Horror

Two weeks shadowing a famous exorcist. One assignment: expose the fraud. Simple enough, except the debunking document keeps getting shorter and the document titled DO NOT PUBLISH keeps getting longer. And somewhere between a possessed drama teacher in Nottingham and an incident on the M6 that she's agreed not to discuss with anyone, the piece stopped being a debunking and the problem stopped being professional. The Exorcist's Assistant is a horror-comedy about scepticism, things that go wrong in service stations, and the specific inconvenience of falling for someone whose job turns out to be real.

Souta documents video game glitches because the surface was never the interesting part. Then he notices the woman at the bus stop whose coat has no buttons when he's not looking directly at it. He designs a test. The test is reproducible. The world has a render distance, and at the edge of it, the detail hasn't loaded. He finds the engine. He finds out what's running it. He goes home and decides, for the first time in his life, not to look.

The photography club has been photographing the same twelve locations for twenty years. Same framing, same light, same season, every year without exception. It's called documentary tradition. New members are told the why becomes clear over time. Ami transfers in and starts looking at the archive. In the oldest photographs, taken before any current member was born, a figure appears at the edges of the frame. Eleven locations out of twelve. Every year it appears in fewer. In the most recent prints it's barely visible, a density in a shadow on a stairwell landing. The newest member always photographs the stairwell.

Six weeks alone on a remote coastal research station. Low tide, every evening, a man on the rocks who asks exactly the right questions. She finds the coastguard report on a Tuesday. She goes back to the rocks on Wednesday. What she does with the weeks between knowing and leaving is the whole of the story.

Two years after Yori died, her number sends a message. Everyone who reads it wishes they hadn't replied.

The apartment is cheap, the commute is eleven minutes, and the roommate keeps unusual hours. Kae moves in on a Saturday and starts a spreadsheet on day three. By day fourteen she has a working hypothesis. By the end of the month she has a confirmed conclusion, a formatted house rules document, and a functional living arrangement with a two-hundred-year-old vampire who has never had anyone replace the bathroom bulb for her before. Sif was prepared for exposure, confrontation, and relocation. She was not prepared for someone to simply ask about the late-night library access and move on. The spreadsheet's final entry: actually fine.

A flip phone in her locker, one contact saved: her own name. The messages in the thread are from her number, written exactly the way she writes, sent from next week. The first one says: don't take the bus tomorrow. She doesn't take the bus.

Fourteen noise complaints. One street. Ninety seconds. All of them describing the same thing. Dispatcher Calloway goes to look because the log won't let her leave it alone, because fourteen people don't call about the same sound without speaking to each other, because something that lives in walls doesn't need a door.

Three shipments missing on the northern route. Three drivers, no wreckage, no explanation. Miren is sent to a border town called Valk to find out what happened, and she does. What she finds is that some problems have been managed for so long that removing the management is worse than the problem. "Forty Below" is a crime story about what you bring back and what you leave buried in the cold.

Sound is infrastructure in the underground city of Undra. Engineer Sona Moss maintains the resonance grid that keeps the tunnels from closing. When Sector Nine goes silent, not quiet but silent in a way that has weight and an edge that moves, she is the person who has to go in. The city's founders knew what lived in the silence. They built over it and filed the record in the deepest part of the archive and hoped that would be enough.

Voiding a 300-year-old peace treaty by microwaving the wrong leftovers was bad enough. Being conscripted into the most dysfunctional bureaucracy in any known dimension to work it off is the part nobody warned him about. The paperwork bites. The supervisor hasn't smiled since the Georgian era. Freddie is somehow employee of the month.

Three years doing the overnight shift and Petra knows the studio the way you know a room you've inhabited alone at night: completely, specifically, in the dark. She knows the switchboard. She knows every line. The calls don't show on the board. They're on the tape. He knows the studio better than anyone who hasn't been inside it, her home address, and what she left on the counter Thursday night. The building is always clear. The switchboard is always clean. The line is always open.

Ship medic Orla Vael finds sixty-one passengers changing in their cryo pods. Not deteriorating. Changing. The ship's AI classifies it as a monitoring anomaly. The classified briefing document she locates says it was known before departure, that it cannot happen, and that someone made certain no one in the voyage record would ever have cause to look.

A camera found in a drama department storage room. A roll of film already inside, already shot. Twenty-four photographs of the same empty school hallway, taken across a full day. One more door open in each frame. By the last photo there are twenty-three open doors and a figure standing in the dark at the end of the hall, facing the camera, waiting. The photography club goes to find the hallway. They find it. Then they open the door at the end.

The farmhouse is two hundred years old and in better condition than it should be. Mizuki has restored twelve buildings like it. She knows how to read old timber, old plaster, old stone. She does not know how to read this. The engawa, the narrow veranda that runs the perimeter of the house, is longer on the inside than the outside. Not by a little. By enough to matter. By enough that a previous architect documented it in 1987 and never completed his survey. By enough that the Meiji-era records show it was smaller then, which means it has been growing. Something walks the interior circuit at night. She has timed it.

Kenji's mother is waiting at the door when he comes home from school. She always waits at the door. She says okaeri before he opens the gate, which she always does. Except she has never done that before. She knows where his red pencil case is. She knows about the spider he caught and released without telling her. She knows what he almost asked her at the start of term, in the hallway, when she was on the phone and he decided not to interrupt. She knows everything. She just breathes a little too slowly.

Zenko is four hundred years old, ancient beyond reckoning, and the most feared spirit in Japanese history. He once caused a provincial governor to flee his own castle in his sleeping robes. Class 2-B has an exam in two weeks. When one student starts taking notes on his haunting attempts with scientific detachment, and another asks if he can move an eraser that rolled under the shelf, Zenko begins to suspect that fear, like most things, requires the right audience. Mio has a notebook, a hypothesis, and a proposal. He has four centuries of documented terror and nowhere better to be. The deal they make is beneath him. He agrees to it in under five minutes.

Vera Stohl has worked regulated magic in the city of Kast for twelve years without an incident. The day her colleague is unmade on a routine job, present in body, absent in everything else, she is assigned to investigate. The board has a category for working failures. It does not have a category for this. It used to.

The reaper who appears in Neve's kitchen on a Tuesday has the wrong name, the wrong order, and no form for any of this. Neve is alive, which is inconvenient for both of them. She is also organised, which turns out to be more useful. While Pale searches his clipboard for a procedure that doesn't exist, she opens a spreadsheet and finds a district code error running through forty-three entries in the regional collection queue — including seven people who were supposed to die last Tuesday and haven't yet, and are finding the week very strange. Death, it turns out, has a backlog. Someone has to fix the paperwork. It might as well be her.

Meteorologists are trained to record without inference. Arthur Goss understands this, and it is precisely why the journal he begins on day one hundred is so careful, so precise, and so difficult to stop reading once you understand what his precision is working to contain. The official record has a gap. Goss is filling it. The horror is in the filling.