There’s something about the eerie stillness of snow – the sudden change in the world, the unfamiliar nip in the air, the way it quiets everything.
 
Of course, winter is also the perfect time to draw a little closer to the fire, to pour a glass of something warming and share a chilling tale or two.
 
So here are some of my snowy favourites:
 
Like the best kind of haunted house story, Dark Matter by Michelle Paver takes place in an isolated setting, with no prospect of help. Here it is the Arctic which provides the distance, with a small outpost becoming the only refuge amid the snowy wastes. Already on his own as the poor man of the group, Jack is soon cut off from the normalising effects of society and left to the wilderness. Is the haunting real, or a result of his extreme isolation? Set in the 1940s, the story is recounted in Jack’s diary entries. I loved not only the terrific atmosphere but his idiosyncratic voice, which leads us ever deeper into the cold and the endless dark.
 
‘Everywhere was snow and silence. Snow and silence; the complete arrest of life; a rehearsal and a pre-echo of death.’ The Silent Land by Graham Joyce takes us to the French Pyrenees, where Zoe and Jake are caught in an avalanche while on a skiing holiday. The sense of eeriness builds from there – they return to find the village deserted and yet seemingly impossible to leave. With an unsettling, off-kilter scenario and wonderful characterisation, this beautiful novel is about love and loss and everything in between.
 
The White Road by Sarah Lotz also has a terrific sense of place and plenty of shivers. The main character produces stories for a somewhat distasteful travel website, which specialises in spooky places, particularly those that can offer a dead body or two. Exaggerating his climbing experience, he joins an expedition to Everest, where the corpses of lost climbers are still frozen in the snow. Considering his motivation, it is perhaps fitting that rather more terrifying things also await him there – but are his visions real, or a symptom of altitude sickness? Hugely suspenseful and claustrophobic, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
 
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is set in nineteenth century Iceland and follows the story of Agnes, a young woman accused of murder. She is sent to wait out her final days on a remote farmstead, where the residents do their best to avoid her and only a young priest tries to listen to her story. They are soon forced to work together in order to survive the hardships of rural Iceland, however, while Agnes must come to terms with her own impending death. This is a beautifully written novel, based on a true story, and set in one of my favourite places.
 
Finally, I can’t resist throwing in The Snow Queen, by Hans Christian Andersen. I always adored his tales – after all, aren’t some of our best-known fairy stories really horror for kids? Here a young boy is stolen away by the Snow Queen. He is forced to live in miles-long halls of ice, while his friend Gerda sets off into the wilds to try and find him. The real horror lies not so much in being stolen away as the threat of losing the memory of everything he has ever known. The boy, Kay, is kissed into forgetfulness, while a splinter of bewitched mirror in his heart turns it to ice. He begins to change inwardly even before he is physically stolen, the familiar becoming unfamiliar, something Gerda can’t recognise: ‘The word ‘alone’ Gerda understood quite well, and felt how much was expressed by it.’ I’ll bet they didn’t put that line in the Disney version.

'Alison Littlewood has a real talent for building atmosphere, loaded with the promise of things to come - hints of dread with the possibility of hope' Guardian

Leah thought Maitland Farm could give her a new life - but now old ghosts are dragging her into the past.

Following the tragic deaths of her husband and son, Leah is looking for a new life. Determined to bury her grief in hard work and desperate to escape Christmas and the reminders of what she has lost, she rushes through the purchase of a run-down Yorkshire farmhouse, arriving just as the snow shrouds her new home.

It might look like the loveliest Christmas card, but it's soon clear it's not just the house that needs renovation: the land is in bad heart, too. As Leah sets to work, she begins to see visions of the farm's former occupants - and of the dark secrets that lie at the heart of Maitland Farm.
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If Leah is to have a future, she must find a way to lay both her own past and theirs to rest - but the visions are becoming disturbingly real . . .

Sinister Horror Company presents a children's book about the secret childhood of a young boy called Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Howard is a lonely, isolated boy who lives in the run-down seaside town of Innsmouth. Most of the town’s men left to fight the Great War and didn’t come back, and those that did, like Howard’s neighbour Mr Derleth, brought their own scars and strange stories with them. None quite so strange as what is about to happen to Howard, however.

