The Counting Game

by Sinéad Nolan

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Into the woods.
Count to ten.
Only one of us comes home again.

An atmospheric suspense set in 1995 rural Ireland in which the disappearance of a teenage girl and the silence of her younger brother unravels a community’s dark past—perfect for fans of Tana French and Liz Nugent.

Two children go into the forest. Only one comes out.

When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear into the woods, and the only witness to the crime—her troubled younger brother Jack—refuses to speak. Saoirse went missing when they were playing The Counting Game, a ritual believed to ward off evil, and Jack has sworn to protect the forest’s secrets.

Freya, a psychotherapist with secrets of her own, is brought in to help investigators break his silence. As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, the search unearths hidden truths and memories long buried. Everyone is a suspect, and the closer Freya gets to uncovering what happened, the more danger she finds herself in.

A haunting and emotional mystery, The Counting Game is a suspenseful debut from an unmissable new voice in crime fiction.

Release date: April 7, 2026

Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press

Print pages: 416

Sample

DRUMSUIN, IRELAND

COUNTY KERRY1995

 

THE RULES

1. Count slowly to ten with your eyes closed. One player hides.
2. The seeker or seekers call out: “Creature of the forest, will you play the Counting Game?”
3. Try to find the hidden player while seeker(s) counts out loud. Walking only. No running. Keep counting until you find the hider.
4. Once you find the hider, they must tell a scary story about what the Creature was going to do before they were found (e.g., steal their voice box, bury them alive).
5. The game is a test. To figure out if the players have been good to the forest. If they haven’t, the hidden player won’t be found.

PROLOGUE

BRANCHES RUSTLE IN the wind. They speak to Jack. They say something, but he cannot understand what. At times, he does not understand the forest; other days he understands it perfectly, like when it sends him messages about himself, telling him he has been wrong or bad.

Jack’s fingers cover his eyes. It is dark underneath. Muggy breath fills the cavern of his palms. The seconds pass as he counts. One potato, two potato, three potato, four.

The blanched October light streams through a gap in the trees and when he opens his eyelids from behind his hands, he can see the flesh of his fingers lighting up. In the afternoon air, he can taste the pine musk on the tip of his tongue. Drizzle floats through the forest and finds its way to the back of his neck, where he feels it crawl. A trail of ants on his spine, goose bumps on his arms. He hears a screech close by and he starts—drops his hands on nine-almost-ten. He opens both his eyes fully and looks up. It is an owl or a mourning dove. He calls out into the cold, still air. His voice shakes.

“Creature of the forest, will you play the Counting Game?”

Jack turns and looks around at the landscape. Then he bends and picks up his stuffed toy, Wilberry, from the cold ground.

“One!” he calls out as he begins to walk up the mountain. “Two!” he shouts, even louder. Birds flap away, startled. “Three!” He scrambles uphill, breathless. He is near the tractor now, far from the tree house. “Four!”

He can hear the sound of the river from here. The wind howls and booms like smoke up a chimney. He stops, turns around, and looks down the hill through myriad trunks.

Jack lowers his voice. “Five…”

He can see a shadow to his right, hiding behind branches. He can hear voices now. Then, as suddenly as they had started, the voices stop.

“Six,” he whispers.

Jack is dizzy. He is now looking down on himself from above. A little boy, all alone and lost among hundreds of pines. Then his stomach drops. In the distance, there is another scream—this one is prolonged and howling. Livid as the goat Jack had seen dragged into Fergal Duffy Jr.’s barn for slaughter, on a day when he was not meant to be watching. The kind of scream his mother would have said had a weight to it, a cry made from fear and agony. This scream sounds like it belongs to a person.

Perhaps Saoirse heard it too. They’ll stop the game and together they’ll find the scream. After all, it was too far off to be Saoirse—a field’s length away, or more. She can’t have got that far in so short a time. But Jack knows that scarlet scream, between the waves of sound, the tidal, earthly graveness of it—he knows in his bones that it is Saoirse.

Jack feels a hollowness inside himself. She isn’t nearby anymore—he can feel it. They are always connected, like people talking on the phone. Now it’s like she has put down the receiver. Disappeared. The very same way he felt when his mother died. Jack needs to search now, but the trees feel closer, more crowded than before.

Thunder rumbles. Left and right there are only the brown bark teeth of giant monsters, the dark gaps between them full of eyes. The Creature is watching him. Jack can feel it. What comes next is a far worse feeling. Like he is under threat. Like whatever had caught his sister is about to catch him too. He turns and looks up. There it is, all at once. The shrouded figure. It hovers above. Black,

human-shaped, but much larger than anything human. Terrifying.

He can feel warm liquid trickle down his inside leg. So scared, he has wet himself. He pinches his own hand to check if he’s having a nightmare, but it stings. He is not asleep and he cannot stay here, he must run away—but where to? As he sprints downhill, he gasps for air. He is surrounded by firs now. The air is hazy, and filled with a ghostly hunger. Samhain. One week now until the souls will return to roam the Earth.

Jack races through the forest away from the Creature, trying to find Saoirse. He runs for what feels like hours. He stops from time to time, hunting for signs of her in the gloom. His back is sticky with sweat. He calls her again and again. Big sister Saoirse. Serrrr-shaaa. Roaring and desperate, then fitful and quiet. Whispering, shouting, howling, sobbing. Yelling her name. She can’t be gone; he won’t believe it.

Jack finally reaches a gap in the trees and stumbles out onto the winding country lane. He waits there until nightfall and listens carefully for a sound of someone, anyone, but all he can hear are the birds. Eventually, as light turns to dusk, a car comes with a person inside. All the person sees is a little boy, standing in the middle of the road. ...