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Under the Tower that Fell

Under the Tower that Fell

This story was published in the newish journal Dark Lane Digest 2 in July 2024. It is another story that involves the paranormal investigators, Henry and Rowena. Their investigation here precedes  those  in Vacancy and The Hinwick Effigy, and comes at a moment when their relationship is beginning to fray. 

When a video purportedly of a legendary ghost  appears on r/eerie_england, Henry and Rowena  head for where the video was allegedly made, the remote LANTA, a top secret military area containing villages abandoned in the 17th century.  Deep in the forest, Rowena starts to sense things that Henry does not, her dread amping up as they approach the weird Wallend Spur, with its ruined church, tunnels, tombs and malicious Chalk Ghost.  

Origin Story

Under the Story the Fell was written specifically after a call-for-submissions for a folk horror anthology. The story was prompted by one of the items of past investigations Henry lists in The Hinwick Effigy, The Chalk Ghost of Wallend Spur.

The story was not accepted for the folk horror anthology, quite possibly because it’s a cosmic horror story. It did find a good home in the beautiful Dark Lane very quickly.

Extract 

We headed off into the woods, in the direction of the Spur. You said, ‘look, no soldiers,’ but there were more soldiers, more of them coming up behind. The ground became boggy, the pine forest denser, the day more overcast. Light that glinted between the trees had a violet spangle to it. There was an odd tint to the sky. We must have walked ten miles. I could sense them in the underbrush. I told you. You repeated one of your theories. Black Parka, Target Practice and Zamoyski were soldiers themselves. The Zamoyski clips were either straightforward hoaxes or warnings to keep out of LANTA. Obviously such a warning would not scare people like us. You did not mention the other theory. Squaddies only faked the footage at the church ruins on Wallened Spur in Clip 3 and the sighting of the Chalk Ghost in Clip 4. These they mocked up to conceal that they had either accidentally or sadistically shot Black Parka and co and needed a cover story. You did not mention this version when we were so close to the Spur, I suspect in case it freaked me out. There were soldiers following us, all the way, of course. I didn’t freak out. I could sense their fear, too, and it was not fear of us. It was fear of something else.

 Reviews

Dark Lane Digest 2 has no reviews. To my knowledge, no one has     read Under the Tower that Fell, but this might not be true. 

Eeriepedia

Under the Tower that Fell has a few references to other stories. A few recurring things also have their first appearance here, The Anglian Book of Judgements and The Milkcurdler but you’ll have to read the story to find out about them.

Henry and Rowena: Paranormal investigators, at this point still romantically involved, he deeply skeptical of the supernatural, and she very psychic. They first appear in The Hinwick Effigy. Rowena also appears in Vacancy.

r/eerie_england: Subreddit where various skeptics, believers, lunatics and hoaxers congregate to discuss reports of hauntings, apparitions, cryptids, aliens, cults etc. First appeared in The Hinwick Effigy. Also appears in Vacancy. Adam Pasmore from The Crumbling Edifice is banned. 

Astraea Themis: Legendary horror writer and author of the cursed collection The Underkin and Other Stories that can contain a story called Under the Tower that Fell. Either meeting her or reading her book by mistake signals your worst fears will consume you. First appears in The Validations.

 

 

Dark Lane Digest 2 also includes recommendable stories by Jacqueline Chau, Grace, Wanebo, Chris Lyon, James Pate and Michael W Thomas. It’s available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon. 

I also gave an interview for the Dark Lane website. 

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Vacancy

Vacancy

Vacancy was first published in the online journal Devour in June 2024 and then appeared as an audio version in October of the same year. The story is another that features the psychic paranormal investigator Rowena Frieze-Green. As this is a direct sequel to The Hinwick Effigy, she is operating alone, without her usual accomplice, Henry Cawthra.

After becoming aware of a missing person’s case with mysterious overtones, Rowena heads for the bleak and dilapidated north Norfolk resort of White Ness where a revelation awaits her in the haunted and restless Salt House.

