Tales of Wanga Book Two

Wanga has records.

The old stories are something else.

For generations they have survived in pub conversations, family warnings, police files, newspaper clippings and the half-remembered things adults tell children when they want them to stay away from somewhere without explaining why.

Eight stories.

A boy who insists something lives beneath the beds-before three members of his family disappear.

A lonely man who begins measuring the trees outside his house because he is certain the forest is moving closer.

Five people fleeing disaster who take refuge in a cabin in the hills.

A television contestant locked inside a box with something he will spend the rest of his life believing never truly left him.

A painting that refuses to remain the same.

A prison cell that becomes less empty every night.

A woman who vanishes while her husband obsessively completes a puzzle that does not want to be finished.

And an orderly at the old hospital whose particular form of cruelty becomes something Wanga remembers long after the official paperwork has forgotten.

Some of the names changed over the years.

Some locations moved.

Some details became impossible.

But the shape of each story remained.

Now the people of Wanga are pulling those old tales apart, comparing folklore with surviving evidence and discovering an uncomfortable truth:

Stories do not have to be completely true to preserve a warning.

The Old Stories returns to the dark history beneath Wanga in eight interconnected tales of Australian horror-stories of isolation, obsession, impossible spaces and ordinary people discovering that the safest-looking room can become a trap.

Before Wanga began asking what was happening to the town, these were the stories it already knew.

And Wanga has been keeping them for a very long time.