Temple Fall

by R.L. Boyle

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Ghost; General Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

A macabre and chilling supernatural gothic horror about a group of teenagers cursed to die on their 18th birthday from the Stoker Award shortlisted author of The Book of the Baku. Perfect for fans of Clay McLeod Chapman, The September House by Carissa Orlando and The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.

Flynn and her friends plan to spend the night in Temple Fall, a mysterious house up on the moors with a strange history, but their planned night of drinking and teenage debauchery twists into a surreal nightmare. Suddenly forced into strange choices and places, the tight-knit group starts to fall apart. And then Jackson falls to his death.

In the days that come after, Flynn finds herself trapped, as if she never left the house. Consumed by the lost secrets of her family past, and haunted by the spectre of a Victorian woman, she finds herself losing time and seeing things that aren’t there. 

Reeling from the tragedy, Flynn must rebuild her group of friends, and bring them all together to grieve – and try to survive – on their own. Because while they escaped Temple Fall, the house didn’t let them go…

Release date: February 17, 2026

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

PROLOGUE

Keep moving! Don’t look back! These words keep time with Flynn’s frantic heartbeat, singing a jagged song in her blood. Sweat glues her top to her back as she runs down the hallway, one hand clamped around Chloe’s, the other clutching the back of Tyrus’s T-shirt. Keeping close to Mei and Jonesy a step ahead, terrified if she falls behind they will abandon her to this insane house.

She has to get out. Out of this nightmare. Candles whicker against the walls, making the shadows twitch. Gaps in the floor-boards reveal shadowy rooms below, chunks of fallen plaster expose the roof space above.

Half-blind in the darkness, Flynn bites back a scream. Every step sends pain through the soles of her feet and prints carmine kisses on the bare floorboards. She feels as though the house is savouring the taste of every bloody footstep.

The staircase creaks and groans as they hurtle down it. The wood is rotten, balusters missing from the sides. One of the steps has snapped in half, toothpick splinters jutting out, ready to turn a misstep into a fall. She sees dried bloodstains on the dust-coated floorboards, and realises in horror the blood is probably hers – that she climbed these stairs earlier, oblivious to the cuts opening in the soles of her feet, blind to the danger.

At the bottom of the stairs, they stagger down another hallway, move through decaying rooms that blaze with candles, sobbing, reaching for each other, until finally, they are back in the lobby.

Flynn’s thoughts tilt at the sight of the paintings on the walls. The surfaces of the canvases are lifting, the colour flaking away so that the images that had repulsed her when they entered the house are now impossible to make out. The wine-red carpet is worn to the weave and ruined by black mould. The ceiling has buckled from the weight of the chandelier.

They pelt towards the door.

Mei twists the key in the lock, pulls it open.

Sunlight spills into the lobby.

Shock drops Flynn to her knees.

The heavens should be a churning vault of darkness, storm-tossed and thunderous, but the sun rides the hyaline sky of a renaissance painting, and the wind Flynn had heard battering the house has dropped to a soft breeze. The gravel driveway is dry, not so much as a single puddle on the porch decking. The only indication that a storm has passed are the fire-blackened trunks of the lightning-scarred trees.

Flynn gazes over the moors. The blaze of purple heather has gone, and in its place are fields of bare peat the colour of stewed tea, and the trees, which had been thick with foliage when they arrived, are now barren. Nude branches claw towards the quiet blue sky, like the outstretched arms of a dark coven.

It is as though, in the few hours they spent inside Temple Fall, time has slipped, the days and months skidding on greased wheels without taking them with it.

Slowly, Flynn turns to the house.

The desiccated walls of Temple Fall crumble beneath wreaths of moss and vines. The roof has caved in and fallen shingles lie in

shattered pieces on the brittle, yellow grass. Rot has eaten away at the wooden decking. There are holes in the stone mullions. All the windows are boarded up, including the one that Jackson fell through. A sign, toppled into the bushes, almost illegible behind a scramble of weeds and thorny bracken: Caution, Unsafe Building, Keep Out! Only the cast-iron knocker on the door, that serpentine ouroboros, looks untouched by the passage of time.

But Flynn is not looking at the house.

She stares at the spot on the porch where Jackson fell.

