Part I Stephen Hampton didn’t expect to find himself back in uniform, even part-time, but his phone began vibrating on the kitchen counter just after six in the morning. He recognized the number—Patricia Simmons rarely called him outside of holidays or bad news—and answered before the...
Annette Grayson liked the part of the day when everything finally went quiet. The last of her third graders had been collected, the last forgotten lunchbox reclaimed. She’d stacked math workbooks, wiped stray marker streaks off desks, and turned off the humming fluorescence in her classroom...
Part I Christian Ward had driven into strange towns before, but Hollow Creek greeted him with a kind of quiet that suggested the place was thinking. The highway wound through the Appalachian foothills in a series of broad, predictable curves until the last stretch, where the...
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...
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...
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 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...
“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...
When insurance assessor Logan Pritchard takes a detour into a small Wisconsin park, he expects nothing more than a quiet evening walk before heading back to his motel. But when a ranger warns him to stay off Wolf Path after dark, curiosity wins over caution—and...
When freelance designer Marshall Blake rents an old farmhouse outside Kubrick Creek, he expects peace, quiet, and time to rebuild his life. What he gets instead are sleepless nights, phantom words written in a stranger’s hand, and the growing sense that something buried beneath his...
Part I The sky over the Pacific was clear that night—clear enough that the control tower at Haneda could see the last blinking lights of Flight 717 as it climbed to cruising altitude. A Boeing 747, call sign N734PA, bound for Los Angeles. 324 passengers, 17...
Ma was a simple woman and I don’t think she would’ve minded the plain wooden cross we put up on her grave a year ago. It was just a two-by-four that we had laying around that we split and nailed back together to make the...
“Hot Damn!” John said looking out of my second floor window, eyeing my next door neighbor. My mother and I had recently moved here about six months ago. John and I were in the same high school Senior class and quickly became best friends. We...
I went camping recently at Lost Creek, on the edge of Riverside, Ohio. I hadn’t been there since that family was attacked a few summers ago. That hadn’t been the only time something strange had found its way to Riverside, or Lost Creek itself, for...
The sun hung low, painting the Sierra Nevada in gold and crimson. James Hawthorne guided his horse along the winding mountain trail. The air was crisp, redolent of pine and trail dirt. A nice enough day for the time being. Of course, these things can...
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...
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...
