All I knew about Ashby-by-the-Moor was that my father had insisted on being buried there.

Or rather, his will had insisted. It amounted to the same: me trying to squeeze into a parking spot beside a band of village green as cold February rain slanted across the windscreen. Not that there were many people there, but there wasn’t a lot of space either. The village consisted of all of two streets, arranged in a cockeyed cross with the church, appropriately, at its centre.

There were five of us mourners. I didn’t recognise the other four and there wasn’t much in the way of conversation. I wished again that I could have talked Deborah or the girls into coming with me, but Deborah was busy with work and neither Jen nor Heather had the faintest interest in a grandfather they hadn’t met. The ceremony was brief, thank goodness; the rain hadn’t let up. The priest said a few innocuous, impersonal words, and I wondered who’d arranged this. My father, presumably, but to the best of my knowledge, he’d never been religious. Could it be that, seeing the end approaching, he’d found some sad glimmer of faith? He wouldn’t have been the first.

Afterwards, I hurried back to the car. With the heater turned up to full, I took the envelope I’d received the week before from the glove compartment and emptied its contents onto the passenger seat. They consisted of a copy of the will and a small, hardback book bound in a cracked sheaf of glossy paper. The will I returned to the envelope, annoyed by its reminder that at some point I’d have to answer its summons to visit my father’s empty rented flat and collect his remaining belongings. The book I flicked through, as I had twice since I’d received it, each time with puzzlement. I still thought that perhaps a letter might drop out, some final apology or explanation or … something.

But no, unless its hidden messages were written in invisible ink, the slim volume was precisely what it appeared to be and what its title stated: A Book of Local Walks for the Solitary Hiker. The copyright page dated it originally to 1952, though this particular copy was a reissue from a decade later. It listed twenty-seven walks of four to eight miles in length, with names ranging from the studiously dull “Up and Down Faxendale” to the faintly enticing “Around Kirby Top and Past the Devil’s Saddle.” And none of that explained why my father had felt the need to arrange for it to be sent to me after his death.

I put the book down and started the engine. Then I switched the engine off and picked the book up again. I flicked to the contents page, scanned down, and read aloud, “Number 12: From Ashby-by-the-Moor Churchyard, via Thiliburton Woods and the Old Granary.” The length was listed as four-and-a-half miles. Was this the significance I’d been meant to find? I vaguely recalled that my dad had been into hiking. Was this intended as some sort of legacy?

I wanted to roll the window down and throw the book out in the rain. Instead, I put it back in its envelope. I was beginning to get hungry and there was nowhere to eat in Ashby-by-the-Moor, as there wasn’t a great deal of anything. If I set off now, I could grab an early lunch in a nearby pub.

I could. But I didn’t. I realised I was staring at my shoes. They weren’t made for walking, but they were sturdy. And didn’t I have my coat in the boot? Anyway, the rain was slackening and the sky was lighter ahead. If I’d interpreted the crude black-and-white map rightly, that was where the walk would take me. And I wouldn’t be doing it for the father I’d barely known, I’d do it for me, to stretch my legs and clear my head and make something of this otherwise wasted day.

The route took me into the graveyard. I purposefully went around the opposite side of the church to avoid the fresh grave there. Beyond, a wrought iron gate led onto a gravelled lane between the gardens of quaint cottages. Within a few metres, the lane met a gate,

It’s autumn again, or at least the aspens are dropping their leaves as if it is. You will soon be saying that we must get warm for winter. You will ask me, again, the question that I am still too afraid to answer. Beyond the copse of aspens, I still think of myself as the girl I was formerly, lonely and locked securely inside herself, even though these days I am not that girl even when I wander far from you. Miles away, I bend to investigate a wild mushroom and you are the one that clutches the mushroom hat through my fingers; I feel you curl my fingers, feel you make a fist of my hand, see the shredded mushroom flesh in heaps on the forest floor even though I did not want to break it. The same goes for the sparrow that lands unluckily on my shoulder one night. Only my eyes are still entirely mine, and even still I can feel you flitting in certain moments at the back of my vision, pressing on the thin membrane that separates me from only being us.

