The Séance

There is a chair kept for you at the head of the table, a circle of joined hands turned toward you in the red dark, and your name already entered in the register against tonight’s sitting. The Séance opens in the cold at the street-door of a tall mourning-house on the last night, when the lamps go down and the sitters take hands and the dead are called, the gas turned to a single red bead far up the stair, where every soul who could not bear to be the one no one ever believed, the witness no one took at its word, the truth always heard as a lie or a fancy, is believed at last, brought up into the warm red room, and given the medium’s chair. You came back through that door because something in here, finally, will say yes to your every word. All you have to do is sign the register, take the chair, and let the house take the weight of being doubted off your own going-out.

The Séance is Book Sixteen 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 crepe and camphor and gaslight 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, The Line, The Light, and The Colours, 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. Sign the register and take the chair, or keep to the cold waiting-hall, a caller passing through and not one of the circle. Let one word of yours be taken as true, or keep your word your own. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the house gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can take back every word, walk out into the cold street believed by no one, and speak one true thing to nobody, an ending that is wholly your own, the genuine doubted one, 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. 134 numbered sections, 37 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.