It began as something of a nuisance.

Lots of fine dust in places where it shouldn’t have been. Inside a sealed lift. Along the rim of an upturned teacup. Marring the folds of a suit jacket untouched in a Whitehall corridor. Thin, careful residue. As if London had been sifting through rubble all night.

Some calls came in, filtered through to Special Branch. Nothing frantic. Just odd.

There was a civil servant who kept calling to say his office smelled like a cold fireplace. A night porter went to sleep and woke up with ash on his pillow and said he tasted smoke. A bus conductor who said all his passengers went silent crossing Tower Bridge - as if they were having a moment of silence at a funeral.

Giles read through the reports in their basement office. Ethan lounged opposite. Feet up, cigarette in hand, watching the ashtray slowly fill.

“Not an attack,” said Giles. “Not in the usual sense.”

“A message, then,” Ethan replied. “London’s passive-aggressive love note.”

Giles ignored him. He looked down at the photocopied statements. The same phrases repeated: thin air, heavy feeling, lived in, dusty.

"More like sediment. Detritus,” Giles murmured. “Emotional residue made physical. It’s settling.”

Ethan smiled. “Like after they demolish a building?”

Giles looked up. “Something like that.”

They took the Tube to Waterloo, partly because some of the reports clustered there. Partly because it was easier to vanish through the crowds. They were on the edge of rush hour, a growing tide of damp coats and tired faces. The Underground smelled like metal and breath and yesterday’s chips.

On the platform, Giles crouched and pressed a finger to the concrete lip near the track.

A smear of gray dust came away on his glove. Not soot. Much finer. Soft.

He brought it close to his face.

Ethan watched. Quiet for once. “Well?”

“It feels…spent,” Giles said. “Like old ash. Already burned.”

The wind whipped, a train screaming in. Grit whipped along the platform. The dust lifted, swirled, and then settled in the same place, like a stubborn memory.

They kept following the trail, back above ground. Away from the station, across wet pavement, down an alleyway that smelt like piss. The dust was thicker near older buildings, especially places where grief might have gathered. Churches, hospitals, even phone boxes where people had heard bad news. Pubs where people had wept over a pint.

At a chapel on the north side of Westminster Bridge, Giles stopped.

The windows were filmed with gray. The door, chained shut, had dust filling the creases around the lock. As if something had wrapped it in smoke.

Ethan tugged the chain. “We could go in.”

“We’re not here to break things,” Giles said.

Ethan grinned. “That’s not what you used to say.”

Giles shot him a look. Half warning, half something else. Ethan held up his hands in mock surrender, but his eyes remained bright.

They circled around the outside of the chapel instead. Stepping into the narrow yard behind where weeds were pushing through cracked paving stones. A chipped bowl sat beneath a dripping gutter - half-filled with gray dust that was turning to paste at its edges.

Giles jaw tightened. “Is someone collecting it?”

Ethan crouched beside him. Close enough that Giles could smell cigarettes and rain, and something faintly sweet on Ethan’s coat.

“Nothing ritual,” Ethan said. “No chalk, no salt. Nothing dramatic. Sure it’s not just coincidence?”

“Not all magic needs theatre,” Giles replied.

He lifted the bowl carefully. It felt heavier than it should be. Dense, like the dust was more than merely physical.

The light in the yard was soft. The dust shimmered in a way that made Giles’ eyes ache. Not bright, but visible, so very present. A sensation as much as a sight.

Ethan watched his face, carefully. “You’re thinking about last week.”

Giles didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. They both were.

The Hollow Man. The fix that felt impossibly clean. A recovery that was all too easy.

“Grief disperses. It doesn’t disappear,” said Giles. “And something’s redirecting it now. It’s settling because it doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Ethan’s expression was unreadable. “So London’s the dumping ground.”

“Ugly way to put it.”

“Accurate, though.”

Giles put the bowl back down. “Right now it’s just a nuisance. If it continues, it’ll make people…sick. Not physically. But maybe thin and stretched, like him.”

Ethan’s eyes flicked to Giles’ mouth, and then away. “Then we’ll stop it.”

“How?”

Ethan shrugged. Careless. “What we always do. Find the source. Shut it down. Help the city forget.”

Giles straightened, brushing the dust off his glove. “Forgetting isn’t always a mercy.”

Ethan’s smile softened. “But sometimes it is.”

They took a cab back, neither of them speaking much. London’s sodium-orange tinged streets slid by, wet reflections in the window. Just the city, pretending to be itself.

Back at their basement office, Giles made tea. Left it to go cold. Ethan rifled through some files, restless, then stopped. Watched Giles move around the cramped space.

“You’re quiet tonight,” Giles said.

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

Ethan leaned against the edge of his desk. “Just thinking.”

“Dangerous, with you,” Giles muttered.

Ethan laughed under his breath. “For me, or for you?”

Giles should have gone back to his reports. Written up a note for Department C and left it at that. Residue, settling, let them monitor the sites. Bureaucratic end to an unnatural problem.

Instead, he looked at Ethan. Really looking. At his easy confidence, chaos held back by charm. The familiar mouth that always seemed like a heartbeat away from saying the wrong thing - or exactly the right one.

