He’s made it.
The hill levels out, but his heart rate doesn’t. It keeps rising and rising, taking his breath with it. Dear God, he can barely take a decent lungful of air as his pulse thuds in his ears. With a sickening jolt, he realises what’s hanging from the tree, tangled in the branches above his head.
A familiar stab of horror pierceshis gut.
Not again.
Chapter 2
STEPHEN
Cherry Hollow, The Lake District, 2025
The great thing Stephen finds about being a freelance journalist is that he can work anywhere he likes. On top of that, being a freelance journalist who also happens to have helped solve the infamous forty-year cold case in Cherry Hollow last year, means he can now pick and choose which jobs he accepts. And he’s bombarded with jobs every day from newspapers, online forums and podcasts, all salivating at the prospect of havingtheStephen Mallow working for them. They can’t get enough.
Stephen still works for the London Times, but his boss, Kevin, allows him to write whatever the hell he wants to write because he knows that whatever he writes will sell papers. Lots of papers. He writes one article a month for the company he’s worked at for the past few years, but can now spread his wings a little and also writes for other publishing houses and newspapers when it takes his fancy.
Everyone wants to know what Stephen has to say. And they’re happy to pay an extortionate amount of money for him to do it. Not that Stephen only writes the articles for themoney, but it is nice to be able to pay the bills on time and not have to worry where his next pay cheque is coming from. It won’t last forever, of course. Nothing does. But for now, he’s revelling in his mild celebrity status.
A year and a half ago, no one had even heard of him. He was just some lowly journalist who wrote trashy articles in the paper; the ones that had no relevance or factual information. No one cared about them and he was paid next to nothing for his time.
But one viral article about The Creature and Cherry Hollow changed everything.
Suddenly, what he had to say mattered to people.
The general public couldn’t get enough of the creepy small town in the Lake District that was supposedly haunted by an evil entity. Was it real or not? Nobody knew, but it was fun to speculate. After he helped Detective Graham Williams solve the case, his life turned upside down seemingly overnight and it hasn’t been the same since.
Now, he is not only living in the creepy small town in the Lake District that was supposedly haunted by said evil entity, but he also has a girlfriend called Rachel.
Him.
Stephen Mallow.
The thirty-five-year-old man who has never had a girlfriend in his life and who has always been a laughingstockto most people due to his unique and eccentric mind that only a small portion of the population can relate to or understand.
It’s only made him more popular online. Apparently, his quirkiness is alluring and he is, what everyone calls,relatableto a lot of people. He stays off social media because he finds it overwhelming, but from what he’s heard, his articles are alwaystrendingorgoing viral. He knows what that means, but has never cared for the terms, and he’s never been bothered about making it as a viral sensation. So much ridiculous stuff goes viral these days. Stuff that doesn’t even make any sense, like TikTok dances and memes, or AI-generated graphics of people that end up having seven fingers on each hand. He doesn’t understand it.
But he’s glad that his article reached a lot of people, and he’s glad that others find him relatable in some way, even if he’ll never meet them.
Stephen knows he’s different and a lot of people he meets find him too intense, too strange and too …much. But not Rachel. Not his girlfriend. Well, she maybedoesthink all those things too, but she also finds him endearing and cute (her words, not his) even though he often turns the light switches on and off seventeen times before entering a new room. It’s something he is working on reducing. Sort of. Maybe. It’s a work in progress.
At first, he tried to hide his quirks and eccentricities from Rachel, but the more he did, the more stressed andanxious he became. He couldn’t hide who he was. As a child, his father tried to beat it out of him for years, convincing him that no one would want to be with a weird, OCD freak, but his father was wrong. Plus, he’s now in prison for life, so it’s hard to believe anything that criminal and murderer says. Stephen’s mother had been kind and understanding about his so-calledbehavioural issues. Back then, mental disorders and mental health were not as well understood as they are today, but she’d still accepted him for who he was. Then his father had to go and kill her.
Rachel stirs, rolling over so her back is facing him. Stephen often wakes much earlier than she does and spends the time before his alarm goes off writing his next blog post or article or catching up on the daily events happening around the world. Not that he spends too long reading the news headlines. It’s mostly all doom and gloom, but he likes to be aware of what’s going on, even if he does feel helpless most of the time.
He clicks on his recent online article in the London Times, a piece about the ongoing struggles of homelessness. He raises his eyebrows at the number of comments that have appeared beneath it since it was published yesterday.
Love your articles, Stephen.
Great writing, dude!
Omg, I loved the Cherry Hollow story. Freaked me out! Couldn’t sleep for weeks, thinking some dark creature was after me.
What a load of crap.
When are you going to write something else like the Cherry Hollow story?
Couldn’t sleep after the Cherry Hollow story came out. Had nightmares!
