The Light

There is a watch kept for you at the top of the tower, a lamp warm in its bracket with your name already chalked against the hour, and the whole dark sea leaning on whoever holds it. The Light opens in the cold on the wet iron of a set-off, a lone tower on a drowned reef miles from any land, the relief due tonight and not coming, the lens turning gold far up the well, where every soul who could not bear to be the spare, the one no one needs, the post the world goes on fine without, is wanted at last, taken up the tower, and set at the wick. You came up off the boat because something out here, finally, would lean on you and not be able to do without you. All you have to do is sign the log, take the lamp, and let the light take the weight of being needed off your own going-dark.

The Light is Book Fourteen 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 iron and salt and lit 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, The Terminus, The Exchange, The Ward, and The Line, and the light remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Sign the log and take the watch, or keep to the cold entrance, a visitor passing through and not one of the keepers. Take the lamp in your hand, or keep your hands at your sides. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the light gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can walk off the rock needed by no one, no watch leaning on you and no ship steering by you, and let a light go dark for the last time, an ending that is wholly your own, the genuine spare, 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. 140 numbered sections, 41 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.