I don’t tell you that I go wandering to be alone for a while; I only say, truthfully, that I can’t be fed by the forest like you. The forest nourishes me more haltingly. I collect wild currants and huckleberries, dig for parsnips. But food is getting scarcer as the forest starves, and soon I will have no choice. I will answer your question. I will climb, alongside you, into the yoke of the aspens. I am only waiting for the first snowfall. For a sign, definite and irrefutable, that you are the only thing left to me now. In the meantime, everything before our shared existence is getting blurrier. I have to try, like a wanderer through dense undergrowth, to thread my way back to before it was only you and me.

You would not remember Father’s stories. He would not have told them to you. They encompassed a whole world of characters, but at the heart of that world was The Angry One, who commanded all Father’s fear and half-sacred loathing. Father told me that our home was on the border of The Angry One’s territory, that The Angry One could use the entwined roots of the aspens to see me from its hiding place in the very bowels of the forest.

The very bowels, he would say, his voice low and roiling.

The Angry One was seemingly younger than me, because Father never mentioned the name before the summer of my eleventh birthday. The birth of The Angry One coincided with the births of all the many other fears that began roaming the dark landscape of his imagination. As I outgrew all my clothes and scrubbed blood out of my underwear, Father threw out the television and the radio, nailed boards over the windows, covered all the mirrors in the house and then finally ripped those mirrors from the walls and carried them outside and smashed them one after another. He never said, but seemed to believe, that hiding would protect us, and writing too. He spent hour after hour filling cardboard sketchbooks with dense columns of his neat square-looking handwriting, although for what reason I couldn’t know. He only buried the books in piles underneath his bed when he was finished.

I was not interested in what he was writing, not then. I was distantly afraid of The Angry One the way that children in old books are afraid of the Devil. I wouldn’t have said so to Father, but I thought I was too small and obscure to be seen through the roots of the aspens. What I was afraid of was Father, who could at any moment, if he chose, abandon me in a windowless and mirrorless house that I did not even know how to imagine leaving.

That same summer, Father had begun vanishing at night. He would come home after midnight smelling of ash and vinegar, stories spilling from his mouth as if they couldn’t be contained inside of him. I knew without being told that I was supposed to stay awake until he returned, although it was long past my usual bedtime. Those were the nights when he explained how The Angry One tore open the belly of the forest and poisoned the trees with its own blood.

Kelly and I met at Ithaca College. Then we both dropped out and rolled down the hill, living in a limbo where we weren’t quite townies but our friends who had stayed students were a bit suspicious of our strange schedules and sudden access to cash. This was back in the late 90s when you could do that, go inbetween, fuck around, and still live. We rented a place and stayed in town after what would have been our class graduated and left. I got to be the pulp paperback and ephemera expert for one of the used bookstores downtown; Kelly scoured the thrift stores and estate sales of the Finger Lakes region for dolls, stuffed animals, and toys to sell on eBay. I phoned her when someone brought in a load of old Oz books and there was a Raggedy Andy at the bottom of the box. She called me when someone had slipped a Tijuana bible in with little Bobby’s Archie comics.

The way I remember it, I got the call about the Van Etten house first, from a guy I knew who hauled crates of vinyl from record fair to record fair all over the state. His name was Clint, and though it’s probably unrelated, I never saw him again after that weekend. I heard later that he tried to open a record store in Rochester, then when it failed he moved out west.

From the outside, the house was just what I expected. Two stories, the blackened ghost of a collapsed porch, front door high and useless so we went around back and through the garage.

There was a bad smell of smoke and blood even from the outside. It made me wary. Clint hadn’t said anything about the guy died in there. It was damn hard to get that smell out of paper or the fabric of soft toys.

