The Reliquary: What Do You Say When Think No One Is Listening?

What do you say when you think no one is listening?Graham Ellis is a 44-year-old night security guard at the British Museum. He walks the same galleries from midnight to 8 AM, five nights a week. Ex-Metropolitan Police, divorced, estranged from his adult daughter after something he said at her mother's wedding - something he still can't remember saying. He watches her Instagram without liking the posts. He rehearses phone calls he'll never make.One night in November, alone in the basement corridor outside the conservation lab, Graham sees a small ivory casket on a workbench. Nobody told him what it is. Nobody told him anything about it at all. He's had a hard week. His daughter's birthday was Tuesday. He didn't call. Standing in front of the glass, he says out loud, the way a man alone at night says things he'd never say in company: I just want her to call.On Friday, she does. She sounds warm. She wants to visit.Graham is overjoyed for four days. Then a colleague at the museum is found dead in his sleep. Then his elderly neighbour is in her armchair, gone for two days. Then a former colleague from the Met dies in a car accident hours after he asks her a question. And in the conservation lab, a Byzantine reliquary's seal is cracking open, and something older than Christianity is beginning to answer every wish Graham speaks aloud.The Reliquary is a slow-burn gothic horror novel in the literary tradition of M.R. James - an ordinary man, an ancient object, and the devastating cost of words spoken when you think you are alone.For fans of M.R. James, Adam Nevill's The Ritual, Andrew Michael Hurley's The Loney, and John Langan's The Fisherman.Visit carrionpress.com for more titles from Carrion Press.