The Assize

There is a dock at the head of the great cold hall with your name already entered on the cause-list, and it has been kept open for you. The Assize opens in the rain on the courthouse steps, under the unlit lamps, with a gavel falling somewhere far off, where every soul who could not bear to go unforgiven is tried at last, weighed all the way down, pardoned, and kept as the acquitted dead. You came in out of the rain because someone, finally, would clear the one wrong no one was left to forgive. All you have to do is enter a plea, give it up, and let the verdict of mercy take the weight off your hands.

The Assize is Book Nine of ENCORE, a choose-your-path horror. The same Curator keeps the house; the same company of the dead is recast into a new production, this one cold and weighed and judged and patient with you. Bring the character you built in The Haunt, The Vigil, The Understudy, The Crossing, The Gallery, The Betrothed, The Confessor, and The Mourners, and the court remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Enter your plea in the book of the court or keep to the edge, a visitor passing through and not one of the accused. Take the dock and be tried or keep your feet. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the house gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can walk away unforgiven, no verdict and no entry in the register and no account ever struck, and go out the prisoners’ door into the cold carrying a wrong that is wholly your own, uncleared and alive.

If you like Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure, if you like interactive horror, if you like the cold anthology dread of American Horror Story, this is built for you.

▶ Play it free in your browser, then keep the ebook or paperback. 158 numbered sections, 34 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.