When Dr. Elspeth Vale is hired to locate a forgotten 1950s BBC courtroom drama, she expects the usual maze of lost listings, vanished tapes, and unreliable memory. Her patron, Lionel Frax, insists he saw The Trial Verdict broadcast live, once, and remembers a guilty verdict spoken before the court could reach it. Yet no archive admits the play existed. As Vale follows one man’s childhood recollection into family silence, jury records, and domestic dread, she discovers that some lost media is not missing from history; it is memory’s disguise for a verdict delivered long before anyone understood the trial itself.
Amanda Girard
The Fourth Mother
When Dr. Elspeth Vale receives an impossible message naming her dead mother as “Ursula,” her ordered life of archives, evidence, and contaminated objects begins to fracture. The message points not only to a hidden identity, but to Mara: a younger sister Elspeth never knew existed, concealed inside a network of occult institutions, false names, semantic traps, and objects designed to remember what families choose to bury.
Drawn into the orbit of the enigmatic Embassador and his unseen patron, Elspeth follows a trail through obsolete museums, defective instruments, forbidden grammars, and the ruins of St. Ursula’s Home for Corrective Speech. There she discovers that language itself has been weaponized: names bind, mistakes open doors, and motherhood can become an occult technology of possession.
As lies accumulate and every clue proves to be both evidence and diversion, Elspeth must decide whether she is rescuing her sister, prosecuting her mother, or being shaped into the next instrument of a system older than either of them. A literary occult fantasy of estrangement, inheritance, and the terrible power of being called by the wrong name.
The Night Trade
Gary Bell is bankrupt, exhausted, and finished with fine dining when Janet Finn offers him a way out: run a 24-hour franchise garage, shop and takeaway in Coldmere, a northern coastal town with steady passing trade and unusual night customers. The rules are simple. Keep the visible business clean, profitable and boring. Use the Black Book suppliers for the other locals. Never improvise kindness after midnight. What begins as a desperate second chance becomes a comic horror of product codes, loyalty cards, old rooms, hostile customers and franchise compliance. In Coldmere, hunger has a hatch, and Gary owns the rota.
Wild Men, Routes and Thresholds: A Probabilistic Reading of British Wild-Man Traditions
What do witnesses see when they report a wild man in Britain: an animal, a hoax, a misidentified stranger, or something older than modern categories allow? The answer depends on how we read the evidence. A hidden breeding population of large humanoids is biologically improbable, but the folklore is real and persistent. The woodwose, the mountain presence, the roadside figure and the forest watcher all belong to a deeper pattern. They appear where human order weakens: at gates, paths, moors, woods and dusk. This essay proposes a different model for the British wild man: not cryptid, but threshold.
RED VARNEY: OR, THE TERROR OF SEVEN DIALS
LONDON’S STREETS RUN DRY!
Something stalks the fog-choked alleys of Seven Dials — something ancient, something hungry, something that leaves its victims cold as church marble and empty as a broken promise. Three women dead. Not a drop of blood between them.
Inspector Crudge is baffled. London is terrified.
But one woman isn’t running.
Catherine Sparrow — seamstress, survivor, the most dangerous person on the worst street in the city — has a knife, a plan, and absolutely no intention of being anybody’s victim.
Red Varney has walked these streets for centuries.
He has never met anyone like her.
He should have stayed in his box.
Building a Generic USB-over-IP Setup
This article explains how to build a generic USB-over-IP setup using a Raspberry Pi or similar Linux single-board computer. It describes how a USB peripheral can be plugged into a network-connected bridge device, exported using Linux USB/IP, and imported by a client computer so the device appears locally. The guide covers suitable hardware, network design, installation, automatic startup, security controls, device compatibility, troubleshooting, and practical configurations such as lab benches, firmware development stations, printer bridges, and remote serial access. It also notes Windows limitations and recommends VPNs or firewall rules for secure operation.
Red Velvet
Red Velvet Summary A dark literary thriller about a woman archivist drawn into the shadow world of elite collectors, notorious objects, secret rooms, and the dangerous men who believe power…
DEAD OF WINTER AT ASHMORE COURT
The branch line from Exeter to Devonport runs through this country,
through the market towns and the agricultural villages and the moorland
that rises between them. Tonight, the 7:15 from Exeter has developed a fault..
The Vale Dairies
The Velveteen Husk The damp of the Fens didn’t just cling to Dr. Elspeth Vale’s coat; it seemed to negotiate with her bones. She sat in the back of a…
The Chalk-Mother’s Toll
The Chalk-Mother’s Toll A Folk Horror Scenario for Call of Cthulhu (1930s) This adventure takes place in the South Downs, Sussex, during a heatwave in July 1934. The thin soil…
The Plenty Below
The Plenty Below – An Adventure A three-session campaign for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition — 2 to 5 Investigators Keeper’s Introduction The fens of Cambridgeshire are not natural. They…
Occult topography of the West Country
The West Country’s dense layering of prehistoric monuments, medieval settlements, and early modern estates intensifies this effect. When a manor disappears, the absence itself becomes a feature of the landscape, inviting explanation. Infernal narratives provide a vocabulary for articulating that absence.