An undersea earthquake brings a strange black reef to the surface just off the coast of Innsmouth, and with it something else. Something old, and forgotten, and every bit as lonely as the young boy who discovers it. What follows is a unique and secret friendship that will change the life of both Howard and his bizarre new friend forever.

“With ‘The Old One and The Sea’, Lex H Jones has crafted a clever and beautiful coming-of-age story set within a miniature Lovecraftian snowglobe – in which adventure and intrigue exist alongside ancient monsters, and friends can be found in the unlikeliest of places.”
Laura Mauro, British Fantasy Award Winning author of ‘Looking for Laika’.

“Lex H Jones is a unique voice in horror and a writer to watch. The Old One and The Sea is an imaginative tale that will delight Lovecraftian readers of all ages.”
Taylor Grant, Two-Time Bram Stoker Award Finalist.

To win a copy of The Old One and the Sea simply share this article using the social media buttons at the side.

Retweet the pinned tweet below and leave a comment on the tweet telling us which monster you would most like to have as a friend. 

Competition Open to UK Readers only 

Lex Jones was born and raised in Sheffield, north England, in 1985. A keen writer from a young age, he was always fascinated with the supernatural and is obsessed with stories. He loves films, books, theatre, videogames, graphic novels, anything with a good story that captures the imagination. His books tend to have a supernatural (or at least 'unusual') undercurrent, as this moves them away from the more boring aspects of real life.​

To mark the release of Hex Life, an anthology of eighteen never before seen  stories of witches and witchcraft written by popular female fantasy authors, including Kelley Armstrong,Rachel Caine and Sherrilyn Kenyon  who have contributed new stories from their own bestselling universes  and edited by Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering. 

We have an article from Christopher and Rachel on the top five misconceptions about witches.   

Witches Are in League With Satan – I was born and raised in the Appalachian foothills, a place largely removed from society and filled with wild and wonderful women who believe in both magic and the redemptive power of the blood of Christ. These so-called Granny Witches were a necessary part of life for rural folk, many of whom lived in remote areas and had no access to medical facilities or news sources. These Christian craftworkers were often relied upon to heal the sick with herbs and salves, remove curses, and predict the weather.
Magic Is Either “Black” or “White” – Magic is magic. It is a tool used by people who, themselves, can be either “good” or “bad” or anything in between. Beyond the fact that evil-doers can send mixed, muddy signals about the truth of magic, the labels “black” and “white” are rooted in racism, where the traditional practices of African-originated individuals, many of whom were enslaved, were seen as bad or wrong, and often feared to be used against white people.

Witches Are All Women – The fallacy in this belief should be obvious to most, but there are those who only associate witchcraft with womenfolk. Often, people will designate a male witch with the misnomer “warlock” as a way to set them apart from female witches, but the origins of this word make it something of a derogatory title. Warlock was traditionally used as a label for someone who was considered an oath-breaker—a historically serious accusation! Not to mention, these terms are distastefully heteronormative and binary and really have no place in the current social climate.

Witches Were Burned At the Stake – While there is some evidence that men and women were burned to death as punishment for being accused of the heresy of witchcraft, this practice was largely limited to the European continent, primarily Germany. The preferred methods of dispatching undesirables in America and some other parts of the world were hanging, crushing beneath stacks of terribly heavy stones, and starving. In fact, of all the witches tried and executed in the infamous Salem witch trials, not a single one of them was burned. The idea of burning witches persisted likely because it looked better on the silver screen and was much more dramatic than the alternatives.

Witches Love Cats – Not necessarily. Cats are perfectly fine creatures and there are certainly many witches who may choose them as their familiar, or simply a household pet, but they do not hold the monopoly on companionship. There are many witches who have preferred to hang out with dogs, goats, horses, and myriad other creatures. At some point during the Middle Ages, cats inexplicably became linked with the devil and, as such, were killed in great numbers during the scare of the Black Plague. This association with evil carried over into the witch trials, where women who were accused of being witches were assumed to consort with reviled felines, who carried communications to and from Satan. Give Alma Katsu’s tale in Hex Life, Gold Among the Black, a read for an exemplary sample of a cat-alternative familiar.

RACHEL AUTUMN DEERING is an Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated writer, editor, and book designer from the hills of Appalachia. Her debut prose novella, HUSK, was published in 2016 and drew praise from many critics and fellow writers. Her upcoming novel, Wytchwood Hollow, is set for publication in 2018.
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She has also written, edited, lettered, designed, and published comics and short prose for DC/Vertigo Comics, Blizzard Entertainment, Dark Horse Comics, IDW, Cartoon Network, and more.

