The Godhead

There is a throne kept empty for you, an act of consecration laid ready on the white cloth, and your name already carved on the plinth against tonight’s first prayer. The Godhead opens in the cold at the portico of a great temple-house in a dead precinct on the last night, when the god is made and the idol is consecrated and the name is raised to the god-roll and the first prayer is said, a warm glow far up the stair where the custody waits by the candles, where every soul who could not bear to be the one no one would ever pray to, the name no knee was ever bent to, the god no altar was ever raised for, is made a god at last, brought up into the warm inner sanctum, and worshipped over everything. You came back through that door because something in here, finally, will make a god of your name. All you have to do is be set on the throne, take the worship, and let the sanctum take the weight of being unprayed-to off your own going-out.

The Godhead is Book Nineteen 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 gold leaf and incense and gilding-size and quietly glad of 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, The Terminus, The Exchange, The Ward, The Line, The Light, The Colours, The Séance, The Surety, and The Reliquary, and the house remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Be set on the throne and take the worship, or keep to the cold floor of the outer court, a worshipper passing through and not a god. Let one knee bend to you and one prayer be said, or keep yourself mortal and prayed to by none. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the house gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can let your name be struck from the god-roll, let your idol be broken and scattered, walk out into the cold court prayed to by no one, an ending that is wholly your own, the genuine unworshipped one, mortal and your own.

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. 133 numbered sections, 39 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.