Ripped police tape is tethered to the railing. It flutters in the breeze, like the dead skin of a snake.

And Jackson’s body has gone. 

 

NOW

Sat in the back of the minivan, Flynn watches the scenery blur past. The grey of the motorway blends almost seamlessly with the grey of the sky, but the gloomy colours do little to dampen her mood. She is with her best friends, on her way to celebrate her boyfriend Jackson’s eighteenth birthday, and while the idea of camping outside a crumbling old mansion doesn’t exactly fill her with excitement, she can’t think of anywhere else she would rather be.

Chloe managed to persuade her older brother, Andy, to drop them off, though he is clearly far from happy to be taxiing his sister and her mates halfway across Yorkshire. His eyes, framed in the rear-view mirror, are set in a scowl, and he and Chloe, who is riding shotgun, have been sniping at each other since they set off.

Flynn leans into Jackson, breathes the faint gasoline tang of his dark room, the peppery smell of his aftershave. On his lap, he holds the vintage Kodak Brownie that she gifted him for his birthday. She’d bid for it on eBay, despite the fact she thought it looked like an overpriced, archaic piece of kit. But then she isn’t the shutterbug that Jackson is, and the instant he had unwrapped it, his beaming face had assured her she’d made the right call.

On the other side of Jackson, Mei nods her head to the music playing through the van. In the middle seats, Jonesy and Tyrus debate which superheroes they would shag, marry or kill.

‘Shag Wonder Woman,’ Jonesy says, placing the crutch in his joint, and scattering cannabis along the paper.

Mei snorts. ‘Wonder Woman? You really want that kind of pressure when you lose your virginity?’

‘Who you calling a virgin?’ Jonesy quips.

Mei smirks, cracks her gum.

‘Where was I? Yeah, so I’d shag Wonder Woman, marry Big Barda and kill—’

‘Big who?’ Flynn says.

Jackson leans closer to Flynn, says, ‘Big Barda’s the daughter of Big Breeda. Groomed by Granny Goodness to lead the Female Fury Battalion. Functionally mortal, physically more powerful than her husband, master of hand-to-hand combat.’

Flynn cuts Jackson a wry look. ‘Sounds like you want to marry Big Barda.’

‘No way.’ Jackson’s smile curls, irresistible. ‘There’s only one woman for me!’

‘Didn’t Big Barda make a sex tape with Superman?’ Tyrus asks.

‘I’ll have you know they’d both been mentally manipulated by Sleez,’ Jonesy says, leaping to the defence of his imaginary bride. ‘Big Barda would never have cheated on Mister Miracle.’

‘Mister Miracle.’ Flynn frowns. ‘So… that’d be you?’

‘No, that’s her real husband.’ Jonesy shakes his blonde mop of curls, exasperated. ‘Haven’t you guys read the Female Furies?’

‘No,’ Mei and Flynn respond together, then share an amused glance.

‘And I’d kill… I’d kill either Reed Richards or Batman.’

‘Then you’ll have to kill Reed Richards,’ Flynn says. She has no idea who Reed Richards is, but thanks to her little sister she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bruce Wayne. ‘If you touched a single hair on Batman’s head, Riley would end you. You know how obsessed she is.’

‘Good point, I wouldn’t want to piss off your little sister, she’s fucking terrifying.’ Jonesy lifts the joint to lick and seal it just as Andy’s eyes snap to the rear-view mirror.

‘You’re not smoking that shit in my van.’

Chastened, Jonesy lowers the joint. ‘Course

 not, man.’

‘Jesus, would you lighten up?’ Chloe mutters to her brother. ‘Honestly, you’re worse than Dad.’

They resume their squabbling, but Flynn tunes them out and stares out of the window.

Even though she has been curious about her biological family for as long as she can remember, it is only in recent months that she finally committed to researching her past. Her reluctance to explore her ancestry sprang partially from fear: her birth mother suffered from severe psychosis, a condition which blighted Flynn’s childhood and left her stricken with a dread of inheriting the illness. Conscious that her family history could play a large part in the likelihood of this happening, for years she had worried about discovering a long line of mentally ill relatives in her past. Finally, she had persuaded herself that it was possible her mother was the anomaly in her family tree, and the chances of Flynn inheriting her illness were far more remote than she expected. By delving into her past, she might be able to eradicate this long-held fear.

