The Appetite

Rose Meyer keeps a small hospice on the Somerset Levels running: eight beds, three dying patients, one road out that floods every autumn. Then a locked basement pantry opens by itself, and a stain shaped like a door appears on the wall — a stain that grows warm to the touch, that whispers in the voices of the dead people you loved most. Something behind the plaster has been feeding for two hundred years. It is almost full. It only needs one more.