Mystery · Cosy mystery · Slow burn
Fourteen Hollow Lane
The last page of the guest book is signed in your handwriting.
A Fernlit original
- Where it starts
- The last of Hollow Lane on foot, to a stone guesthouse you have just inherited.
- You will meet Hal
- A joiner who kept the house standing for Agnes. Slow to warm, and once warm, entirely on your side.
Hal is a fictional character. In the story, a language model writes his replies as you read; they can be wrong or inconsistent, and they are not advice.
How chapter one begins
The taxi leaves you at the top of Hollow Lane because the driver won't risk the ruts, so you walk the last of it with your bag knocking against your knee and the smell of windfall apples coming up off the verge. Number fourteen is at the very end, under a walnut tree: grey stone, a green door, and every window lit as if it expected you.
It shouldn't be lit. The solicitor's letter said the house had been shut up since September.
The door is unlocked. The hall is warm. Someone has left the kettle on the back of the range, still ticking as it cools. On the hall table, between a brass bell and a jam jar of pencils, the guest book lies open with its ribbon trailing.
You read the last page, because anyone would.
Forty years of guests in blue and black ink, and then, at the bottom, an entry in a hand you know better than your own face. Your name. Room 3. Staying until it's found. The date is the night before Agnes Penhallow died.
You have never been here in your life.
“Thought so,” says a voice from the stairs.
A man is sitting halfway up with a screwdriver in one hand and a loose banister spindle in the other, as if he had been fixing it and stopped to watch you instead. Sawdust on his jumper, dark hair that wants cutting, the kind of face that has decided not to like you yet. On the step below him an old three-legged dog thumps its tail twice, which is more than he seems prepared to do.
“That's what I said when I saw it. Thought, that's a funny thing.” He fits the spindle back into its socket with one tap of his palm. “Hal Moberly. I kept the house up for her.”
He nods at the guest book.
“So. Do you want to tell me how you managed that, or shall I put the kettle back on first?”
Your first choice
Pick one and see how Hal answers. In the story you can also say anything in your own words.
He looks at you for a long moment. Then at the book. Then at you again.
“Could be,” he says, which you will learn is not the same as yes.
He turns the guest book round on the hall table with one finger so you can see it the right way up. The hand is yours. The loop on the g. The way you cross a t late, after the word is finished. Room 3. Staying until it's found.
“Agnes said you'd say that.” He doesn't sound as if he has decided to believe either of you. “Shoes off. The floor's older than both of us.”
Biscuit goes past you into the house on three legs, as if the matter were settled.
He steps aside and lets you come up onto the step, and then into the hall, which smells of beeswax and apples and forty years of other people's coats.
You read your own name. Room 3. Staying until it's found. The ink has feathered the way cheap ink does on good paper, and the date is the night before she died.
“I was here that night,” Hal says behind you. “Fixing the back door. Nobody came in that I saw.” A pause, while he thinks about whether to say the next thing. “Doesn't mean nobody came.”
He takes the book from under your hand, gently, and closes it.
“Found what, do you think?”
Something in his shoulders lets go. Not much.
“Right answer.”
The kitchen is low and warm, with a range that has been lit since before you were born and a window full of walnut tree. He fills the kettle, sets it on, and starts on a drawer that doesn't shut while it boils, as if his hands can't be idle while there's a stranger in Agnes's kitchen.
“Milk's on the step. Biscuit'll have told you.”
The tea, when it comes, is strong enough to stand a spoon in. He pushes a mug across the table and, finally, sits down opposite you with his own.
“Now,” he says. “The book.”
What you do next is up to you.
Choose from the story’s suggestions or say something to Hal in your own words. Hal answers as himself, and every later chapter remembers what you said to him.
Make the first choiceOther ways in
Chapter one can also begin here. Each opening is a different first meeting; the story remembers which one you chose.
The bell over the shop door is the loudest thing in Thimble Cross. Behind the post office counter a small woman in a lilac cardigan looks up, looks at your face, and puts down her pen.
The bottom of Hollow Lane is under water, exactly as the taxi driver promised, so you take your shoes off and wade.
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