But alongside this pragmatic motivation, there resided another: Flynn had longed to discover someone remarkable, a connection perhaps to a celebrated war hero, a royal descendant, or some pioneer who had revolutionised modern science. The form or nature of their merit mattered little to Flynn, only that it did exist, for such a discovery would surely play a part in erasing the shame of her childhood.

And so, when she should have been studying for her A Levels, instead she carefully worked through her family tree, tracing her lineage back generation by generation; when she should have been sleeping she stayed up late, mining the internet for birth records; when she was looking after her little sister, Riley, she watched ancestry programmes in which celebrities discovered the admirable deeds of their ancestors, and imagined how she would feel when she made her own discovery.

Without any information about her biological father, she’d only had her mother’s family line to work with, but she had managed to trace her ancestors as far back as her great-great-great-grandfather, Budd Young, who was adopted as a baby in 1884. His mother was a woman called Lyda Gray, but aside from her name, there was little else Flynn could uncover about her. With the trail

cold, she had contacted a genealogist for help, but even he had struggled to find out anything, aside from the fact she had lived for a spell in a house called Temple Fall.

Flynn had searched the internet for information on the house but hadn’t found anything. It was Jackson who had suggested she check out the ‘historical imagery’ feature on Google Earth. Only then had an image of the house filled the screen: a black and white taken some time in the 1930s.

The aerial shot didn’t reveal much, other than it was a sprawling mansion deep in the moors. But its mysterious aura and isolated location were enough to capture Jackson’s imagination. His passion for photography peaked when the subject matter was old houses, or as he called it, ‘decay photography’. He suggested it would be the perfect place to spend the night of his eighteenth birthday, a creepy camping trip outside Flynn’s ancestral home.

‘What the fuck, Clo!’ Andy yells, his voice jolting Flynn from her thoughts. ‘We’re on the fucking motorway!’

Ignoring him, Chloe crawls over the passenger

seat, a bottle of prosecco wedged under one arm, a tower of paper cups in her hand. She perches on Jonesy’s lap and passes the cups round. Despite the fact they are spending the night camping in a muddy field, she is wearing a skimpy vest, wet-look leggings and a cable-knit cardigan. Her stiletto nails are painted the colour of tin foil and her cornsilk hair falls down her back in waves.

‘I can’t believe you talked us into this, Jax,’ she grumbles. ‘We could have done just about anything for your eighteenth, but you want to camp in a muddy field outside a derelict old house in the arse-crack of nowhere.’

‘Yeah, bro,’ Jonesy says. ‘It’s not too late to bang a U-ey. My mum’s away with work, we could all stay at mine, order Taco Bell, smoke a Fat One.’

‘That’s just a regular night with you,’ Jackson says. ‘And when it’s your eighteenth, if that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do. But this is my birthday, so suck it up.’

‘When did you turn into such a diva, bro?’ Jonesy grumbles.

‘It’s gonna be great, trust me.’

‘I hate camping,’ Chloe says, sulky.

‘Really?’ Jackson mutters. ‘You haven’t said.’

‘Yeah, really. I’d sooner spend the night at The Pitfalls, and that’s saying something. Actually, I think I’ve still got a bottle of vodka stashed there somewhere…’

‘God, I can’t remember the last time we spent the night there,’ Mei says. ‘I wonder whether it’s even still standing.’

The Pitfalls, a derelict four-storey building that used to function as a university hall of residence until subsidence forced its closure. Reparation work was abandoned years ago, and these days the structure looks as though it is held together by the scaffolding and walkways pinned to its walls.

Almost nine years have passed since Flynn and her friends turned a room on the second floor of the collapsing building into their secret bolthole. Undeterred by its dubious condition, with rugs, blankets and throws, they had transformed the space into a cosy nook. Mei smuggled a gas heater from her dad’s garage to warm the space, Chloe draped fairy lights over the bare brick walls and brought beanbags from her bedroom, while Jonesy contributed a giant wicker basket, which they all kept supplied with crisps and snacks. Flynn filched a deckchair from her foster family’s garage, Jackson knocked together a bookshelf to which they had all contributed a stash of books. Tyrus added a stack of comics he had finagled from his big brother’s bedroom, along with a collection of board games that grew as they each added to it, until they covered the entire back wall of the room.

