The Twelve Strokes of Brackenford

Beneath an abandoned railway arch, five teenagers find a scarred stranger standing beside three wet marks cut into the stone. Each mark means a body. Each teenager carries a private hunger. And the stranger knows exactly what to offer them.

As the ruined church bell counts towards its twelfth stroke, the town’s dead begin to walk, old bargains tear open, and the families who own Brackenford are forced to face what their parents sacrificed beneath the pit in 1954.

The town did not survive its worst night by chance. It fed something. Now it is hungry again.