It was the closest thing he had to a sixth sense, but he knew with absolute certainty that there was something wrong.

“Maggie? Louisa? This isn’t funny. Where are you guys?” Zack called again.

Silence.

It took him a moment to realize what he wasn’t hearing.

There was no clack, clack, clack.

“Here,” Louisa said, behind him. Somehow he’d passed them in the darkness of the house.

“Jesus, you scared the crap out of me.”

She smiled at that, and he knew Grayson had got it all on camera and would enjoy making him look stupid later.

“Where’s Maggie?” Daphne asked from just within the narrow stairwell.

“Isn’t she with you?” he asked.

“Nope. We were waiting on the landing, then she said she heard something and went off to investigate.”

He sighed that familiar frustration. “And you just let her? Where’s Harris?”

“With her.”

Which was something. How much trouble could she get into with her bodyguard in tow? He nodded to himself.

The stairs were steep and narrow and uncarpeted. Grayson switched the camera to night vision and killed the light. They used torches to light the path up.

He heard the scuff of one of the others stumbling and felt a hand on his back as they scrambled at him for support.

He reached back, offering a hand in support, feeling fingers slip through his as he took another step up, his help no longer needed.

They climbed to a small landing where a narrow window provided the small amount of moonlight, barely enough to illuminate a tiny patch of bare boards which, as far as he could tell, was an even narrower hallway between the walls, which crossed the width of the storybook house before opening up onto another set of stairs that doubled back on themselves, rising straight into the second turret room above them.

Every board creaked and groaned as they moved through the passageway.

The passage was barely wide enough for them to walk single file without having to turn sideways, which explained how it could be hidden so easily within the dimensions of the house without it being obvious that the rooms were too small. How many other passages were there offering hidden routes around the old home? Enough for someone to sneak down and light a fire, he thought, more sure than ever that he was right.

He bounced the crowbar off the side of his leg as he walked.

He pointed upwards.

Grayson nodded, moving in behind him to frame the shot.

“Is that really necessary?” Louisa asked, looking pointedly at the metal crowbar.

“Who says it’s a ghost waiting up there for us,” he said, bouncing the bar off his leg meaningfully.

She just shook her head.

“Ready?”

The others nodded one by one.

He climbed the short flight of stairs, Grayson coming up behind him.

He didn’t know what he had expected to find, but it wasn’t this. It was a bookworm’s paradise. Every inch of floor was piled up with stacks of books that seemed to form a maze within a deceptively large room. Every inch of wall space was lined with bookshelves, rammed full with books, files, and folders spilling yellowed papers. The only light came from a single narrow slit cut into the ceiling.

He followed the stacks of precariously balanced books to the center of the room. It opened up into a space dominated by a large wooden desk. There was an old Royal typewriter on it, a stack of pages beside it.

There was no sign of Maggie or Harris, or anyone else for that matter.

“Maggie? This isn’t funny. Where are you hiding?”

Nothing.

He walked across to the desk, running his fingers over the leather inlay.

Grayson followed him into the room, filming the stacks. There had to be ten, twenty thousand books up here.

“Where are they?” he asked the women, but of course they had no answer. He was beginning to think the old woman was in on it, and she’d been spirited away down one of the hidden passageways so it looked like she’d just been swallowed up by the old house. There was nothing to say she’d made it up here.

Louisa went over to the desk and tapped out a few letters on the old typewriter, which clack, clack, clacked in response. “Well, I guess that answers that, at least,” she said.

A roll of paper had been fed into the machine, rather than a single sheet. It spilled out the back of the old typewriter and onto the floor.

Some of it had already been written on, Zack saw, but much of the paper remained unused on the roll.

On the floor beside the desk someone had made a perfect origami replica of the storybook house they were in out of one of the old manuscripts. Above the door the words Cold House named the place. The turrets, the steep pitch of the roof, the haunted aspect of the place, they were all beautifully rendered in miniature. The work that must have gone into it was incredible. She leaned in closer to get a better look at the detail of the model, and realized that the words of several chapters swirled around the façade, telling the story of a dark, strange city which may exist, in a time which may have been, in a cold, cold house as big as Cleveland, on streets the color of blood, among a thousand ghosts, and people who watch but barely speak, where a man and a woman, separated by nightmare, search for each other and find an eternal winter, see faces they do not recognize, and find love, torment, sacrifice. She found herself getting lost in the words, as though she was somehow being pulled into their magical place.

Louisa pushed herself back to her feet and shook her head, like she was trying to shake off the weird malaise that had settled on her as she’d become lost in the storyteller’s strange paper storybook house.

Zack couldn’t see where Maggie and Harris could have gone, but the prickle at the back of his neck wasn’t going anywhere fast. He rested the crowbar on the desk, thinking.

He wasn’t about to admit that he was beginning to get worried, especially not with the camera rolling.

––––––––

Zack walked around the room again, another full circuit.

There was so much junk in the turret room, like the mouldering stacks of books, including a broken mirror that leaned up against a precarious tower of hardbacks. The gilt frame was intact, bar a few bumps and scratches, and looked to be in decent condition, but the silvered glass had been shattered into hundreds if not thousands of pieces. Some were still in the frame, lots of the bigger pieces, but hundreds of tiny shards and splinters lay on the floor around it.

Zack thought nothing of it for a moment, but then saw the thick white candle—a match for the one in the window of the reading room that seemed to burn endlessly—with rivulets of congealed wax down its side, sitting between volumes on a nearby shelf.

Even from a distance it was obvious there were a number of strange markings in the wax. Grayson must have seen what he was looking at, because he’d moved the focus to him as he stooped to take a closer look at the candle.

“What is it?” Louisa asked over his shoulder as she moved into shot. It didn’t take much for her to slip back into her presenter persona.

Zack held it up so that both she and the camera could see and turned it around slowly. While he couldn’t say precisely what every marking was, he had a pretty good idea of what they were all about.

“They are runes,” he said. “I’m not entirely sure of the origin, but they are almost certainly occult.”

“Can you translate them?”

Zack knew that she was every bit as familiar with them as he was. The question was for the benefit of the viewers. That was part of her job as their window onto the world, to ask the questions they’d want to ask. “It’s not exactly my area of expertise,” he admitted, “but the presence of a candle combined with a mirror is fairly common in black magic rituals.” He turned the candle again to make it look like he was studying it, but the truth was that he was just deciding what to say. “There are a few symbols on here that I am familiar with, but several I don’t know. I can make a reasonable guess about what this was intended to do, though.”

“Go on,” she encouraged.

“It’s part of a ritual.”

“Black magic? Is that what you are saying? That whoever owned this place was involved in black magic?”

“Well, let’s just say I’m confident that’s what someone would like us to think, which isn’t the same thing.”

There was plenty he could say about being hoaxed, but almost none of it would make the final cut, so what was the point? The minute he went off on one Grayson would just cut the filming, which just left him feeling like he was drowning in so much bull-shit.

Still holding the candle, he stood up so he could look straight into the camera.

“It’s all a load of nonsense, though, isn’t it? So many little things, like the clean windows downstairs, have been set up to make us look stupid. If we’re gullible, we fall for it. Are we gullible, Louisa? Or are we wise to this litany of parlor tricks? I’d like to think that we’re smart enough to realize that there’s no way this pace has been empty for four or five years. It’s lived in. Sure, there’s dust, and a kinda frozen in time quality about things, but that’s something we ascribe to the house, it’s not real.”

“Are you telling me this is some kind of hoax?”

“Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”

“But what about Maggie and Harris?”

“I’m sure the old fraud’s in on it,” he said, and winced as the word escaped his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say that.

“What? You think Maggie set this whole thing up?”

“She did. She arranged the shoot, sorted it with the Network, arranged the finance, even arranged for the RV and all the new equipment we’re playing with. Hell, she even insisted on her Man Friday coming with us.” Which was all true. Circumstantial, as the cops would say, but true. “So, forgive me for thinking she’s not far away, probably watching us through some hidden camera waiting to jump out and go boo to this ghost.”

Louisa shook her head. She didn’t look anything like convinced.

“Look, even if she’s not in on it, they’re pranksters at worst. They’ll let her go as soon as they know we’re onto them.”

