ITCH!

by Gemma Amor

Genres: Ghost; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Horror

Synopsis

READERS LOVE GEMMA'S DARK, ITCHY WORLD 🐜
'If you are after something that is both shocking and horrifically beautiful then take a journey and discover this little atrocity for yourself' 🐜
'I kept telling myself I really should turn off the light and get to bed now, eyes dry, head heavy, but every sentence in this book commands the reader keep turning the pages and press onward...' 🐜
'Gemma pulled me in with this compelling tale. Each page turned yielded me to another. I couldn't stop. Seriously!' 🐜

Josie is at rock bottom, living a haunted existence after returning to her isolated hometown on the edge of the Forest of Dean. But the tall, dense pine trees are not the only things casting shadows across her skin.

When Josie stumbles across a decaying, ant-infested body in the woods, she plummets into a downward spiral, facing uncomfortable truths about the victim and her own past - all whilst battling a growing infestation of her mind . . . and her flesh.

Desperate to solve the case, Josie scratches the surface of an age-old mystery - a masked predator stalks the forest around Ellwood, a place deeply gripped by folklore. As the village prepares for its annual festival, Josie gets closer and closer to unveiling a monster, and begins to ask herself:

Are these dark crawling insects leading her to uncover the truth? Or is she their next victim? 🐜

🐜 'From the first page, this story is already under your skin, building a nest in your heart' KYLIE LEE BAKER, New York Times bestselling author of Bat Eater 🐜

🐜 'A chilling and tremendously disturbing examination of a wounded mind . . . Sinister and utterly fiendish, ITCH! is a shocking and truly surprising blend of mystery, folk horror, and body horror that will burrow deep in your softest places, into your tenderest, most unspoiled secret parts' ERIC LAROCCA, award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke 🐜

Release date: October 9, 2025

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

2001

Josie’s father was chopping meat with a large and very sharp butcher’s knife, humming along to music, when his daughter came downstairs.

‘Dad?’

At first he didn’t hear her. The music was too loud.

Josie tried again, heart in her mouth.

‘Dad?’

The knife halted, mid-slice. Her father looked over to where Josie hovered in the kitchen doorway.

The girl wrung her hands together.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Her father reached out, turned down the CD player, just enough to be heard over.

‘Are you a good girl, Josie?’ he asked, then.

Josie didn’t know how to answer that. The question, delivered so abruptly and without any context, felt like a trick.

She wrinkled her nose, fiddling with a strand of hair that had come loose from her braid as she worked through the best possible response.

If she said yes, her father would no doubt disagree. Worse, he’d be disappointed with her for lying. Josie knew she wasn’t a good girl. She had a hard time paying attention, was clumsy, frequently lost or broke things, and was often getting into trouble. A truly good girl would do none of those things.

If she answered no, however, her dad would be equally as disappointed in her. He would say she should try harder, then, to be good. He was alone now, he would remind her sternly. She should behave better.

Teamwork, he was fond of muttering, brows low with disappointment. It’s supposed to make the dream work, Josie.

And she tried, she really did, but sometimes she made mistakes.

Didn’t most people make mistakes?

Her father didn’t like mistakes very much.

Josie didn’t hold this against him. He had a lot on his mind lately. People (other adults) went out of their way to tell her that, wherever possible. Your dad’s got a lot on his mind, love. Don’t take it to heart. He still loves you.

It was best not to upset him, they said.

And yet here she was, interrupting his evening.

Her father stood waiting, head cocked to one side, face highlighted in a peculiar fashion by the harsh kitchen lighting overhead.

Josie scrunched her toes against the freezing tile floor. Rain assaulted the windowpanes of their cottage. It sounded like thousands of fingernails tapping the rattling glass. Wind whistled and moaned down the chimney in the living room.

Autumn is trying to get in, Josie. Can you hear her?

