THE ROVING PECKER PRESENTS: Boxing Day Thrills 'n Chills With Raincoaster!

Greetings, Manor Hors! Today "The Roving Pecker" presents two boxed gifts for Boxing Day from our own Raincoaster. Dare you open them? Bwahahahahaha!

Who is it?

Smee.

But the question is: is that good news or not?

A jolly country house Christmas party. All the food, all the comforts, all the jollity of the season due the prosperous English gentry. A happy bachelor guest, excited for a grand holiday. A posh game of hide-and-seek.

“Every player is given a sheet of paper. All the sheets except one are blank. On the last sheet of paper is written...Smee. Nobody knows who Smee is except Smee himself – or herself. You turn out the lights, and Smee goes quietly out of the room and hides. After a time the others go off to search for Smee – but of course they don’t know who they are looking for. When one player meets another he challenges him by saying, Smee.

“The other player answers, Smee, and they continue searching.

“But the real Smee doesn’t answer when someone challenges. The second player stays quietly beside him. Presently they will be discovered by a third player. He will challenge and receive no answer, and he will join the first two. This goes on until all the players are in the same place. The last one to find Smee has to pay a forfeit. It’s a good, noisy, amusing game. In a big house it often takes a long time for everyone to find Smee. Perhaps you’d like to try. I’ll happily pay my forfeit and sit here by the fire while you play.”

A sudden death.

And a very strange echo many years later.

Welcome to Smee. Play safe. Sleep well.

Text from The Value of Sparrows is RIGHT HERE!

Audio from EnCrypted Horror, narrated by Jasper L'Estrange is RIGHT HERE!

Ready for more? Can your heart take it?

We all have, or have met...

That Aunt! The fussy one, the one with Too Many Collections, the one with The Good China which you're barely allowed to look at, let alone actually use. Have we perhaps wished her dead? Well, not so much that, but at the same time, wouldn't it be a relief?

But would it?

This soggy, seasonal story takes place in the fen country, the swamp country, the low country of England, and features flat, grey landscapes, flat, grey characters, and flat, grey narration, yet all the same is brought to life by the fire of the heroine, a lively woman who's a passionate collector of fine bone china. It's really hard not to love the protagonist, who's the kind of dashing spinster whom flat, grey characters must have found exhausting, but today would be celebrated as GirlBoss material.

A long, flat, grey drive with a long, flat, grey pony leads to a grey house and a decidedly interesting encounter with a fellow collector of peculiar habits and nature. Unusually for a ghost story, it takes place in the daytime, albeit a flat, grey daylight.

The full text is RIGHT HERE!

Or listen to the audio RIGHT HERE!

Photo Credits: Getty Images, CharterwellsUK