“Ethan,” Giles began, then stopped.

Ethan waited, eyebrows raised slightly, as if in mild amusement. But his eyes were sharp and attentive. Present.

Giles swallowed. His throat felt tight. “I don’t want this,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the room, outside to the city. The cases in sheets on his desk like bruises on paper, “to disappear if we stop paying attention.”

“Then don’t look away,” Ethan said softly.

The words landed like a match struck near dry kindling.

Giles stepped closer. He could feel his own pulse, loud in his ears. The hum of machinery under a floor. Ethan didn’t move, but even his breath hitched slightly, like a small betrayal.

Giles lifted his hand and touched Ethan’s shoulder. Then his cheek.

Warm. Real. Not an echo.

Ethan’s eyes closed at the touch. A quiet sound left him, not quite a breath. When he opened them again, there was no humor in his expression. Just desire, stripped bare.

He leaned in. Slow, as if waiting for Giles to stop him if he wanted to.

Giles didn’t.

Their mouths met with urgency, barely restrained. Careful at first, almost tentative, and then less so - a kiss deepening as the dam broke, finally giving permission to move. Ethan’s hand slid under the back of Giles’ coat, his fingers curling there, pulling him closer. Giles felt the pressure of Ethan’s body, wiry, solid and undeniable. His heat cut through the chill that always seemed to cling to the basement.

This wasn’t reckless. It wasn’t careful. And it wasn’t hesitant.

They shed layers without hurry. Coat, scarf, the careful armor of their day - until Giles’ back brushed up against the edge of the desk, cold against his skin. And Ethan was there, close enough that Giles could feel his pulse, quick and insistent. Ethan kissed the line of Giles’ jaw, his throat, his teeth grazing just enough to make Giles’ breathe in sharply.

“You all right?” Ethan murmured. His voice was low, almost reverent.

“Yes,” Giles said - too quickly - and he steadied himself. “Don’t stop.”

Ethan didn’t.

Outside, London kept making its noise. A siren flared and faded. Dust settled on a windowsill. For a little while, none of that mattered.

Later, the light had shifted and the kettle had long gone cold. They sat together on the room’s narrow sofa, shoulders touching, their legs tangled together without thought. Ethan’s cigarette burned down in the ashtray. Giles could feel the imprint of Ethan’s hands, his touch - at his waist, his back, lower - as if the contact lingered under his skin.

Giles was staring at the far wall. The corkboard hug, pinned with maps and notes and pictures. A city rendered in dots and lines, like a body traced.

“We’re alright,” said Ethan, his voice low.

Giles turned to him.

Ethan was watching him, that maddening mixture of affection and mischief. As if to say, See? You didn’t break.

Giles believed him.

He shouldn’t have, perhaps. But he did.

In the morning, the two of them walked out together into the gray daylight. The pavement was damp. There was rain in the air. A street cleaner was sweeping dust into a pan near the curb, then he tipped it away without looking.

Giles watched the motion with more intent than necessary. The neatness of it, the way it vanished. Almost comforting.

Ethan nudged him lightly with his shoulder. “Come on, Rupert. London’s just going to try and make a mess again.”

They walked on, side by side. Not quite touching, but close enough to each other to feel the warmth.

The city settled around them. For now.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

They found the man near Finsbury Park, just after dawn. Standing on the pavement, smart buttoned coat, clean shoes. He flagged down a policeman calmly, and said he thought he might be unwell.

The hospital ran some checks. Steady pulse, normal blood pressure. Not intoxicated. No signs of drug use. No visible injuries.

The nurse who attended to him couldn’t remember his face ten minutes later.

Department C rang Giles before lunchtime.

“Perfectly responsive,” Judith Hall said over the line. “He can answer questions. Knows his name, knows the date. But there’s no variation, no reaction.”

Giles rubbed his forehead. “Reaction to what?”

“To anything.”

The ward smelled like disinfectant and vegetables boiled for too long. The man sat propped up on pillows, hands folded neatly. Somewhere in his early thirties, and an ordinariness that also defied description.

“Good afternoon,” the man said as they approached. Voice calm, and flat.

Ethan leaned in towards Giles, arms folded. “He looks fine.”

“He looks intact, certainly,” Giles said. “That’s not always the same thing.”

Simple questions. The man answered all of them. Childhood. Employment. Favorite foods. All facts, no emphasis.

Giles raised his voice suddenly. “Fire!” he snapped.

The man blinked once. Not even a flinch. No spike in a heart rate on the monitor beside the bed.

“He should have been startled,” Giles murmured, after they’d said their goodbyes to the man.

Ethan tilted his head. “Maybe he’s just very polite.”

“More than that, surely,” said Giles.

They played back the tape recorder from their short interview. The man’s voice was thin, level, and already less recognizable. Stripped of inflection, as if something had been sanded away. Still human, but empty.

“The machine recorded him,” Ethan said. “But it doesn’t sound like it keeps him.”

Giles didn’t smile.

