The Exchange

There is a position kept lit on the boards with your number already up and a headset on the rest, and it has been held open for you. The Exchange opens in the rain in a cold public call office, the kiosks lit dim and a line ringing somewhere that no one will take, where every soul who could not bear its own call to ring out un-answered is picked up at last, connected all the way down, and kept on the line. You came in out of the rain because someone, finally, would lift the receiver for the one no one was left to answer. All you have to do is place your call, let yourself be put through, and let the warm voice take the weight off your hands.

The Exchange is Book Eleven 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 connected and answered and patient with you. Bring the character you built in The Haunt, The Vigil, The Understudy, The Crossing, The Gallery, The Betrothed, The Confessor, The Mourners, The Assize, and The Terminus, and the exchange remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Place your call and be put through, or keep to the call office, a listener passing through and not one of the callers. Let yourself be answered, or keep the receiver down. 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 un-answered, no call placed and no docket left and no answer ever finished, and go out the test line into the rain to a death that is wholly your own, un-taken 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. 147 numbered sections, 35 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.