“So, what do we do now?”

This time he could not be sure if he was looking at Louisa the presenter or Louisa the friend. The red light was off, so he had to assume friend. He answered accordingly.

“We wait,” he said.

Daphne coughed, a polite little cough, cough, cough, to get their attention.

“You’ve got a suggestion, Daph?”

She nodded. “It’s the mirror. They are usually used in reversal spells by someone who thinks they’ve been cursed, aren’t they?” He nodded. They were. “So, why would someone think they’ve been cursed if this is supposed to be the only place in town that isn’t haunted?”

He wondered that, too.

He was trying to construct a narrative in his mind that made sense, and that meant trying to think of it from the perspective of the pranksters, which meant thinking of it like a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

But it was Louisa who had the answer. “Maybe it worked. Did you ever consider that? Maybe being haunted is the curse. Maybe that’s why this house is the only dead spot in the entire town, and it was that ritual that drove them away?”

“That makes sense I suppose,” Grayson said, thinking it through. “Or at least as much sense as anything else.”

“Okay, so bear with me,” Louisa said. “But maybe we need to reverse whatever they did, somehow undo the ritual, so we can find out what’s really going on here?”

“Which sounds absolutely batshit crazy, Lou. Reverse a reversal?” Zack said. “What do you think we might learn?”

She looked at him like she wanted to crush him with the sheer intensity of her mind alone, and said the next thing slowly, as though speaking to a particularly slow on the uptake child. “We bring whoever was banished back.”

“You heard me saying this was all a hoax, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Louisa said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with you, Zack.”

Somewhere in the middle of the exchange Grayson had set the camera going again. The small red light betrayed its prying eye.

Zack wanted to tell her that she was talking nonsense, but Daphne was nodding and smiling.

“Okay, so, what are you suggesting, Lou?”

“I’m saying that if someone’s spirit was banished from this place by ritual, and we can undo that ritual, then maybe we can get some definitive answers, once and for all, about what it’s like on the other side, about blurring the lines between the living and the dead. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To hunt for the truth.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to just go along with every stupid hoax we encounter, though does it? And have you ever, and I mean ever, encountered a single moment of truth in any of these supposed black magic rituals? Honestly? I think it’s a waste of time, but I’m not about to stop you. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do until madam shows her face, is it? So, I bow to you. Like I said, black magic isn’t my area. Any idea of what needs to be done?”

Laura looked to Daphne, no doubt hoping that she had a better idea than she did.

“They broke the mirror, so it stands to reason we have to put it back together again.”

“Knock yourself out,” Zack said, not exactly doing his best to avoid sounding petty. “I hope you’re good at puzzles. But consider this, there are plenty of other rituals that a candle and mirror can be used in, aren’t there? And what about the second candle in the window that seemingly refuses to burn out? Linked? A whole other ritual, or like the fire in the grate downstairs, someone sneaking around lighting fires behind us?”

“I don’t know,” Louisa said. “But like you always say, I’m keeping an open mind.”

He smiled at that.

“Where the hell is Maggie?” he muttered.

“Maybe she went outside,” Daphne suggested.

It was possible.

No doubt she’d taken it upon herself to wander off and commune with the ghosts of Mallam Cross.

It wasn’t as though they could call the cops; she’d been missing for less than half an hour.

––––––––

Zack let them get on with it.

He sat himself down at the desk and ran his fingers over the keys of the old manual typewriter. He hadn’t used one like this since he was a child. His father had owned an old portable, but that was nothing like this with its round pearl keys. He felt the urge to simply add the first few words that came into his head to the manuscript fed into the old machine, but imagining the writer sitting here, hunched over whatever masterpiece he would never get to finish ... it just felt wrong.

Grayson was filming Louisa and Daphne as they painstakingly tried to reassemble the razor-edged puzzle now that they had laid the frame on the bare wooden floorboards.

Once they’d brushed the tiny, dust-like shards away there didn’t seem to be all that many actual pieces. He still couldn’t imagine them finding a way to piece all of the minute fragments back together, though. It felt like a pointless exercise. But then, like ghosts, there was no such thing as magic, was there?

He shook his head and caught himself leaning forward to read the last few words on the paper where it had fed through the roller.

The last few letters were a jumble where Louisa had hit a few random keys.

Zack gathered up a few of the pages to read.

By the time he’d reached the bottom of the first page his mouth was dry, his tongue a little too large inside it, cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

It had to be another trick being played on them.

Had to be.

But for the life of him he couldn’t imagine how they could do it, unless they were being hoaxed by David fucking Blaine.

He rolled back half a dozen more pages, unable to resist skim reading as he did.

He found a break in the narrative and started to read properly.

He was only a couple of lines in when he knew the others needed to be in on this.

“You guys, leave that for a minute. I think you’re going to want to hear this,” he said.

They looked up at him but stopped what they were doing.

Grayson turned the camera on him.

Zack started to read aloud, telling them a story unlike anything they’d ever head, but very much like one they’d lived.

––––––––

The impossibly large vehicle pulled up to a halt some distance from the old house. The track was overgrown and deeply rutted. On both sides it was as though the fields were trying to reclaim what had not so long ago been a road. The driver was unsure as to whether it would be able to negotiate the track without doing some serious damage to its suspension, and assuming it could, was there room for the RV’s wide turning circle or would he be forced to reverse his way back out of there when it came time to leave?

Six others waited for him by the ancient standing stone: three men, three women.

There is one of the other kind amongst their number. He is aware of the house’s true nature, and knows that there is no way he can make it all the way to the door without facing his undoing, and yet he is willing to walk with them to the last step. Such is the threat that the brothers pose to Mallam Cross.

There must be sacrifices in this life, and Bilis is willing to give everything to keep his precious Deldrid safe. That is the measure of the dwarf king.

Standing side by side, the newcomers look up at the house on the boundary, unaware that just as they study it the house is looking down at them, judging them, and finding them unworthy.

The spirit waits for them inside, watching out of the lonely window where the candle still burns as an elderly woman leads the way. One of the men—a muscular fellow, a Vet perhaps, given his physique, or an ex-con—offers her an arm to lean on.

The others seem a little more reticent about approaching, as though sensing something in the air. But they follow. They stand on the threshold, wondering how they might force entry, not realizing that the house has been waiting for them and all they need do is push the door and it will open in welcome. It has waited a long time for this moment. It would not keep them outside. Not when it has such wonders to offer within its walls.

From the moment they set foot inside the old Wright place they find themselves struggling to make sense of what they know, or thought they knew. The questions lose shape in their minds as they walk through the empty rooms. Everything they have heard about the old place is that it has been empty for years, and that much is true. Nothing lives here. The old woman believes so desperately in the notion of an afterlife she claims she can commune with the dead, but having walked side by side with a man who died before she was ever born for these long days it is obvious she has no special talent. What she doesn’t understand is that the dead can choose who they speak with, and this one spirit has taken a special interest in looking over her.

But then, there is a lot Maggie Carlisle does not understand about the second layer to existence. The spirits they have seen in Mallam Cross are not what they seem, though they will learn the truth of the ribbon soon enough, and what it means to this place.

They move methodically through the old place, checking the rooms for evidence of anything beyond what they call the dead zone, anything that might serve as an explanation to the strangeness of Mallam Cross, but see only what they are meant to see.

There are sounds though, coming from up above. They are distant at first but grow more and more insistent as they move through the rooms. They see the portrait in the turret room and still don’t understand the nature of Wright’s demons swirling around his head, but they will, soon. It is almost time. Again, they hear the distinct clatter of the old typewriter keys hammering away in the hidden room, stirring their curiosity. The ribbon is calling to them. They hear the story unfurling around them even if they don’t understand. But then the world is a slippery place and can so easily be misunderstood, where what you think you know, even the nature of identity and who you think you are, is open for manipulation and confusion as your sense of self blurs and the world you thought yours is in fact little more than imagination, and what is written is more real, more substantial, and less transient. But that is the nature of reality. It is every bit as fleeting as time. Who remembers everything as it was? Who, though, remembers something as they hoped it would be, or wanted it so desperately to be? Who even remembers themselves as they were when the sense of self is so deceptive. The ribbon adds permeance to things. Immortality. For once it is written it cannot be forgotten. That is the magic of the ribbon. Even as you forget yourself, even as you lose all sense of who you were, it will remember for you.