When Josie’s mother used to say that, Josie would imagine a long, earthy woman wrapped around their house like a strangling root, her tangled auburn hair draped across the roof, skin made of crinkly leaves, fingers that were spindly twigs, tap-tap-tapping on the panes.

Let me in.

It’s cold and wet out here.

Let me in!

‘Um,’ Josie said, stalling for time.

Thunder pealed in the distance, added percussion for the orchestral efforts leaking out of the CD player. Josie didn’t know what tonight’s music was called, but it had lots of violins in it, all hacking away together in a frenzied manner. It didn’t sound very nice, not to her ears. It sounded how she imagined a headache would sound. Her dad loved music like this. He liked cooking to it. Violin concertos were his favourite, he said. At first, she’d misheard him. She thought he had been saying violent concertos. She still secretly called them that. Josie didn’t know what a concerto was, exactly, but she did know they were very loud. Sometimes so loud, the music filtered into Josie’s dreams.

Perhaps that was why she was awake, now. Dad was cooking later than usual tonight. Josie knew better than to ask why. Dad had a way of turning questions into conversations she didn’t want to have, like have you done your French homework, or why are you bothering me, or did you take the money from the jar on the mantelpiece or when will you learn to fucking behave, Josie?

Her father hated questions almost as much as he hated mistakes.

Yet Josie had woken up, and now she could not get back to sleep.

And Dad was being weird, for some reason.

‘Well?’ he persisted. ‘Are you?’

Thunder rumbled again, closer.

Josie plumped for honesty. Being honest was good, wasn’t it?

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, looking down at her blue pyjamas with gold stars on them. A gift from her mother. She was getting too big for them but refused to wear anything else to bed. Her pale ankles stuck out well below the hemline, making her feet look twice as big.

An ant ran suddenly across her left big toe, a large black ant with a huge head capped with giant pincers. Josie gasped and twitched, jerked her foot. The ant scrambled off towards the kitchen cabinets.

Her father narrowed his eyes, murmured something, turned the volume dial back up on the CD player and went back to chopping meat, ignoring her entirely.

Minutes passed. The music swelled, rising to a crescendo that Dad seemed to get lost in. Eyes half-closed, head tilted back, his carpenter hands kept going at the meat. Josie marvelled at how skilled he was, how he never managed to cut himself. Like the meat was wood to be worked.

Thunder grumbled again, closer still.

Another ant emerged from under the fridge, ran after its companion.

Josie waited for the most dramatic part of the concerto to die down. In the brief gap between tracks, she worked up enough courage to ask the question she had come into the kitchen for in the first place.

‘Daddy,’ she said, trying to feel brave and failing. ‘I can’t sleep.’

A snort.

‘What’s new,’ came the reply. The knife moved up and down.

Josie was undeterred. In for a penny, in for a pound, as her mother would have said.

‘Will you tell me a story?’

This request, she knew, would go one of two ways. If he was in the right sort of mood, her father would be kind, funny and accommodating – he would willingly follow her upstairs and tuck her back into bed, read to her patiently, using all the funny voices, and let her snuggle into his chest while he spoke, all the while gently re-braiding her hair into the usual, long neat plait he preferred. Or – and this was the more likely outcome – he would be in the wrong sort of mood, and shout at her, tell Josie to grow the fuck up and stop being such a fucking baby, before sending her back to bed. If she was lucky, she would escape without being spanked on the behind, soundly. If she wasn’t . . .

He’d go back to normal soon enough, her teacher reassured her when she caught Josie crying in the playground one breaktime. It would just take a while. He was grieving.

Be patient, she was told. Be a good girl, for his sake.

Josie knew she should go back to bed, leave Daddy be.

But Josie didn’t want to go back to bed, not alone. Something made her uneasy, frightened, something worth risking the threat of a smacked bottom. Whether it was the storm, or some other noise she heard, or maybe a bad dream, she didn’t know.

She just wanted someone to sit with her for a little bit.

And seeing as how her mother wasn’t around anymore, her father would have to do.

