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#AScareADay – Day 9 – The Secret Chamber by Margaret Oliphant

October 9th – Margaret Oliphant – ‘The Secret Chamber’ (1876) – Read it  or, for a more accessible version, .

Catch up on the whole challenge here: romancingthegothic.com/2025/09/21/the-scare-a-day-challenge-october-2025. If you missed the previous ones and would like to catch up on all the spooky reads (or try to do four challenges at once!), here are the 2022, 2023 and 2024 challenges.

I really enjoyed this. The family legend of the wicked Earl, the legend of the secret chamber, the set up of the Gothic castle, all of that was a lot of fun, and when we get to the reveal, I was very invested. I particularly loved the build-up:

By this time Lindores began to feel himself again, and to wake to the consciousness of all his own superiorities and enlightenments. The simple sense that he was one of the members of a family with a mystery, and that the moment of his personal encounter with this special power of darkness had come, had been the first thrilling, overwhelming thought. But now as he followed his father, Lindores began to remember that he himself was not altogether like other men; that there was that in him which would make it natural that he should throw some light, hitherto unthought of, upon this carefully-preserved darkness.

What secret even there might be in it–secret of hereditary tendency, of psychic force, of mental conformation, or of some curious combination of circumstances at once more and less potent than these–it was for him to find out. He gathered all his forces about him, reminded himself of modern enlightenment, and bade his nerves be steel to all vulgar horrors.

He, too, felt his own pulse as he followed his father.

To spend the night perhaps amongst the skeletons of that old-world massacre, and to repent the sins of his ancestors–to be brought within the range of some optical illusion believed in hitherto by all the generations, and which, no doubt, was of a startling kind, or his father would not look so serious,–any of these he felt himself quite strong to encounter. 

The fact that our protagonist, John Randolph, Lord Lindores, really believes himself to be a modern man of science and above superstition and the horrors of the murky Celtic past, sets up the supernatural reveal. I was wondering if it would go down the Supernatural Explained route and be anticlimactic, but no – I wasn’t disappointed.

This story reminded me of the original idea I had for after I finished The Crows, which was to write the same story deliberately over and over in different ways and settings, with the house in each, and have different outcomes and so on each time, like a multiverse.

[There are actually 2 versions now, one being The Crows and the other being a contemporary queer romcom version where the house is a person (a nonbinary trans femme who uses she/they pronouns), called Birds of a Feather.]

This story almost feels like it belongs to that idea; an undying magician in a secret room of a family castle, living for centuries in secret and casting a pall over his descendants. The mad magician in the attic could well be a reveal that fits Pagham-on-Sea, and maybe if I wrote that novel again, that would be how it turned out.

I think stories like this might be ripe for retellings and reimaginings anyway, and to be honest, now I have the germ of a dark Gothic romantasy idea.

I think for this I’ll share an extract of what I’m writing in the Yelen & Yelena universe, which is currently in progress.

This is an unedited draft chapter from As Below, So Above, my alchemist Phantom of the Opera X m/m Rapunzel.

Calcination

The stone tower dominated the landscape on its bare-sloped hill, the road towards it nothing more than a track overgrown with grass. Corentin regretted that his first glimpse of it was by night, when all he could see through the carriage window was a dismal silhouette against the sky, knowing he would not see the outside of it again for some time.

“That’s the place,” Master Armel said, unnecessarily. “You’ll be supplied every Monday, and I’ll be checking in with you when I can. You can see now what I mean by ‘lonely work’.”

Corentin gently traced the ridges of scar tissue on his own forearms, from his delicate wrists to rolled-up sleeves. “I’m used to lonely work.”

His patron gave a soft grunt in the back of his throat. “All I ask for are regular reports. If you find anything, even if you think it’s not of interest, I want to know what it is. I hope you don’t put too much stock in the superstitions about this place, young man.”

In fact, although a man of science, the idea of living in a reputedly haunted tower did not appeal to Corentin, but he couldn’t protest. Master Armel was paying far too much for that, and it was his only chance to learn the secrets of an alchemist so reclusive he had shut himself up in the tower ahead of them, determined to perfect the transmutation of base metal to gold.

“We don’t know the whole truth of phantoms, sir,” Corentin said, as the carriage turned a corner on the approach, and the twinkling lights of a hamlet replaced the looming dark shape that now lay dead ahead. “We know the voices of the restless dead travel on the wind. The idea of phantoms, spirits, if you will, remaining in one place and being seen rather than simply heard… is not as far-fetched as it sounds.”

Master Armel gave him a shrewd look, heavy-eyed with the late hour, and shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I myself have stayed several weeks in that tower, working on the locks, and never heard nor saw anything that couldn’t be explained in an ordinary way.”

“That reminds me.” Corentin clutched the strap dangling from the roof as the carriage wheel bounced over a stone. “Shouldn’t I have the keys?”

Master Armel laughed. He was not a jovial man, and the laugh was more of a grim chuckle, ground out of his chest like a chore.

Corentin’s stomach turned. He gripped the strap tighter, although the track was much smoother now, albeit sloping upwards, and Corentin did not want to slip forward into Master Armel’s uninviting lap.

“There are no keys,” his patron informed him, a nasty smile on his thin, wide lips. “I didn’t mean to mislead you on the particulars, I thought you would have asked around by now.”

Asked whom? Corentin was a loner by choice, who barely communicated with his academy fellows. He had been a singular, sheltered child, now grown into a singular, sheltered adult, barely out of his teens.

A prodigy, his tutors said.

A precocious prick, claimed his peers, which numbered among the nicest epithets they bestowed on him in his hearing.

Armel saw his expression and tutted. “Don’t look so wounded, my learned young friend. I see you have had other things on your mind than base details. Well. There are no keys, because Master Elouan did not merely lock himself away, he walled himself up. And each floor of the tower, at least the ones I could access in my weeks of trying, has a chemical lock that only releases if you understand the exact combinations of chemicals needed to create a reaction.” He tilted his grizzled head. “And that will be your problem, of course, as it is likely his greatest discoveries and writings are sealed at the base of the tower, or possibly even below it.”

Corentin swallowed. “But – the door…?”

“There is no door. There is only the window, at the very top, and the way up and down is via a winch lift that takes two men to operate. So if you want to come down, you must wait for the supply cart, or climb the rope.” Armel’s eyes twinkled in the carriage lantern light as Corentin’s knuckles grew white. “Now do you see why I call it ‘lonely work’?”

“Mister Corentin is not in a position to refuse such an offer,” said the Dean, perched raptor-like behind his desk in voluminous black robes, as if the matter was already settled.

This suited Master Armel; as a master merchant in the Venturer’s Guild, he preferred deals that came signed and sealed, with guarantees and guarantors. The sea was treacherous, and his ventures took on elements of extreme risk each time, but this was not a venture in the usual way of his business.

The learned youth, Mr Corentin, was a skinny, pale lad, crowned with lank blond hair that fell unnaturally straight to his shoulders. His arms were a map of chemical burns, and a starburst of glass shrapnel was stamped on his right cheek. He looked up morosely and Armel wondered if his eyes had ever had a stronger colour than this washed-out blue, almost pale grey, or if he had been thoroughly bleached by years of fumes.

“All the same, I’d like to hear why you want me,” he said, and even his voice was mellifluous and gentle, scrubbed of assertion, character, and volume.

Here in the Dean’s study, set against the heavy browns and dark reds of a much more forceful personality, the young man bore no sign of the genius that had perfected spark cables, through which harnessed magic could be tamed and channelled harmlessly into homes and workplaces, reducing leakage to zero.

Everything about Mr Corentin was soft and muted, from his hunched, apologetic posture, to his fawn trousers and matching waistcoat.

Master Armel was secretly impressed. Everything about the boy – although in his early twenties, ‘boy’ was the epithet that leant itself most readily to Mr Corentin – was calculated to render him unthreatening, unassuming, and utterly forgettable. At a time where rival alchemists and their patrons were known to assassinate one another on an alarmingly regular basis, if the sensationalist newsmongers were to be believed, this showed a remarkable sense of self-preservation.