That is its greatest gift.

That is its cruelest curse.

Because at the end you do not recognize yourself in its words, yet you know it must be you. That you shaped this world. That you are its creator and curator.

And the keys rattle on, weaving reality around the intruders in their world.

It is only a matter of time before they realize the secrets of the reading room and find the passageways that weave throughout the old house, offering up its secret heart. But they do not go up. Not yet.

The house sprawls around them, deceptively large, and while they believe they know all of its secret places they haven’t even begun to find half of them, so while they argue about the house and the lit fire and the candle that will not burn out, the elderly woman slips away unnoticed, venturing into a part of the old storybook house that is more part of the ground than it is of the building.

It is out of my reach.

As curious as she is, the woman without the gift will find nothing down there because there is nothing to find.

Everything that can be known, everything that can be learned and understood, every secret, every lie, they are here, but these intruders from the big city need to open their eyes if they are going to see.

The door to the turret staircase opens with the softest of sighs, catching the woman by surprise. She is delighted. She is convinced that the talents she has always claimed have finally revealed themselves as pure, and that she has the gift. She knows. This is her moment. It is just a tragedy that the camera isn’t there to record her triumph. That thought is fleeting. She can feel the presence waiting for her up there. She can feel the spirit of the house. She is not a fraud, whatever the sceptic might say. She has the gift.

She catches a glimpse of a shape and follows it through the doorway.

If she had called to the others, if she had waited for them, things might be different.

If, if, if ...

But she didn’t.

She was obsessed with the lie she had sold herself. She was driven by a version of her she thought she knew but in truth did not exist. She was such a stranger to herself that she had forgotten the truth of her soul. She could not speak to the dead.

But the dead could talk to her.

If only she knew that they were all around her, that she had hailed a taxi cab driven by a lost soul only the other day, that it had taken her through the city to a restaurant where diners who couldn’t imagine an ever after without the sensory delight of food chose to gather and dine on meals they could never taste, talking over their plates about lives they had long since stopped living. If only she could have seen them hanging around on the street corners beneath the sneakers tied to the overhead wires, or huddled in the cardboard boxes of the tent city down by the Hudson where the recently lost wait because they do not understand why this world has no need of them anymore when they so desperately need it. If only she could have glimpsed the shades still waiting graveside beneath the weeping willows of the old cemeteries long after the mourners had moved on, trying to come to terms with this second layer of existence. If only she could have understood that the brownstones of the city were haunted by the living, not the dead, and that no amount of wishing on her behalf would open up the afterlife for her to see before it was her time to walk through those same streets, unseen by the living, the irony of death being that a woman so desperate to talk to the dead when she was alive would be so desperate to talk to the living when she was dead.

But this was a woman who had never been happy with who she was and had worn new identities and new lives as easily as she had changed clothes. Always wanting to be somebody else, always needing to be different, to be seen as special.

She climbs the stairs to the turret room as fast as her old legs will allow, leaning on her companion for strength. She stumbles once, but he has her. He won’t let her fall.

A life’s dream is almost in her grasp.

She can hear the typewriter keys writing their reality onto the ribbon.

She sees me by the window, looking down to where the brothers try yet again in vain to breach the lifeless perimeter of this place, but they cannot get far beyond the stone before they fade away before my eyes. It is the fourth time in as many minutes I have watched them come rushing up the hill, naked in all their glory, only for them to stumble and stagger and fall short.

I know what they are of course, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy with his blood eagle emptiness. They are the damned disease that consumes me still, swallowing all of the people and places I have created. They are devourers. They seek out the Griffins and McIntyres and and and I can’t remember their names, they are lost to me. The first to go was a detective, Riggs ... no that wasn’t it. Briggs. Harry Briggs. He went looking for a dead woman in Silver Lake but found the brothers and now I cannot remember how his story ends. I can’t even remember their names now. I think of Jasmine McIntyre, but that’s not her name. She was someone else. It’s close, but not right. It’s not who she was. Janet? Janice...Janice McIntyre. How could I forget her when she lived inside me for so long?

They must be so frightened, my children.

Can they feel themselves slipping away, too? Is it contagious? Or does the ribbon protect them? That was why I created this place, to protect them. To give them somewhere to live on. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I am still here. And, turning to face the old woman and her handsome beau, I know that I am losing myself again. The brothers will eventually find their way to the house, tearing themselves open to devour all that remains of me. And will I go, finally? Or will I linger? I am not ready. There is so much inside of me I have forgotten, so much I need to send through the ribbon so that it may live on in my place. It is who I am.

I can’t imagine not being a writer. I’ve always enjoyed the process of developing my characters. They become long term friends in my life. I can visualize them at any time coming into a room watching me create another character. One time I had Ryerson Biergarten shaking his head at me as I wrote, “I am in the Bird.”

“Who are you?” she asks, as though party to my thoughts. She is struggling to catch her breath. I can feel her heart beat racing faster than it has done for years. The sheer thrill of being here is intoxicating. Her body is flooding with a rush of emotions stronger than any chemical high she might once have pushed into her veins.

But I do not answer her.

Remember, the dead choose who they speak with. Always.

It should be such an easy question: who are you? But that is the essence of my loss. I find it harder by the day to recall with any clarity who I am. Conversely, what used to be a bright brilliant mind wallows in fragments. I find myself unable to recall yesterday but to see with vivid clarity days over fifty years ago when I was just a boy with a headful of ghosts waiting to tell their stories to me. It is a heart-breaking realization that I am forgetting myself. That’s why I need this. Why these words become my way of remembering myself and all of the worlds I gave life to with my words. There is such simple magic in the ribbon and how the impacts of my thought become permanent as they filter through it. My one true hope is that the essence of who I am can live on through the ribbon, long after I have forgotten myself and find myself coming to these words as a stranger I used to know.

So I have no answer for her. It is far too complex a question for me in my current state.

Instead I settle into my seat before my old typewriter. The ribbon answers to my touch.

She comes closer, desperate to see what is being written.

Her hand trembles as she reaches out for the endless paper spooling out the back of the typewriter to gather on the bare floorboards.

––––––––

Zack stopped reading.

He glanced at the others.

They were as lost for words as he was.

So much of what he’d read barely made sense to him, and what did make sense was impossible, surely?

He could hear Grayson breathing behind him, the deep slow inhale and exhale as he got the shot of the paper he’d read.

“I don’t understand,” Louisa said, all thoughts of the camera gone. “How could someone write this? I mean ... it’s just happened. Or part of it did. We’ve just done that stuff ... ” She shook her head. “It’s got to be a hoax, like you said, Zack, a cruel, elaborate joke.” Because if it wasn’t, then the rest of it had to be true, didn’t it? The stuff about Maggie coming up here before them and finding the writer.

But nothing he’d read gave even the slightest clue what had happened to her or where she might have gone.

“Someone could have written the first part while they watched us walking up the track,” Daphne suggested. “If they’d been watching from the window they’d have seen Grayson coming in the RV and us waiting ... But the stuff about Bilis disappearing? The rest of it? The loss of self. The idea that the dead are among us all the time, that Maggie’s met so many of them but has been too blind to see?” She shivered at the prospect.

“You can’t see the front of the house from here, only out of the reading room window where the candle’s burning.” He was right, they were on the wrong side of the house for a view of the monolith and the approach road. “So, whoever wrote this watched us and then came up here to write what they’d seen.” He was thinking about the practicalities of it. The slight divergences from what had happened and what was written could easily be explained by an unreliable memory or haste as the writer needed to transcribe his thoughts before the memories slipped away. But why write it down at all? Why write something as mundane as their arrival at the old house?

“We’ve heard the typewriter,” Louisa said.

He nodded.

“We’re not alone in here, are we?” Daphne said.

This time he shook his head.

“I don’t like this place, Zack. I don’t like the house, the hillside, the standing stone, the whole town. It’s all wrong. All of it. They tried to drown Maggie out there, then we walk down a Main Street full of apparitions like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s not. None of it is natural. We shouldn’t be here.”