Josie held her breath, counting to ten in her head. A flash of lightning lit up the sky outside the kitchen windows on the count of seven. Josie briefly glimpsed the tall larch trees in her garden whipping around in the fierce wind, rain hammering the roof of her dad’s shed, where she wasn’t allowed to go, on pain of severe punishment. Then the dark returned, filling the windowpanes. No stars – the storm was right on top of them.

The black was punctuated instead by the pale reflection of her dad’s face in the rain-spattered glass. The counter lights shone in such a way it seemed as if the man had no shoulders, no body. He was just a head, his eyes shadowy holes. Like he was wearing a mask, Josie thought.

Uneasy with this image, Josie’s eyes darted around the kitchen, seeking comfort.

She noticed her mum’s favourite fern, wilted, browning at the ends. She saw cobwebs gathering in the spaces above the kitchen cupboards. She saw her cat, Max, asleep on a pile of laundry dumped next to the washing machine. A bowl of half-eaten cat food spilled on to the tiles nearby. The litter tray was just beyond, several fly-specked deposits noticeable under a dusting of pellets. She could smell it, a faint, foul under-odour. The house had never been untidier than it was right now. Josie didn’t like it.

Then she spotted Dad’s jacket, hanging on its peg by the back door, dripping. His bike helmet was dumped on the hall stand, right where Josie’s mother had always asked him not to leave it. Rainwater had run down the visor, was probably staining the wood underneath. By the back door – her father’s biker boots, caked in fresh mud, brown stuff splattered over the floor tiles. The boots should have been upside down on their pegs in the porch outside, where the mud wouldn’t get tracked into the house.

It was beginning to feel like Mummy had never existed at all.

‘Daddy?’

The knife ceased chopping and slicing once again. Josie’s father sighed and set the utensil to one side while he registered the request, flexing his knife hand, working the kinks out. Freshly cubed meat lay in a large mound on the chopping board before him.

His hands, Josie saw, were wet and red, almost all the way up to the wrists.

‘Josie,’ he said, eventually. Irritation carried his voice above the concerto. ‘I have to make these pies. It’s the Devil’s March tomorrow, and I promised three of them. And now your mother isn’t here to do it . . .’

He used the poppy tea towel to wipe his fingers clean. Different shades of red bled together on the fabric.

Josie frowned. The towel was Mummy’s favourite.

That was one step too far.

‘Mummy says you should wash your hands with soap before wiping them on the towels,’ Josie blurted, her mother’s exact tone and intonation still strong in memory.

Then, because her father didn’t like talking about Mummy very much, she plugged her thumb into her mouth.

She started counting to ten again, feeling panicked.

On the count of five, another sheet of lightning flared, followed by a gigantic clap of thunder that rattled the windows and set a dog barking somewhere down the lane. Max stirred, stretched one leg out straight as a rod in front of him, let it fold lazily and fell back asleep.

Josie cringed, waiting for her father’s response.

Another ant scuttled out from beneath the fridge.

Josie’s father smiled, a wistful gleam in his eye that could have been a tear, but that was unlikely. Daddy didn’t cry – at least, Josie had never seen him cry. Maybe he did it in private, in his shed.

Or maybe he just didn’t get as sad about things as she did.

The music shifted to something slower, more mournful, as if reading Josie’s mind. An adagio, her father had tried to tell her, multiple times. He didn’t like those movements as much. Too soppy, he said. Too sentimental.

Dad crumpled the tea towel and threw it at the laundry pile festering on the floor near the washing machine. Max the cat looked up in surprise, sniffed the towel, closed his eyes in disdain.

‘Mummy won’t mind,’ he told Josie, gently. ‘She’s dead, remember?’

Two more ants scrambled across the kitchen tiles, then three. Then four, five. A column formed. It moved quickly, climbing the cabinets, headed for the countertop where the meat sat, ready to be made into festival pies.

Her dad did not seem to notice.

