Witching Hill

The story opens in the unremarkable Witching Hill Estate office, a cramped wood‑box perched behind rows of Queen Anne houses, where a young clerk drifts through monotonous paperwork. He dreams of a quiet life far from the drab routines of ‘crabbed age and drab respectability’, until a flamboyant stranger named Uvo Delavoye bursts in wearing white tropical attire. Delavoye’s lively chatter and odd request about a mysterious hole in his newly marked tennis court instantly pulls the clerk out of his routine and sets a strange tone for the days ahead.

The hole is described as a yawning, perfectly formed depression that appeared overnight, untouched by grass and oddly reminiscent of a churchyard crypt. Delavoye insists it cannot be filled with ordinary earth, hinting at a deeper, perhaps supernatural, disturbance beneath the estate’s tidy lawns. As the clerk agrees to investigate after his shift, the ordinary world of paperwork begins to crack, promising a series of uncanny events that will test both men’s wits.