It was hard to argue with her way of thinking, but they were here, and as long as Maggie was missing they couldn’t just grab their bags and go. Not without her.

“Do you think they are still watching us?”

He looked around the strange room with its stacks of books, and realized that dozens upon dozens of them were the same titles, some with different covers, some identical, stacked in haphazard piles. There were manuscript pages, too. Zack didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he walked through some of the lines of books that made up the maze back to the stairs. The same name appeared again and again on so many of the spines. T.M. Wright. He didn’t recognize the name immediately but realized that the pages he’d just read had called this place the old Wright house, hadn’t they, and Bilis had said the last inhabitant had been a writer. He picked up the top book on the pile and started to flick through the pages.

––––––––

When I think about a ghost story, I think about children shivering around a campfire while an aging man with a long, austere face summons up—in resonant, wonderfully spectral tones—the way the misdeeds of the dead will soon be visited upon the living, and I think about the old gray houses that have had Evil implanted in them, and I think about crying in empty rooms, about cold spots, warm spots, hot spots, hounds of hell, men who hang themselves in attics, and in cellars, again and again and again.

And it’s all true.

I know it’s all true.

But there is a whole lot more going on over there, on The Other Side, than any of us can imagine. And some of it’s very interesting, very entertaining, but some of it smells bad, some of it stinks, in fact, and if you tried to put your finger on it, if you tried to pin it down and say, Yes, this is what it’s all about, this is what Death is all about: sit back now, I’ll tell you—My God, they’d swarm all over you like angry bees, the Dead would, like angry bees.

––––––––

Licking his lips, he set it aside, recognizing the truth of those words, and picked up another of the writer’s meditations on death. He turned to the first page.

––––––––

Here’s something you desperately need to know: the world you live in is not the world you think you live in, and if you try to live in it believing you know it, one day you’ll find yourself surprised way beyond the powers of your poor synapses to express surprise—as if a spider has suddenly climbed into your mouth and bitten you on the tongue and made you unable to move, swallow or spit.

That is what I live with constantly. I have a spider on my tongue.

My name is Abner W. Cray and, long ago, I knew lots of things—what time to get up in the morning, what to do after I got up, who to kiss and who to avoid and who to listen to, who to be afraid of, or joke with, what tasks to leave until later and what to accomplish within the moment that was upon me.

Now, this day (this beautiful, grotesque morning) I have only a spider on my tongue. Now I cannot move, swallow or spit.

And here’s something else you need to know: You cannot trust me, or anyone, about anything. You cannot even trust yourself, because I cannot trust myself—about my survival, about my death (whether it has happened, or will happen or should happen), about those who crowd me constantly in this little house, about the places I can go to, about the places I can never go to again, even though I’ve been to those places ten thousand times in what surely must be one hundred thousand years.

He liked that. A spider on the tongue. He’d never heard the expression before, but there was something evocative about it. He could imagine the sheer panic of being bitten inside and not being able to move or speak, in all ways mimicking death and the effects of the soul’s departing, without the actual dying. It was, he realized, a simple metaphor for the disease the writer alluded to in those most recent typings—the disease ascribed to the ghosts of Gwydion and Gilfaethwy which devoured the self.

Dementia.

He couldn’t imagine a more harrowing loss than the loss of self, and the implications it would have upon the immortal soul when it simply failed to know itself.

Zack couldn’t belief that he was the one saying it, but as he set the thin book aside, he finally voiced the one thing he was afraid of. “What he wrote about our arrival, it’s right, or right enough ... so what does that mean for Maggie? Did she really face him in here?”

“It doesn’t have to be a ghost,” Louisa said. “She could have followed someone up here thinking that they were from the spirit world and come face to face with the hoaxers.”

“Did you hear anything? A fight?”

Daphne shook her head.

“Grayson?”

The camera man shook his head. “What does it say happened to her?” he asked.

Zack crossed back over to the desk, and hunkered down behind it, looking through the rolls of paper for the truth, knowing from the writer’s own words that he couldn’t trust him.

––––––––

There’s an anger deep inside me that I can’t control. It smoulders, festering away in my belly. I try to find the words to give life to what is in my mind where it’s all so vibrant, so alive, but they won’t come, and even as I struggle with them, trying to wrestle them into shape, my hands betray me. The trembling is a relic, I think. An artefact of a life once lost. Or a life not lived. I struggle to create. You see, that is the fundamental nature of her question: What am I if I am not myself? When I write I am infinite, I am like God to these creations, but so much of what I am is locked up inside me now and, like poor Abner there is a spider on my tongue. I didn’t really understand what it meant when I came up with that notion, but as day by day more and more of who I am became locked inside of me beyond my ability to let out, I came to understand exactly what the nature of that spider was.

And I hated it.

She looks at me, and I wonder if she can’t understand all of this conflict in me that I cannot voice, and that’s why she repeats the question, “Who are you?”

I wanted to tell her I wasn’t always like this. I wanted to tell her there was a time when my mind was brilliant and my tongue sharp, my thoughts sharper, not blunted like they are now. It was all just alive. It flowed. Now all of these people and places are in there, still inside me, fighting to be heard, but they can’t voice their thoughts in any coherent way. I try. I slave away. I write and write and write, but nothing I say works. I am not happy with any of it because it isn’t me, and that just makes the anger worse. They are half-formed characters and ideas. I am failing them.

I can’t even make my paper houses because my hands betray me. This damned disease, Parkinson’s, makes no exceptions for those of us who have worlds within us. It doesn’t differentiate between beggars or kings. It levels both just the same in spasm after brutal spasm until we can’t even find it within ourselves to breathe.

I try to speak to her, but the spider has my tongue, so the best I can do is offer her a page from the typewriter and try to explain while she stands there, looking over me. I write the line:

Is this what it is like to be dead?

She doesn’t have an answer for that, so I ask something less challenging. I ask her: What would you give to walk the streets with the ghosts of this place, aware, able to converse, to experience and feel the land of theirs?

Everything, she says, and I know that she means it because it is all she has ever wanted.

She dreams every night of those cold places and hot spots, those whispers in the dark and groans in the attic, choosing to believe they are real, that the Dead are reaching out to her, and now I am offering her what she has always dreamed of, a chance to be one of them.

It is as if all her of birthdays have come at once.

She looks at me from across the typewriter, and I tell her I can help her travel the ribbon. I can give her it all. All she has to do is tell me it is what her heart truly wants, because the strength of her desire is paramount. She needs to want this half-life, this shadow walking existence. She needs to let go of the physical and shatter the mirror, cutting herself on the glass, because without her blood the ritual can never be complete. Is it what you want? I type again. Say the words.

Yes, she says, yes, yes, yes, her pleasure tantamount to sexual release as she does exactly what I tell her. There was no trace of fear in her demeanor, just the thrill of excitement she can barely contain. She has longed for real contact with something from the spirit world. She has always known she was not meant for this place, but could never understand why the Dead would not welcome her.

She takes the book, my first, from the pile and cracks the glass, but that is not enough, she needs to shatter it, so she drives the spine into the mirror again and again until the shards fall, cutting her hands as she pulls them out of the frame. In a single shard, larger than the others, she sees me and the swirling fog of shadows and smoke all around me that are my ghosts. She sees me properly, as I used to be, and her smile is heart-breaking as she sees the deep cut across her wrist.

It is as though the sight of blood spurs her hero into action, though he has no intention of saving her. No. Her Mr. Harris has been waiting for this moment for fifty years. Finally, they can be together as she accepts why he has not aged in all their time together, frozen in that one perfect moment before the accident.

The Dead walk amongst us. They always have.

––––––––

“Is that saying what I think it’s saying? That Harris is ... what? Some kind of dead soul that has gravitated to Maggie?”

Louisa wasn’t really listening. She was on her hands and knees again, going through the shards of glass looking for the larger one that Maggie had supposedly used to cut her wrists so that she could take up the writer’s offer.

There was an arc of blood staining the hardwood floor. It wasn’t some Pollack painting like she might have expected, but rather a single slash that looked more like a crooked smile burned into the old boards.

She ran her fingers across the wood, expecting them to smear the blood, but it had already dried in enough to survive her touch.