Josie sucked her thumb harder, hurt by his words. She did remember that her mother was dead. Of course she did. Sometimes she forgot, but usually only right after she’d woken up from a sleep, and only for a short while.

Sadness flooded in, heightened by the music. There had been a funeral. All the grown-ups had been crying. Josie’s father had given a speech, his voice cracked and funny. There had been flowers and cards and, strangely, a cake, like they were having a birthday party, only everyone wept openly at this party and there were no candles – at least on the cake – and no games, no pass-the-parcel, no musical statues. Everyone had been dressed in black and grey. Relatives she had never met had pinched her cheek and patted her hair, eyes bright from crying. Josie had not liked being touched by any of them.

She missed being touched by her mother.

Josie’s lip wobbled. Suddenly her face was hot and wet.

Six more ants joined the column.

Her father sighed, again.

‘Come on now,’ he said, finally crossing the kitchen and scooping Josie up with his meaty hands. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. None of that.’

Josie tensed, hoping the leftover red on her father’s hands and arms wouldn’t stain her pyjamas. Then, as the sadness jabbed at her heart, she wrapped her legs around his waist, taking some reluctant comfort from his familiar bulk. He smelled like no one else she knew: a combination of wood shavings, motorbike oil, raw meat, smoke. Sweat, too, a sour tang that made Josie wrinkle her nose.

He carried her out of the kitchen, towards the staircase.

‘You have to be braver than this,’ he muttered, as she sniffled into his neck, exhausted. ‘You have to be strong, we both do. No choice. Can’t cry forever.’

Josie wasn’t so sure. She sometimes felt like there was an endless supply of tears in her body, but she let her father carry her away, back up to bed. Tonight, he was Good Daddy, and she would have to make the most of that. Josie never knew when Bad Dad, or Sad Dad, was going to take over, so she exploited the moment, snuffling and snuggling into him as he hit the stairs.

‘Can I have some milk?’

Her mother used to make her warm milk before bedtime. Her dad only made it when Josie asked, and sometimes not even then. Not my forte, he said, meaning domestic things, chores, anything to do with cleaning or tidying. Pies were different, pies were for the festival. Pastry and chopped onions and diced meat.

Warm milk was another thing altogether.

He made the milk differently to Josie’s mother, burning it in the pan, sometimes, she thought, on purpose, then adding honey, he said, to sweeten it, to correct the mistake.

‘Daddy? Milk?’

‘Will you leave me alone if I do?’

Josie nodded. She didn’t mind the burned taste, or the skin of milk that always grew on the top of the mug as it cooled. She just liked that her dad made it every now and then. It made her feel special, like she mattered more than his grief, and she always slept after, soundly, waking groggy and gritty-eyed the following morning.

‘Fine. Story first, then milk.’

Satisfied, Josie cast one last look into the kitchen over Dad’s shoulder before they ascended. Another sheet of lightning flared outside. Thunder boomed. The red beef sat lurid under the strong counter bulbs.

A large line of black dots now traipsed across the wooden countertop, coalescing into a dark, crawling mesh as the insects swarmed over the meat. From the way they moved, they resembled a strange, living sort of net, a net that moved with purpose, the individual strands tightening over the cubed beef with perfect intention, lifting and turning it, like a baker turning dough.

Josie wriggled against her dad as her skin started to feel itchy.

She hoped none of the ants ended up in the finished pies.

Seeing them made something in the back of Josie’s mind itch, too. Some memory of crawling things and bugs and meat and the colour red, or maybe all those things together, but then Josie was beyond sight of the kitchen, up the stairs, being carried towards her bedroom. There her dad would tell her a story while the rain splattered hard against the windows. There she would drink sweet burned milk and fall asleep, and get one more night, one more bad dream, away from the day her mother died.

