Catherine Cavendish: November 2020

Carol and Nessa are strangers but not for much longer.

In a luxury apartment and in the walls of a modern hospital, the evil that was done continues to thrive. They are in the hands of an entity that knows no boundaries and crosses dimensions - bending and twisting time itself - and where danger waits in every shadow. The battle is on for their bodies and souls and the line between reality and nightmare is hard to define.

Through it all, the words of Lydia Warren Carmody haunt them. But who was she? And why have Carol and Nessa been chosen?

The answer lies deep in the darkness…

Carol and Nessa – two strangers living widely contrasting lives in the same town. In normal circumstances their paths would never have crossed. But these circumstances are far from normal.

Carol Shaughnessy – orphaned and haunted since childhood by an entity whose name she has never known. Her childhood was spent moving from one foster home to another, until the horror of the last one. Now she works in a supermarket while looking after a beautiful luxury apartment. The couple who own it are in Dubai for six months and Carol can hardly believe her luck, but the block of flats overlooks the Royal and Waverley Hospital and is built on the same land formerly occupied by the Victorian Waverley Workhouse and Asylum.

Within a day of moving in, things start to happen. Strange, unnerving events that Carol struggles to explain. A walk in the grounds of the apartment block proves anything but therapeutic as she finds herself cast back in time, seeing the world through another woman’s eyes – a wife married to a sadistic, controlling husband a century earlier, whose anger is about to overwhelm her.

That same night, restored to herself once more, Carol finds a poem by a woman called Lydia Warren Carmody. Titled, In Darkness, Shadows Breathe, its words haunt her. She sees a face of a young girl at the window – a girl who mouths the words, “You’re next” and then vanishes into the shadows. From then on, it seems those words are destined to pursue her. She collapses at work and is hospitalized where she meets a woman who takes her through a door into another world – the world of the One and the Many.

Nessa Tremaine – diagnosed with a rare form of cancer - undergoes extensive, life-changing surgery in the Royal and Waverley, where she soon discovers all is not as it seems. A voice summons her in the dead of night. She finds herself in the workhouse of the past and in contact with pure evil – an entity that controls its chosen servants and continues to thrive. It knows no boundaries and crosses dimensions, capable of bending time and space itself.

Nessa and Carol are thrown together. Each needs the other, although the reason is unclear. Nessa also finds the poem In Darkness, Shadows Breathe. Like Carol, she is consumed by it. But who was Lydia Warren Carmody and why do her words haunt them? What is the significance of the young girl she, like Carol, encounters? All Nessa has is question upon question. She must find the answers – for her and for Carol. The battle is on for their bodies and souls and the line between reality and nightmare is hard to define.