THE MUSTER
In 1943 the War Office gave the parish of Netherstoke forty-four days. On the seventeenth of December, one hundred and forty-one people walked outof a chalk...
About this ebook
THE MUSTER by Robert Martin is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £7.99. Language: English. Categories: Horror.
In 1943 the War Office gave the parish of Netherstoke forty-four days.
On the seventeenth of December, one hundred and forty-one people walked outof a chalk valley in southern England carrying what they could hold, on an understanding — never written down, never denied at the time, never honoured since — that they would be allowed back when the war was over.
The valley became a firing range. The village became a street of roofless brick shells with windows painted on them in white gloss, used for eighty-three years to teach soldiers how to fight in somebody's home.
Three things survived: the churchyard, the war memorial, and the church. Now the Ministry of Defence is handing the valley back. In six weeks, twenty-two families are coming home. The church has to be conserved first, and the grant has a deadline.
Martha Vyner is forty-four, freelance, and better at her work than her career suggests. She has six weeks to remove eight coats of limewash from the walls of St Cuthburga's and find out what is underneath.
She has one assistant, one escort, no telephone signal, and a professional creed she has held since she was nineteen years old: that nothing was ever helped by being covered up. What is under the limewash is not a Doom.
It is a muster: one hundred and forty-one villagers painted in 1487, each with their name on a scroll, by a parish that had just buried two thirds of itself and did not intend to be emptied again.
Every census from 1801 to 1931 records the population of Netherstoke as one hundred and forty-one. Fourteen censuses. The same number every time. And the wall is not finished. Nine of the figures have a name and no face — and the faces are filling in.
THE MUSTER is a cold, patient, meticulously researched English ghost story about restoration, about a promise the state has never kept, and about the person holding the scalpel. If it stays with you, please leave a review. It is how a book like this finds the next reader.
Book details
Details: 290 pages, about 81,139 words, published by Robert Martin, publication date 5 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 5.5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
THE MUSTER is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
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