2005

Josie could smell woodsmoke. Rich and appealing, the smell of safety in the winter, of comfort, of warm foods and warm toes after a cold, dreary walk. In the cottage, when her mother had been alive, the fire had always been lit on returning from any winter rambles she and her mum took together. Wet socks would get hung in front of the fire to dry out. Josie would watch them steam while her mother made hot chocolate in the immaculately tidy kitchen, adding cinnamon and nutmeg and marshmallows. The fire was rarely lit these days. Josie’s father said they couldn’t afford the logs, even though that was his trade, his currency. He had enough chunks of oak and pine and beech in his shed to light a thousand fires, but that would be burning money, he always said. Only a fool would burn their livelihood like that.

The smell tickling Josie’s nostrils now came from a thin column of white smoke that rose above the trees just beyond the path she trod. She walked cautiously towards it, reluctant to turn back, hoping she wouldn’t be spotted through the trees in her school uniform, pushing her bike.

The path wound around the edges of Darkhill Ironworks, a collection of nineteenth-century stone and brick structures deep in the forest where men used to experiment with metals, with the making of steel and alloy. Josie knew this because her mother had told her all about it, on one of their many excursions together. Not that you could tell from what remained of the ironworks. Right now, pushing two wheels along the narrow, bumpy path, Josie saw a stepped rise, covered in blackberry bushes, honeysuckle and masses of ivy, through which an old, tumble-down wall would occasionally be glimpsed. Rubble, ruin. Nothing more exciting than that. Not a place where men played with the elements.

Her mother had brought Josie here several times when she was very small, and tried to teach her about the terraced structures, the secret experiments carried out behind the walls, in the bowels of the forest, while the Industrial Revolution raced along elsewhere, changing the course of history, of nature, and of the people caught between the two.

Tungsten steel, her mother had said, as if that should have meant something to her, but Josie had been more enchanted by how the green had grown back over the ruined ironworks.

It looks like a castle, Mummy! Her mother, unimpressed with her contribution, had merely snorted in response.

Do you think fairies live here?

The expression had softened.

Yes, darling, came the reply. I rather think they do.

Not long after, Josie’s mother stopped bringing her. She’d been too sick to take Josie anywhere. Her eyes sank into her face, her soft, pink cheeks hollowed out and turned white. She vomited repeatedly. The local doctor, when he was finally called, was baffled. He talked of blood tests and scans, but nothing ever came of it. No cancer, no medical reason for the decline.

Josie loved her mother but had found the smell of sickness difficult to be around. The illness was confusing to a child who didn’t understand how it could change a person so completely in such a short space of time.

And then, one day, her mum was gone entirely. No lingering presence in the bedroom. No smell, no vomit sounds, no groans of pain or people coming in and speaking in hushed voices. There was a complete lack of anything associated with Josie’s mother.

She still found that absence difficult to cope with. It was like leaving a conversation partway through, expecting to return to it, pick up right where she’d left off, only to find she couldn’t – unless it was in her own imagination, and that was too painful.

Still, coming to these places made her feel closer to her mother, somehow.

The ruins were even more crowded by foliage now, overgrown despite a valiant attempt to mow the grass along the pathway, to erect fences to keep the trees and bracken back. The forest was not interested in staying away; it wanted to reclaim land lost to it hundreds of years before. Saplings sprouted all over the site, much to Josie’s joy; red cedars, oak, plums, willows, even a rare redwood. Black beetles crawled across the path in their dozens before her, too many to completely avoid. The slow ones popped beneath her bike tyres, a noise both satisfying and mildly disgusting.

Sound carried in this strange little pocket of the forest, echoes of Josie’s own footsteps, birds singing a morning song, high up in the branches of the trees, the rattle of dying leaves falling. It was winter, the early days of it. Soon the Devil’s March would wind its way across the land, off to the Devil’s Pulpit.

But first, Josie had feathers to collect. The woods next to the ironworks were famous for woodpeckers and Josie wanted to replenish several balding patches on her mask before the next procession.

And, she wanted to spend some time alone. Not alone like she was in her classroom, alienated from her classmates by grief. Not alone as she so often was in the cottage, listening to the ticking walls and creaky pipes.

