October 20th – Elizabeth Jane Howard – ‘Three Miles Up’ (1951) – Read it here. Find the whole challenge list here.
There’s a lot of things going on in this one – I really think I should read it a few more times to get the layers of it. It reminded me of the mini-series The River (2012), a USA-made supernatural found footage horror series about the experiences of a boat’s crew travelling down the Amazon. It was also giving me some Algernon Blackwood The Willows vibes in places.
Wyrd Britain has a review of this story and a link to the 1995 TV adaptation for the BBC’s ‘Ghosts’ series. This version changed the dynamics so that the friends are brothers, and they have lost their mother. I would watch this for the #100HorrorMoviesIn92Days challenge, but it’s classed as a Drama on Letterboxd, so it doesn’t count.
I’m definitely left wanting to know more about Sandra, who is weirdly the perfect domestic goddess, and if she’s real, a spirit of the water, or like a ghostly hitchhiker, drawing them into her world. I love the way things start to blur and fade, and how known landmarks like the village simply aren’t there.
This one took me a while to think about, as I really like it, and I wondered what I could play with myself based on this story. I thought about the ending most, and the endless expanse of water, and it made me think of the North Sea videos where a sailor is dwarfed by a gigantic wave that builds up, and there’s nothing beyond except more grey waves.
It also made me think of the scene in K. J. Charles’s 1920s paranormal MM romance novel, Spectred Isle, where the MMCs get stuck in a similar way but on a road that goes on forever.
With these themes in mind, I want to introduce you to my story, ALONG THE XYLOPHONE ROAD, which is being published in the anthology OCCUPYING BODIES later this month.
Annoyingly, the thing I’ve already written that would go really well with this, and the idea of a journey that never ends, is being published on 31 Oct 2025 in OCCUPYING BODIES, an anthology of short fiction from Black Hare Press.
My story in this collection is about a decaying revenant making its way slowly along the train tracks in a desert, on its way to where its long-distance lover lives. They never got to meet up in person before the end of the world, and now the revenant is dragging itself along the sleepers, to the person who, in life, felt like home.
It’s deeply sad, and a little bit sinister.
I think this story, with the never-ending journey and the strange sense of loss and haunting, the travelling companion who is not really there, is a good one to put with the spooky story today! I also like the juxtaposition of the canal in Howard’s story with the desert in mine!
It’s called ALONG THE XYLOPHONE ROAD, and it opens like this:
I stare down the length of the xylophone road, the one that looks like my ribs and plays the hollow song of civilization, its slats extending into the shimmering horizon. The rails glare in the harsh light that slows me down. My bones ache. The world looks different under the dusty rose of the sun, a bloodshot eye in the sepia heights. I look for you, but you aren’t there. I know that.
We never spent a single day together in person before the world fell apart, but I look for you every morning as if the space between us were as thin as the breath I can no longer take without pain. You were never there, but this morning, as I pull my shattered body up into another lurching start, I look for you anyway. Even as the infection took me, I spent my last moments in front of the blinking screen in my room, reading your address over and over until it became an earworm, embedded inside me like a snatch of percussive song.
If there was to be nothing left of me, I hoped there would be something left of you.
And now you are still too far, so I drag myself along the xylophone road, following the metal rails into the distance. I don’t know my name, or what other people used to call me, but I know where you live.
I know where you live, and I am coming.
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