Armel cleared his throat. “You may be aware of the work of a certain alchemist, a Magister of Alchemical Philosophy from this very institution, in fact, Magister Elouan Mazhe.”

Mr Corentin nodded.

“Magister Elouen was reputed to have discovered something of immense importance before he died, although only his letters remain to hint at any such success. He claimed to have achieved his goal, his primary goal, and then, of course, his body was found at the base of his tower. He could have fallen, or jumped. Or been pushed.” Armel watched Mr Corentin for any reaction to this, but the young man remained in his hunched, slightly apologetic position, with only the slightest flinch at the suggestion of foul play. He betrayed no emotion except that bland, flat affect, which was hard to tell if it was natural or practised.

The Dean, on his part, seemed almost bored.

Armel moved the story along. “I bought Magister Elouan’s tower at auction. It’s been difficult to access his rooms, and so… I have need of a gifted alchemist, who understands alchemical codes, to work through what remains, and translate the discoveries into lay-speak. I’m afraid for all my interest in the arts, I am still only at the rudimentary stage of understanding.”

Mr Corentin stirred. “Can you not… simply… pick the locks, or take off the doors?”

The Dean and Master Armel exchanged glances.

“I did tell you Mr Corentin has been somewhat sheltered here,” the Dean said, and Armel allowed himself a flicker of amusement at this masterful understatement.

For almost all his life, the Dean had explained, the gifted young man had enjoyed the protection of the academy walls, the company of his tutors, and peace and quiet, freedom to work without interruptions. As such, Mr Corentin was also unfamiliar with the survivalism and jealous paranoia of his unprotected peers. 

Alchemists beyond institutions like the academy were notoriously elusive, and each guarded their secrets with a paranoid jealousy that made learning anything from them very difficult. Moreover, their tendency to secure their secrets in a – volatile – manner meant that any fortune hunter would think twice before tampering with seals and doors.

Master Armel had studied the Beryl Incident, when a sealed door in Magister Beryl’s cellar was expertly and carefully unsealed, only for the entire wooden structure to explode with enough force to take out the streets in front and behind, levelling rows of houses and shops, and starting a fire that quickly spread city-wide. The casualties climbed into the hundreds, although fatalities miraculously stayed in the tens.

“We didn’t think it prudent,” Armel said, after a long pause.

The winch-lift shook under Corentin’s trembling knees, shins rendered weak as custard. He had not realised it was possible for one’s feet to sweat, but his hose was miserably damp and he was clammy all over.

“I don’t like heights,” he managed, after the first two ells. He could easily hop onto the grass at this distance with no injury, but his head was swimming with fear and the ground seemed impossibly far below him.

“Face the stone,” Master Armel called up unkindly.

Corentin twisted very slowly, terrified his knees would buckle, knuckles white as he gripped the ropes. The boards below him swung from side to side, and he whimpered. Now he was stuck at a diagonal, twisted awkwardly so that he could see the tower behind him if he kept his head turned over his shoulder like an owl.

“I can’t, I’m sorry.”

The winch-lift jerked him upwards another couple of ells, and marking his ascent with the stone slabs was somehow worse. Corentin tried looking upwards instead, but the window was so far above that his approach only made him nauseous.

“I can’t,” Corentin repeated, pleading. “Please, I can’t.”

It did not help that he now knew how Magister Elouen had been found; his broken body at the foot of his sealed tower. He could only imagine himself that way, and nearly swooned as the intrusive thought slammed into his mind.

“Well you’re not coming back down,” Armel snapped, and the winch raised the shaking alchemist higher. “The wheel only turns one way.”

“Then how do I get back down?” Corentin was so light-headed now he was sure he would faint. He clung to the ropes either side of the boards with feverish intensity, unable to take more than quick, shallow breaths.

Master Armel didn’t reply, and the winch-lift creaked and swung him higher.

Of course it goes both ways, Corentin’s rational mind assured him. He just doesn’t want to reverse it.

His legs shook.

“Sit!” Armel barked the command up at him as if he were an untrained pup, and the ropes took some of the skin from Corentin’s palms as he folded himself up with a sob catching in the back of his throat.

His knees hit his chin, bony backside thudding onto the board with plenty of width to spare, and hands stinging as the cold sweat mixed with rope-burn.

It only helped a little; his head still swam sickly with panic. He remained in this position, eyes scrunched shut, until Master Armel gave another shout from below and the winch-lift swung to a halt.

“Climb through!”

This was a nightmare, surely.

Corentin opened his eyes, and the sight of the village in the distance with its flickering lights brought frightened tears to his eyes. He was sure he would lose control of his bowels and bladder at any moment, and that his legs would not, could not, take his meagre weight.

His hands hurt.

He chanced a glance behind him at the tower, and saw the window was not level with his feet. He couldn’t guess as to how far away it was, but he was sure the answer was an impossibly long way away.

“Get up!” Armel shouted from the ground.

The boards shivered in response to Corentin’s shaking limbs. He unfolded himself with a burning pain in his cramped muscles. The world fell away into nothing. Corentin sobbed.

He kept his knees bent in a crouch, clinging to the ropes either side in a vain attempt to keep the contraption steady, and tried to twist himself around. Seconds crawled like hours, stretched out as a drop of perspiration rolled down the nape of his neck and soaked into the linen on his back.

The window was the level of his chest.

When he forced himself to stand properly, he could lift his leg onto the sill and crawl through without any difficulty; it was forcing his knees to bend again that was the main problem.

“I’m sorry,” he called down, ashamed of himself. “Sorry.”

“Climb in!”

“Sorry.” Corentin dared to release the rope and grab the stone. It was solid and firm. He pressed his whole skinny chest against it and saw bare floorboards below, a homely interior, and a workbench.

There were two doors. One, Armel had explained, was to Elouan’s waste disposal, dealt with by chemicals and flushed out with rainwater when enough collected in the chamber above. The other accessed the rest of the tower, and it was locked with a chemical lock that Armel had supposedly already opened.

Corentin pulled himself through, landing on the floor in a heap of damp cloth and quivering bones.

The creak of the lift outside informed him that the wheel did, in fact, turn the other way. By the time he got to his feet, legs still trembling, and hauled himself up to peek over the edge of the sill, the lift was already halfway down.

“I’ll send up supplies,” Armel yelled up from below.

Corentin had never cursed anyone before, but the choice words of his peers bubbled to the surface and pressed against his lips.

He couldn’t bring himself to say them.

Instead, he dropped to his knees on the floor and hid from the great drop below him, telling himself he was gathering his nerves; they crawled even now, tracing sickly shivers under his skin.

Here he was, in Master Elouan’s tower. His work would soon begin, and the secrets of the alchemist revealed. Corentin breathed more easily, chest beginning to loosen. Soon, he could begin to unlock the secrets of the tower, and learn something new. For that, he could brave retrieving supplies from below the window.

He waited for Master Armel to winch up his first week of rations, the ghost of an excited smile playing on his tight lips.

Corentin’s new home was as comfortable as his rooms in the academy, with everything he needed and no fellow students to interrupt him.

The circular room was divided into four segments with invisible lines, rotating around the pillar in the middle where the narrow spiral staircase was enclosed. There was the washstand beside the door to the private purging station, and a tin bath hanging on the door. This section of floor was empty and bare.

The next section was a library of sorts, marked by bookcases and a comfortable, well-stuffed chair with a footstool of matching brown fabric. Here was the fireplace, the flue jutting out of the tower as the purging station did.

Then there was the workbench, the equipment, shelves of vials and powders, and instruments to observe the moon and stars. Corentin’s interest lay here, primarily, but it held no secrets. It was not even as well stocked as his own workbench at the academy – Armel didn’t have the knowledge on his own, and it showed. Corentin found some ink and paper, and scratched out a list for the next delivery. Armel was sending someone to him to retrieve whatever items he needed.

The last segment was the bed, a humble, straw-stuffed affair, and a trunk for clothes, and hooks and shelves for personal items.