“There’s blood,” she said, confirming at least part of the story from the ribbon.

She noticed that one side of the paper house seemed to have blackened, as though the words of the old manuscript had begun to bleed into each other, painting the one outside wall black with their ink.

Everything about this room was hard to focus upon, reality seeming to slip and slide around her. She looked to the camera and told Grayson, “Make sure you get the paper house,” to which the cameraman looked slightly puzzled, following the direction of her gaze without seeming to see the house itself through the camera lens. It was only when he lifted his eye away from the viewfinder that he realized there was a six-inch-high replica of the house on the floor beside the gathering manuscript pages.

“It’s not showing up on the screen,” he told the others, shaking his head.

“This whole room is weird,” Zack agreed.

There were places in this world that just felt off. There wasn’t anything obviously special or different about them, certainly not to look at, but they were waiting rooms for those not ready to move on.

She heard the groan of the stairs behind them, and as she turned to look, heard the clack, clack, clack of the typewriter and turned back to see the old man sitting there, writing furiously.

He was in a world of his own, the grip of creativity upon him.

She looked from Grayson to Zack to Daphne and back as though to ask if they saw him too. They all did. Though a shaft of dusty moonlight from the arrow slit window up above speared down through him, dust motes reveling in his company.

“Who are you?” she asked, unconsciously echoing Maggie’s question.

“I think I know,” Zack said, picking up a copy of A Manhattan Ghost Story. “Terry Wright. That’s your name isn’t it?” he said to the spectre in the chair who didn’t look around. He just typed on, the keys clack, clack, clacking in their disjointed rhythm.

Louisa saw more words appearing on the endless manuscript. It took her a moment to realise they were describing something that hadn’t happened yet. She read the words, seeing Daphne act them out almost as she digested them. The other woman crossed the floor, negotiating several stacks of books, the paper between the covers yellowed and brittle, and saw Maggie half-buried beneath the pile. They’d missed her the first time because of the disarray, but even several hundred novels piled over her corpse couldn’t hide her forever. The old woman’s eyes were open. Her expression could only be described as blissful.

“Oh God ... oh, God ... ” Daphne said, dropping to her knees to claw away New York Times Bestsellers and bombs alike to get to the body beneath.

And still the ghost writer kept on with his work, the type-writer keys clack, clack, clacking with maddening intensity. The desk trembled beneath the impact as he hammered away on the pearly keys furiously.

The first book, a copy of Strange Seed, flew across the room, pages ruffling open like a crazed bird in flight as it slammed into the wall beside Zack’s head. Before he could duck away more copies flew, a sudden cacophony of paper wings drowning their screams as paperbacks and hardcovers buffeted and battered them, driving them back through the stacks. As Louisa stumbled away from the desk, her hands up to protect her face, more research material slid out of the stacks to slam into her legs over and over again, as more whipped up into her stomach and chest. The sharp edge of a red cloth board somehow made it through her hands and barely missed her eye as it struck the bone of her temple. And still more books swirled in a bizarre cyclonic gyre. The desk and the spirit writing at it sat in the eye of the wild storm, oblivious, writing it up and writing out his anger, venting all of it onto the intruders in his home who had come to destroy everything that he had made.

“We have to get out of here!” Zack yelled, his voice barely carrying above the vortex. Daphne crawled away from Maggie’s corpse on her hands and knees, books flying over her head. The pathways through the labyrinthine stacks of books were gone, obliterated by the rage storm hurling thousands of books around the turret room, but amid it all there was some white taking shape from the twisted manuscript pages, taking on shape and form as the paper twisted like snapping bones and continued to twist, coming together in a paper golem that stood blocking their way out of there. Every inch of the huge paper man contained the worlds of the writer, not just the pure published novels but the half-formed ramblings and ill-conceived ideas that were never going to be worthy of worlds of their own.

And as the writer wrote on, creating this latest nightmare, his shade began to fade, the single beam of moonlight spearing down through the arrow slit window filled with spinning motes of dust and little more, while the paper golem grew, solidifying as more and more of the manuscript pages were drawn to it, putting pulp on its paper bones and crafting muscle from the pages as it continued to gather shape and form until it was the mirror of the man in the chair, made from his own words, and the man in the chair was no more.

But still the keys on the old typewriter clack, clack, clacked even if the tiny impacts could no longer be heard above the windstorm and flying books.

Calm as could be, Grayson stood in the middle of the maelstrom, filming it all, including the dissolution of the writer at the desk and the gathering of the face within the paper creases of the golem’s head.

They had the money shot the Network so desperately craved. They had more than their fill of them, from Maggie’s lifeless corpse to the whirlwind of books, the haunted typewriter and the paper golem. They were spoiled for choice. Assuming they could get out of this place.

And if they couldn’t, the images fed back directly to drives on the RV and uploaded to the cloud services for backup, meaning they weren’t simply going to fade away. Everything he captured on film would be seen by someone eventually, even if they weren’t around to present the show.

More and more books were hurled around the huge tower room, pages tearing away from the glue binding them, folding into tiny little origami creations in the air, folding and folding and folding into minute perfections that echoed the writer’s obsession. She didn’t understand what they were at first, until one settled on her arm. Flies. More and more flies. As though the mind behind them realized the link between those damned insects and his flesh. And still more flies came, folding their way out of the old books until thousands upon thousands of precisely folded origami flies buzzed incessantly around them, in their faces, in their eyes and ears and trying to get into their mouths.

Zack grabbed Louisa’s hand, and together they fought their way through the churning swarm of paper flies towards the stairs, their only thoughts on getting out of this place.

She still clutched a handful of pages from the typewritten manuscript in her hand where she’d torn them free of the infernal device.

Grayson followed them, still filming, as the paper golem moved to intercept them.

It was slow and lumbering, as though moving in response to the words being written through the ribbon into the evergrowing manuscript rather than under its own impetus. But they were faster than it ever could be. They plunged headlong through the chaos of flying pages, crazy thoughts running through Louisa’s mind; like how giving up smoking fifteen years ago was a mistake. No matter what supernatural force bound the paper golem together, it was still paper, and paper burned. But she didn’t have a match or lighter on her because fifteen years ago she’d decided smoking was a mug’s game.

Who’s the mug now? she thought, bitterly, as the garish cover of sickly green eyes flew into her face.

For a moment she couldn’t see, the eyes blocking her eyes.

Panic threatened to overwhelm her, but Zack pulled her forward, off-balance as she stumbled across the books that had fallen out of the maelstroms as the writer’s rage slowly blew itself out.

The paper golem lumbered towards them, swinging huge, clubbing fists full of scenes of horror and heartbreak written upon them. One wild swing took Zack clean off his feet and sent him sprawling across the floorboards, wrenching their hands apart.

He didn’t stay down long.

He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, like a sprinter ready to burst out of the blocks. Seeing the golem turn on him, Louisa ran for the stairs, the manuscript pages crunched up in her fist.

She hit the first step running and had to adjust her gait or risk running out into thin air, so fast was she moving. Grayson was two steps behind her.

Zack was still up there with the paper golem.

She yelled for him, but didn’t dare slow down. Not so much as a step. She hit the bottom and kept running, following the narrow corridor hidden within the walls of the old storybook house, and burst out through the bookcase into the reading room as she heard the first scream from up above.

She couldn’t think about what it meant.

She ran to the window, thinking of jumping right up until she saw just how far the drop was. She saw two men running up the hill from the granite monolith. It was too dark to make out any of their features. The candle’s flame surged, burning suddenly twice as bright and three times as high, catching her hair as she leaned forward. Louisa pulled back before it could take proper hold, though several inches of it had shriveled and curled in the half-second it smoked. She beat at the side of her face, stepping away from the glass as the screens slammed shut across the reading room window, shutting out the moonlight.

She turned around as Grayson came rushing through the bookcase-door, but before Daphne could make it through the tight gap, the false door slammed shut, cutting her off from them.

The small framed picture of the white-bearded writer on the bookcase was different.

The wreathed smoke of ghosts had dissipated from around his head, as though his demons had been let loose.

She looked at Grayson.

She looked at the door.

