Novels by Joy Mba

The candle flame on the twenty-ninth floor burned with unnatural steadiness, a small yellow spear refusing to bow to the drafts that should have existed in an unfinished building open to the elements on three sides.Freya Malik stood five metres from it, camera still recording, lens pointed at the window.The glass had become something alive.It no longer merely bowed. It breathed.Each slow inward pulse stretched the tempered laminate further, the spiderweb cracks lengthening like roots seeking water in dry earth. The sound was the worst part—not loud, not dramatic, just the quiet, intimate creak of molecules being asked to hold more tension than physics permitted.She kept the viewfinder pressed to her eye because looking directly at the thing pressing from the other side felt too personal, too intimate, like making eye contact with someone who already knew your death date.Through the lens the shape resolved into more detail than she wanted.Not one creature. Not even several.

January 11, 2027 – 23:42Canary Wharf, London – The Skeleton Tower (still officially “Development Site C-17 – Unsafe – Keep Out”)The rain this year was colder. Thicker. More deliberate, as though the sky had decided that last year’s downpour had been too gentle, too forgiving.Freya Malik walked the last stretch from the Crossrail station with her hood up and the collar of her waxed jacket turned high enough to cover her ears. She was twenty-nine, five-foot-six in the battered Doc Martens she refused to replace, dark hair currently dyed a faded midnight blue that had mostly washed out at the roots. A small scar curved under her left eye from a moped accident in Dalston when she was twenty-one. She carried a beat-up Lowepro backpack containing: - a Sony A7 IV body with a 24-70mm f/2.8 GM - two extra batteries - a small LED torch taped to a monopod - a notebook half-filled with fragmented urban legend notes - a packet of nicotine gum she chewed when the cravings got

January 11, 2026 — 00:17 Canary Wharf, LondonThe rain had stopped.Not gradually, not tapering into drizzle. It had simply ceased—as though someone very high up had reached over and turned off the tap.The silence that followed was worse than the storm.No wind. No distant traffic hum from the Westferry Circus roundabout. No late-night Deliveroo moped whining through the side streets. Just the soft drip-drip-drip of water falling from the edges of the unfinished tower onto the cracked tarmac below.And breathing.Not one person breathing. Many.James Carter opened his eyes.He was lying on his back on the cold concrete of what had once been the ground-floor lobby of the Skeleton Tower. The ceiling soared above him—thirty-four storeys of unfinished ambition, now lit by a strange, sourceless silver light that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.He tried to sit up.Every muscle screamed.His coat was gone. His Nikon was gone. His phone—when he patted his pockets—

The blue-lit staircase beneath the perfect house in Larkspur Mews descended in a slow, deliberate spiral, each step feeling slightly softer than the last, as though the stone were breathing.James moved carefully, one hand trailing the smooth wall for balance. The light here was the same cold azure that had guided him down from the Skeleton Tower, but now it pulsed—slow, rhythmic, like the heartbeat of something very old and very patient.He counted the steps this time.One hundred and eight.Exactly one hundred and eight.When the final step arrived, it didn’t announce itself with a landing. The staircase simply flattened out and became floor. He found himself standing at the threshold of a long, low-ceilinged corridor. The walls were lined with mirrors—floor to ceiling, edge to edge. Not ordinary mirrors. These reflected nothing of the corridor itself.Each one showed a different James Carter.Not the versions from the candle circle. These were subtler. More intimate. Snapshots of m

The moment James Carter stepped through the second door, the cold concrete smell of the Skeleton Tower vanished.He didn’t fall. He didn’t stumble. The transition was surgical: one heartbeat in darkness, the next in light so warm and honey-coloured it felt like someone had poured late-afternoon sunshine directly into his lungs.He stood on cobblestones that gleamed as though freshly washed. Not the uneven, oil-stained stones of old Covent Garden or Brick Lane. These were perfect—smooth, pale gold, laid in a perfect herringbone pattern that stretched away in every direction. Above him, the sky was the deep, endless blue of a clear September evening, no clouds, no red scar, no bruise of coming storm. Streetlamps—actual Victorian-style ones with frosted glass globes—glowed softly, their light the exact colour of strong tea with milk.He turned slowly.No Canary Wharf towers. No glass-and-steel monoliths stabbing the sky. Instead, low Georgian terraces rose on either side

The staircase didn’t creak. That was the first thing James noticed as he descended. Concrete stairs, poured twenty years ago and left to the elements, should have groaned, cracked, or at least whispered dust with every step. These didn’t. Each footfall landed with the muted finality of a door closing behind him. The blue glow that lit the walls grew brighter the deeper he went—not electric, not fluorescent, but something older. Something that remembered light before London had streetlamps.He counted floors. Or tried to. After the first twenty steps the numbers stopped making sense. The landings disappeared. The walls smoothed until they looked machined rather than cast. The air grew colder, then warmer, then colder again in slow, nauseating waves. His breath fogged, then cleared, then fogged once more. Time felt soft here, like wet clay.He kept walking because stopping felt more dangerous.The older versions of himself had not followed. Their voices had faded almost immediat