Itch in the Party House by Ivy Grimes

“The universe was working through Shelley’s hands.”

This is not only an equally engaging story as a kindred themed (Partygate?) house to that in the previous story above, but also a story that continues the parallel with my own world as it seems to have transpired since yesterday when I reviewed the previous story! The monster insidiously remains; in fact the monster is Shelley’s boss who has explicitly sent out her and her co-workers to tell lies to the public and try to sell a horror. You couldn’t make it up!
It is the story of Shelley – a woman with rituals and idea-masochistic fixations. “The only other option was to live with a permanent itch in the brain, a nag a nag a nag that never went away.” And she is trying the sell the Party house for her implicated Estate Agent boss, a house that Shelley sees as Jane Eyre-like typhus themed with indoor pool and irrigable corridors, and a resident replicable old woman monster called Agnes. Like the earlier morphed monsters in the previous story, she seems unable to be be killed.

“Put one finger in the fire to see if it burns.”
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Full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/vastarien-vol-5-issue-1/#comment-25003

One of the many Jim Kay illustrations, 2011, from ‘The Monster Calls’