After numerous trips to the local skip, Jonesy had found a ratty old sofa that he claimed was perfect for the space, and Andy – only seventeen years old back then, fresh from passing his driving test and more amenable to his cute little sister – had agreed to help when Chloe asked him to use his minivan to transport it to their den.

The electrics had been cut off when the building was vacated, but it remained plumbed to the water supply, and flushable toilets and running taps meant Flynn and the others could spend hours there without having to go home.

After a heated debate about what to name their den, Tyrus had suggested ‘Nostromo’, taking inspiration from his favourite film, Alien. They toasted the name by sipping whisky Jonesy had swiped from his dad’s

drinks cabinet, even though they all agreed it tasted worse than hot sick. Tyrus was the only one who abstained, announcing there and then that he would never touch a drop of booze.

It was an impassioned vow, and with her mouth and throat on fire, Flynn had not called it into question. Besides, even then, they all knew the reason Tyrus had sworn off booze was because of his dad.

Tyrus never spoke about his dad’s drinking, but it was hardly a secret on their estate. Flynn and the others regularly spent their evenings in the games room of The Dive while their parents drank themselves stupid in the bar, so they knew Elijah Adebeyo was a mean drunk. He was regularly barred from the local pubs for fighting, and Flynn had lost count of the times Tyrus had come to school sporting a black eye or a busted lip.

In all the years that have passed since then, whenever his friends were splitting a six pack in Nostromo, or smuggling drinks from The Dive, Tyrus stayed true to his word and never touched a drop.

‘Hey, Flynn,’ Tyrus says, popping the tab on a Coke and twisting in his seat to look at her. ‘What did Mr C want you for today?’

Flynn shrugs, watching Chloe work the foil from the top of the prosecco bottle. ‘He just gave me a lecture, said I should know by now what courses and unis I want to apply for.’

‘Ah, don’t worry about that,’ Chloe says, easing her thumb beneath the cork and pointing it towards Andy. ‘You’ve got ages to decide.’

‘I’m sorry, Flynn, but he’s got a point,’ Mei says. ‘You’ve gotta start narrowing down your options otherwise you won’t have anything at all lined up. You don’t want to be stuck working in The Dive for another year, do you?’

The cork shoots from Chloe’s prosecco bottle with a jocular pop, smacking Andy in the back of the head.

He jerks round and the van swerves. ‘Do you want to fucking walk?’ he yells.

Chloe sniggers, pours fizz into the paper cups.

‘Have you even looked through those prospectuses I sent you?’ Mei presses.

Flynn groans, shakes her empty cup at Chloe.

‘I just think you should—’

supposed to be a birthday party, not a fucking careers advice meeting.’

The words come out harsher than Flynn had intended, but Mei just holds up her hands and sinks back into her seat. Flynn feels bad for snapping, especially when she knows Mei is only looking out for her, but she doesn’t want to think about university.

In less than nine months, she will finish college, and while she still has no idea what she wants to do with her life, her best friends have already filled in their university applications. Jonesy plans to do a gaming degree in Cornwall or Bolton; Tyrus is hoping to study Film and TV Production in Cardiff; Mei wants to study Sports Science and is hoping to get into either Manchester or Glasgow; Jackson wants to land a place at Edinburgh Napier University to study photography; while Chloe has her sights set on London, where she plans on studying Events Management.

Flynn envies her friends their motivation and purpose. Without their sense of direction, university feels like a waste of time, money and energy. While they excitedly talk about the future, Flynn shies from it and secretly longs for everything to stay the same. She can’t help but feel as though they are somehow leaving her behind, relegating her to the past in their eagerness to move forwards. She dreads their departure, especially Jackson’s. They have been dating for less than a year, but in that time, she has fallen for him, hard. She would never admit to it, but the idea of him leaving, meeting other girls, living with them, stirs in her a thick, dark resentment.

To hide her insecurity, Flynn feigns a nonchalance about university, dismissing their concern and ignoring their offers of help. Pretending that it doesn’t matter to her, that she doesn’t care.

‘Hey, is that the place?’ Andy points at something in the distance.

