The Line

There is a place kept for you on the wall, a frame turned to the light with your name already cut into the brass, and the line of the house drawn close around it. The Line opens in the cold in a long portrait hall, the dead faces in their gilt frames going back further than the eye can follow, a clock somewhere counting down a descent that never ends, where every soul who could not bear to be the last of their name is taken up at last, continued all the way down, and hung among the kept. You came in out of the cold because someone, finally, would carry the name on for the one whose line was always going to die out. All you have to do is give your name, let yourself be entailed, and let the house take the weight of being the last off your own shoulders.

The Line is Book Thirteen 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 panelled and gilt and ancestral 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, and The Ward, and the line remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Be named and taken up into the line, or keep to the entrance hall, a guest passing through and not one of the family. Give your name to the brass, or keep to your own two 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 the last of yourself, no place taken on the wall and no name left in the pedigree and no descent ever carried on, and go out the outer door into the cold to an ending that is wholly your own, the last of your line 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. 137 numbered sections, 36 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.