His work history was easy enough to trace. By mid-afternoon they had his maintenance contract records. Mostly night shifts. Working on tube lines that intersected with too many other incident reports for them to believe it was coincidence. He cleaned platforms after accidents. There were notes about how he stayed to listen to other staff who’d seen suicides.

“He’d linger,” Giles said quietly, looking over the file. “Sometimes people just start talking to anyone who stayed.”

“And something listened back,” Ethan added.

The diagnosis seemed clear, once they’d discussed it.

“Someone’s emptied him,” Giles said. “He’s not possessed. Not taken. Just…worn down. Emptied.”

“Until he’s almost nothing left to give,” Ethan said.

They prepared the ritual that evening, in a sealed utility room beneath the hospital. Simple chalk circle. Salt. A dispersal ceremony - release whatever remained, and sever any further drain.

“It won’t restore him,” Giles said, checking his notes. “It’ll stop any further damage.”

“And then?” Ethan asked.

“I’m afraid that’s as good as it gets.”

Ethan nodded, once.

The ritual went smoothly. Too smoothly.

The air pressure eased. The lights steadied. The man’s breathing shifted - not dramatically, but enough.

The heart rate monitor ticked upward, a fractional change Giles hadn’t expected.

Later, the doctor said the man was speaking with a little more variation. Asked for some tea. Smiled faintly at a joke.

Giles stood in the corridor, uneasy.

“That shouldn’t have been possible,” he said. “Or at least drained me if he was taking something back.”

Ethan leaned beside him, his cigarette ash stark on the hospital corridor floor. “Cities absorb things, too, Rupert. Noise. Heat. People. Maybe it can give back, too.”

“That’s not how the ritual works.”

“It’s how London works.”

Giles didn’t answer.

They walked out into the night together. Traffic hissed along wet streets. There was a distant siren that wailed and then fell silent.

Giles stopped under a streetlamp. “If we treat people like conduits…”

“We already do,” Ethan said gently. “Hospitals. Offices. Government. You just prefer it when it’s mundane, when it has rules.”

Giles looked at him. Really looked, catching his eye.

“He gave too much of himself away,” Giles said.

“That’s not a crime, if he chose it,” Ethan replied.

There was a pause. The city breathed around them.

Giles spoke again, quieter. “Do you ever worry? That there won’t be anything left?”

Ethan didn’t answer straight away. When he did, he kept his voice light, almost careless. “Only when I stop moving.”

Their eyes met. Something fragile and unspoken hung between them. Desire, and recognition. Giles reached out, tentatively, to touch Ethan’s cheek.

A bus roared past, spraying water onto the pavement. The moment broke.

“We should file the report,” Giles said.

“We should,” Ethan agreed.

They walked on.

Behind them, the hospital lights hummed. The hollow man slept - alive, stable, but incomplete.

And beneath London, grief continued to spread a little thinner. Pulled into places already heavy with it.

But nothing looked wrong.

Which might have been the most troubling thing of all.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

They called it “C”. As if it stood for something respectable. A letter to try and make it all sound like part of a filing system, instead of a confession.

Giles had been up since just after five, smoking and drinking tea, reading the week’s incident reports until they blurred into something meaningless. Two more hauntings. Different mechanisms…manifestations, but the same result: the dead sticking around.

“Looks like something doesn’t want them leaving,” Ethan had said, voice soft in a way that he only used when he didn’t want to be heard.

Now they were back at Whitehall. Polished doors and men in grey suits. A clerk with a Ministry badge met them at the end of the corridor. He glanced at Ethan’s leather coat as if it were a crime, gestured for them to follow him down a stairwell that smelled like wet newsprint.

“Rupert Giles,” the clerk said. It wasn’t a question. “And Mr. Rayne.”

“Mr Rayne,” Ethan murmured, amused. “How formal. Makes me feel almost employable.”

The clerk didn’t smile. “This way.”

Down and down - they went past boiler rooms and rusted pipes. Eventually the building forgot it was the seat of government and turned into what it really was, a cellar full of secrets.

The door at the bottom, at the end of the last corridor, was labeled with a stenciled C. Faded, like it’d been there since rationing.

Inside, there were buzzing fluorescent lights, and a room that looked like it was assembled from detritus. Desks made with old doors. Filing cabinets that didn’t match. Maps of London pinned to slightly sagging corkboards. A well-used kettle sat on a hotplate next to a stack of folders labeled in red ink: UNCONFIRMED.

A woman stood up as they entered. Late thirties, early forties maybe. Hair pinned back, a thin cardigan that probably didn’t keep out the underground chill. Cigarette half-burned down in the ashtray beside her.

“Ah, Rupert Giles,” she said. “Finally.”

Giles blinked in confusion. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

“Not personally. Professionally.” She held out a hand. “Judith Hall. Department C.”

Ethan whistled. “Department C. Sounds like an NHS vaccination wing.”

Judith’s mouth twitched in annoyance. “We’re not supposed to be glamorous. Just necessary.”

Giles took in the room. “What is all this?”

“A ledger, I suppose you could call it,” Judith said. “Everything that the government needs to pretend doesn’t happen.”

