This story first appeared in a shared collection with three early stories by Robert Aickman and is similar in style and mood to his work. Like Aickman, Howard insists on her nightmare horrors taking place in recognisably modern settings, without distancing Victoriana and cosy gaslight.

‘Three Miles Up’, like Aickman’s ‘The Trains’ from the same collection, starts with a relatable real-world horror: you’ve agreed to go on holiday with a friend only to realise that perhaps you don’t get along quite as well as you’d imagined. Here, it’s two chaps exploring Britain’s neglected canals on a narrowboat, snapping at each other and bickering. Then they come upon a young woman sleeping on the bank and convince her to join them, hoping her presence might change the dynamic.

She’s a prototypical manic pixie dream girl, I suppose, except in British mythology pixies are famous for tricking travellers and leading them to their doom:

“To the left was the straight cut which involved the longer journey originally planned; and curving away to the right was the short arm which John advocated. The canal was fringed with rushes, and there was one small cottage with no light in it. Clifford went into the cabin to tell Sharon where they were, and then, as they drifted slowly in the middle of the junction, John suddenly shouted: ‘Clifford! What’s the third turning?’”

The inconclusive ending of the story only adds to its power. Where has this third channel taken them? Have they slipped through time, or into another plane of existence? I wonder if it’s some other aspect of The Beyond from Lucio Fulci’s 1981 film of that name.

First published in We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, 1975