My short story ‘Hide & Seek’ is now out with the Three Impostors Press, the fifth publication in their Wentwood Tales series, inspired by the works of Arthur Machen. You can order it HERE.

‘Wentwood, the largest forest in Wales, undulates across the low-lying Gwent hills overlooking the coastal plain and the silver slash of the Severn estuary beyond. To the traveller entering south Wales it forms a mysterious green smudge along the northern horizon, and to the young Arthur Machen gazing east from the windows of his childhood home in the rectory at Llandewi Fach, north of Caerleon, it was a sinister and disturbing presence which lodged in a corner of his imagination for the rest of his life, emerging later as the setting for a number of his dark and unsettling stories. Machen walked the woodland trails and Roman roads of the forest many times, and was familiar with its ancient remains, old houses and farms and sheltered villages, but he concluded that it was ultimately unknowable.’

‘Hide & Seek’ is my own modest foray into Machen’s wooded netherworld. In it, an unsuspecting man finds his own reality turned inside out when his children disappear in the forest:

He sees only an image, or replica, of a life played out by others who – although they might resemble the figures, his own included, that make up his life, his world – are nonetheless figments, ghosts, a fleeting apparition. He is spellbound, but knows, at the precise moment of recognising the blankness of his mind, that he must break the spell, and whatever it costs him, he must return to his real life, return to the real nursing home, the car park, the Audi, his wife and kids. His decision is made; to assert the reality of the real.

Many thanks to the Three Impostors for making such a lovely object, to have and to hold (whatever you might make of the story).