She nodded toward the far wall. Dozens of photographs pinned up. Scorch marks on concrete. Bodies laid out on tarpaulins. Close-ups of sigils, charms, strange bruising that looked like handwriting.

Two prints were pinned next to each other at the center.

A tunnel wall. Charing Cross. Names carved into concrete.

A bowl of honey and ash on a dirty floor, its surface rippling.

“Two separate incidents,” Giles said carefully.

Judith raised an eyebrow. “But not unrelated, as I’m sure you accept by now.”

She crossed to the largest map, tapped it with the end of her cigarette, flecks of ash falling unnoticed as she did so. Pins dotted London like a rash - Soho, Camden, Islington, Walthamstow, Lambeth. Pins connected by twin, criss-crossing to such an extent that the city looked like a spiderweb.

“Not ghost stories,” she said. “Spikes. Patterns. They come in clusters, usually every few years.”

“How long have you been tracking them?” Giles asked quietly.

Judith exhaled smoke through her nose. “Department C officially? They moved me here when they formed it in ‘68. Unofficially? Since the Blitz uncovered some things that weren’t supposed to see daylight.” She paused. “London’s always been porous…too much history for it not to be. But the last six months have changed.”

Ethan wandered closer to the board, hands in his pockets. “Changed how? Another…cluster, I think you called it.”

Judith reached into a folder and slid a photocopy onto the table near Giles.

A symbol. A serpent biting its own tail. Tiny thorns crowning its head.

Giles felt his stomach tighten. Sensed, rather than saw, Ethan next to him, fumbling in his coat pocket for his pack of cigarettes. The paper looked harmless, but the ink had a weight to it. A page that wanted to sink through the table it was on, absorb into the earth.

“The Serpent’s Crown,” Giles murmured.

Judith watched his face closely. “You’ve seen it.”

“I’ve seen it,” Giles nodded. “In Camden.”

Ethan, leaning against a filing cabinet, didn’t meet Giles’ eyes.

“We pulled that from a case file from ‘75,” Judith continued. “Squatters found it in a derelict house. One dead, three institutionalised. Their statements were…fragmented at best. But they all described one thing the same. A presence. A voice.”

She flipped the page.

…called itself Eyghon…

…fed on fear…

…required invitation…

Giles swallowed.

“That name doesn’t appear in any records,” he said tightly. “It was buried. Deliberately.”

Judith nodded once. “Yes, we’ve noticed.”

Ethan gave a soft, humourless laugh. “London loves its secrets.”

Judith leaned forward. “Whatever tried to come through then, we think it failed. But it didn’t disappear. And we’re seeing echoes of the same methods, the same pressures. Something’s learning, or trying to teach. Or both.”

Ethan leaned over Giles’ shoulder, close enough that his smoke wafted into Giles’ face. “And what do you think it means, Judith? Is there a demon somewhere in the filing system?”

Giles swallowed. “The names. The honey. They’re attempts to anchor spirits. Keep them closer.”

“Yes,” Judith said. “You saw it as much mistakes as anything. Grief, in one case. A small error from a small person.”

“It was,” Giles said.

“But not only that.” Judith took a step closer. “It was a test. Someone’s seeing how easily London can be made to hold onto its dead.”

Ethan gave a thin smile. “Someone with an unpleasant hobby.”

Judith’s gaze flicked to him. “Someone with an unpleasant purpose.”

“Why call us down here?” Giles asked.

Judith’s answer was quick. “You’re standing in the middle of it. These cases found you.”

“We were assigned,” Giles said, weakly. Not believing it.

Judith slid another file across the desk. A photograph. A letter on a worktable. Unstamped, neat black ink.

Do not go to Camden.

She tapped the photo. “We intercepted two of these before they hit the field. Addressed to men dead ten years. The other one slipped through. We think it was addressed to you.”

Ethan’s head tilted, a flicker of interest. “You might have led with that.”

“Fine,” Giles said tightly. “We assume there’s a pattern. What does Department C do about it?”

There was no warmth in Judith’s smile. “Document. Advise. Contain, when we can.”

“And when you can’t?”

“We find people who can,” her gaze sliding over Giles and Ethan. “People who’ve been in the dark before.”

Ethan gave a half-nod. “Very flattering.”

Judith stubbed out a cigarette. “You’re not here because you’re special. You’re here because you’re the best connection we have. Whatever’s out there seems to know your names.”

There was a beat of silence. Lights buzzing. Far above them, Parliament went on with the mundane.

Giles pulled together the papers on the table carefully, keeping his hands steady. “You must have some sort of theory.”

Judith looked suddenly tired. “I think something or someone is trying to build a map,” she said. “Not streets. Not even just people. But weak points of grief. Where London leaks.”

Ethan’s voice was softer. “And where it hurts.”

Judith looked at him, as if giving him real regard for the first time. “Yes. Where it hurts.”

Giles slid the Serpent’s Crown photocopy back across the table. “You want us to close the leaks.”

Judith nodded. “That’s the idea.”

