Thanks to everyone who bought People Skins, Volume 2 last week! We made it to #62 of the British and Irish Horror charts! If you’re still thinking about it, you’ve only got a few hours before it goes back to $4.99.Get it here: https://books2read.com/PeopleSkinsVolume2
Then come back for this month’s short story about someone who keeps making the wrong decision, and my selection of this weeks best links!
Canary
“There’s nowhere to go but–” Overuse has rubbed out the rest of the white postcard’s message.
Two identical, unvarnished wooden doors stand in front of you. One of them will continue to take you down, as impossible as that seems. The other one, presumably, will lead you to the exit.
Billed as the ultimate escape room on the UrbxnAbxndon website, this is the worst game you’ve ever played. Possibly also the last one.
Your body cam is still recording, but you can’t imagine the feed is getting through. Even if it is, it won’t be much of a video.
Metal steps wind their way around the concrete wall, with a drop into the bottomless dark in the middle of the stairwell. Everything is pitch black, with your torch, on its last set of batteries, providing too little light.
Only these landings with the doors and a card break the monotony. But whichever door you choose, you go down further.
You can already see the comments below your video saying it’s all a trick, that you’re using the dark and bad quality footage to disguise the editing. There’s no way stairs could keep going down that far.
And yet here you are.
You’ve been here a week, always heading down. Your supplies are exhausted, as are you.
Only the doors break the monotony, yet you dread them, knowing that every time you choose, it opens into more dry blackness, leading you further down.
You hope it is an illusion, and that these steps will somehow lead you back to the top. You don’t have the energy to return the way you came.
The nausea of circling around and around and around for days made you vomit dozens of times, but you’ve acclimatised now. Still, the disorientation would make it easy to fool you into believing you’re going down.
Perhaps that’s what the card means. “There’s nowhere to go but up!”
A hint that you’re on the right track. You rub the card gratefully with your thumb.
It’ll be over soon. Air, water, light. No more migraine from exhaustion and crushing vertigo. Even standing before the doors, your body is spinning around and around.
The last card said, “Hang in there!” That was a day—thirty flights of stairs—ago.
You had thought they were making fun of you, and imagined finishing the game by tying your belt to the railing protecting you from the hole in the middle of the stairwell and jumping.
But it must have been for motivation.
You choose the right-hand door, because there are five words on the card, and five letters in the word “right”.
When you pull the handle, the lock on the other door snicks closed forever.
There’s nothing behind the right-hand door except more feathery darkness.
Metal steps lead down.
With nowhere else to go, but suddenly feeling hopeful, you continue on into the darkness.
Oh, and…
Read!
Awesome monthly short fiction magazine The Deadlands is now free each month. All you have to do is sign up to their newsletter for FREE fiction. Sign up here!
Read!
I like Kingsley Amis’ books. BookBub is currently offering the ebook of The Green Man for 1.99.
It’s one of those old (it’s from 1969), posh English books about drinking too much and failing to have sex, BUT this one is set in a haunted pub. Definitely one of Kingsley’s more interesting books.
I have no control over when BookBub will end this offer, so grab it here quickly if you’re interested.
Watch!
Here’s an entire hour of Alfie Brown doing stand-up comedy. This is my new comedy find. Funny, but dark enough for fans of this newsletter. Watch him here!
Watch!
And once you’ve seen Alfie, you’ll need to see the man I intend to keep calling my spiritual comedy animal until he asks me to stop, Stewart Lee.
His Snowflake show is on BBC iPlayer on Sunday at 22:35! I’m guessing you need to be in the UK to watch this without a VPN.
Listen!
In case you missed it, this is what a black hole sounds like. I have this on repeat while writing!
Listen!
Max Booth III has released his book Maggots Screaming as a five part audiobook on his podcast. You can listen to that here!
See you next week!
