The Terminus

There is a seat kept warm on the train at the head of the platform with your name already up on the board, and it has been held open for you. The Terminus opens in the rain on the station steps, under the unlit lamps, with steam letting go somewhere far off and a split-flap board clattering, where every soul who could not bear to come in un-awaited is met at last, welcomed all the way down, and kept as the arrived. You came in out of the rain because someone, finally, would keep a place for the one no one was left to wait for. All you have to do is buy your ticket, go aboard, and let the welcome take the weight off your hands.

The Terminus is Book Ten 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 kept and waited-for 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, and The Assize, and the station remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Buy your ticket and pass through, or keep to the concourse, a visitor passing through and not one of the passengers. Step onto the platform and be met, or keep your 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 un-awaited, no place kept and no name on the board and no welcome ever finished, and go out the goods door into the rain to a homecoming that is wholly your own, un-met 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. 164 numbered sections, 40 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.