And the door slammed closed so hard it shook the frame.

––––––––

Louisa looked back to the candle burning in the window.

At the flame.

Who needs a lighter? she thought, picking up the candle. She shielded the flame with her left hand as she carried the candle in her right. The last thing she wanted was one hasty move blowing the flame out.

“We’ve got to get back in there,” she told Grayson, who instead of answering turned the camera on her, framing the presenter against the backdrop of shuttered windows, the flickering candlelight lending her a ghostly aspect of her own.

“What are you thinking?”

“That thing is paper. Paper burns.”

“Does it? Does that kind of paper burn? You’re going to risk our lives on a candle?”

“You don’t have to come with me,” she told the cameraman.

“I’m not letting you go in there alone,” Grayson said, and then came the hammering on the other side of the hidden door, Daphne banging her clenched fists desperately off the wall.

“We’re coming,” Louisa shouted, trying to remember which book the skeletal shadow man conjured by the moonlight and the trees had pointed out, and praying that the mechanism would still work.

Giving up, she started pulling the books off the shelf at random, clearing one shelf and half of another before she tripped the mechanism and the bookcase swung forward again, revealing the hidden passage.

Daphne stood on the other side. In the faint light of the candle she looked as though she was teetering along the edge of a breakdown. There was a wildness about her eyes as she tried to push her way past Louisa and get out of there. The other woman didn’t stand in her way.

A moment later Daphne’s shrieks of desperate frustration and the sound of her bare fists pounding on the only door out of the reading room told her that the ghosts weren’t letting them out of here that easily.

Louisa steeled herself and walked back along the secret passage towards the turret room, slow and steady, keeping her hand cupped around the guttering flame.

Grayson followed, keeping the camera steady.

He didn’t point out the obvious flaw as she ascended the few short steps back up to where the ravaged books had fallen now and lay scattered across the floor.

The paper golem stood in the doorway, glaring down at her.

It seemed to have grown considerably in the time she’d been out of the room, bulking up.

She couldn’t see Zack.

The thing’s face rippled with black lines of movement, scrawling like ants crawling endlessly across its unnatural flesh. The words had taken on a life of their own, wrapping around the golem’s suddenly muscular frame. The words disappeared into the cracks where the paper formed muscles only to emerge on the other side and ripple across its shoulders and down the ladder of its spine and buttocks to chase down the back of its thighs and into its calves only to cross over and emerge running up the opposite leg, into its weird well of a belly button and finally emerge, spewing out of its contorted mouth to fill in the damned thing’s face until it turned everything the inky black of typescript.

Louisa climbed one step at a time.

This time Grayson didn’t follow. He dropped to one knee, framing the shot of the presenter walking up the stairs and began to quietly narrate what he saw.

The paper golem, oblivious to the threat of the flame, crowded in the doorway as behind them every single door in the storybook house slammed one after another, the sounds reverberating through the thin walls.

“Zack?” Louisa called, still five steps beyond the reach of the paper golem. “Are you okay in there?”

He didn’t answer.

“Be careful, Lou,” Grayson told her needlessly.

She held the flame out as she advanced, gambling that it wouldn’t burn out as the golem swung at her. The wooden slats beneath her feet shivered, as though recoiling from the presence of the flame, but the paper golem itself lacked the awareness to grasp the threat the candle posed, even as she touched the naked flame to its outstretched hand and watched the yellow flame blush and the curled finger blacken, shriveling up in the seconds before the flame caught and flared, burning up the paper golem’s arm in a rush that seemed to draw all of the oxygen out of the room.

The thing stood rooted to the spot as the flame chased across its chest, consuming its unnatural body as it ran from arm to arm, blazing all the way to the extremities, and in seconds the whole man was aflame, arms wide open, head thrown back, paper flesh charring and warping as it was devoured by the flame, pieces of the paper golem scattering, still burning to fall amid the ruined books littering the floor. Instead of burning out in the few seconds it took for the flame to consume the paper golem, the spirit of the writer possessing it held the damned thing together even as the heat from it battered Louisa back several steps down the narrow stairway.

Grayson focussed on the burning effigy, and the dozens of smaller fires igniting behind it where the still-burning scraps fell. The wind had fallen to a whisper, all of it drawn in to feed the flames. The origami flies were still in the air, though now as more and more caught the flame and spread it through the room from one to another and another, they became fireflies.

The sheer heat was brutal. It threatened to flense away skin and melt the meat onto the bone, but she wasn’t about to back out until she was sure the anchor holding the writer’s spirit to this place was gone. Before her, the golem held its shape even as more and more of its stolen paper was consumed, leaving gaping holes in its body. Through one such wound, Louisa saw Zack lying prostrate amid a pile of translated novels. There was blood on the side of his face, and the way his left arm lay it was almost certainly broken. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

“I can see Zack,” she shouted down to the cameraman. “We can’t leave him in here. Help me get him out.”

Grayson came up the stairs behind her, but the golem wasn’t about to move to let them enter the turret room.

The relentless clack, clack, clack of the old pearl typewriter keys hammered on as more and more words fed through the ribbon to ink the endless paper, the story of the fire being written by unseen hands.

The flames chased across the room, rushing towards the desk.

They curled and warped the boards of the discarded books.

They sent curls of flame dancing into the air only to catch in the draught and eddy away to another torn book and another and another, spreading their flames until they reached the corpse of Maggie Carlisle and burned away the books burying her.

The old woman’s clothes began to burn, but she was beyond feeling any of it.

And still they burned, turning the turret room into a glorious inferno even as the old typewriter keys clacked on and on and on, the spirit of the writer still dictating the fate of his creations even now, making them all dance to the most macabre streak of his imagination.

Then the first smouldering curl of golem landed on the paper house, and that single spark was all that was needed to summon the fire it held in its darkest rooms.

Everything changed in that moment, in the silence between one heartbeat and the next, as Louisa stood on the threshold of the turret room, trying to see a path through the gathering flames to reach Zack. Almost as though echoing the manner with which the flames consumed the paper house, the fire finally rose up to tear at the walls around them, eating into the wooden sidings that insulated the room from the cold brick of the turret itself and scorched into the bare floorboards. The heat was ferocious. She couldn’t bear to stand on the threshold, never mind throw herself into the conflagration, yet that was exactly what she had to do.

Grayson discarded the camera, and together they plunged through the remains of the burning effigy into the devouring flame, fighting back the sting of the smoke and the choking lack of air to reach Zack’s side.

As Louisa knelt to help Grayson lift the sceptic she saw the silhouette of the writer begin to take shape once more in his chair, his ghostly fingers hammering away at the keys as he urged the flames to rise all around them. There were tears streaking his face. The pain he felt at the end of it all was impossible to comprehend. But still his fingers worked the keys, putting his will onto the paper.

At his feet the origami house was ablaze now, flames licking at every window even as the paper roof collapsed.

They got Zack into the upright position.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Louisa urged.

He nodded, but he wasn’t really with them. His eyes had that far away glaze of a man on the brink of never. He clutched at her sleeve as she tried to get him up to his feet, but he was too damned heavy and not helping them.

A thousand origami fireflies burned out, sparks trailing as they faded and failed, joining the greater fire.

There was a book in Zack’s lap, which was hardly surprising, given how many there were all around them, but it was the cover illustration that stopped her cold. In the few endless seconds as the heat of the inferno caused the lacquer on the cover to blister and burst and the ink to ripple away from the paper beneath, she saw the storybook house they were in now slowly consumed until there was only burned cover stock where the painting of the house had been. In that moment she understood that the house itself was as much a ghost as any of the figures that haunted Mallam Cross in that it was one of Terry Wright’s creations. It wasn’t that it was the only dead zone in this paranormal storm, it was the eye of the supernatural hurricane, the dead calm at the core. And everything, everything had somehow been given life by the writer who now, himself, couldn’t let go.

The typewriter, the endless manuscript, they were giving him the kind of immortality writers craved, the words allowing him to live on.

Between them, they got Zach to his feet and lurched back in the direction of the stairs, even as the ghost writer wrote on. For one mad fleeting moment she wanted to go back and see if he’d written them a happy ending, but the collapse of the floor between them and the desk ended that stupid idea.

