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.