Deering is a rock 'n' roll witch with a heart of slime. She lives with a bunch of monster masks in suburban Michigan.

“Deering deftly crafts vivid, melancholic, and truly disturbing psychological horror with an authentic vibe of Appalachian noir. It will haunt you.”
​Paul Tremblay, Author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock

Please visit her  at http://rachelautumndeering.com/index.html

​The 13th of September 2019 was Roald Dahl day, on what would have been his 103rd birthday.  Like National Book Day, when children go dressed as characters from their favourite books, the pavements outside schools were dotted with children dressed as Matilda, Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket (or his cavalcade doomed fellow Golden ticket winners), The Grand High Witch, James and George (of distended peach and awe-inspiring medicines fame, respectively), some oddly scaled-down BFG’s and The Twits, to name but a few.
 
(Incidentally, my costume of choice on National Book Day – Oracle Database 12c: Oracle RMAN Backup and Recovery – never goes down particularly well. Philistines.).
 
However, just one year I’d like, on Roald Dahl Day, to see somebody dressed as a monstrous child-sized bloated grub, because one thing that people often forget is that Dahl wasn’t just a writer of macabre children’s stories, he was a damn fine writer of scary material for adults too.
 
The aforementioned grub featured in the episode "Royal Jelly" from the seminal TV series "Tales of the Unexpected", a new-born transformed into bee larvae from over-consumption of the substance of the episode title. Along with a public information film about the dangers of drowning in grain silos – admittedly, not a common peril for a ten year old living in the middle of Coventry – this episode is one of the earliest memories I have of being truly afraid.
Sunday Night in the Court Household was Tales of the Unexpected Night. After the light entertainment japes of Family Fortunes and the mundane and gentle humour of Last of the Summer Wine, what better way to end the weekend than with a dark tale that would cause nightmares for anywhere between one and six nights?

​Every episode opened with the vaguely sinister Ron Grainer tune (yeah, the Doctor Who theme writer, a tune later realised by famous Coventrian Delia Derbyshire) accompanied by a Bond-esque silhouetted naked girl dancing in front of flames. Various bits of sinister imagery would flash by – a roulette wheel, a gun, a lion’s head, a devils face (where the eyes suddenly terrifying lit up), and, jolliest of all, a catacomb wall of human skulls.
 
The dancing girl from the opening credits may well have – along with Wilma Deering from Buck Rogers and the Dukes of Hazzard's Daisy Duke – been partially responsible for pubescence for a great many boys born in the 1970's. I'm not proud.
 
It’d open to the creased face of Roald Dahl himself sitting in his drawing room in front of a roaring fire, suddenly looking up at you as thought you’d unexpectedly popped around to read his gas meter. Or as though you'd woken up, tied up and drugged, in his front room.

​ 
He’d introduce the episode; “There is a place far up in the North of Russia called Pravdinsk, where in the winter, the earth freezes so hard it is impossible to dig a grave when a man dies. So the clever Russians – do you know what they do? They simply sharpen his legs and knock him into the ground with a sledgehammer. This has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re going to see now.”
 
Thanks a bunch, Roald. That’s an image that’ll be embedded in my subconscious until my Honey Nut Cheerios tomorrow morning. We haven’t even started the bloody episode yet.
 
His tone was that of a mischievous uncle, friendly and trustworthy, yet sneaking trying to show you something that your parents wouldn’t like you seeing. “Sit down, David,” he seemed to be saying, “I’ve got something to tell you that’ll shit you right up.”
 
Be warned – if you’re not familiar with Tales of the Unexpected, I have absolutely no qualms about spoiling forty year old television programs in the paragraphs that’ll follow. I'll be talking about my personal top three of scary episodes of Tales of the Unexpected.
 
