The prospect of discovering a shipwreck containing riches beyond our comprehension was what drew us to scuba diving in the first place. Needless to say, we were disappointed pretty quickly. The likelihood of discovering a wrecked ship is infinitesimal, let alone a wrecked ship containing...
I didn't know why everyone was Googling September 23rd, but I do now. I wish I hadn’t found out. My name is Oren Pierce. I write about fringe culture and the ways people convince themselves the sky is falling. That was the plan last week when...
Leave it up to me to try to do something beneficial, and end up ruining my life in the process. All I wanted to do was go to the gym and right as I stepped through the threshold, BOOM! I trip and fall and my...
Hannah and Becca, the quintessential young couple in love. Newlyweds, or relatively newly wed at any rate, the pair would sometimes baffle their peers in their curiously optimistic pursuit of the fading light that was the classic American dream. During their initial courtship, well on...
When a man notices strange, distorted faces peering from his neighbor’s upstairs window, he tells himself it’s a trick of the light—or children playing. But the nightly appearances grow more frequent, more unsettling, and impossible to ignore. As his obsession deepens, and his girlfriend begins...
The rain began as a mist on the windshield, the kind that smudged the view rather than blocked it, and then, without much warning, it thickened into bands of water that wove through the beams of the headlights. Rachel Whitaker turned the wipers up another...
The fluorescent lights hummed with their own strange cadence, a nervous flicker dancing above the library doors. The building always felt different once the last bell rang, but tonight it felt worse. The classrooms had gone dark, the lockers stretched like empty shells, and the...
Peter, a seasoned fire investigator, uncovers a hidden machine in the ruins of a burned mansion. When messages begin arriving from the deceased homeowner—pleading for help to restore the device—Peter is pulled into a nightmarish struggle between duty and obsession. As the voice grows stronger,...
The glow of the screen has beckoned me and I have answered its call. It’s the middle of the night and I am compelled to walk downstairs, still rubbing sleep from my eyes, and sit down at my desk. The screen is on, a writing...
Past lush green forests and misty valley At the end of a long winter’s chill The Salesman conducts his grand finale In the town of Diona Hills. Four will be one, and one finds demise By him who is called oblivion. Come closer, and hear of our grand reprise In the place...
Two days ago, I was out for a walk around my neighborhood. It was the ideal kind of summer day; bright sun overhead, wispy white clouds streaking across the sky, and a gentle breeze to keep my body from overheating. I even took the time...
Of all the nights for the devil to visit, he chose one that was calm. No great storms, no loud bashes of lightning and thunder. It was a quiet evening, cloudless, the stars blotted out by the lights of the city. I was on the...
When I was six years old, I followed a red bird into the woods. I didn’t think much about it, it just made a funny sound and I wanted to look at it. So I wandered off. My mother had fallen asleep on her sunbed...
“Can you believe this crap?” Doug asked his younger brother, David. The Sunday night football game featuring their vaunted Steelers had meandered to its soul-wrenching conclusion: a Steelers loss. “You knew good and darned well that this was gonna be a rerun of last season,” David...
When Everett and Ruth Watterson move into a quiet neighborhood, they seem perfectly polite—until strange noises, missing pets, and unsettling encounters convince their neighbor that something far darker lurks behind their curtains. What begins as uneasy observation spirals into obsession, culminating in a discovery that...
I’ve started and deleted this more times than I want to admit. The drafts always stall at the same place, where I have to write my brother’s name and follow it with what became of him. Caleb. Seven years old when this began, with a...
David Halloway had lived in the new city for less than three months, and already the novelty of relocation had worn away. His apartment was smaller than the one he’d left behind, the traffic worse, the food scene less impressive than the online blogs had...
Frank Delaney didn’t like shopping on Saturdays, but his wife Martha had asked, and he’d put it off long enough. The local grocer was busy, though not unbearable. He parked near the entrance, took one of the rattling carts with the stubborn front wheel, and...
Alone in the drafty old wing of his family’s farmhouse, a young boy awakens to a strange rhythm echoing through the night. At first faint, the sound builds into something deliberate, something that doesn’t belong—and it’s moving closer. Isolated from the rest of his family,...
I’ve always been a night walker. Some people drink, some people binge Netflix, some people smoke. Me? I put my sneakers on after dark and walk until the buzzing in my head dies down. That night had been especially heavy. The rain had started before dawn...
