Ted pulled his car off the paved road and onto the gravel driveway where his worn tires grumbled. “Yeah, I get the feeling.” It had been a long sales day for them both. When Ted had started selling water purifiers, everyone was in a panic about lead...
Being a police detective means you see a lot of horrible things. Things you can’t unsee. They haunt your dreams at night, and the images spill over into the daytime. Waking nightmares – ever hear of those? I get them all the time. Pretty soon, every time you...
Every time I fall asleep, I have the same horrifying nightmare – a flashback of what we went through. In the dream, we’re back on Xangrath again. Everything is just the way it was, and my heart aches for reasons my sleeping mind can’t comprehend. My...
The couch reeked of cigarette smoke, ashes, and body odor. It was faded yellow like the wallpaper, its springs creaking loudly as I sat down. It smells like him, I thought to myself, surveying my late father’s living room and its precarious stacks of old books...
There hadn’t been a murder in Franzburg for over five years. Not since old man Weathers killed his wife over a Monopoly match gone sour and a marriage gone even sourer. Up until last week, that was. Now I’ve got three different files sitting on my desk,...
“Let’s go hiking!” she said. “It’ll be fun, babe!” she said. Yeah…yeah, it’s definitely real fuckin’ fun right now… I’m sorry, I gotta…gotta stay calm, right? Okay… okay, let me start again. It was around 10:00 this morning when Selena woke me up with a thing of doughnuts...
“The warmth is completely gone now, she took it all away…she’s behind me…she’s angry with me. Ice…everywhere…I have my gun. Can’t let her…ice everywhere…so…cold…” Those were my brother, Christopher’s last words; hastily scrawled on the last page of his fiancee, Darla’s personal journal that was found...
I spent my childhood in a small town. Long, winding single-lane roads with speed limits that topped out at seventy miles per hour were common. Modest-sized houses on large lots dotted the landscape, innumerable trees providing privacy and anonymity. One of those houses was mine. ...
Danny was always afraid of the dark. The kind of kid who'd slept with a nightlight until he was way too old. One who’d never dare to step out of his room if the hallway light was off. I remember our first sleepover, when tucked away beneath...
I believe there are imperceptible forces, energies and intangible things, which, arising from some sub-dimensional source, act on our minds, influence our thoughts, and perhaps even create entirely new thoughts—ideas which we wouldn’t have normally, naturally considered. The human brain largely remains a mystery and is still yet...
I have only a few things to say, a few terrible events to relate, and then I must go and join my best friend. She is in the other room, struggling against her restraints, crying out wildly, madly, shrieking like a thing inhuman. In many...
The worst thing about trying to stop your brain from re-entering your skull is that, with it being your brain, you can’t exactly resist the commands it issues. You can struggle, dimly, bodily, but in the end, the brain wins out. It gets back into...
I’m sitting in a bar right now, somewhere in the more southern portions of Missouri; Howell County, I think. I haven’t bothered to ask. The police are on their way, the owner of the bar called them the moment she saw me stumble through the...
My name is Andrew Thames, and I am nothing more than a slimy thief. I used to call myself a writer. I can’t say I ever wrote anything worth it. Despite years and years of work, pouring over my laptop, sending submission after submission, I had...
Snow. I absentmindedly watched the white flakes lazily drift down from the sky, remembering that the forecast called for a blizzard by noon. It didn’t seem like it would get that bad, at least not now. But I couldn’t spend all day looking at the...
Messes are funny things. The longer they’re around, the harder they are to clean up. That was the way it was with the Falling River Schoolhouse. It was May, the day after Memorial Day. We’d been off school for all of three days, and already I...
“He is dead, Senhor,” Paulo told him. Mr. Jameson, a portly man, sat back in his chair, making a long, low squeaking sound as he did. He was a businessman. His head was large and bald from too much thought, and his body was a soft,...
It awoke to the sounds of bootfalls on rocks. Voices followed. Someone had come into its cave again. It listened. “Matt! Look out for the camera!” “I’m looking! I’m looking!” “I could put that in my bag, you know.” “And let it get crushed by your two tons of gear? ...
In some ways, it is terrifying to imagine just how close the town of Marchington came to obliteration by the tentacles of a demonic cephalopod. THE END It was finished. Months of toil had finally given way to Marty’s latest masterpiece. Of his eighteen novels to...
Vestwell Subway was a pedestrian tunnel which ran beneath the busy A37, linking East Lydford with West. A notorious accident blackspot, few ever chose to use it, preferring to risk life and limb crossing the road above. Indeed, many fatalities had been recorded at the...