They stumbled and staggered through the flames to the stairs, Zach coughing his guts up as he leaned on them. Grayson hesitated as they passed the camera but didn’t try to retrieve it. The sweat ran down their backs. The smoke choked and swirled all around them, as they pushed into it. More fireflies danced on the smoky light. And through it all, the clack, clack, clack of keys amplified by the weird acoustics of the turret room.

Louisa looked back through the burning pages to see the writer hunched over his manuscript, unable to let go. She wanted to talk to him. To say it’s okay, he would be remembered, that his words would live on and he didn’t have to keep sending more of himself, more of those tiny little pieces of him, out into the universe. Above them, a deep crack resonated through the fabric of the storybook house as something inside the old bones of the place surrendered to the fire.

Finally, the spider relinquished its hold on the writer’s tongue, and he said five words which the ghost in the chair seemed to find hilarious given the circumstances: “A rare and blazing talent.” His laughter echoed hollowly around the turret room, spiraling into madness as the laugh seemed to haunt the stuff of the fire itself, no longer belonging to the ghost writer in the chair. One word lingered longer than the others, blazing.

The writer turned to face her, and told her, “It was always a curse, that line. A curse. And now, it consumes me. Go. Leave me. I must work.” There was such incredible sadness in the writer’s voice, grief incomparable. “I must write. It is who I am. If I cannot write ... who am I?” That last haunting question hung in the air between them as the timbers overhead gave way, coming down in a spray of plaster and splinters. Another twisted cry from the walls around them promised collapse as the turret’s integrity failed. “Who am I?” he asked again, tormented by the fact that he was forgetting himself.

It was heart-wrenching. His fingers hesitated over the keys, as around him the pages of his creations burned. The noise of the inferno was all-consuming. The flames were finally too much, driving them back down the stairs. With the contact broken, the spell the ghost writer held over her failed, and Louisa started to run. In front of her Grayson and Zach stumbled and staggered, pushing the bookcase back on its hinges as they ran out into the reading room, the fire chasing them.

Impossibly, the flames were already here, spreading down the walls, peeling away the old floral wallpaper and eating up the rug that dominated the middle of the room. The fire’s voracious appetite made short work of the soft furnishings. And all of this destruction came from a single candle flame that refused to burn out.

Daphne sat with her back to the door, sobbing.

“We’re going to die here,” she said, looking up at the others as they looked around hopelessly for a way to get the door open. “Don’t you think I’ve tried?” she asked, broken. Even so, she moved aside so Zach and Grayson could throw themselves at the door one after the other after the other after the other, slamming their shoulders into the wood again and again until it started to splinter under the strain.

The shattering of glass brought more oxygen into the tower to feed the flames. The backdraft of fire folded in on itself, then licked out into the night as above and below them the sounds of the old storybook house succumbing to the inevitable collapse haunted them.

Louisa dragged Daphne with her out of the reading room and back to the landing. The flames gathered everywhere, on all sides. The heat seared her lungs. She couldn’t understand how the fire had beaten them down here, or how it stood between them and the front door and the night, but it had. Of course it had. Every lick of flame here echoed the ones that had claimed the paper house upstairs.

The clack, clack, clack of the round mother of pearl keys drummed beneath the cackle of the fire. The flames claimed the balustrade, transforming the final flight down into a gauntlet of fire that closed in around them. Another rush of noise, a crescendo of collapse, as more of the story­book house came undone, rooms collapsing in on themselves. Louisa looked to Grayson, who nodded, Zack, who doubled over coughing a lung up, and Daphne, who looked like she was coming apart at the seams. They had no choice. They had to run into the tunnel of fire.

Louisa ran down the stairs, not daring to touch the handrail, taking two and three steps at a time, rushing as though Death itself was on her heels. Tongues of flame lashed at her body as she ran, the blazing walls closing in around her. She didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Didn’t think. Couldn’t. She just ran and prayed the door would open and that the writer would let them go.

Five steps from the door she heard another massive rending tear as the fabric of the storybook house came undone.

Four steps and the crash of the ceiling collapsing on the kitchen sent shockwaves through the building.

Three steps, a crack like the bones of her mother’s back shattering under the weight of Grayson, Zack and Daphne treading on them. The brittle wooden stairs were breaking away from the wall where the flames had already charred away their support. It was far too fast. The entire house was coming undone with shocking momentum, like time within its four walls was running on fast-forward.

Two steps and a line of fire arced through the electrics overhead, culminating in a fireball deeper in the darkness behind her. The shockwave of air barreled Louisa that final step to the door.

She didn’t have time to think about all of their equipment in the downstairs room, or about Maggie Carlisle’s body in the turret room, or Harris’s supposed ghost that had been with them all along, an interloper from the kingdom of the Dead, reaching out to the old faker psychic without her having the wherewithal to know that she was communicating all the time with the Dead she so desperately wanted to befriend. There would be time for all of that later. For now the single imperative was escape.

She hit the door running, and struggled to wrestle it open, tugging at the brass handle which burned into the palm of her right hand. The filigreed pattern seared into her flesh, marking her forever as a possession of the old Wright House. For one endless heartbeat the warped wood stuck in the frame, but with every ounce of strength she could muster, Louisa threw the door open and stumbled out into the night, sucking down huge great lungfuls of beautifully cold air as she stumbled on down the drive before she finally fell to her knees.

And behind her the Wright House burned.

––––––––

They stood in the driveway, the heat of the fire warming their faces.

The moon hung heavy over the scene, but its light was nothing beside the conflagration.

They didn’t say a word.

The candle was back in the window, as too, was the shadow of the writer seemingly looking down at them. Up above the window, the turret slowly twisted, buckling as the timbers lost their integrity and the render shriveled and crumbled and flaked away, exposing more of the stonework beneath. It couldn’t hold. It was only a matter of time before the turret fell, and as it came crashing down, so too did a huge section of shingle and a steeply sloped section of roof, bringing down the guttering and eaves, too.

More glass shattered, each broken window like a gunshot ringing out into the night.

From a certain angle it looked as through the fire stretched across the horizon, blanketing the town of Mallam Cross below in a blanket of flame.

But of course, that couldn’t be burning, too, could it?

The timbers around the window splintered, cracking as the paint blistered away from the frames and the torque of the turret’s collapse exerted pressures upon them that they couldn’t possibly withstand. Within a matter of seconds the turret room collapsed in on itself, gone as completely as if it had never been there at all.

And still more fell, the eaves buckling and twisting, pulled down by the collapsing brickwork.

But somehow the façade held.

The flames billowed out through the open doorway, curled up the walls through the shattered windows, chased along the buckled eaves and consumed the clematis and ivy growing around the columns of the porch steps.

Nothing was safe from the flames.

Louisa stood watching as the weird halo effect seemed to linger, the flames themselves somehow clinging to the shape of the turret and the rest of the façade long after the bricks had collapsed in on themselves.

She stared through the flames to the shadow man in the window and wanted to tell him to let go, that immortality wasn’t worth this much torment, but what did she know? For all the days she had spent exploiting the Dead for money she had never walked so much as a mile in their shoes. She had no real understanding of what it meant to be not ready when it was your time to go.

She realized she was still clutching a fistful of pages she’d stolen from the endless manuscript.

She didn’t know if she dared read them.

Not now, at least. Not with the shadow man in the window watching her through the raging fire.

She stuffed the pages into her back pocket, not taking her eyes off the house, even as more of it collapsed.

The heat coming off the old house showed no signs of relenting.

Daphne stood beside her, sweating as she stared into the fire. The production assistant was already struggling with how she was going to explain the lost equipment to her bosses at the Network. It helped to focus on the mundane when everything else was spiraling out of control in her life.

“Get the camera,” Zack said. They were the first words he’d managed since they’d dragged him out of the turret room. For a moment Grayson seemed to think he was telling him to run back into the burning building to rescue the camera he’d dropped so that he could help drag his sorry arse out of there, but then he realized what the other man meant. Nodding, he ran back to the RV for the reserve camera. His feet crunched across the gravel driveway, echoing the mad cackle of the flames. He cursed the fact that he was missing the money shot, the final curtain, because it was the perfect finale for the show assuming they could actually rescue a usable amount of footage from the stock he’d shot. For a split second he thought the Network might block the episode, given the fact that Maggie Carlisle died during the filming, but then he remembered the kind of people he was dealing with. It wasn’t so much that the show must go on as it was the show must generate ad revenue and social media hits so the more tragedy the better. The death of the beloved psychic inside the first truly haunted house they’d ever investigated? That was front page news, and not just the tabloids. That was ratings gold. Assuming he got it all on film.