In the centre of this room was the staircase, enclosed in a stone column and with one heavy metal door blocking the way. Its lock was made of a metal unfamiliar to Corentin, and therefore, he supposed with some degree of academic snobbery, unfamiliar to Master Armel. He was beginning to doubt his patron had spent as much time up here as he claimed.

It was not only locked, but showed no sign of previous tampering. Perhaps it had locked itself again behind Master Armel, or perhaps Corentin was right to doubt, and Master Armel had not been entirely truthful about his own sojourn in the tower. Either way, Armel had left no instructions, and it was his first obstacle to entering the tower proper.

Corentin pondered on this problem for a while, bringing all the candles and lanterns to the door so that he could see better at night, and barely touched his first day of rations. He tied back his hair, a habit when he worked, and sat in contemplative silence.

Magister Elouan’s books marked him as a philosopher, unconcerned with wealth and immortality. His library focused on the spiritual and esoteric, which made Corentin’s work feel clumsy and pedestrian. All that Corentin did, he did to solid matter. Magister Elouan appeared to think of alchemy in terms of personal and universal transformation.

Of course, the lock had a keyhole, but no key.

The keyhole had a lip, and a well, as if he were meant to pour liquid into it. The well itself was dry. Above it, Corentin discovered the bulbous glass curve of a container, hidden from him by the metal casing of the lock, and he could not prise it out to investigate it. Prodding and poking produced no results except to release tubes and thin rods, which felt less like progress, and more like a taunt.

The solution would be elegant, or perhaps metaphysical. First, Corentin must grasp the idea of the lock, and then he would discover how to open it.

The first day gave way to the second.

The second to the third.

Corentin rationed his food, but the height of the tower had severely dampened his appetite. He began to experiment with the chemicals Master Armel had provided, but the fumes made him weak.

He was too afraid to move closer to the open window.

The third day rolled into the fourth, then the fifth, and still he was no closer to the idea. He forced his tired mind to think of theorems and equations, but the mystery of the fluid in the glass vial he could not access was the piece of the puzzle that evaded him.

He needed more books on Magister Elouan himself to understand his mind; he needed the Magister’s diagrams and theories, the imprint of the man’s intellect inked into the page, primed for reabsorption. He had nothing.

On the sixth day, frustration rendered his experiments useless and void. He had come up with a most advanced solution, poured it into the lip – and the lock remained stubborn. It did nothing while left overnight, except react with the metal, and Corentin watched with horror as it melted through the base of the lock and caused a metal plate at the bottom of the door to stain.

His heart thrumming painfully in his throat, Corentin saw the stain turn into a shape; a miserable rune, the exoteric alchemical shorthand for ‘this experiment yielded no results’.

Magister Elouan mocked him.

The seventh day was tinged with panic.

Corentin made some notes, ate a hunk of granary bread with oil and salt, and a few slices of cheese. It was the most he had managed to eat in a single sitting since he arrived. The bread was getting stale.

He could not explain his state of mind, except that it felt like someone was whispering in his ear at night, each night since the first, to tell him he should not be there, that his achievements beyond the Tower were worthless, and that this was his true testing ground. Each morning he woke with the same resolve, hardening little by little each day, only to be dashed by each successive failure.

He wondered where his ideas came from, if the equations he scribbled and pored over were even his, or if they came from his dreams.

Days eight, nine, and ten were the same, and what had merely been a tinge of panic was spreading into an overwhelming pool that threatened to drown his reason completely.

His doubts were amplified by the claustrophobia; pacing around and around the circular walls, unable to escape his cell, Corentin forced himself to close his eyes and push his head out of the shutters simply to breathe in the fresh air. He may have passed out on the window ledge, unaware of the time.

He jerked back into consciousness as his arm dangled in space, and opened his eyes to the dizzying depths of the ground below, and the stone of the Tower against his cheek.

He threw himself back into the safety of the high room, the wooden floor spinning, afraid he would fall through the boards and keep falling forever.

He couldn’t take more of this.

If Master Armel didn’t return, he was sure he would go mad.

Then, on the twelfth night, the phantom appeared.

There was a chill on the night air, but he did not close the shutters of the tower window. He couldn’t bear to be enclosed in this stone tomb so high above the ground, with no means of escape. Besides, even the thought of leaning out again to close the shutters made him dizzy.

Perhaps that was how the phantom came in.

Corentin didn’t know when he fell asleep on the footstool, slumped loosely over his knees, but he dreamed he was not alone in the room.

A shape appeared to him, reflected in the metal door as if the door were a mirror.

“Our gold is not common gold,” it said, and Corentin was struck by the rasping quality of the voice, so dark and harsh, like a raven calling.

“Nor our locks common locks,” Corentin answered, although this was his first experience with such things.

The phantom in the metal rippled as it moved.

Corentin saw a glimpse of a grizzled, gaunt cheek beneath a hood of dark red. The figure was as tall as he was, and as thin, but he could not see more than the fleeting slivers of detail.

“You must be talented,” the phantom said. “Or a fool.”

Corentin blushed. “I’m here to learn.”

“And what have you learned so far, before coming here?”

 He had an urgent desire to impress this mirage, although he couldn’t say why. He launched into a list of all the foundational theories, the application of which had led him to discoveries he would never share with his grasping tutors until he had perfected the outcomes.

Corentin talked himself into a fugue state, no movement in his body but the movement of his mouth, not even blinking.

He explained his discovery that allowed tamed magic, pulled from the atmosphere, to run through spark lines without leaking, and how these aqueducts for magic were constructed.

As he talked, a fire burned through the stillness of his limbs, from his joints and through his bones, finding release on his tongue. He talked about alchemy until his tongue dried up, and he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He only knew he had fallen silent when the room sounded different, and there was a ringing in his ears – the absence, he realised, of his own voice.

The figure was blurred, indistinct. Corentin wasn’t even sure there was anyone still there.

“Calcination,” the figure said finally, breaking the silence. “That is the first stage.”

But Corentin tasted those words, dry as ashes, in his own mouth, and couldn’t be sure who had spoken them.

Corentin awoke with the sunrise, but he was too afraid to look out of the window. He had fallen asleep on the stool, staring at the lock.

His back ached, and unfolding made him feel sick.

He realised, cricking his neck by looking upwards, that the beams were the base of the tower roof.

Vertigo swung him into a quivering bundle of nerves.

He was much too high up. The tower felt hollow and empty below him, the floorboards the only thing stopping him from plunging into nothing, the only thing that kept him from falling forever.

In the academy, he was safe. There was solidity and order; everything in its place, meals served in the refectory at appointed times or brought to his room, and supervisors to check on him.

Here, he was alone.

His patron was miles away, and the only way out was a winch-lift that he couldn’t operate alone. He didn’t know if he could even climb out of the window into it. In fact, he was sure he could not. He would rather solve every lock and make his way to the base of the tower, from there to dig his way out with his bare hands, than face that lift again.

Calcination; that is the first stage.

Of course.

Corentin found a candle and box of phosphorus matches, lit the wick, and thrust the burning candle into the keyhole.

#AScareADay – Day 8 – The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing but the Truth by Rhoda Broughton

October 8th – Rhoda Broughton – ‘The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing but the Truth’ (1868) – Read it 

Catch up on the scares and read ahead with the list: romancingthegothic.com/2025/09/21/the-scare-a-day-challenge-october-2025/

I really loved this one. I loved getting to know the characters via their letters, and that made the horror of what happened to others, second-hand, the more chilling (for me, at least).

The characters themselves were really engaging, and I loved their back and fore at the start, and their domestic banter. I had to look up what ‘short skirts’ meant in the 1860s, and it turns out it means skirts that show off your ankle boots, so they’re not dragging in the street. Scandal!! I thought this was really funny because I always thought about the skirts being ~w i d e~ and not how ‘short’ some fashion trend made them. I also loved how catty the women were in their letters, saying how that style (ankle showing) didn’t suit tall women or short women…

But I digress, that’s not the point of the story.