When we got into the house proper, then I was surprised. I’d heard of hoarders, but this was before you could see them on TV. I’d never walked into anything even close to this. Clint and Tom the book guy were already at work, like ants at the base of a pyramid, shifting grains here and there in the living dunes of crap. It made me dizzy and for a moment I couldn’t see the ceiling, the walls, where it all ended.

I forced myself to concentrate on the details—the split seams of cardboard boxes, still-bright dust jackets and album covers peeping out. Tom gave me a thumbs-up and hoisted the A.A. Blue Book, first edition, then pulled aside his dust mask and said “You two are going to want to take a look upstairs.” Clint, flipping through a crate of vinyl, didn’t even break concentration to greet us. It was going to be a rich and fruitful day.

Kelly and I sidled on through the stacks of cardboard boxes that reached, I could now see, to the ceiling. I mean really to the ceiling, the topmost boxes were crammed in, slightly squashed in a way that seemed impossible to achieve from the top of a ladder. From what Tom told me later, he and Clint ended up having to chop up the boxes and pull things out Jenga-like until they could let an entire column collapse without getting squished. There were a lot of twisted spines, a lot of snapped vinyl towards the bottom. Tom won’t shut up to this day about the signed Helter Skelter he found far down in the mess, beyond repair.

The walls I glimpsed as we worked our way along the goat paths towards the stairs didn’t give me great faith in their structural soundness. I went up anyway.

It was an old-fashioned house, with none of that master suite business going on, three bedrooms and a bathroom spaced evenly along a central hallway. The first bedroom was already almost clear. Tom told me later that the new owner had come in early that morning, hauled out heaps of clothes and the mattress with the sheets still on and set them on fire at the edge of the backyard. Tom, who can be very nice when it won’t cost him anything, cautioned the guy that even ugly vintage clothes can be worth money. The guy told him they were too gross to sell.

The second bedroom, though, made Kelly gasp despite the stale air. “Jesus,” she said on the exhale.

Sin was a summer ghost, born of a death sudden as lightning. They slipped on bare ghost soles down the long corridors of an old inn deep in the forest, drifted and danced in the abandoned heft and dust-limned dim of the inn’s pillared halls. With ghost vision, Sin could see the many lanterns, persimmon and gold, that once illuminated the inn’s woodwork and polished floors, and the travelers and locals seated over honey wine and food.

These spirits of the inn’s long memory flickering through the abandoned spaces annoyed Sin at first, speaking of a kind of life they had never known. At the same time, the gauzy manifestations engaged them, like dreams on the ever-waking air of their ghostlife. One evening, they tried an experiment, sitting in the memory flicker of a patron, a large, thick-bellied man. Sin moved with him while taking a bite and the flavor of onion pancakes burst crisp-savory-sweet through them. The honey wine startled them, sting and tang, but its soft echo settled like fragrance on skin.

After that, Sin spent evenings slipping from one memory guest to another, tasting dishes the inn had been known for, getting drunk on honey wine and making up the flickers’ silent conversations.

“Let us eat all the food.”

“Yes, we are so rich and can have all the food.”

“Ah,” finger to the side of their nose, “and we will not share with grubby orphan children because we are piiiiiigs.”

When the inn’s remembering faded each evening, night came large and rustling in the woods around it. In the darkness, the memory of lanterns lingered, the inn wearing festive shimmer.

One night, some uncounted run of mornings, noons, and nights into Sin’s ghostlife, as summer passed into autumn, a cat squeezed into the inn through a crack in the walls, wild-eyed and rattled. Sin heard barking and snuffling on the other side of the wall, and drifted through to see three dogs, large and excited. They saw Sin, bayed and barked, then ran off.

Back inside, the cat heaved breath, eyes wide and round under one of the tables.