As they left, the clerk reappeared as if summoned. The passage outside was still narrow, air stale, as they made their way up to the more traditional corridors of power. Ethan walked a fraction behind Giles, his shoulder brushing Giles’ coat.

“You didn’t mention there were other letters,” Ethan said.

Giles kept his eyes forward. “I didn’t know.”

Ethan laughed quietly. “Trouble with paperwork, Rupert. It always turns up eventually.”

Giles stopped so suddenly that Ethan nearly walked into him. They were too close - the narrow corridor, Whitehall’s damp walls, their breath, the press of history.

“This isn’t a game, Ethan.”

Ethan leaned in, just enough. “It never is with you.”

For a heartbeat, Giles didn’t move. Their lips just inches apart. The pull between them was the same pressure as the hum in the walls - down to the bones, unignorable, and tuned to the pain of old mistakes.

Then a door opened down the corridor, and a civil servant stepped out, startled to find two men standing close like a scandal waiting to happen.

Giles stepped back first. “We have to work,” he said flatly.

Ethan’s smile returned, as casual as if it had never been gone. “So we do.”

They walked out. Raining again. London pretending it was only politics and petrol shortages and public transport.

Somewhere in the city, something listened - patient like bureaucracy, hungry for grief - taking notes.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

It was just an old office building, a few minutes walk from Russell Square. Boarded up since the war, just the occasional groups of squatters moved on by the police. But lately it had been picking up a new reputation: a place where you could hear a building sing to itself.

Passers-by reported a low hum from inside. Like a choir under water. One man swore he’d smelled something sweet and rotten drifting out from behind the broken windows.

Special Branch called it “possible environmental contamination”. Ethan rolled his eyes when Giles told him.

”This is charming,” Ethan said, pushing through the rusted back gate. “Nothing says ‘romantic evening’ like a condemned building and the tang of mould.”

“It’s not mould,” Giles said. The air was thick, cloying. “It’s honey.”

They walked through the deserted corridors, torches swinging across faded notice boards and crumbling tiles. The hum was clear, at the edge of hearing but also deep in the bones. Not a tune, just a pressure, like somebody humming through their clenched teeth.

“You hear that?” Ethan said quietly.

“I’ve been trying not to,” Giles replied.

They found their first bowl in the shadow of an old, wooden reception desk. An enamel basin on the floor, crusted at the rim, and half-filled with a viscous, amber sludge. Ash floated in it - grey islands.

Giles crouched, shining his torch. “I think it’s bone ash,” he murmured. “Mixed into the honey. And graveyard soil, if I had to guess.”

“An offering?” Ethan suggested. “Or someone’s very grim tea service.”

Giles dipped his gloved finger, bringing it close to his nose. “Something’s a binding element. Sweetness to attract. Ash to anchor it here. “Someone’s trying to bring something here. And then make it stay.”

The hum pulsed, a fraction louder. The liquid’s surface shivered.

Ethan’s hand closed around Giles’ wrist, steadying him as the floor started to vibrate. Honey smeared against Giles’ sleeve where Ethan’s thumb brushed him. For a moment, neither of them moved.

“Be careful you’re not the one who sticks,” Ethan said softly. “That’s what honey does.”

Giles glanced at him. Ethan licked his finger and gently wiped away the honey. The contact lingered a half-second too long. “Let go.”

Ethan did, eventually.

There were three more bowls further down the corridor. Each of them were close to reception desks with Bakelite phones, or broken-down switchboard offices. Cables snaked out from the switchboard. A jury-rigged connection to a cracked PA, a contraption bolted to the wall - a mesh of radio parts, valves, and broken pipes.

“Someone’s building a harmonic engine,” Giles said. “Feeding it with emotional residue.”

“A translation?” Ethan asked.

“They use it to replay…what’s left of people. Grief. Memories. Ashes to hold the echo. Honey to anoint it, keep it preserved.”

As if on cue, the speakers crackled into life. Just for a heartbeat, the hum resolved into something different, almost words.

“Henry?” came a whisper. A woman’s voice. Stretched thin, like old tape. “I’m still-”

The sound warped, quickly, and dropped back into the static.

“Wonderful,” Ethan said. “You’ve found the world’s most depressing radio station.”

In a utility room toward the stairs to the second floor, they found the architect of it all.

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by more bowls, more ash, more honey. There was a tape deck resting in front of her, the reels turning slowly. Her hands were sticky and flecked with grey.

She looked up at them.

“They fade,” she said, without looking up at them. “There’s church bells, songs, the sounds of laughing. It fades. I’m keeping them.”

Giles kept a careful distance. “What’s your name?”

“Margaret,” she said. “Margaret Field. Maggie.” Her eyes were rubbed red. Exhausted, and furious. “He went, before I could say goodbye. And I couldn’t even remember his voice properly. I didn’t want that to happen to other people. So I kept those voices safe. Followed what they said, wrote it down.”

She held up a notebook. The pages stained with her honey thumbprints. Neat handwriting on crumpled paper. Under the incantations and notes were other hands, different writing. One stood out, a looping serif, precise and old-fashioned. Other inks with corrections.

Ethan’s breath hitched.