The really scary thing here is that you never see the thing that terrifies a maid literally out of her wits and into an asylum, or scares a young man so badly he drops down dead in front of his friends. I love not knowing what that was, or what it could be.

I had a few ideas about this one, but I just loved it as it was. It made me think about the unknown, and absences, and things that consume you. I didn’t really want to write anything for this one, but instead I’ve got some recs for other media – and some folklore – that tackles similar themes.

As the title is The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth, I thought a non-fiction response would be appropriate! So here are some recommendations and notes!

One film that does some really interesting things with sight, not seeing things, and not needing to see things, is the Spanish horror, Hermana Muerte / Sister Death (2023) dir. Paco Plaza. There’s so much going on with the visions and whether they were even real, whether what was seen was really seen, and the girls seeing what the teacher could not. Seeing, in the end, leads to a catastrophic showdown.

A book (MG/younger YA) that has the autistic-coded protagonist never seeing what his siblings and friends can see as an otherworldly threat approaches, is Down In The Cellar by Nicholas Stuart Grey, published in 1961. It is told from the first person perspective of an autistic-coded boy, and relates the tale of how he and his siblings find and care for a mystAs the protagonist can’t see what the others can, but has to have the phantom procession of eerie lights marching down the hill described to him, for example, or see the effects of what might be in the cellar on his cousins and siblings while never experiencing them himself, he has to take everything on trust, and that’s a really interesting perspective.

You can include this in your trans books list, as Nicholas was a trans man. He was also an actor who loved playing the part of the pantomime cat, and would stay in costume and in character backstage. Cats are often main characters in his work, and he loved to play the parts he wrote for them. So not only a trans man but a proto-furry icon?? I really hope he was nice in real life. The more I learn about him and read his work, the more I like him. Much of his work is harder to get hold of now, but well worth it if you can find it second-hand.

Some actual folklore about an entity haunting a room which you never see, is, of course, the vampire furniture of Glamorgan, and in particular the Jacobean four-poster bed in a Cardiff home which claimed the life of a baby, and nearly claimed the grown men who stayed in it. These stories are recorded in Folk-lore and folk-stories of Wales, by Marie Trevelyan, 1909. I wrote about them here in my post about Welsh vampires. The book is available on the Internet Archive here. The passage is reproduced in a more accessible format here.

Hopefully that intrigues you! Have a read of my vampire post and the series on Welsh Gothic fiction, going through Jane Aaron’s book, Welsh Gothic, chapter by chapter, and looking at the texts and the folklore and history behind them.

If I’ve inspired you, shown you something you hadn’t heard of before, or sparked something for you, feel free to leave me a tip if you can! It would be much appreciated.

Author Spotlight: Talia Wall

Talia Wall (she/her) spent most of her life in North Carolina and had the lifelong dream of becoming an author since she was five. She not only loves to write but also to draw and paint.

She has a loving husband and Persian cat named Thor who often interrupts her writing sessions. She writes young and new adult, supernatural, fantasy, and dystopian genres with the intent to send powerful, relevant messages and warnings through fiction.

Author Links:

Website: taliawall.com

Amazon Book Link: Paperback/eBooks
Barnes & Noble Link: Book Series Link

Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Lemon8: @FromDreamsToPaper

What are your favourite future-set books/films/TV with vampires and paranormal creatures/entities, and what attracted you to combine vampires with a future setting?

I was first drawn into the dystopian genre with assigned readings in middle school (The Giver by Lois Lowry, 1984 by George Orwell, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury). Then I discovered the Hunger Games and Divergent series, and I shifted my writing from fantasy to dystopian.

While none of these works have vampires in them, I have yet to discover a book or film that combined dystopian elements with their presence. So, that inspired me to make one. There’s hundreds of vampire retellings ranging from classic Dracula/Van Helsing to Underworld and Twilight, so I wanted to create a future world of civil unrest, with some echoes of the Jim Crow era.

How did you approach worldbuilding in your series – what’s your worldbuilding process, and can you give some examples of the things you had to think about and develop to create this world?

The idea itself hit me while working as a cashier, with one question I asked myself: “What if vampires weren’t in hiding, and they coexisted with humans?” If they did, I’m sure there would be fear.

How did they come into existence? I created a history of the Red Plague and the Crimson War, which brought on the new oppressive government and laws.

If the vampires survive by blood, how can they live among humans without killing them all?

Humans are mandated to donate blood, which is then sold in grocery stores. The vampires can shop for it rather than hunt it.

Why have a curfew? They get burned by the sunlight, so the curfews were for the humans’ safety.

Why bother rebelling if they have a sun blight? Maybe there would be science experiments for immunity.

How would hospitals, law enforcement, or any other facility operate? Only essential personnel can operate outside of their curfew time.

I had to think about the stereotypes and fears humans could develop towards this species who historically lost control and attacked due to a virus, but still never regained trust generations later, and think about fallacies society operated under despite a more docile/civilized vampire race living among them, much like how racism and discrimination still exists today under ignorance.

Introduce us to your protagonists and tell us about how you developed them! What are their dynamics, and did they give you any trouble?

The Until Equinox trilogy is told under multiple POVs. If there was going to be a lot of division and tension, I wanted my characters to be on opposite sides of the fence.

Draven Hawthorne, a reluctant Vampyre belonging to the mafia Nightshades clan, yearns for his old life as a human.

Briar Shaw, a rebellious human with a broken past, is bored with her life and craves purpose under the moonlight. Her brother is a Vampyre-hating police officer and younger sister goes by the book. When she breaks curfew and witnesses a crime Draven committed, he’s supposed to kill her. But her free spirit leaves him hesitant, and her brother’s position in law enforcement proves to be an enormous obstacle. He lived with shame for who he was, believes himself to be the monster of monsters because of the lives he destroyed in the past working in the clan.

I wanted his shame and desire to be free to be an obstacle for his potential. Briar was a little problematic to develop. I needed to create a legitimate reason for her to break curfew for the first time rather than suddenly decide to do so.

I wanted to make her more well-rounded, and not a try-hard or fall under the “not like other girls” trope. She loves motorcycles, but also makeup. I wanted her to be flawed—reactive, temperamental, impulsive. I want her to have a rocky road to maturity, even if it meant making readers smack their heads a few times with some of her decisions.

Introduce us to your antagonist – how did you develop Uriah King, what motivates him, and maybe tell us a bit more about the Vampyre hierarchy, why you chose the title of “Alpha” for Uriah?

I wanted to create a mob boss with a charismatic exterior and a void interior. There are many morally grey antagonists, but I wanted to bring back the purely selfish and evil for the sake of greed and power.

I was inspired by charismatic leaders who appealed to their audience, but held sinister ulterior motives. His motivation is power, but in order to get it, he capitalizes on the oppression of his subordinates to drive a rebellion and spark another war.

Among law abiding citizens, there’s no hierarchy other than authority figures (ex: law enforcement, government) over the general public. For his crime syndicate, “Boss” seemed too basic, “Godfather” never resonated with me, but “Alpha”… with its definition as “the beginning” or “most dominant,” it seemed most fitting. Uriah would take on the title as the one ushering in a new age for his people with the goal to dominate both the humans and vampires.

What key themes can readers expect in these books, and how will these be developed further going forward? 

I felt the drive to create a story of love and hate, division and unity, ignorance and understanding, in hopes to send the message that it doesn’t matter who (or what) you are, there’s good and evil on both sides.

The trilogy is titled “Until Equinox” symbolizing where day (humans) and night (vampires) are of equal length. The vampires fight for equality, the protagonists try to survive among each other and within the world, corruption, and unity are some of the key themes.

What are you future project plans?

The Oleander, the final installment in the Until Equinox trilogy is set to release in October this year.

After that, there will be a Christian horror romance, a contemporary romance, and revisiting some of my old stories from my childhood.

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#AScareADay – Day 7 – The Last House in C____ Street by Dinah Mulock

October 7th – Dinah Mulock – ‘The Last House in C____ Street’ (1856) – Read it .

I really loved this little story! It’s ostensibly a ghost story, but really a reflection of life for an older woman when she was young, the twists in life that come unexpectedly, and the circumstances for an oldest daughter when her mother dies in childbirth.

