Showing results by author "Alan Baker" in All Categories

In February 1959, a group of friends went on a ski-hiking trip to a remote mountain in the northern Urals. Something killed them. When a rescue expedition eventually found their camp, they discovered that for some unknown reason, the nine friends had cut their way out of their tent (instead of simply opening the flaps) and fled down the mountain, half undressed and without their shoes.

London has harbored many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956). A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said "Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man." But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river.

A terrifying mystery of the sea. In December 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished without trace from the remote Scottish island of Eilean Mòr. An emergency relief crew was sent to man the lighthouse. At the end of their month-long duty, they resigned from their posts, and never spoke of what they had experienced on the island. The mystery of Eilean Mòr has never been solved. Until now. In the present, a group of environmental researchers arrives on the island to observe the wildlife.

London, 1899. It has been six years since the discovery of intelligent life on Mars, and relations between the two worlds are rapidly developing. Three-legged Martian omnibuses stride through the streets and across the landscape, while Queen Victoria has been returned to the vigour of youth by Martian rejuvenation drugs.

Something strange is happening on the London Underground. The ghosts which haunt the platforms and tunnels are being seen much more frequently than usual, and it seems that they are both angry and frightened. Something has appeared on the subterranean railway network of which even the dead are afraid, and the train drivers and other staff are becoming increasingly reluctant to work there.