Featured Stories

They will meet you in the lobby. Words about organ donation and making arrangements and bracing for unfortunate outcomes but you will hear nothing. Miranda, you will say. I just want to see Miranda. A doctor will take you to her, warning you not to get your hopes up. Brain damage and blood loss, the prospects are bleak. She’ll look alien and unlike herself, a hub of tubes and bleach-smell. Beep. Beep. You will hear the machine go off and you will see the way they surround her and push you away.

They will meet you in the lobby with condolences.

The palest hues of pink, shaken free, are scattered by the wind and fall—springtime in England when cool blue sky is dotted with whipped-cream white clouds, and when the golden sun shines, all the world is warm. Lacey curls up on the back seat of the vintage MG, bouquet abandoned, tears shocked dry, listening to murmurs from her father as he talks to guests outside. Dismayed, people move quickly away.

Soft pink tears of cherry blossom petals spatter the back windscreen until blown briskly away, unwanted, onto the verge. She was on time, but he never turned up at all.

She sipped her martini. “I’m in security.”

“Surveillance systems?”

“Integrity management.”

I grinned. “I assure you I have no integrity at all.”

She laughed. “Companies hire me to confirm their employees are still who they say they are. If a different personality is loaded into someone’s wetware, you have no guarantee who’s behind their eyes.”

I checked my surroundings and my sidearm. The bar was crowded and noisy. Nobody would hear the gunshot; I’d be gone before they noticed the body. “Sounds interesting. So who hired you this time?”

Only then did I see her pistol pointing at me. “You did.”

He was a loner. A drifter. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks.

She was cheap. Easy. But she could sing like a bird.

He bought her a guitar and some blue jeans that would make her mother blush.

They stopped at a truck stop on the way to Nashville. He went inside for burgers. She slid over to check her cherry red lipstick in the mirror.

She closed her eyes.

Suddenly, they are sixteen years down the road. They never made it to Nashville. He’d pawned the guitar.

She still sings like a bird, but he never listens.

He drives the middle road, across The Heath, tarmac edges crumbled like eczema, clamping his cheap car to the centre of the camber; the realm of tractors and pheasants.

The Give Way sign is ahead, the vanishing point of hedges higher than a man, set back on geese-wide green verges.

He’s going nowhere, just home, that silent empty sham.

He’s driven this a hundred times, always wondered: what if he ignored the sign, went straight across? Never any traffic.

Fifty yards to go and he puts his foot down. Fifty. Sixty. Adrenalin accelerates.

There is a moment he feels alive again.

Parvale wasn’t a haunted house in the traditional sense. No spirit was tethered there, no crime unsolved. Instead it acted as a resonator: manifesting your guilt and sins as shades.

People came there, brought by word of mouth: the penitent, the defiant, the masochistic. Some fled screaming into the night. Few found what they were looking for. None came more than once.

I asked the caretaker, the only person who could stand to stay, what his secret was.

“First, you have to stand before your sins and beg forgiveness,” he said.

“And then?”

He smiled. “Then you have to forgive yourself.”