The framed narrative, making it a reminiscence, worked for me, and I liked that closure of knowing what happened, especially the additional twists of fate in the last few paragraphs, which honestly made it feel more realistic to me and the ghost sighting more believable in the story’s context.

I appreciated the very unsentimental tone of the ending, and the soft sorrow of the story itself.

As this is such a warm story, and such a human one, I wasn’t sure what my response to it would be. I was really struck by the domesticity of it, and the way grief can strike unexpectedly. It’s a very common story, too – I know people who have had similar visitations from their relatives at the moment of those relations’ deaths, where they came and sat on the end of the bed, usually.

I thought I’d do a short, sad piece from Pagham-on-Sea, mixing in the themes of lost love and seeing a ghost at the time of their passing.

Olive looked up from her book, eyes smarting in the lamp light. She hadn’t been watching the time, and the night had drawn in. Her sisters were out at a dance in a town nobody knew them, and wouldn’t be back until late. Olive had put the youngest children to bed some time ago. She hadn’t been asked to, exactly; it was an understanding that since she didn’t like dance halls, she wouldn’t be going.

Two rooms were given over for the nursery, and Sir Peter had at least handsomely provisioned it with cots and toys, but that was all they could expect from him and more than Olive wanted to take.

It was a cold night, and the fire had burned down. She had been so engrossed in her book, she hadn’t noticed, but it wasn’t just the words that caught her attention. Between the leaves was a photograph, one of the only photographs in Olive’s possession, of a tall, moustachioed man in spectacles and military dress, standing to attention in front of a bedsheet background. It had been taken on the High Street, and he had queued for two hours. Of all the people to whom he could have presented this keepsake, it had been Olive.

Olive was sure it was one of the only things her sisters didn’t know about. She and Mr. – Cpt. – John Moon met in the library each Tuesday. Her younger sister despised the library, and had better things to do than read all day. Her older sister loved to read, but would never do so in public, as she preferred to read romances in secret and pretend they were grimoires. Olive didn’t understand such fancies; she liked to keep the peace, though, and so she never brought it up. Being caught out in any sort of deceit, no matter how trivial, always made Belle terribly cross.

Mr Moon was a very normal, very polite man. He had nothing occult or esoteric about him, and he liked children, which was just as well. Olive told him she was a widow, and refused to disclose her age, and he took the rather large number of her fatherless mites in his stride, even though the oldest batch of sextuplets were now twenty-one. He didn’t ask for anything, except to occasionally take her for tea.

Olive had waved him off on the train when his regiment were called up, and he said cheerily that it would all be over by Christmas.

She still kept up the old routine; on Tuesdays, she went to the library, and one Friday a month she went to tea. The tea shops were not what they were, given the War, but for Olive it was less about the light sandwich and tasteless buns, and more about the sitting with a book by the window, at the table they had always reserved, and thinking about nothing in particular.

She knew he wasn’t coming back when he walked by the window at their appointed time, and gave her wave. “Can’t stop,” he mouthed through the thin pane of glass at her, regretfully. “Bought it at Wipers.”

Olive didn’t remember anything except his sad, apologetic smile, and the way her heart froze and her mind took over with pedantry as its only survival mechanism.

“It’s Ypres,” Olive said out loud, and realised she was talking to herself, and the lady on the nearest table said, “Pardon?” in a friendly way, thinking Olive was talking to her.

Olive had pushed her glasses further up her nose to hide her confusion, and shook her head. “It’s Ypres,” she said to her book, numb with the shock of it, and never went back to the tearooms again.

Now, with the book open on her knee and Cpt. Moon’s first, last, and only photograph resting between its pages, Olive felt that cold numbness seep through her again. “It’s Ypres,” she said softly into the gloom of the sitting room, and put another log on the fire.

#100HorrorMoviesIn92Days – Films 71-80

I’m really excited – so close to the finish line! I’ve enjoyed all the films in this next 10. This has honestly been a good challenge so far this year. When/if I do get to 100 I’ll make a post with my highlights!

I’ve really liked exploring world cinema again, and I’ve seen films by lots of new-to-me directors as well as added new-to-me countries to my Horror Padlet. I’ll get around to adding these as well eventually, but at the moment I’m just adding any new-to-me countries.

71) Rabbit (2017) dir. Luke Shanahan. Australian creepy psychic twins film that is as much about the sibling bond and family grief as it is the paranormal side of things. It was a bit underwhelming for me over all, but there were loads of things I liked about the family drama side of things, and the concept kept me interested.

72) México bárbaro / Barbarous Mexico (2014) dirs. Lex Ortega, Jorge Michel Grau, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Ulises Guzmán Reyes, Aarón Soto, Isaac Ezban, Laurette Flores, Edgar Nito. This was a good film anthology – TW for rape in a few segments. I liked a lot of the takes on folklore and legends though. No framed narrative here, just a collection of different tales bound by the theme of fucked up folklore/urban legends. The warning is in the title.

73) Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016) dir. Jared Cohn. I’ve been wanting to watch this one for a while, so I saved it for the challenge. It’s on my Red Riding Hood in cinema list. I was not disappointed. I really liked Eric Balfour in Haven, so I knew I’d like his performance in this. I really loved the concept, where the red-caped forest guardians have powers from the grave. It was pretty fun, there was some nice worldbuilding, and it felt like a fairy tale version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Underworld on a very low budget.

74) El Amarre (2021) dir. Tamae Garateguy. This is one for the women who never got out, I guess. It’s about an abusive relationship, where a woman asks for a love spell to get her crush to love her. It works – but it turns out he’s an abusive, violent bastard, and his ex quickly calls and tries to warn her. Unfortunately, now she can’t get rid of him, and she’s bound him to her even after death. It’s pretty bleak, honestly. I would be interested to see more films by this director.

75) Pabrik Gula / Sugar Mill (2025) dir. Awi Suryadi. I like Suryadi’s films, and this one is pretty good. I really enjoyed it. I really liked the story and the mystery aspect, and the ghosts were great. I always enjoy melodramatic storylines and this one delivered.

76) Trinil: Kembalikan Tubuhku / Trinil (2024) dir. Hanung Bramantyo. Apparently this was based on a 1980s radio play? I really enjoyed it. Trinil was a great character. It was an absolute rollercoaster. I felt so bad for her with the backstory, and because I didn’t know where it was going, I really enjoyed the ride.

77) Sinners (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler. I’m glad I saved this one for the challenge, and it was on limited offer in UK Prime to rent for £1.99! Really enjoyed this, although the weird Irish vampire line about their colonisers bringing them the Lord’s Prayer threw me off. I think the vampire was either lying to trying to persuade Sammy by saying they had a shared history of colonial violence and identity-theft/imposition of religion, or it was a mix-up around the Plantations, as the version of the Lord’s Prayer they said together lacked the last 3 lines, which is a kind of shibboleth, but that would be the wrong way around? I’m glad I read around the discourse on the film before I watched it, as obviously a lot of the cultural references didn’t translate. It was definitely a rich film with a lot to it. This had strong Saloum vibes for me in terms of set up and the switch to the supernatural; I really loved the characters, the Black American history you don’t get to see in mainstream cinema so much, at least not here (UK).

78) 신체모음.zip / Body Parts (2022) dirs. Kim Jang-mi, Wally Seo, G’sam, Lee Gwang-jin, Jeon Byeong-deok, Choe Won-kyung. I loved the framed narrative for this anthology of films. Deeply sinister! I do love weird esoteric cults, in any religious tradition, and this one is mixed with body horror and trauma. Delicious. Also: such a refreshing thing to see an exorcism attempt in one of the anthology segments that’s in a Christian tradition that is not in some weird, USian Evangelical Protestant-culture fantasy version of Catholicism. I think those films are interesting enough for how USian Evangelical Christianity looks and thinks about other Christian traditions (spoiler: not a lot), but films like that get a bit wearing after a while.