Sin hovered nearby, settling to sit, though still a handspan above the dusty floor. The cat watched them. His eyes were gold and caught the shine of memory lanterns. But he was not a ghost; Sin could feel his warm, wild solidity, the rank odor of dirty, dog-slobbered fur going through them as strongly as the smell of a roasted potato from a street cart had when they were alive.

Eventually the cat began to clean himself, the sound of rough tongue rasped over disheveled fur slipping into the night. Sin sat, hovering, the cat washed his fur clean of dog and fear, and the night ticked over until the cat curled up to sleep, Sin keeping watch. When dreams twitched the cat’s grey paws and made his whiskers tremble, running from dogs in the endless of his inner landscape, Sin drifted closer and lowered one hand to, then through, tongue-washed fur, into heat and intent, hunger and fascination with the tiny motions of the world. “You’re safe, you’re safe here,” they said, incanting it so with all their ghostly will.

In the early, still-dark morning, the cat stretched with thorough languor and slinked off to investigate all the corners and corridors of the inn. There were voles to eat, grasses in the inner courtyard to chew, water in the broken cistern, where birds came down to drink. Sin drifted after and when, as day crept on and sun furled into dust-soft air, the cat curled up on the rocks of the broken cistern, Sin stayed in the courtyard, twirling and singing, following memory guests passing through or sitting with them in the open doors of their rooms.

The season turned, rains poured through the courtyard, leaves in shades of flame and plum fell from trees and patterned the broken stones, leaving shadows behind when winds blew them dervish. Sin called the cat Hui and Hui followed them as much as they followed him. Hui played with the trailing tatters of Sin’s ghostl...

There is no one here, no one but me. Out of ninety apartments—ten in each of the nine floors—only mine has someone inside, but most have already been sold. It’s an investment, the estate agent told me when I was signing the contract. An investment for life. Yet I had no interest in becoming a landlord: all I wanted was a clean, well-ventilated, spacious apartment, and my new house ticks all the boxes. The only “downside” is that nobody lives here.

At first, I thought it would be an excellent setup. Without tenants, I wouldn’t have to worry about the unwanted sounds that came from my last apartment, like loud music, student parties and insistent moans in the middle of the night. All my life, I have struggled with noise and chaotic environments, a combination that doesn’t fit my silent personality. Now, every hour is as quiet as I am, with only the distant sound of cars as my company, the mews of my cat, or an occasional bird chirping from outside the walls of this private condominium, beautiful, ample, and empty.

“Wish me luck,” I tell my sisters through the video call in the first evening, after removing all boxes from my brand new house. I have always disliked clutter, and could only rest after organizing everything. “This place is so peaceful that it will be hard to get up tomorrow morning.”

“Of course Sara’s house would be like that,” said Ana, laughing. I frowned, and Carla chuckled as well.

“You must be really happy in your empty shoebox!” she said, pointing at the background behind me. My cat moved her tail lazily, and Carla waved. “Hi, Kika!”

I wanted to say they had no right in criticizing me; it’s not like they would have their own house anytime soon. My sisters are often in my mind, and I worry that they will never cut ties with our parents or live in any other healthier, better way.Mind your own business, I remind myself with a smile. They are grown enough to choose what to do with their own lives.

“Well, I’m tired now. Talk to you guys later!”

I close my laptop and push it aside, exhausted after cleaning the house and talking to them. That was all I have here: a sofa, a desk, a table with a single chair, and a few clothes, as little as possible to fill this vacant beauty. Even my books are digital, to avoid occupying space, and I feel like I can finally breathe, about to fall asleep like never before.

No noise.

No mess.

No chaos.

No one.

No one . . .

When I close my eyes, I’m back to my childhood home. The stale smell hits me at once, and droplets of humidity drip down the walls. I force myself through the living room, and there is no space between the cardboard boxes, forcing me to push them aside, but what I find underneath is a vile dark nest. The cockroaches crawl between my feet, their antennae brushing against my toes, and the mere feeling of it is enough to make me throw up. I hate their wings, their hairy legs, their reddish bodies and the noise it makes when I crush it with the sole of my feet. Die, I think.