“Royal Jelly” (Series 2, Episode 1) is a stone-cold classic, and one that no doubt mentally scarred a great many children around my age. Originally appearing in Dahl’s 1960 short story collection “Kiss Kiss” (which would feature a great many other Tales of the unexpected stories), it tells the tale of Albert and Mabel and their baby daughter. Their new-born child is having difficulty eating and has been losing weight since birth, but Albert – a beekeeper – finds that adding Royal Jelly to the baby’s milk helps. The child downs it voraciously, getting fatter as the story continues. Mabel learns of this and objects, but Albert continues regardless. He eventually admits to Mabel that he’s been eating Royal Jelly himself, and it increased his fertility enough to get Mabel pregnant in the first place. Albert begins behaving oddly, a weird buzzing accompanying his words with thick yellow and dark hairs sprouting from his cuffs. The tale ends with Albert handing Mabel her daughter, now transformed.
 
"Mind you," he said, turning away from her, gazing lovingly now at the baby, 'it's going to work far better on a tiny infant than on a fully developed man like me. You've only got to look at her to see that, don't you agree?"
 
The woman's eyes travelled slowly downwards and settled on the baby. The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose, like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings.
 
"Why don't you cover her up, Mabel?" he said. "We don't want our little queen to catch a cold."
Royal Jelly – Roald Dahl
 
I was always loathe to watch this episode again, remembering how terrified I was on first viewing. I vividly remember the grub-like creature in Albert’s arms in the final shot, Mabel’s horrified scream drowned out by the buzzing of bees.
 
False memories are an incredible thing. As an adult, the episode is still wickedly sinister - held together by an incredible performance from the ever-reliable Timothy West – but you see no grub, only a flickering greyscale image of the child’s face. Like the best horror, it’s implied rather than blatantly shown.
 
How many other people out there who watched that episode when I did are subject to the same Mandela effect of remembering something that they never actually saw?

​Roald, feeling strangely benevolent, gives an appropriate warning before the innocuously titled William and Mary (Season 1, Episode 3).

"This is basically a very nasty tale".  He's not kidding. When Dahl tells you something is nasty, you know shit is going down.

It opens with the death of William Pearl, professor and research scientist.  Mary, his wife, finds that she's been left next to nothing in her husbands Will – but he's also sent her a sealed letter. "To be read to my widow, exactly one week after my death".

The posthumous documentation gives instructions to ring an old neurosurgeon colleague of Williams, a Doctor John Landy, along with other strict instructions – even in death, William seeks to control his wife's life. She is to give up alcohol, television, make-up, cigarettes and to dispose of her telephone.

It turns out that William had made plans prior to his death, that the neurosurgeon Doctor Landy had met with William before. William had agreed to be a guinea pig to an experiment, to have his brain removed from his skull just prior to his death – and that his brain would be kept alive by machinery. 

Mary is introduced to the contraption housing her husbands' brain, which in turn is hooked up to an encephalogram. They couldn't save his hearing, but one of the optic nerves is still intact and hooked up to a single unblinking eye. 

​ 
Deaf and unable to speak, the box housing William can only communicate through excitable pulsing noises.
 
Mary insists on taking William home, despite Doctor Landy's protestations. When Landy claims that William is his own, Mary reminds him that he is still legally her husband.
 
The story ends at Marys house, as she carries out all the activities that her husband forbade her from doing in life – drinking, smoking, wearing pretty dresses, watching television. All William can do from the confines of his life-preserving contraption is stare helplessly at her, bleeping out angry impotent pulses.
 
"I have to say, William - it's heaven having you home. It's like they say – life goes on. And on. And on. And on."
                                                                                                             William and Mary – Roald Dahl
 
Although the pay-off is somewhat contrived – and the old 'consciousness stuck in hell for eternity' is a well-worn trope (even featuring in a fair few 2000AD Future Shocks, and even the odd tale of mine) the performance from Mary – the wonderful Elaine Stritch – makes it well worth your time.
 
"I personally think this story is funny," opens Roald, once again frighteningly overdressed for sitting in front of his fire, "but if your sense of humour doesn't happen to be the same as mine, then I'm afraid you're going to be a bit disturbed by what goes on."
 
We'll take that as granted, Roald. I don't think anyone's sense of humour is quite the same as yours.
 
In "The Landlady" (Series 1, Episode 5) We met Billy Weaver, our lead, travelling on the train to Bath. He's in Insurance & Risks, travelling to a new office. His travelling companion, a friendly vicar like the ones you only get in television dramas (see Dad's Army, Dick Emery, Derek Nimmo, et al), recommends that he stay in a B&B. Weaver, apparently having been born yesterday, needs the concept of a Bed & Breakfast explained to him.
 