He scrambled through the door inside. He emerged seconds later, fumbling with the stock and battery of the reserve camera as he zoomed in on the collapsing façade of the Wright House.

The images streamed back to their control rig inside the RV.

He walked towards the fire, camera on his shoulder, capturing it all.

Louisa knew she needed to talk, to explain what they were witnessing, but she didn’t have the words, as, with a tragic sigh a huge section of the timber frame collapsed in on itself and an immense cloud of smoke and flame billowed up to hide the moon.

For a moment she thought she could just make out a swirl of faces within the smoke; the writer’s demons burning out, shredded by the wind up along the boundary, before they scattered across the rooftops of Mallam Cross as they were finally set free.

––––––––

Two figures approached them on the hill, the first had reddish brown hair that needed cutting, and grey-green eyes that sparkled with reflected flames as the Wright House blazed in the night. He wore no-name jeans and a mustard yellow cardigan over a beige button-down shirt. He looked like a poor man’s college professor. The clothes did little for his long-distance runner’s whip-thin frame. The second of the men was in his mid-thirties, tall, with sandy-blond hair, a few pounds overweight. His eyes were by far his most expressive feature, but then that was true of most people.

Louisa shielded her eyes and pointed.

Grayson got them in the shot.

They looked almost pitifully normal but given that they were walking towards the burning ruin of the writer’s house, there was almost certainly nothing normal about them.

The man with the reddish brown hair held up a hand in greeting. The other didn’t.

“Ryerson Biergarten,” he said, introducing himself. “And my surly friend here is Abner W. Cray, though back when he was alive people used to call him Doubleday, which he didn’t find particularly funny.” The man shrugged a make-your-own-mind-up shrug.

She knew the name. It had been in the manuscript. Something the writer had said about Ryerson Biergarten shaking his head at him as he was writing one of his books, meaning the two men in front of her were no more ‘real’ than any of the other ghosts they’d found in Mallam Cross.

“What are you doing here?”

“We’ve come to take him home,” Abner said, “assuming he will come with us.”

“It’s a choice, you see,” Ryerson explained. “Abner made his peace with the Dead. He lives with them. I don’t. I’ve never been all that comfortable around them. But then, a lot of the Dead I’ve encountered have been utter bastards. It goes with the job.”

“Job?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

“I have certain talents. I’ve always heard things. Seen them too. It was a gift, or a curse, depending upon your perspective. I track down gateways between our world and the next that allow ghosts like him,” he nodded towards Abner, “to slip through between dimensions.”

Abner walked past them, carrying on up the track to the burning house.

Daphne tried to call him back, but it was as though he couldn’t hear her, or didn’t want to. He just walked on up the few short steps to the door and into the fire.

“Well, looks like old Abner’s off to meet his maker, so to speak. I best be getting in there with him. It’s not much of a choice if it’s only him in there.”

Louisa nodded like it was the most obvious thing in the world to happen, the writer’s two most famous creations walking into the fiery heart of the house his ghost had built and offering him a way into the Afterlife if he wanted to let go.

Ryerson inclined his head slightly, then followed Abner into the flames.

She heard barking, and a moment later a Boston bull terrier came tearing up the road and barreled into the flames after its master. “Come on, Creosote,” Ryerson called from inside the house. Louisa couldn’t help but smile, even if she felt utterly adrift in this peculiar twilight world where the dead roam and characters that never were offered their creator salvation.

––––––––

“There’s nothing left for us here,” Zack told the others. It was true. They had the shots. They had the story. But there was no getting away from the fact that they had less than what they came with.

“I just want to go home,” Daphne agreed, rubbing at her eyes.

It stung them to look at the smoke for any length of time.

The ghosts, if ever there were ghosts, had long since dissipated.

Grayson nodded. “Pity about all of the gear.”

“It’s all replaceable,” Daphne said, the inference being there was one thing that wasn’t. Maggie Carlisle. “The Network’s insured.”

“And they’ll no doubt get a healthy insurance pay out on Maggie,” Zack said, sounding more callous than he was.

“They won’t pay out on suicide,” Daphne said, which was true, of course, the old actress had slashed her own wrists with the broken mirror. There wasn’t a checkbox on any insurance form that said driven to suicide by supernatural forces.

Louisa said nothing.

She just stared at the ruin where the Wright House had been.

“Come on,” Zack said, and started to walk back toward the RV.

“I’m going to stay here for a bit,” she said. “Clear my head.”

“Suit yourself. We’ll meet you back at the guest house, get the rest of our things together and get the hell out of Dodge.”

She nodded.

Here wasn’t actually here, it was a little way down the hill. She sat on the granite monolith, which, she realized now had words carved into it, though they had already faded to the point of anonymity thanks to the elements:

Terrance Michael Wright

September 9th 1947—October 31st 2015

An Unleashed Imagination

Who resides now in the universe of our Souls

––––––––

She smiled slightly at that, aware that they’d all missed the true nature of the granite stone, as a marker to a life once lived, and watched the others drive away in the RV.

She remembered the few scraps of paper she’d rescued from the fire and took them out of her pocket, smoothing them out to read.

The woman sits on the gravestone, realizing finally the true nature of this place, and is left to think about the choice in her own hands. Because as long as the pages exist, then I cannot leave this place as my essence is locked within every word I have written. There is immortality in these pages, just as there is in my stories. I have spent my life exploring strange places inhabited by strange people, and I find myself writing about these people, in these places, as if they’re real, as indeed they are. They have to be real, in some universe, anyway. So why not this one?

But with the words gone, what is real then?

It is her choice.

Does she burn the last of the pages and let me go, or does she keep them safe, and in a way assure my immortality?

It is not a choice I would want to make.

She is crying as she faces this final dilemma, tears for herself, tears for me, though she could never truly know me for who I was, only for the words I left behind.

Sometimes that is enough.

Always it has to be.

Because that is who I am.

Or who I was.

I feel myself slipping.

How bitterly ironic for a man who spent his life imagining the loss of identity and what it means to slip between worlds, losing yourself in the process.

You know what you have to do ...

––––––––

Louisa walked back into Mallam Cross.

There wasn’t a soul to be seen.

No children playing in the streets, no ancient Welsh brothers consuming the writer’s creations with the voracious appetite of dementia, no one dangling from the rope strung from Hangman’s Oak. The signs over the grocery store and the diner were flaking with rust, one bulb sizz­ling, the rest long since dead. The price of gas on the station’s sign was hopelessly out of date. The weekly specials in the window of Bill’s grocery store had long since rotted to become a playground for flies and maggots, the brown paper wrapping all that survived. There were no gods here, no scrying mirrors or smoking remains, but equally, at last, there was no torment. No souls wrestling with their pains, not accepting of their fates.

She walked towards the Silver Bough, feeling no little loss for the role she had played in these empty streets where as the night began there had been a thriving little community.

But then, that was what his creations had most feared, wasn’t it? That the ghost hunters would come to Mallam Cross and that would be the end of life as they knew it. They had been right to be afraid. These empty streets were proof of that.

Louisa walked through the ghost town, thinking about the mind that had made it and what it must be like to live with those characters haunting you day and night, like needy ghosts, demanding so much of you to shape themselves that there wasn’t enough of you left at the end to remember yourself.

Up ahead, a small pug came running along the empty road. The dog bundled happily towards her, licking at her face as she knelt to greet him. There was a small silver bone-shaped name tag on its collar that told her his name was Galway. She scruffed his head, asked, “Who’s a good boy?” But the little dog didn’t let on if he knew the answer. He licked her cheek again, then carried on running through town, back in the direction of his best friend’s house up on the boundary.

Galway’s paws sounded like the steady clack, clack, clack of keys on the road as he ran.