Die, die, disappear.

The sound of a cockroach’s cracking carcass brings me back, and I jump out of the sofa. Out of instinct, I scratch my arms, my face, my ears. I need to make sure there are no bugs in me.

“It was just a dream,” I tell myself. Kika meows, and I remember where I am. There are no insects in this building, and if one appears, she would kill them for me.

Yet the noise continues on, and I look around, trying to find the source of it. First, a slap against the wall; then another, and another, and another. My brain recognizes the sound immediately, too used to the act of finding and killing bugs. No one should be here, I remember, looking out of the window to find lights, but there are none.

I only sleep again after convincing myself that I’m alone.

There were always too many things in my parents’ house. The bathroom had piled magazines over the hamper,

Randall left work early again, feeling ill. Nothing definitive, a general fatigue, a general malaise—that was the word, although he’d never used it before. If he’d stayed in his chair another minute it would have required an army to get him out. He didn’t know where he belonged, but he didn’t belong there.

The bus was unusually crowded for the time of day. He wondered if there might be a concert or some such event. He found a seat quickly and hunched forward, trying to shut out the pack. But there were just too many of them, jostling about, not exactly noisy, but murmuring. That constant murmur. And they smelled: rank body odor and cigarettes, and things left out in the rain. But it had been a dry fall, so that stench had to be from something else.

He glanced around. Had they all been fighting? Their faces were discolored, bruised. That fellow’s nose had gone scarlet, swollen. The woman next to him appeared caked in blue, turning black around her eyes. Another woman’s lipstick smeared from both ends of her lips, as if a razor had widened her mouth. Some of their clothing was torn. He studied the women, seeking exposed flesh. It was an old habit, but he didn’t mean any harm. He simply liked women. Was that an exposed breast or an elbow? He felt vaguely ashamed, but he looked anyway. Another word he’d never used occurred to him: voyeur.

Their outfits were unusually colorful, some of the clothing beyond outlandish. They were in costume, he suddenly realized, but they’d been wearing their costumes too long, and now their costumes stank, and their makeup had deteriorated.

Halloween wasn’t until tomorrow—were people partying early? He’d never liked the holiday himself. It seemed such a sad and desperate celebration, poking at your fears for some supposed fun.

“Paula!” A female’s voice from the back of the bus. Maybe an objection. Maybe a warning. Randall couldn’t get the tone, the intent, or even the age of the speaker from just a single word. He turned around in his seat to see if he could tell who had said her name. Maybe, he thought, he might even see Paula herself. Would he even recognize her after so many years? He’d certainly had plenty of practice trying to imagine her older face, her body. Of course it was unlikely to be her, but what did they say? A small world.

His cell went off. One ring. He looked at the screen. “Not Available” was all it said.

“Paula!” He jerked his head up, looking for the speaker. No one looked at him. No one looked eager to speak. Each huddled to him- or herself, nursing their poorly disguised injuries, murmuring softly.

He’d always thought of her as the one who got away, although arguably he never had her in the first place. She’d been pleasant enough, and consented to his kisses. But never further, no matter how he’d suggested it, although he’d never been that direct. They’d gone to dinners and movies and he’d felt cowed by her quiet beauty. She was taller than him, and had that beautiful voice, especially when she laughed, or whispered into his ear. Those were early college days and he had lacked confidence. He never told her how he felt, and he had no idea how she felt about him. It was ridiculous to be thinking about her now, but someone had said her name, and he hadn’t had sex in a long time. If he could find that person he would tell them to shut up.

His cell went off again. “Not Available” flashed on the screen. He answered anyway. There was nothing but static on the line, and perhaps under that a distorted murmuring.

At his stop he pushed his way through the stinking crowd. Everything he touched left his hands feeling greasy. Climbing off he looked back to see if anyone watched him as the bus pulled away. It was hard to tell. The one face turned in his direction appeared to be sleeping.

