by Darren Stafford (Author)

One night. One wing. One name that refuses to stay forgotten.

Night shifts at HMP Stillwater have their own rhythm.

Locked doors. Observation checks. Radio calls. The distant clatter of gates. Footsteps travelling along landings when nobody should be there.

Officer Darya Jones knows those sounds. She has spent enough nights inside prisons to know that old buildings make noises, tired minds play tricks, and there is usually a perfectly ordinary explanation for whatever seems strange at three in the morning.

But tonight, G Wing is different.

A prisoner insists she has seen another officer walking the landing.

CCTV shows movement where nobody is standing.

Footsteps sound beneath a floor that should lead nowhere.

And when Darya completes the roll check, the numbers refuse to agree.

They are one short.

What begins as an irritating discrepancy slowly draws Darya towards a part of Stillwater that has been closed for years-and towards the remains of a night the prison would rather leave buried.

There was a fire.

There was an evacuation.

And somewhere among the damaged reports, forgotten corridors and half-remembered voices is the name of a woman called Karolina Voss.

As the night deepens, the prison begins to change around Darya. Past and present bleed together. Old radio transmissions return through the static. Locked gates remember being opened. Smoke appears where there is no fire.

And Darya begins to understand that Stillwater is not trying to frighten her away.

It is trying to make her remember.

Because prisons remember things.

The people who passed through them.

The people who worked inside them.

And sometimes, the people who never truly left.

ONE SHORT is the first supernatural tale from HMP Stillwater-a haunting prison ghost story about memory, guilt, forgotten lives and the strange sounds that become much harder to dismiss when you are the only officer on the wing.

Some footsteps belong to prisoners.

Some belong to staff.

And some have been walking the landings for years.

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