A Secret Chord (en Inglés) - William Meikle

Three Sigils & Totems stories

It is a simple enough concept.

There are houses like this all over the world. Most people only know of them from whispered stories over campfires; tall tales told to scare the unwary. But some, those who suffer, some know better. They are drawn to the places where what ails them can be eased.

If you have the will, the fortitude, you can peer into another life, where the dead are not gone, where you can see that they thrive and go on, in the dreams that stuff is made of.

There it is in a nutshell. There are houses where people can go to get in touch with their dead loved ones.

But this gives me lots of things to play with. To even get inside a room, you need a sigil; a tattoo or carving on your skin, and a totem, a memento of your loved one. Then there's the fact that your loved one might be a parallel universe version rather than the one you actually know.

And where do these houses come from? What's behind the walls? How do they work? Why do they work? And who chooses the concierges who run them? Or fixes them when they don't work?

So I've got all that to play with, plus the fact that the houses can exist anywhere, at any time. They're like lots of boxy, multi-faceted Tardis, spread across space time, places and situations into which I can hook in characters and stories.

Take my hand.

We're about to knock on some new doors.