79) ບໍ່ມີວັນຈາກ / The Long Walk (2019) dir. Mattie Do. I loved this one. I think I preferred it to Dear Sister, the other film of Do’s I’ve seen. It’s an amazing genre-bending film, about a little boy who finds a fatally injured woman in the jungle and stays with her until she dies. She becomes a ghost who sticks around on the road where she was killed, and can bridge the gap of time between the boy as a boy, and the boy as an old man. I love this concept. The ghost and the main character are friends throughout his life, and he is able to use her time-travelling powers to interact with, and to help, his childhood self. I also really liked the:

(Click for Spoiler)

…way that the ghost’s friendship and help was only possible because she was left unburied. She had no resting place, and her distraught mother was unable to bury her. When the mum approached the boy to ask if he had seen her daughter, he lied, and the ghost approved. She knew that if she was laid to rest, she wouldn’t be able to help him anymore, and they had been together for 50 years, although the boy didn’t know it. So she allowed her mother to grieve in the absence of closure, to keep that trauma open, so that she could look after the isolated child.

Also, the part where the boy’s mother dies, eased instead of agonised, helped along by the older version of himself and the ghost’s support, and the boy is so upset he orders them both to leave because he doesn’t yet understand that this is the only help his mother could get, is just so heartbreaking.

I think this is a really lovely way of exploring trauma and loneliness, and the theme of Haunted by the Past. Genuinely one of my favourites from the challenge so far, I think.

80) Вурдалаки/Vamps (2017) dir. Sergey Ginzburg. Russian Dracula with Sommers’ Van Helsing vibes. I actually laughed out loud when it turned out the Master’s servant was a Turk? And the Master had a lot of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula in the costuming… Genuinely the castle was amazing. The three swivelling bookcases. The Hammer Horror décor. Plus, it’s always good to see an Orthodox version.

Countries A-Z Films 71-80

Australia
Indonesia
Laos
Mexico
Russia
South Korea
United States of America

#AScareADay – Day 6 – And Now The House-Dog Stretched Once More by Emily Brontë

October 6th – Emily Brontë – ‘And now the house dog stretched once more’ – Read it .

I really liked this poem. I read it like a slow pan from the domestic scene at the hearth to the dinner table, with eerie music in the background.

Ah, a lovely cosy fire with a dog before it. The children are playing but they don’t seem comfortable being in the room anymore. The dinner table has a guest at it, with the mother and father. The guest is… creepy. There is something very wrong here.

I really enjoyed this one.

For this one, I thought about the mysterious visitor, and his ‘basilisk charm’. I thought I would share my take on otherworldly visitors and share a short scene from my story The Snow Child, which is available in full from my shop.

Alice crept down the stairs to her mother’s singing. She hadn’t sung a note since they had heard Jimmy was dead, not even in church. It should have been a relief, something nice, something familiar. Almost like it was all back to normal.

Instead, her mother’s song was brittle and off-key, notes sliding in and out of tune.

Alice’s eyes were sore and her head heavy – she had slept fitfully, waking at every creak of the cottage and every rustle against the window. She had the vague impression that she had woken to see a pale, ghostly white head behind the thin curtains, lit by the brilliant silver penny of the moon.

She was sure she had not dreamed the wet, bare footprints glinting in the moonlight as the curtains flapped back, or the icy breath that sent her spinning into nightmare after nightmare, but when she woke the floorboards were dry, and it was morning.  

Her kitchen was the same, chairs and table in the middle, the clutter of jars and rolling pins and wooden spoons strewn over every floury surface, her mother doing a hundred things at once, and a fresh boiled egg on her plate with a slice of bread. The cast iron pots and pans were mostly missing from their hooks; all they could spare had been donated to the war effort.

She slid into her chair, making sure her egg and bread did not touch as she shuffled her chair forwards into position.

Her mother warbled her discordant song.

Alice focused on her egg, the hot brown shell cracking under the smart tap of her spoon, the tiny shards peeling away from the white membrane beneath.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something sitting in her brother’s chair.

It was staring at her.

Frightened tears blotted out the speckles of the eggshell. Her hand shook as she picked the shards away and scooped off the top. A sticky ribbon of yolk, stinking and bloody, dribbled onto the plate.

Alice sprang up.

Jimmy’s pocketknife bumped against her thigh. She thrust her hand into her pocket and squeezed it. The blade was stainless steel, folded into its simple wooden handle, and her fingers were trembling too much to click it open.

She couldn’t look at what was sitting in Jimmy’s place. She couldn’t look her mother in the eye, afraid of what she might see. She cast about for her school bag, dropping low so the table blocked her view and groping around on the floor.

It’s a dream, she told herself. A bad dream. And I’ll wake up soon.

The bag was against the table leg. Its leather was smooth under her hand, firm, dependable. She slid the strap over her shoulder and stood up, focused on the weight of it. She couldn’t raise her head.

Her mother stopped singing. “Alice, it’s time for school.”

Alice forced her lips into a brief, stretched smile, which people seemed to think was ‘sweet’, and dropped it immediately.

“She’s a funny little thing, our Alice,” her mother said, distant and dreamy.

  Alice marched out of the house with her head down. Her stomach knotted and clenched.

Behind her, something followed, keeping its distance.

She could feel eyes on the back of her neck, and her scalp prickled.

The street was quiet. No curtains twitched back as she trudged to school, no sounds came from within the shut-up houses. Mrs Lankin usually washed the steps in the morning, but today there was no sign of her. Her milk bottles sweated outside the smart green door.

All she could hear was a strange clicking sound, like teeth chattering, and the slow, slithering steps of someone progressing down the street behind her, not attempting to catch her up.

Alice shivered, although it was a bright, sunny day, few clouds peppering the wide expanse of blue.

If this was a dream, it didn’t feel like one anymore.

#AScareADay – Day 5 – The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A short little poem today! I like this, I like how sad it is at the end, and I love the ideas of the shapes and movement of the sleeping creature under the waves.

October 5th – Alfred Lord Tennyson – ‘The Kraken’ (1830) – Read it .

I would point you to my novel THIRTEENTH for some Kraken mockery, and some Call of Cthulhu / Dagon influences. This time, however, I thought I would share a little short piece I wrote a while ago, called Sea Skins. It’s not a kraken, but it’s about bodies and changes, and the sea.

Sea-Skins

Of course he had let her use the bathroom. Alone in the beach house to write all weekend, he wasn’t expecting guests. But here she was.

There was something about the way she swam, like a seal, slick and smooth in the waves, that filled him with a sense of longing he’d never felt before. Not for her, but for the sea. It was a tug he resisted every morning, beneath his ribcage. He didn’t like swimming. Not for its own sake, but because there were parts of himself he didn’t like to display. For as long as he could remember, his skin had never fitted properly. It hung awkwardly on his frame and he could never tell from his reflection how much space he took up, how much width, depth, height. There was always something wrong, something too – too much, too little, not like the magazines or the actors, not like the movies or the album covers.

The sea didn’t care what he looked like, and yet the current was an intimate embrace he wasn’t ready to receive.

He never saw her arrive, or leave, for that matter. He didn’t want to keep watch, in case that was creepy. Instead, he would keep his head down, try not to actively listen for an engine, refuse to look up from the taunting flicker of the cursor, but whenever he did… there she was. In the water.

Except today.

Today, she was in his bathroom.

His heart had nearly stopped when she rang the bell, standing there smelling of salt and cold, her hair dark and plastered to her shoulders, her skin gleaming in the grey, sunless afternoon. When she smiled, it turned him inside out.

“Can I use your shower?” She had an accent he couldn’t place.

For one wild moment, he wanted to climb inside her skin, and see if it fitted better than his own. But it wouldn’t. He would ruin it. He thought his body wasn’t the right shape for any skin, sometimes.

“Sure.”

And now—

“Do you need a towel?” he called to her through the closed door.

“Sure,” she said, and he cracked the door open a little to pass a towel through the gap, keeping his eyes on the floor.

She grabbed his wrist.

Seagull talons sank like fishing hooks into his skin, pulling him inside.

“Would you like to wear my skin?” she asked.