Origin Story

Vacancy features a shimmery, phantom beach house that winks in and out of existence at night and is sometimes visible from Salt House. The first glimpse of this just appeared in my mind’s eye in January 2023 when I spent hours and hours trudging around in the rain listening to Once, Twice Melody by Beach House.

I then shifted the story from a story about a couple, one of whom vanishes into the phantom beach house, to an investigation into the disappearance when I tried to write for an anthology of stories set in out-of-season resorts. In doing this, I was tempted to revisit Rowena, who I had left doing a midnight flit in The Hinwick Effigy.The story was written in two sittings over a weekend.

It did not make the grade for the out-of-season anthology and was turned down two further times before it found its rightful home with Devour, who love the idea of Henry and Rowena, paranormal investigators in a post-apocalyptic world. 

Extract

It was about a mile and a half walk from the rubble of what would have once been a mid-sized supermarket on the edge of White Ness, then along a coastal road and a dry-stone wall to the only house left. No traffic. Heavy rain. If anything the rain was heavier and the key colder in my hand by the time I reached the porch of Salt House. I was sodden. It was hardly a house, a pebble-dashed stub of a bungalow more abruptly-promoted chalet or outdoor toilet block than a house, a home. In the hall, its period 1950s linoleum was still in place. A row of yellow rubber-ball-tipped coat hooks alarmed me somehow. Pronounced smell of mould. Pronounced smell of damp. The light indoors had a brackish, silvery quality that made me feel like I was wading through a Soviet surrealist film. In the kitchen the cooker and the fridge had been removed. I would have to walk into White Ness every day to eat or buy groceries. There was no shower in the bathroom, but there was hot running water. Whether it would run long enough for a bath, I did not yet know, and I would want to bleach and scrub that bath before I sat in it. There was a lounge with sepia-coloured oblongs on the walls where pictures or mirrors once hung. Rainwater like slugs trails slid down the window. Looking at the sea was like looking through lavatory glass. I never returned to this room. I let it be.

Reviews

So far, Vacancy has received no reviews to my knowledge, though the YouTube audio has some nice comments.

Henry and Rowena

As hinted at above, Henry and Rowena are paranormal investigators, once romantically involved and the veterans of many alarming encounters. Rowena is powerfully psychic and sees ‘Things that Should Not Be’. Henry is so skeptical of the supernatural he doesn’t believe her, thinking instead her professed gifts conceal some unremembered childhood trauma.

I first intended the couple to be one-off  characters in The Hinwick Effigy but readers of that story liked them so much they wanted more of their investigations. I have been gradually writing accounts of their encounters referenced in The Hinwick, and added Vacancy. I have plans to write about them a lot more. 

Eeriepedia

Vacancy has loads of references and call-backs to what I am calling the Eerieverse, a loose sequence of weird stories that occur and cross-fertilise in the same stricken, distorted, near-future England.

There are loosely two sets of stories, The Underkin and Other Stories, which have the Great Disorder (see below) as a background, and Eerie_England, stories connected to the subreddit also described below. 

r/eerie_england: First appears in The Hinwick Effigy. Subreddit where various skeptics, investigators, believers and cranks meet to discuss paranormal activity: sightings, footage, photographs, testimony. Rowena first meets Henry on eerie_england during The Great Disorder. 

The Great Disorder: a global lockdown when the world is invaded by cosmic spores that induce a fatal psychotropic effect on anyone who comes in contact with them.

White Ness: Terrifyingly shitty resort on the North Norfolk coast. Also appears in Replacement Bus Service (Out of Darkness, edited by Dan Coxon, Unsung 2021) and The Volkhova Perplex.

The Abandoned Estate at Crobe also appears in How Beautiful You Are. 

The Eye Hospital appears in The Scarisbrick Intuition. 

The Chalk Ghost appears in Under the Tower that Fell. 

The Claustrophile: impossible-to-watch, possibly non-existent yet lethal 1998 British found-footage horror much obsessed over by a certain faction on r/eerie_england.

Hinwick: Post-industrial canalside heritage site and location of Henry and Rowena’s last investigation together. The Hinwick Effigy is just about still available in Cloister Fox 2. 

