Part I The tomb was not where it had been. That was Marcus’s first thought as he stood in the moonlit dunes, the wind scraping sand across his boots and the legs of his pants. Each shift of his weight caused him to sink slightly into the...
Part I The candles flickered against the early evening air, their small flames dancing like fireflies battered by wind. One by one, they dimmed, their light extinguished as a restless breeze stirred the space between the trees. Heather stood among the clusters of townspeople, her vigil...
Part I It had rained the day before they arrived, though the air that lingered along the hedgerows and cottages smelled more of earth than of water. Andrew noticed it first as they stepped out of the narrow rental car in front of the stone-framed gate...
Part I I first noticed something different in Owen when the heat broke and the evenings cooled enough to leave the windows open. There hadn’t been an incident—no fever, no fall, nothing to blame. Just a sudden and unshakable quiet that didn’t belong to a six-year-old...
Part I We came to the cabin after everything else had fallen apart—not for a vacation, and not because we wanted to live a simpler life. It was the only option left. My aunt had owned the place decades ago, back in the seventies, when she...
Part I Mason Firth watched the rural highway unravel in a slow curve through brittle grass and leafless oaks, the pavement cracking into patches where frost heave had bullied its way to the surface. His truck groaned with each dip, suspension aging as poorly as his...
Part I The gravel cracked beneath the tires of the rented Jeep as it slowed to a halt, dust rising in thick orange plumes that lingered in the still air before dissipating into the mid-afternoon glare. The sun was high over the rim of the ravine,...
Part I Dr. Neal Farrow stepped down from the rust-scorched cab of the Hilux, his boots sinking slightly into the orange dust as the wind carried dry grains in lazy spirals across the barren flat. The engine idled for a moment longer before the driver cut...
Part I The iron gate at the edge of Charlotte Street let out a brittle screech as Camille Wren pressed it inward with her forearm, careful not to let her suitcase topple sideways against the uneven brick. The fence, once black, now bore the fading bronze...
Part I There was something in the tape that defied explanation. Claire Morse had watched it more than a dozen times since the envelope first arrived, but each viewing stirred the same unease—an itch at the base of her neck, a vague stirring behind her eyes....
Part I The storm rolled in heavy over the Gulf, carried on winds that scraped shingles off rooftops and bent palm trees at the waist. Rain lashed the streets of Old Town, and the few people who hadn't already taken shelter had long since vanished into...
Part I The package arrived without a return address. Wrapped in weathered brown paper and sealed with twine that left rust-colored streaks across her hands, it had waited patiently in her mailbox, as though it had been there longer than it had any right to be. Eleanor...
Part I I hadn’t expected the house to be as quiet as it was. You’d think an old farmhouse, even one wired for utilities and insulated in the seventies, would creak or groan or do something to remind you you weren’t the only one inside it—but...
Part I It was the siren that woke him, though the sound at first didn’t register as real. It wormed its way into his half-dreaming consciousness, a drawn-out wail that ebbed and surged, pitching awkwardly between mournful and mechanical. Dennis blinked against the dark, lifting his...
Part I Michael and I had been best friends since the first week of high school. I met him in the lunch line, both of us shuffling forward with our plastic trays, silently weighing whether the nachos looked edible. He cracked a joke about the cheese...
Part I Martin Greaves arrived at the Cortland Municipal Archive just after eight on a Tuesday morning, two days after the city finally cut power to the upper floors. The building, a vast brutalist monolith set between two defunct overpasses, had been shuttered since 2007, but...
Every morning, the grave of Ken Kline is found disturbed, as if he has been climbing out in the dead of night. Pastor David Locklear isn’t one to believe in ghost stories, but when he sees Ken rise with his own eyes, he follows him—and...
Roger Westle is no stranger to artificial intelligence, but when his experiments with the latest AI model take a bizarre turn, he begins to question whether he’s dealing with mere lines of code—or something far more sinister. At first, the responses seem normal. Then come...
When teenage metal detectorist Edward Hartwell unearths an old silver ring, he doesn’t expect much. But the moment he slips it onto his finger, strange things begin to happen. Weeds wither at his touch. A creeping warmth pulses through him. The ring isn’t just metal—it’s...
When an antiquarian stumbles upon a long-lost manuscript at an estate sale, he believes he has found a mere relic of forgotten folklore. But The Nether Codex is no ordinary book. As he studies its cryptic passages, reality itself begins to shift around him—words change,...
