Carlos became aware of the damp brick against his back, cold and rough through the thrift-store parka. He opened his eyes, grateful that the rain had stopped, but unsure how long he’d been out. No dreams, thankfully. It must not have been long; the last few...
Nathan Rye was six years old the first time he heard the wall move. It was a Tuesday. He remembered that much, mostly because Tuesdays were spelling test days, and because his mother had said it out loud when she tucked him in. “Long day, Tuesday,” she’d...
It was supposed to be the summer that finally gave him a chance at feeling normal. In 1984, sixteen-year-old Wyatt is sent to Camp Chattahoochee—an escape from the state home, from cruelty, from the ghosts of the family who abandoned him. Instead, he finds first...
Brad Carter only wanted one thing: to save his daughter. When he finds a strange, warm egg deep in the woods, it feels like fate—an impossible discovery at the exact moment he’s drowning beneath medical bills and running out of time. What hatches inside his...
I have a skull in the corner of my office. It sits on a shelf a little above my eye line. It watches me, and fills me with great dread. I acquired it at an open air bazaar in China. If you wish for a street or...
Samantha Barkley has spent years fighting to keep her home bakery—and her family—from collapsing under the weight of impossible expectations. When a vindictive client destroys her reputation overnight, Sam finds herself desperate, exhausted, and cracking under pressure. Then a stranger tells her about someone called...
In a faraway future, across limitless desert wastes, living in the ruins of the old world, lay the emaciated colonies of the new one. The feral lands of Zimitra. The land of forgotten knowledge. The land where the memories of the ancient world were lost to...
Part I I work nights at our old middle school. It’s a small place—two floors, one gym, a cafeteria that still smells vaguely like canned green beans even when it’s spotless. Budget cuts mean the day crew leaves at five and I handle the late shift...
Part I The tires hissed over gravel as Alexis Kidd turned off the county road and followed a winding lane that sloped toward the lake. The air cooled the deeper she went into the trees. A thin mist hung in the birches like gauze, and the...
There was a time when I could still tell the difference between work and distraction. Now, they’re the same thing. Lines of code, endless and sterile, fill the hours I used to spend sleeping. The glow of my monitors paints the apartment in perpetual dusk. Dust...
I hated John Sweeney from my first breath. That might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. The feud began in my grandfather’s day–a dispute over an insult which escalated into a blood vendetta over the next two generations. So, I guess you...
Looking for a new beginning, Cameron takes a high-paying job at a pharmaceutical plant with a lot of secrets—and even more red tape. But when his body begins changing in impossible ways, he suspects the work isn’t just dangerous—it’s transformational. As he peels back the...
My hometown of Mildensboro is shrinking. Cherie, my wife, was the first to call it. One night, on our back porch over a beer, she pointed toward the old water tower out past the treeline and remarked that it sure seemed closer than she remembered....
When art teacher Seth Kline moves into an old farmhouse with his five-year-old daughter, Lila, he hopes the light-filled windows will help them heal after his wife’s death. But as Lila begins to draw impossible patterns—colors that shouldn’t exist, shapes that shift when unseen—Seth realizes...
There’s a lotta darkness in this world. That’s a lowercase ‘d’ dark, mind ya. There’s also the capital ‘D’ kind, but that’s another kinda thing all together. Now, some people’ll tell ya that it’s the big Darkness that ya gotta watch out for, and in...
I don’t post here often, and when I do, it’s usually dumb stuff—neighbor drama, weird noises in the old building, that kind of thing. This one isn’t that. I’ve been sitting on it for a few days, trying to talk myself out of even typing...
In a world reduced to rubble, where the living cling to routine just to survive, Joseph Emerick finds that his greatest enemy isn’t the wasteland around him—but the darkness inside his own mind. Haunted by a voice that whispers from the shadows, Joseph struggles to...
“Farewell, happy fields, where Joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors, hail!” — John Milton, Paradise Lost Standing under the glow of a flickering streetlight, John Avery’s hands shook as he tried and failed to light the cigarette they held. With a mumbled curse, the stubborn smoke finally caught,...
The…the dark. God, so dark. Can’t feel, can’t think, can’t… I’m floating in the black. No, not floating. There’s something under my feet. My God, there’s nothing here but me. Am I dying? Am I…dead? Can I move? I lift my hands in front of me. Don’t want to...
A quiet lakeside retreat was supposed to be the perfect cure for burnout. When overworked insurance broker Kyle rents a secluded cabin at Clearwater Lake, he plans to spend the week recovering and finally finishing his novel. But when he discovers a strange artifact buried...