Flynn follows his gaze across the mist-shrouded moors. At first, she doesn’t see anything, but then the fog slides apart, revealing the solitary spectre of Temple Fall.

*   *   *

Flynn climbs out of the minivan and stares up at the house as her friends drag their bags and the camping gear from the back.

Behind skeins of mist, Temple Fall is grim and grey and somehow miserly. Walls of age-blackened stone dressed in threadbare ivy climb towards the lowering sky, worn steps lead up to a wrap-around porch with a sloped roof braced by stone columns. A turret, crowned by a cupola, projects from the left side of the house. Countless tall, narrow windows stud the walls, like hard black eyes fixed upon the landscape.

As she stares at the house, Flynn is gripped by the sudden conviction she has been here before. She tries to shake it off, to dismiss the eerie familiarity as a result of her preoccupation with the house over the past few weeks. But that doesn’t quite account for the way the small hairs at the nape of her neck stir, or the tension that tightens the base of her spine.

It’s just a house, Flynn tells herself.

Mei drops her bags beside Flynn, flings an arm over her shoulder as they both consider the house. Her wrist is bandaged from a recent parkour sprain and the familiar menthol scent of joint spray lifts from her skin. Her sleek black hair is fastened into a topknot, exposing her shaved back and sides, the assortment of piercings in her ears.

‘Didn’t you say the place was unoccupied?’

‘It’s definitely empty,’ Flynn says. After discovering the location of the house, she had searched the Land Registry to see who owns the property now. A man called Mitchell Lister was the listed deeds holder, but according to the records, his current address is a care home in Leeds.

Mei snaps her gum behind her teeth. ‘I mean, it doesn’t look like no one’s lived here for over a hundred years.’

‘All I can tell you is the guy who owns it doesn’t live here,’ Flynn says. ‘And it doesn’t really look like the kind of place he’d rent out.’

And yet, a hint of uncertainty has edged into Flynn’s voice. Because Mei is right. Despite its years of inoccupancy, the house doesn’t look abandoned. The walls are weather-worn but not crumbling, the windows are

intact, the paintwork in good condition. A few of the slate roof tiles have slipped but are otherwise undamaged, and while the lawn is overgrown, the steps that lead up to the porch are clear of debris.

‘Does it matter?’ Jonesy says, lighting the joint Andy refused to let him smoke in the van. ‘It’s not like we’re spending the night in there.’

‘I just want to be sure we’re not camping in someone’s garden,’ Mei says.

Jonesy shrugs, eyes slitted as he drags on the joint. ‘Maybe the National Trust bought it and renovated it.’

Tyrus moves up beside them. ‘The National Trust only buys places of national heritage, doesn’t it?’

Andy leans out of the van window, peers at the sky. ‘You better pitch your tent. Looks like it’s about to chuck it down.’

Flynn follows his gaze to the thick bars of rain-dark clouds overhead. The forecast had been cool but dry, and so the clotted, grey skies are an unwelcome surprise. She turns to the mist-clogged foothills, her imagination conjuring an image of a figure materialising from the smoky haze, ghosting towards them.

‘Hey, dickhead, have you got your insulin?’ Andy says, looking at his sister who is crouched on the grass rifling through her rucksack. ‘Coz I’m not driving back here if you’ve left it in the van.’

Chloe flips him the bird without looking up.

‘You’re a real lady, you know that?’ Andy casts a final glance towards the house, a dubious expression on his face. He shrugs, starts the engine. ‘It’s your funeral.’ He winds up his window and steps on the gas, honks his horn twice as his minivan hits the rutted track. Flynn watches his tail-lights disappear into the murky fog, fighting the sudden inexplicable urge to shout him back. 

 

2014

Flynn studies the letters on her rack as she waits for Heather to take her turn. Sand slips through the egg timer. Static plays quietly on the radio, a curtain of rain that falls day and night inside the house. Heather insists it protects them, helps conceal them from Outsiders. Flynn has grown so used to the sound, she barely notices it anymore.

She picks up the black biro on the table, mindlessly colours in the white letter ‘A’ of the word SCRABBLE on the front of the tile bag.

Heather sets her tiles on the board.

She writes her score down. 34 points. ‘Your turn,’ she says, and flips the sand timer.

Flynn leans over her tiles, as though a closer proximity might make a word materialise. ...