As he walked home it occurred to him how the homeless huddled under steps and in alleys appeared to be in costume,

To Whom It May Concern:

I’m writing to inform you that I have recently moved into ____ House. I apologize for being circumspect about the name. I should probably just spit it out to make all of this easier, but what with copyright laws being as they are, it feels safer if I leave that to you to assume. I don’t want to be sued for infringement! Besides, I’m fairly certain you are familiar enough with this particular house to discern its identity pretty easily on your own. It’s rather famous, after all. If you haven’t read the book, you’ve surely seen one of the films or the recent television series. Hint: it’s that forsaken house on a hill made iconic by the phantom hand in the night, the bloody writing on the walls, the thing that walks alone there.

Except now, that thing has me for company.

Not that I ever dreamed I’d make ____ House my home. All I wanted when I opened the book was a change of scenery, you understand? A few hours refuge from the purgatory of this interminable quarantine and Mother’s vicious sniping, especially if I could spend that time at a place with the spine-chilling reputation ____ House has. You see, I’ve always had an appetite for the macabre. Even when I was small, I was the sort of boy who pulled wings off of butterflies and incinerated ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. I’ve spent my whole life rooting for the ghosts, ghouls, and monsters in my favorite novels.

For example, when I was eleven, I stole a paperback copy of The Shining from our local Goodwill and spent an entire weekend in delicious terror wishing I had my very own roque mallet, so that I could join Jack Torrance rampaging through the halls of the Overlook Hotel.

At thirteen, I sold my soul to the boy next door in exchange for an actual kiss, open-mouthed and with tongue, though when I pressed my luck and copped a feel between his legs, he slugged me in the gut so hard I saw stars. Then he tore to shreds the little slip of paper I’d given him with my name written out in my own blood.

That’s what really broke my heart.

Then, on my seventeenth birthday, I got arrested for reciting Poe by candlelight in the middle of the Salem Hill Cemetery. I’d dressed all in black, of course, and painted my fingernails especially for the occasion in a shade of blood-red called “Tell-Tale Heart.” The cops didn’t know what to make of me. They asked if I was there to smoke weed or kick over headstones, sacrifice kittens or to blow some old creeper I’d hooked up with on Grindr. How could I explain to them that I simply felt more at ease reading to the dead than skulking in the shadows of the Homecoming dance like some impotent Carrie White?

The dead do not laugh at me.

They listen.

Go ahead: call me a freak if you like. Everyone else does, including Mother, but I enjoy that word very much. Freak: One who is markedly unusual or abnormal. That’s from the Webster’s definition, although when Mother screeches “FREAK!” at the top of her lungs as she clutches her rosary, I get a flame-in-the-belly satisfaction knowing I’m the one in our little nuclear meltdown of a family who’s considered “markedly unusual and abnormal.”

When she claims to pray for my soul’s salvation, I don’t even believe her.

Dear old Mother, with her pink fleece slippers and acid wash jeans. Her “Hang In There” calendars marked up with monthly novenas. Her jugs of Ernest & Julio Zinfandel stowed beneath the elastic-waist skirts in her closet where Jesus can’t see. And the endless chain of her Merit Menthols, which, when I was smaller, somehow managed to find themselves occasionally snuffed out on my arms and back.

Ah, memories.

Every now and then I wonder if she misses me, now that I’m living here full-time at ____ House. I doubt it. We’re so little alike, after all. Me, with my books and dark thoughts, and her, with her parish suppers and 24-hour Fox News.

“Call Them Children” by Wenmimareba Klobah Collins, as narrated by Kate Baker for The Dark Magazine.

“Bobbie and Her Father” by Gillian Daniels, as narrated by Kate Baker for The Dark Magazine.

“When Charlies Sleeps” by Laura Mauro, as narrated by Veronica Giguere for The Dark Magazine.