Giles noticed. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Ethan said, too quickly. He stepped forward and took the notebook, flicking past the amended lines before Giles could linger. “Poor penmanship.”

Maggie was talking again. “They come back when I play them. When the machine hums. It helps.”

“No,” said Giles. “You’re stopping them from moving on. Holding them here in a half-state. That’s why living people can hear them.” He was gentle, calm, “The dead shouldn’t be this loud.”

“I just wanted something sweet. Honey doesn’t spoil,” she whispered.

The hum was climbing, and the pitch rising. The bowls were starting to vibrate on the floor. So much that honey was oozing over the rims, dragging ash with it in sticky streaks.

“Ethan, the machine,” said Giles.

Ethan moved to the wall of equipment, eyeing the cords and the valves. “Which one? I don’t want to turn central London into one big accidental séance.”

“Just do it.”

The sound was growing, like it had teeth. Voices were surfacing, escaping the noise. Some half-formed, or overlapping. Pleading or shouting. Giles heard names, snatched confessions, a laugh that turned into a sob.

Below it all was a single phrase, as clear as a knife.

“Rupert. We shouldn’t have-”

Ethan grabbed a cable and pulled it violently from the wall. It came free with a spark of blue. The hum keened briefly, then collapsed into silence.

Sparks were dancing along the cables and the lights were flickering for a moment before they steadies. Maggie was sobbing, casting her hands around the shattered bowls of honey. “They’re gone.”

Giles looked to Ethan, blinking. “Did you hear-”

“A lot of very annoyed ghosts,” said Ethan quickly. “Too loud, you can send them a strongly-worded letter.”

Later, they stood on the steps from the back yard up to street level. They stood for a moment in weak daylight. Smuts of ash still clung to Giles’ coat. The honey left on his wrist was syrupy, sticky crystal. A faintly golden smear.

“Do you ever think about him?” Giles asked suddenly, not looking at Ethan.

“Which him?” Ethan said, though the tone suggested he already knew.

“Randall.”

Ethan smiled, slight and strange. “Only when I breathe.”

Their eyes met. Something old and raw and fragile sat between them. Like one of Maggie’s bowls of honey - full to the brim, a careless movement away from spilling over.

A bus rumbled past, and Giles looked away first. “We should file the report.”

“We should,” Ethan agreed. He didn’t move.

It looked for a moment like he might reach for Giles’ wrist again, to brush away more dried honey. Instead, Ethan slipped a hand into his jacket.

“Come on, Rupert,” he said lightly. “London’s still full of people who want to keep the past alive. We shouldn’t disappoint them.”

They walked the last few steps out onto the Euston Road. Into the city’s noise. The traffic. The living world.

Leaving the sweetness and ash behind in the dark - for now.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

It started at Charing Cross. People started noticing names etched into tunnel walls overnight. No sign of tools. No witnesses. No idea how anyone had cut the concrete so cleanly.

Every name belonged to someone who’d died somewhere on the tube. A suicide, an accident, workers lost to the endless rebuilds of the Underground.

The oldest inscription was a name from 1934. The newest was two weeks old.

Special Branch had passed it up the line. “Occult considerations.” Which meant Giles and Ethan.

“Graffiti and ghosts,” Ethan said, stepping off the service lift into the gloom. “It’s quite romantic, in a municipal sort of way.”

Giles ran his hand over one of the carvings. “These markings are precise. Masterful carving - not something you could do quickly.”

He traced a finger over the final curve of a letter - a looping serif font, old-fashioned and deliberate. “Someone’s handwriting.”

Ethan crouched beside him, reaching out to touch Giles knee - just for balance, maybe. “You’re tracing ghosts by their penmanship now, Rupert? Romantic.”

Giles gave him a look. “Practical. Everyone leaves a mark.”

“Even on love letters?” Ethan’s grin flickered, half challenge and half memory.

Giles straightened up sharply. “This isn’t about sentiment.”

“No,” Ethan said, still squatting by the last carving, looking up. “It never is with you.”

They followed a paper trail instead.

Giles found a matching signature - H. March - on rosters and records going back several decades. The most consistent connection with all the names, whether it was on Civil Defence rosters from the war, or schedule rotations for the Bakerloo Line.

A recently-retired records clerk. And his son killed in a tunnel collapse. Address for his pension checks still current.

The flat was above a tobacconist on Villiers Street, just up from Embankment. Smelled of dust and tea that had been left to go cold.

Binders lined the walls, stacked and cared for. Kept neat as they could be, respectful. Each labeled in neat blue pen: To be remembered.

Henry March answered the door in his shirtsleeves, surprised but immediately polite. “Is this about the names?” he said, before they even had a chance to ask. “I’ve tried to keep them safe,” he explained as he showed them pages and pages of lists, dates, and deaths. “When I write them down, it stops them vanishing. Stops them being forgotten.”

The air around the binders was trembling faintly. The paper edges shivering in some non-existent draft.

“I’m sorry to say that your comfort’s become more of a prison,” Giles explained gently. “I think you’re binding their souls here. They can’t move on.”