The text version of Vacancy is available to read here.

The audio file is available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

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The Crumbling Edifice

The Crumbing Edifice

First published in March 2024 in For Tomorrow: Wellbrook High Yearbook, 1993 (edited by Dan Coxon, Black Shuck Books), The Crumbling Edifice introduces the world to Adam Pasmore, demon-hunter and qualified driving instructor. At the outset, Adam is summoned to investigate strange events in the dour outer London suburb of Farworth. A family has been murdered by an assailant with cult connections and occult aspiration. Although the killer has been caught, the demon he evoked is felt to be still corrupting the area. Adam comes to the rescue, but the escalating conflict turns very personal, with its origins in the 1993 Wellbrook High Event.

Origin Story

I was asked to write this story, but its first inkling was in a news story about a man who, misled, exploited really by malign dark-web voices, signed a contract in blood with a demon, then killed two people expecting to win the lottery in return. My initial idea was to dramatize this relationship between fool and monster. On committing to write a story for For Tomorrow, I ended up shifting the story towards an investigation into, rather than a dramatic reconstruction of the crime. The twist at the end of the story came as a surprise to me. I wasn’t intending until I sensed it when I was writing the last pages. Fortunately, the story needed little adjustment to facilitate the twist. The story was written at the end of 2022 and took about two months to complete.

Extract

“Dig a little deeper and we realise that you had been talking about your wants to people on the dark web, members of the so-called Arcane Order of the Temple of Ashes – AOTA – whose T-symbol, like a satanic version of the Sergio Tacchini logo I had seen today on the plywood board covering the Da Souza’s backdoor. AOTA had steered you to Grand Jack Thorian, who also goes by the name The Candleman, or The Remembrancer, or in Cumbria, Jack Wondrous. AOTA had shown you how to summon and bind Grand Jack and sign the contract. It was Mo Dent’s assertion that not only was Grand Jack Thorian real, he was still in Farworth. Hence her contacting a demon hunter.”

Reviews

For Tomorrow received a few good reviews, a notable one in Runalong the Shelves:

‘There feels room for dark comedy in ‘The Crumbling Edifice’ by Ashley Stokes as we meet a demon hunter and driving instructor but this story is one of the darkest in the collection. It uses the idea of those who claim they’ve done horrific deals thanks to demonic pacts and imagines what if these could be real. Neither answer will make you feel better about the world and for those of us who were isolated geeks back in the 1990s this may bring some uncomfortable moments of similarity that slightly make us worry could we ever do this. Stokes takes us on a history tour of one particular online myth and those who believe they encountered it and then in a great spooky urban location we have to decide what will happen next. A great story!’

The story also made it onto James Everington’s list of Best Horror Short Stories of 2025.

Benjamin Kurt Unsworth in Phantasmagoria said, ‘Even the more distinctly standalone stories possess a quaint nostalgia which they exploit perfectly: ‘The Crumbling Edifice’ by Ashley Stokes, notably, focusing (via the narrative of a demon hunter) on the ramifications for a driving instructor with perfect dark humour.

Eeriepedia

The Crumbling Edifice is a standalone story and has proved more a gateway to other things than part of a definite sequence like my Underkin and EerieEngland stories. It is also quite possible that Adam Pasmore will return in other stories, as could Grand Jack. 

Farworth is also referred to in Under the Tower that Fell (the paranormal investigator Henry Cawthra fatefully finds his copy of The Underkin and Other  Stories by Astrea Themis in the waiting room of Farworth Station (which is where The Crumbling Edifice begins). In How Beautiful You Are, Erasto’s mother is said to work in the Sainsburys in Farworth. Also in How Beautiful You Are, Marie-Elena works at the Murder Ink tattoo parlour Adam visits here.

For Tomorrow: Wellbrook High Yearbook, 1993 (edited by Dan Coxon) also includes fab and memorable work from Lucie McKnight Hardy, Verity Holloway, CC Adams, Penny Jones, James Everington and more. You can order it from Black Shuck Books, and if you don’t want to support a fine small press directly, from all good bookstores and online retailers