As though the very term isn't self-explanatory. Weaver is dead meat.
 
As Billy spends an extraordinarily long time looking at a Bed & Breakfast sign – seriously, check it out on YouTube as the scene goes on for a comically long time - the landlady is creepily watching him from within, silently urging him to come in. Nothing creepy there; the B&B trade in Bath is notoriously cutthroat.
 
In all seriousness, the landlady is terrifying from the get-go. I wouldn't have stepped in any further than reception before turning around and legging it. As previously stated though, Billy is very naïve.
 
She takes him to his room, being thoroughly unnerving throughout. She's equally as odd when alone and downstairs, talking to her stuffed dog as though it were alive.
 
That night, as the Landlady's insistence, Billy goes to sign the guestbook. He recognises some of the names in it but can't recall from where. The dates against them are from years back, but he can't place them until he suddenly remembers one of the names as being somebody who went missing years back.
 
Like I say, naïve. Rather than run screaming from the building, he joins the landlady for biscuits and tea. He continues to be slower on the intake than the audience – even the ten-year-old me watching – when he notices that every pet the Landlady owns is stuffed.
 
As Billy starts to behave oddly, wavering around as though tired or drunk – or perhaps drugged from poisoned tea – the Landlady remarks how she's done all the taxidermy herself.
 
"I stuff all my little pets, when they pass away. I'm glad you remembered the book, because later, If I forget – and you know now what a one I am for forgetting - I can always pop down and look it up. I still do that every day with Mister Mulholland and Mister... and Mister…There I am, gone again. Bedtime, dear. Up we go."
                                                                                                                     The Landlady – Roald Dahl
                                                                                                                                  

The closing shot, of no surprise to anybody, is The Landlady putting Billy to bed. Before she closes for the night, she wanders the corridors to check out the stuffed dead residents in the other rooms, bidding them goodnight. You may well note that one of them looks remarkably like Ted Danson, although he's not credited. She then wanders back to Billy, pulling on her rubber gloves.
 
In hindsight, it's worthy of note to mention that not every episode of Tales of the Unexpected was as disturbing or horrific. There were comedic, lighter episodes, but they're not the ones that stuck in the minds of this impressionable ten year old.
 
Roald Dahl stopped introducing episodes somewhere around the start of the third series, which was about the time when they stopped being adaptions of his own stories – there's probably a connection. As a writer whose adult work often gets overlooked, he's well worth checking out – as a writer of quality short stories, I'd rank him way up there with Ray Bradbury.
 
"Tales of the Unexpected" was, even at its worst, never anything less than entertaining. If only that it's a great opportunity to see a relative smorgasbord of UK television, film and theatre talent in one place. It lost some of its sparkle as Dahl became less and less involved, but, along with the original series of Twilight Zone, has a far greater level of quality control than a great many other TV anthology series.
 
I'm looking at you, Tales from the Darkside.

David Court is a short story author and novelist, whose works have appeared in over a dozen
venues including Tales to Terrify, StarShipSofa, Visions From the Void, Fear’s Accomplice and The Voices Within. Whilst primarily a horror writer, he also writes science fiction, poetry and satire. His last collection, Scenes of Mild Peril, was released by Stitched Smile Publications and his debut comic writing has just featured in Tpub’s The Theory (Twisted Sci-Fi).
 
As well as writing, David works as a Software Developer and lives in Coventry with his wife, three cats and an ever-growing beard. David’s wife once asked him if he’d write about how great she was. David replied that he would, because he specialized in short fiction. Despite that, they are still married.
 
Website: www.davidjcourt.co.uk
Twitter: @DavidJCourt

Today we are honoured to bring you the world exclusive first look at the cover for the brand new novel from M.T. Hill.  The Breach will be released in March 2020 by the ever reliable Titan Books.  Pre-orders are already up for the book, and I have a sneaky suspicion that this is going to be a winner, with its potent mix of horror and science fiction.  

And as an added bonus we also have an excerpt from the novel below underneath the rather snazzy cover.  
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M.T. Hill grew up in Tameside, Greater Manchester, and now lives on the edge of the Peak District with his wife and sons. He is the author of Zero Bomb, The Folded Man and 2016 Philip K. Dick Award nominee Graft.