March’s eyes filled with confusion, then fearful tears. “No, no. I do it to give ‘em peace. I make a pot of tea for them every night,” he said. “They keep me company.”

“I know,” said Giles. “But peace isn’t the same as captivity.”

Ethan touched the windowpane with his fingertips, leaning softly against the wall. The glass flexed as his fingers touched it, and a shimmer of reflected faces pressed close, whispering. “They don’t look very peaceful to me.”

March’s voice broke. “But if I stop, they’ll be lost. Forgotten. My boy, too.”

“You have to let them go,” Giles said. “All of them.”

At Giles’ gesture, Ethan pulled a binder from the shelf. The whispering rose into a storm. Pages fluttered, ink seeping through the pages like black tears.

Giles struck a match and dropped it into the hearth. “Rest,” he whispered - laying the binder gently and letting the fire take hold.

March lurched forward, as if suddenly realizing what was happening. “No! You’ll kill them again-” And then he fell, his sentence unfinished. A final sigh lost in the crackle of flame.

The fire itself turned blue. The voices at the window shifted from fury to sounds of relief, a long, slow exhale. And the walls stilled. Names turning to ash as Ethan added more paper to the flame.

“You always did prefer a clean ledger,” Ethan said quietly.

Giles’ face was unreadable. “It’s not about clean. It’s about balance.”

He turned away to attend to the fallen Henry. He didn’t see the last flame guttering, and missed the faint shimmer of letters forming in the soot.

A new name, not written in ink, or by any visible hand: R. James.

Randall. The name Giles never liked to speak aloud.

Ethan glanced at Giles, and reached gently into the hearth. The page was still warm, edges curling but the name intact. It came away easily in his hands. He folded it carefully, slipped it into his jacket.

The soot smudged his thumb like a stain of old blood.

Outside, rain had turned the pavement into dirty mirrors.

“They’ll rest better now,” Giles said, watching the glow from the station mouth.

Ethan lit a cigarette, cupping his hand to protect it from the drizzle. “Rest is a relative term, isn’t it, Rupert?”

Giles didn’t answer. He was watching the wet lights reflected on the street, blurring into each other, like those names had blurred into each other.

As they walked away, the city exhaled.

In Ethan’s pocket, the paper whispered once, softly.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

Arthur Meacham had worked the Returned Letters desk in North London for twenty-three years. “Every letter wants a home,” was his mantra, before he slit the top with a brass knife and logged whatever undeliverable postal detritus was washed up.

He read the first line aloud, as he always did…and managed only a few words before black script bloomed beneath his skin and stopped his heart.

“Cutaneous sigils,” Giles muttered, crouching next to the corpse an hour later. “Old magic. Dangerous.”

“Your favorite kind,” Ethan said, lighting a cigarette beneath the NO SMOKING sign. “So what’s the gossip?”

“Unstamped envelopes. Name, no address. They appear overnight.”

“Royal Mail branching out?”

Giles ignored him. On the clerk’s desk were three more unopened letters.

“There’s one for a Mrs T Morton,” said the clerk, still pale with shock. “One for Randall James.”

Giles froze. Randall had been dead for years.

“Well,” Ethan said softly, “someone’s not keeping up with the obituaries.”

The clerk swallowed, holding out the last envelope. “And one for…Rupert Giles.”

“Afraid of a little junk mail, Rupert?”

Giles tore it open. Just four words, written in neat black ink. Do not go to Camden.

Below it was a stamped sigil. A coiled serpent biting its own tail - crowned with three tiny thorns.

“Serpent’s Crown,” Ethan said softly. “So we’re going back a bit to ancient myths, are we? Time devouring itself.”

“I’ve read this before,” snapped Giles. “Before Randall…died. I should have paid more heed.” The memory clawed at him - the smell of candlewax, the blood. They’d been so stupid.

Ethan’s grin was sharp, humorless. “Never was a good listener.”

The Camden house had been derelict even back in ‘75. They vaulted the padlocked gate, knowing the way. Grip slipping on the slick black metal, then boots echoing in long damp corridors that smelled of history left to rot.

“Too many bad memories,” Ethan said.

They found the room by following the smell of fresh ink and paper. A circle chalked on the floor. Dozens of letters fluttered and floated on silver threads, towards an odd, clattering machine. It seemed half typewriter, half heartbeat. And in its center, that same crowned serpent sigil, this time daubed in red ochre.

“That’s a new one,” whispered Giles. “Temporal addressing. Someone’s writing to the past.”

“And is it writing back?”

A figure stepped from the shadows. Tall. Lab coat, wide eyes, trembling voice. “You shouldn’t be here. The letters aren’t for now.”

“Who’s sending them?”

“I am,” the woman said. “The serpent must bite its tail, or London burns.”

“It’s killing people.”

“Necessary sacrifice,” the woman hissed. “Each death prevents a greater one. But you two - you’re distorting the pattern. Especially him.” Her gaze fixed on Ethan. “Wherever he walks, the threads get tangled.”

Ethan gave a half-bow, theatrical. “I do my best.”

Outside, the cobbles were slick with rain. They’d shut down the machine. The woman was on her way to a holding cell - trespassing, for now.