There it was – folded neatly, a perfect, smooth, gleaming thing.

Underneath, she was beautiful in another way. He saw her cracks and fissures, the battle-scarred scales, the half-mangled fin jutting from her back, the bright, glassy roundness of her eyes.

“No.” His throat was dry. “I want…to take mine off.”

She nodded. “I thought so.”

She flayed him in the tub and reshaped him, softly, quietly, underwater. He choked on salt and iron-tainted liquid, rushing warm and bloody down his throat.

She held him down until he could breathe through the neck slashes.

Underneath all that pink and red, he was grey, with streaks of bone-cream.

She dressed again, first in her own skin, then put the meaty suit of his skin on top, modelling it, and he saw himself for the first time. He looked wonderful, but only from this angle, being worn by someone else.

He watched himself leave, wet bare footprints left on the tiles and parquet, and followed.

He couldn’t stand upright – she had reformed his vertebrae like a Rubik’s cube, finding the right configuration, just for him. He loped on all fours, dragging errant skin fibres.

She took his skin off on the beach and left it there for him, as if she knew he would come back for it, that he might change his mind.

Perhaps he would.

It could wait.

He slipped into the water for the salt to seep into his wounds, finally a shape that felt right, and the sea’s permissive embrace no longer scared him.

#AScareADay – Day 4 – The Buried Alive by John Galt

Today’s short story is pretty fun, with a good tension build-up!

October 4th – John Galt – ‘The Buried Alive’ (1821) – Read it  or, for a more accessible version, . Listen to it .

So, once upon a time before The Crows was in its current form, I wrote a novel called The Reckoning, in which a necromancer from another world came to Pagham-on-Sea to save them from one of Death’s escaped minions, running riot in our world. It was a pretty cool story, and it was here that Ricky Porter – in embryonic form, and not as fleshed out as he became – first appeared.

It was also the book where I properly explored Katy Porter and her powers, but with a different dynamic and purpose to her current one in Thirteenth.

In this novel there is a scene in which Katy Porter is buried alive, is found dead, and then the family decide to resurrect her… I won’t put the whole thing up, but enough to get a flavour of it.

Two nights later, the moon was waxing gibbous. The hill was being watched.

About a mile away from the stakeout site, Katy Porter was walking the lanes from her cousin’s cottage, tucked away among the trees of The Chase, once a wood belonging to the medieval monastery which, after the Reformation, became part of the Fairwood estate, and was now public land maintained by the County Council. Budget cuts had left the Council without the means to send in tree surgeons and the like, so now The Chase was wild and overgrown, and Ricky Porter’s crooked old cottage sat in the middle with a dilapidated air of mouldering neglect. 

Katy had stayed a few hours, her uncle and aunt looking on as Ricky performed the first rite of the Change. “Glad you changed your mind about all this travelling, Uni, nonsense,” her uncle had said gruffly, while her aunt rested in her natural form beside him, her many beady eyes blinking in unison as approving slime dripped from her maw. “Don’t see the fuss, myself.”

Of course you wouldn’t, Katy had thought angrily, you can’t even spell India never mind point to it on a map. But she had kept her peace, out of respect born of fear.

The tea Ricky made her drink was bitter and vile, but no worse than the stuff Dr Monday had made her take. Ricky’s second mouth had gaped in a grin at the back of his half-shaven head whenever he turned around, like it could see the faces she pulled behind his back.

“Thirteenth daughter of a thirteenth daughter,” her aunt had said, replacing her thick black veil as Katy made to leave. She had showed Katy to the door, leaving a trail of slime behind her beneath her Victorian mourning gown. “We will expect great things.”

Now, the night had fallen, and Katy was pondering this. She wished she could speak to her gran, but Bez Wend was dead, killed in a nursing home protecting some secret. She knew that much. A sad, cold ache in her chest slowed her steps. Head down, she trudged along the lanes without paying attention to where she was, remembering the little things: the clicking of the knitting needles by the gas fire, the fresh baked cakes and the way the smell wafted through the hallway, the gingerbread every Winter Solstice, the pearly buttons on her favourite cardigan, the Sunday roasts with all the family around the table and muffled cries coming from the oven,the lily of the valley scent she wore on special occasions. Katy sighed. Her gran had made the best gingerbread.

There were no pictures of her grandad. He was a mythical figure, and no one had any clear memories of him to share. It was like he had never existed. But Katy had once been allowed into her gran’s private room, down in the cellar, to see the little shrine of bones in his honour and put an offering on it. Little Katy had reverently placed a bar of chocolate between the dribbling candles, still wrapped, because it was the most precious thing she had in her pockets at the time. She still treasured the pride and pleasure in her gran’s indulgent, approving smile. 

“I bet I’ll be slimy like Aunt Lucretia,” Katy muttered glumly to herself, imagining she was talking to her gran. “It’s not fair. I bet I’ll get tentacles with suckers on them, or start growing snakes out of my head…” she kicked a stone moodily along the road. “…I don’t want to be like Aunty Maud, or Ricky, or Uncle Darryl, or Pete…” She started to run through her family members one by one, but gave up. “I like being me.” The moon would be full next week, and Ricky would perform her second rite then. She had a week before some of the attributes she would be stuck with emerged and settled down. “I guess spines wouldn’t be too bad. Useful.” An owl hooted in the distance. “I mean, I guess, ok, tentacles would be useful,” Katy continued, hands in the pockets of her jeans, scuffing her trainers on an uneven patch of tarmac, “I just don’t fancy the slime thing. Tentacles might be cool, actually. Like the whole sea hag aesthetic, that’s pretty badass. I could pull that off. I’d have to change doctors though, and Dr Debas is always so busy, there’s a waiting list… and I don’t like him as much as Dr Monday.” She huffed. “Swings and roundabouts, I guess.”

A rustle from the hedgerow made her turn around.

It was probably just a rabbit or a hedgehog.

Katy backed away a few paces and carried on going.

“Wish I had some now,” she muttered. “No one would fuck with me then.”

Behind her, a twig snapped.

Katy didn’t bother to look. She picked up the pace, an adrenaline surge zipping through her veins and lending her speed. Don’t run yet, she thought. Try and Change… but she couldn’t turn it on and off at will. Not yet. That wasn’t how it worked.

Her own brisk steps and the rustling of her jacket played tricks with her hearing, making her think she heard sounds that weren’t there. She forced herself to stop, listening hard, more to prove to herself that there was nothing there.

The soft rustle, identical to the sound of her own waterproof jacket, continued on the other side of the hedge, catching up.

Katy lurched into a full pelt sprint. She powered down the lane, flat out, phone and house keys bouncing awkwardly in her jacket pocket and banging against her hip, ragged, panicked breaths not deep enough, lungs and legs starting to burn. She raced around the gentle curve in the road where the hedgerow broke, vision blurring and spots dancing before her eyes. Just as she got level with the stile, a dark shadow bounded over the top of it and slammed hard into her side.

