Some places are haunted. Others are watching. A figure waits beside a lonely Lincolnshire road – but he may not be a ghost from the past. Impossible footprints cross the snow, passing over walls and rooftops without breaking stride. A medieval Doom painting continues a judgement begun centuries ago. A mathematician discovers a fourth angle in reality – and something looking back through it. Across the Fens, strange lights, bells and ancient roads hint at patterns older than human settlement. On Holy Island and beneath the woods of Northumberland, the world itself begins to feel dangerously thin. In West Wales, a researcher tracks down a man who once investigated the extraordinary UFO events of 1977 – and discovers why he tried to burn everything he knew. But the strange is not confined to old churches and forgotten folklore. Adults die almost overnight, leaving children to inherit civilisation. A perfect city appears to reverse entropy itself. Millions begin dreaming of the same impossible place until the dream starts rewriting the waking world. At Temple Bruer, centuries collide beneath the ruins of the Knights Templar. An abandoned psychiatric hospital refuses to let its fires remain in the past. There is a seventh son who feels deaths before they happen. A grieving family installs a household technology promising that all dust will be removed – and learns how literally a machine can interpret an instruction. A storm-lashed island hides something hungry for human memory. And after the end of almost everything, survivors discover a peninsula that should not have survived at all. The Vapour Above the Water is a collection of eighteen tales of the weird and the unwholesome – moving from the tradition of the English ghost story through folklore, cosmic horror, UFOs, science fiction and apocalypse. Roads remember. Buildings continue their work. Time folds back upon itself. Landscapes exert pressures of their own. We think we are the ones observing the world. These are stories about what happens when the world looks back.