Thieving Fear (33 page)

by Adam Nevill

Few believed Professor Coldwell was in touch with an unseen world – that he could commune with spirits. But in Scotland's oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. And now the young are being haunted by night terrors. And those who are visited disappear. This is not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and a burned-out explorer have of surviving their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it?

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by Stephen Gregory

A bleak mid-winter. An icy wind blows through the corridors of Foxwood Manor, a boys' prep-school deep in the woodlands of Dorset. It is the end of the Christmas term and the old house is empty save for the headmaster, Dr Kemp, his wife, and the one boy who has been left behind. Alan Scott, 12, abandoned by his feckless mother, faces the grim prospect of Christmas alone with the Kemps. Until, at dusk the following afternoon, a vision from the outside world arrives at the school: Martin Pryce, a suave, arrogant ex-pupil, and his bewildered girlfriend Sophie. And, as the snow falls heavily on the house and the surrounding woods, a story of revenge and retribution unfolds: a web of half-truths and innuendoes woven into a bizarre game of hide-and-seek through the corridors and dormitories of the school . . . and a series of shocking revelations which lead inexorably, horrifically, to a bloody climax on a crisp, lovely Christmas morning.

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