The Ward

There is a bed turned down on the ward with your name already on the card and a chair drawn up close beside it, and it has been kept for you. The Ward opens in the cold in a great receiving hall, the wheeled chairs in a row and a bell ringing somewhere that no one comes to, where every soul who could not bear to be the one no one sits with is taken in at last, tended all the way down, and kept at the bedside. You came in out of the cold because someone, finally, would draw the chair up for the one whose chair was always going to stand empty. All you have to do is give your name, let yourself be admitted, and let the warm hand take the weight off your own.

The Ward is Book Twelve 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 tended and accompanied 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, and The Exchange, and the ward remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Be admitted and taken up to the wards, or keep to the receiving room, a visitor passing through and not one of the patients. Let yourself be tended, or keep to 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 alone, no bed taken and no name left and no vigil ever finished, and go out the night door into the cold to a death that is wholly your own, unattended 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. 135 numbered sections, 31 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.