Alone in the forest, with trees, with birds.

Josie was disgruntled to find that someone else apparently had the same idea.

She kept pushing towards the narrow plume of smoke, feeling nervous. She should be at school. Her dad would be furious if he found she’d taken her bike and bunked off to collect feathers and leaves.

But what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, she reasoned.

Unless she was seen.

Besides, what did her dad do all day? He never told her. She knew it involved tools and making furniture out of wood or fixing things that were broken, but she didn’t see how that could occupy as many hours in a week as it did. When he wasn’t at the pub, her dad was always off on his motorbike on some job or other, and yet the money wasn’t coming in. Not enough, at any rate, to match the amount of labour he professed to.

This mattered to Josie. It mattered because her father kept badgering her to get a paper round, to bring in some small sums of cash, to ‘pay her way’, as he put it, which hardly seemed a fair thing to ask when he was not upholding his end of the deal.

It also mattered because Josie was painfully aware that she only had one parent now, and she wanted that to actually mean something. Loneliness was not a new state of being, for she’d never found it easy to socialise with other kids even before her mother’s death, but it was worse now than it had ever been. Before, her mother had plugged the gaps in Josie’s solitude, overcompensating for her father’s aloofness and lack of interest in his child.

Now Mum was gone, her father’s discomfort in parenting meant he was finding excuses to be absent for even longer periods of time. He would slam the front door behind him at the crack of dawn, leaving Josie to get herself ready for school, make her own breakfast, walk herself across Ellwood, and he would return just in time for her to fix dinner, which was always something basic, like a ready meal, or baked beans on toast, or an omelette, which Josie would eat by herself while her father took his elsewhere, pottering around in his shed in the cottage garden, before heading out to the pub. Sometimes he didn’t come home until after last orders; other nights, he’d be back by nine, red-faced, eyes unfocused, and then he would collapse on the couch and open a can of beer, having loaded a concerto on the kitchen CD player first.

At first, being avoided by her own father made Josie sad and confused. After a few years, sadness turned to anger and defiance. She didn’t think it was right for a dad to be gone as much as he was.

So Josie bunked off school, feeling too miserable, too aggravated to go in. The pain of rejection sat like a ball of biting, scratching things in her chest. She missed her mother, the other kids in her class were mean to her, and she had little to no interest in learning French or maths or English or anything much at all, not when the sky was so blue, when the leaves burned so bright against it.

Not when her mask needed attention.

That morning, Dad had set off on foot instead of taking his motorbike, which was not like him. Curious, Josie followed him at a distance, pushing her bike through the shadowed parts of the road so the neon colours wouldn’t catch his attention. She’d stalked him along the main street, off down Fern Road to Old Jacob’s house, past the dilapidated Range Rover with its two flat tyres, moss-covered windscreen and mildewed seats.

She watched her dad duck around the giant willow tree in front of Old Jacob’s house and knock on the front door. After a moment, the old man opened it. Tense words were exchanged. Both men looked angry, gesticulating, but whatever the argument was about carried on behind closed doors as Jacob disappeared into the gloom of his house and Josie’s father followed.

Perhaps her dad was there to fix something for the old man, Josie thought. The house looked like it needed a whole lot of fixing.

It didn’t matter. She took the opportunity to scoot past the house as quickly as possible on her bike, into the woods beyond Old Jacob’s driveway, along a left-hand path that skirted past Smith’s Hill, across Marsh Lane, where cars always drove too fast, and back into the woods until they opened out around Darkhill. Around the edge of the ironworks, and then off to the right, into a dense rise of oak and beech trees, some of which had hung on to their leaves but were preparing to drop them.

Josie had never come this far on her own. The nerves started to die down. In their place, she felt the exhilaration of freedom.

She found a tree to rest her bike against, the smell of smoke stronger, but not close enough to be threatening. If someone had made a campfire, it was none of her business, she tol. . .