“You’re thinking about the symbol,” Ethan said. “Ouroboros. Eternity and inevitability.”

“I’m thinking someone wants us out the way.”

“Someone always does.”

They stopped under a streetlamp. Huddled close while the rain made halos of light. Too close. A breath apart. The past between them like a live wire they still didn’t quite dare touch.

“Ethan. We were a mistake,” Giles said.

Ethan’s voice was quiet. “And yet we’re still here.”

He leaned in. Giles didn’t move. Their lips hovered, just a heartbeat apart - then a cab roared past, spraying water. Breaking the spell.

“Later,” said Ethan, too casual.

“No. Not later.”

Ethan smiled - the maddening, boyish smile that had undone Giles before. “Then we should make the present count.”

They walked out into the rain, not talking. Silhouetted as the sun rose. Somewhere in the city the serpent kept turning - jaws gnawing at its crown.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

New 12-Part Drama Series – Fridays, 9.00pm – Thames Television

They swore they’d never work together again. Now London’s only hope is that they do.

The year is 1979. Britain is running out of faith, fuel, and patience - but something older and deeper than politics is stirring in the capital’s shadows. Demons, forgotten gods, curses are bleeding through the cracks into the modern world. And Special Branch’s most secret unit needs a pair of unlikely investigators to hold back the dark.

Rupert “Ripper” Giles (Anthony Head) is an Oxford-educated scholar who’s spent the last five years trying to bury his past. Ethan Rayne (Robin Sachs) is a charming trickster who’s never stopped running from it. They were once the closest of friends - and more - with a shared history marked by forbidden magic, terrible mistakes, and a bond that neither man can sever.

Thrown together into the capital’s most dangerous occult cases, Giles and Rayne need to navigate a London that’s alive with conspiracies and creatures - and their own unfinished business. A combustible partnership: intellect and impulse, discipline and chaos.

Whether it’s the cobbled backstreets of Soho or the marble corridors of Whitehall, Ripper & Rayne blends the grit of 1970s police thrillers with the glamor of British folk horror. Each week brings a new mystery - a haunted record, a vengeful spirit. But the real story is the fraught, electric connection between two men caught between saving each other, or destroying everything.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.

Rain was hammering the streets, the city on edge, petrol shortages, too much cheap lager. Somewhere off the Charing Cross Road, a shop bell jangled in the night, even though nobody had touched it.

“The place was locked up two days ago,” Giles muttered, hunched in his trench coat. “Owner found face-down behind the counter. Eyes boiled out.”

Ethan smirked as he slipped through the splintered door. “And yet, here we are. Breaking and entering before breakfast.”

“Don’t start,” Giles shot back. “You said you’d behave.”

“You always say you’ll stop lecturing,” Ethan said, brushing dust from an empty record sleeve. “So we’re both lying.”

The place was a wreck. Gramophone records were lined up like trophies, most of them smashed into bits. One of them was still turning, the needle scratching a single note into the air. A sigil burned faintly into the wood behind it, still glowing dully red.

Giles crouched to get a better look. “It’s a containment ward. Whoever was here didn’t finish the job.”

“Or they didn’t live long enough to,” Ethan said, already reaching to remove the needle.

“Don’t...” Giles snapped, but too late. The record hissed its last, and the temperature dropped.

The shadows began to thicken, crawling up the walls and pooling on the ceiling. Slowly coalescing into...something. Something with too many teeth and no face at all. Giles’ pulse spiked - not just fear, but the same thrill he’d sworn he was done chasing.

“Bloody brilliant,” he hissed at Ethan, pulling a thin, silver-edged blade from his coat. “You always have to touch it.”

“Well, wouldn’t be me if I didn’t, would it?” Ethan grinned, though his eyes darted nervously. “Latin? Enochian?”

“Latin. You always cock up the Enochian.”

Giles fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a vial of sanctified salt.

“Oritur creatura caecorum et tenebrarum. Te relego...”

The thing howled as if scalded. Books exploded from the shelves. Giles threw the vial and it shattered, and the record screamed.

The gramophone burst apart, and the shadowy entity folded in on itself like smoke sucked down the drain. Silence, broken only by the rain still hammering on the pavements outside.

Giles exhaled. “One day you’ll get us both killed.”

“One day, Ripper,” Ethan said with a smile. “Not today.”

Giles eyed the remnants of the charred sigil. “Looks like someone’s trying to open a door. Bigger than anything we’ve seen before.”

“Then we’ll kick it shut,” Ethan said, putting a hand on Giles’ shoulder. “You and me. The clever boy and the beautiful disaster.”

Giles gave him a long, hard look. Like he trusted Ethan just enough to hate. “We’re not heroes, Ethan.”

“I never said we were.”

They stepped back out into the rain. Two silhouettes swallowed up by the sodium-orange glowing London fog. Overeducated misfits with blood on their hands, and a talent for trouble.

Tomorrow they’d be back in their smoky basement office, trying to explain another “incident” to Special Branch.

Tonight, London slept a little safer. But something in the dark was taking notice.

Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.