 Shep can pull chins on a doorframe with only his little fingers, so the ten-foot brick wall at the bunker’s site boundary is as easy as it comes. He runs at the slab of it and springs both-handed to its coping stone, hauling himself up in one fluid motion. 

Standing on that skinny border, he already has to manage his breathing. The site beyond the wall is a lightless pool. He pulls on his dust mask and head torch and quickly double-checks the scrambler and helmet are covered by the bushes. He sweeps his torch across the site. Vague outlines emerge: the ruined foundations and strewn masonry of a levelled outbuilding, the crude parallelogram of the bunker’s concrete entrance. His heart is going, and his breath rasps through the mask filter. He shakes out his arms and sweeps the torch vertically. Mechanical parts are scattered between Shep and the bunker door. He turns off the torch to wait and check. The stars glower through the canopy.

This, then, is the edge. Balanced with one arm, rocking over on himself, Shep twists the torch back on and looks for a place to land on the other side. Imagine you’re standing on a ledge of cold, wet slate. His toes pulse with strain as he leans over. At the wall’s base is a concrete border studded with broken glass, rusty nails and metal offcuts. He nods. Faint nausea like an affirmation. In some ways he expected worse than sharps – substandard measures, really – but figures the bunker being hidden counts in his favour. Dogs and glue traps are standard in more built-up areas, and sonic barriers aren’t out of the question. Not that sharps are easy, mind – he’s definitely taken some tetanus shots in his time.

Shep sits on the wall and unties his bootlaces. The torchlight falls into him, jangling between his knees as he swaps the boots for rubber darts, a bit like covered ballet pumps. He stretches out the rubber with his toes, then folds the boots into his Bergen. He turns off his headtorch, transfers his weight over his knees and launches from the wall’s inside.

The breach is on.
 
Shep goes low through the grounds, closing on the sloped concrete lintels of the bunker entrance. A sharp thrill to find its surfaces unspoiled by graffiti. He gathers pieces of machine debris and wraps them with canvas strips, a bin bag for rain cover. He straps this bundle to his rucksack and takes out his ageing camera. Dicey, pausing here, so he reconsiders and continues towards the bunker entrance. Drilled. Trained. Alone by design. There he takes two flashless pictures of the land he crossed, level as he can manage. The first in RAW format to fiddle with later, the second stabilised but over-exposed to get an impression of his surroundings. He reviews them: grainy, yes, but useful. Nothing stands out, even as nothing is familiar. The aerials he saw in the pub toilet have no relationship with the terrain. Then he twists on the torch again. The darkness jumps back thirty yards.

There’s a codebox on the door shell, so he applies a skeleton-string. A mechanism stirs and the door clunks open, soil raining from the frame. The smell of must and metal. Shep takes out a wooden stopper and wedges the door.

The bunker’s entranceway gapes, wet and warm. Oesophageal. Pale stones under a well-worn earthen path, which in the torchlight resemble fossils. Shep’s leading foot brings him out of the wind. He has his hands on the walls, and his skin crawls at the sound of dripping, the wind across the entrance. His tongue thick in his mouth. Now only the habit will keep him down here. Practice and persistence. He can’t see what’s dripping, and that makes it louder. Another set of deep breaths to try and slow things down before he creeps on. One step. Two. As he rounds a corner the wind dies off completely, and the Lake District is gone. He’s crossed a second boundary, and the acoustics change with it. He’s vaguely conscious of his eyes watering.

Shep soon reaches a vaulted antechamber, as dark and indefinite as the site looked from up on the wall. Brown fluid leaks from what might be a run of shower fittings in the roof. The pools beneath crackle and splash. There’s still no graffiti.

When he hears a weak scratching, he stops.

To deal with fear, you have to reimagine the threat. So because Shep can’t shut his eyes, won’t dare, he tries to do just that – remodels the space as the foyer of a hotel, connecting to a corridor that leads off towards its suites. If he holds his head torch at a certain angle, the rough floor passes for carpet. He puts a hand to the slick wall, and smells again the age of the place, the stagnancy. His breath, condensing on the mask, has started running down his chin.
​
As Shep goes to wipe his eyes, he stumbles on something soft. He cries out, then gags himself with his sleeve. The scream echoes, travelling deep inside, and his back ripples with cold trepidation. Look, don’t touch.