Katy had no breath left to scream as the weight smacked her down, her ankle twisting under her, and she hit the road forearm first, flinging out her arm by instinct. It didn’t hurt at first. A cloth was pressed over her face, blocking her nose and mouth with its sweet, slightly acrid, smell. The world turned a sickening shade of blue-black flashed through with bursts of polka dots, and she didn’t know anything else until she woke choking, wracked with pain, and another shovel of earth was dumped on her face. 

~~~~

At five in the morning with two hours left of the shift, Jazz made them another coffee and triple-checked the rota. It was a slow night. There had to be someone on at all hours this time of year, just to check on the bodies. Leaving them to their own devices unmonitored was generally frowned upon. 

Tonight, everything had been still. 

The cleaners turned up with the bits of the Riser in the canteen in a black bin liner, and Tina volunteered to lay them out to pass the time, although this was a body destined for the ghouls who worked at the Crematorium, and ghouls weren’t fussy on food presentation. 

Jazz knocked the office window to get her attention. 

Blinking and stiff, she waved and wandered back into the room. “Nothing going on out there,” she said. “Parts are ready to go off to the Crem. I still can’t believe top floor let one get in the lift.”

“Just had a call from Viv,” Jazz said, looking haggard and serious. Their usual forensic pathologist, Vivien had a long-standing relationship with the Underground and had just returned from annual leave. “He’s been in a field all night. You’re not going to believe this. Katy Porter’s been buried alive.”

Tina gasped. “Katy? She’s not – she isn’t dead?“

“Found at about ten o’clock,” Jazz muttered. “Shame Yury’s help couldn’t have been everywhere at once, but there’s miles of fields to cover I guess. She’d been buried earlier this evening or late this afternoon, and then dug up again a few hours later – and there’s a puncture wound in her arm.” He sighed. “No sign of him. They’re going to bring her in soon, another hour maybe. Weather’s turning to shit. Viv says he’s got all the video and the pictures, he wants us to prep.”

“No,” Tina exclaimed, staring at him. “We can’t. We can’t do an autopsy for twenty-four hours, not on someone like her. Make sure Viv and Paula know she’s a VIP guest with a twenty-four hour wait.” 

‘VIP guests’ of the morgue were treated with kid gloves, generally because you never knew what they might do if disrespected. Waits varied, but Tina was very good at information recall: two years of careful study had enabled her to produce a colour coded wall chart that tracked VIP waiting times, with emoji stickers to show what happened when these were ignored. It had been a labour of necessity rather than love, and the result of much trial and error. The most common emoji on the chart was the face screaming with fear. 

Jazz shrugged. “On it. Find a place we can store her at a reasonable temperature.”

“She has to be kept warm,” Tina said, thinking fast. “I’m going to take the trolley and set up something in the boiler room, ok? I’ll get some blankets.”

“You better be right,” Jazz muttered, calling Viv back. “Hi, Viv. Eglantine says it’s a VIP guest with a twenty-four hour wait so she’s setting up in the boiler room not the lab. Ok? Yes. Yes, sure. I’ll – No I don’t think that’s a problem. Thanks. Bye.”

“Are we good to go?” Tina was shivering with impatience and urgency. “Poor kid. She must’ve seen something, surely.”

“If there’s nothing by the end of the wait, they’re going to conduct the full autopsy like the others,” Jazz said. “The scene is going to take a few days to process, it’s a bloody big area. Viv says they’ve had a nightmare with one of the floodlights – it’s been on the fritz all night. Now the weather’s changing. So if she didn’t see anything, or we wait and nothing happens… hopefully he’s left a trace, this time.”

Tina frowned and peered out of the window, cupping her hands around her face as she pressed up to the glass. “Can’t see any rain.” The threads of dawn were beginning to appear on the horizon, and the sky was cloudy but clearing up. “If it’s localised… how long has it been since she was found? Seven hours? That bodes well, doesn’t it?”

Jazz was back on the phone. “Viv? Move her, asap. It’s not raining here at all – sky’s looking pretty clear. If you want to preserve the scene, get her shifted. Egg- Tina- thinks it’s localised… bodes well for her being a VIP. Yeah, she does know her shit, doesn’t she?” He grinned at Tina and gave her the thumbs up. “Yeah no worries, we’re on it. Prepping now. See you in a few.”

Tina beat him to the door. “Right,” the medium said, rubbing her hands together. “Let’s see what Katy Porter knows.”

#AScareADay 2025 – Day 3 – The Sand-Man by E.T.A. Hoffman

This one is a good short story overall, but my favourite image is right at the beginning. I really struggled to read this, as the whole style is like nails running down the blackboard of my brain, but I got through it. It was definitely worth the payoff.

October 3rd – E. T. A. Hoffman – ‘The Sand-Man’ (1817) – Read it .

I love the actual folk horror of the eye-stealing sand-man and his beaked children nesting in the moon. Respect to the single dads out there providing human eyes for their children after a hard night of blinding people with sand.

I thought about doing something with the automaton and the clockwork woman, but isn’t that… quite a lot of modern media? I think there’s maybe an interesting story in there somewhere along the lines of a man being beguiled by a clockwork girl, forgetting the real one he’s supposedly in love with, and then having her dismantled in front of him, but that’s literally the story of Blodeuwedd, made of flowers to be a wife without agency, and the plot of several TV shows, so… perhaps not.

I went with the folktale, and something more fun. Here is a little tribute to the sandman, in the same meter as Herrick’s The Hag from Day 1.

Look man, it is hard
to be no-holds-barred
With a conscience of any kind;
You have to suppress
to avoid distress,
and ease any trouble of mind.

For a moon-crook nest
to sit two abreast
is hardly cheap for the renting;
and, furthermore,
a fam’ly of four
requires expenses expending.

Then is the question
of indigestion
when the young are not prop’ly fed;
To grow to full size
They need human eyes,
and must have some before they a-bed.

Look man, it’s strife,
This troublesome life,
Lugging endless bags full of sand;
What’s worse, employees
are hardly at ease
when tasked with the next job at hand.

You can’t get the staff,
so don’t make me laugh,
It’s better to play one’s own tune
And don’t you blame me,
It’s those kids, you see,
And my landlord, the man in the moon.

#AScareADay 2025 – Day 2 – The Elopement by Johan Karl August Musaus

The second day of the challenge is a very short story, originally in German and translated into English, in which a plucky girl decides to run away with her lover using the night that ghosts haunt her troubled castle as the perfect cover. Horror-comedy! All’s well that ends well.

This is set in Castle Lauenstein, which looks so lovely and not haunted at all:

Photo Credit: Rainer Herrmann © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

October 2nd – Johan Karl August Musaus – ‘The Elopement’ (1801) – Read it here. The link is to a translation of “Die Entführung” from Volksmährchen der Deutschen volume 5 (1787). This translation is slightly modified from its first publication in The German Museum volume 3 (1801).

For my creative response today, I’m going to focus on the procession of burning nuns, and that image of a phantom procession only a travelling seer can handle. I have tried to retain the comedy aspect…

I found this image of Orlamünde Hall, and I think a blazing procession of ghostly nuns would really work with the decor.

Photo Credit: Rainer Herrmann © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

He did not have to wait long. Night had fallen on the benighted hall, throwing its vaults and pillars into arched and rounded shadow. What in daylight appeared as silver foliage climbing over the rich blue vaulting now seemed to writhe about overhead in a sinister, serpentine tangle. The stout round pillars bore none of their regal stamp in this evil light, but rather squatted menacingly in their row, goblin-like and leering.

The door at the far end of the hall slid open. At first, he could see nothing, but the gloom gradually gave way to a sombre orange glow playing on the stone, and then to the soft-soled steps echoing around the silent space, and then he saw them.

The burning nuns processed with habits smoking and flaming with tongues of fire, two abreast, although the door could not support two living people to walk through side by side.

Their habits blazed like torches, throwing light around the room in twisting, agonised patterns.

The air was stifling, his lungs burning with the stink of charred flesh and fibre, and the woodsmoke smell of rosary beads.

It was no wonder that bell, book and candle had not sent these ladies to their rest, he thought. They were already fired with holiness, clay vessels now glazed firm with martyrdom, and they were not for moving with further evocations and prayers. What could be spoken over them that they themselves had not already said in the furnace of their purgatory, in the solemn meditations of their earthbound, heaven-turned hearts?

No, the seer thought reflectively. This would take more than holy men were equipped for.

He stood in the way of the procession, bracing himself, and took a long, slow breath, filling his whole chest, and trying not to choke and gag in the process. Then he addressed the burning nuns in a great, booming voice, in all the expletives and insults he could contrive to hurl against them, never repeating himself, but uttering every colourful curse he had ever heard. 

The nuns stopped their procession, and smouldering hands flew to their crosses, glazed eyes wide beneath their phantom wimples, a whole nunnery of ghosts utterly aghast.

“F— off and be damned, you ragged mischief of magpie-garbed c—s!” screamed the wise seer, finally out of breath.

The nuns, scandalised beyond measure, retreated with burning hands over smoking ears, overcome with such horror that the castle was quiet for seven years while they recovered.