Chapter 1 The sounds of people screaming filled my ears and a dull pain was throbbing in my head. I realised I was lying on a cold, hard surface and I had a faint metallic taste in my mouth. I gave a splutter and opened my eyes; they felt like they were full of needles….
I used to think nightmares were fun, so I asked for more. They were the only source of excitement in my endless rut of a life. I never used to get nightmares, and for that, I should have been grateful. I wasn’t. I wished for more, I craved the adrenaline and the pounding of my…
1. ‘Nobody likes you. Nobody ever has and nobody ever will.’ ‘Not true…’ ‘Yes it is. Why would you think otherwise? What’s there to like about you?’ ‘What do you know about me? Can’t you just leave me alone?’ ‘People just pretend to like you, but everyone hates you.’ I’m sitting in the back of…
In Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, there is an abandoned amusement park known as Takakanonuma Greenland. It sits in the outskirts of Hobara, a section of the Japanese city of Date. Very little is known about this park, and its exact location is largely unknown. You can’t find it on any Japanese map, as it simply isn’t…
It was a Friday night, and I was grounded, without a phone. I lived alone with my dad in a rural community where everyone knows each other, but some keep to themselves. My dad headed up to bed around 11 o’ clock, and I began to get ready to carry out the plans I had…
A beautiful snowfall – the first since Kara had moved in to the small, cozy house she had rented. It was in the country, and the perfect place to complete her online university classes while also fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming a starving artist – starving science fiction writer, specifically. The elderly couple she…
He was an exceedingly average man. He had sometimes done good deeds and had sometimes done bad deeds. He had built up bad habits and good habits, neither outweighing the other. He was just average. If anyone had asked him he couldn’t have said why he decided to go through the Museum of Modern Art…
I hope to God, that this is the right thing to do. This is what he told us to do. This is the precaution he told us to take. That’s what I’ll tell myself to help me sleep at night. *** The following is the main body of the transcription of the Apollo Inventus flightcrew…
I work the night shift at a local mom-and-pop convenience store at the front of my neighborhood. We sell snacks, drinks, milk, bread, all the normal stuff that people need but aren’t willing to make a traditional run to the grocery store for. There was talk about adding a gas pump out front, but it…
I crawl. Thirsty. Bitter. So bitter, but I must eat them. The things that grow. They came here in a recent time. The growths are bright. They have a neck, and there is a ball on top of that neck, and one two three four five six seven round fans attached. Is this light? This…
They called it the doll cemetery. It was a small valley, barren and deserted, behind a hill that hid it from the sight of the town. Nothing grew on its arid soil; the few trees that had tried were long dead, turned into wooden skeletons that stretched their hooked fingers to the sky above. The…
Close to where I live there is a forest, which holds a dark secret; The Witches Tunnel, a cluster of trees that have intertwined, clasping hands with each other to form a dark passage. It is said deep within the forest lives an old witch with eternal knowledge. Walking through during the day is unsettling,…
As I stood outside the entrance to the underground passages, heavy rain falling upon the cobblestone road, ready to take part in the cities famous ghost tour amongst a group of about 20 to 30 people, I felt a sense of nervousness and excitement in the atmosphere. I’d arrived in Edinburgh that afternoon, travelling light,…
Her family had lived in that house, on that street, for as long as Ivanna could remember. She had her birthday parties in that backyard and swung from the big tree in the front yard until the rope wore down and the metal creaked. Every Christmas morning her and her brothers gathered on the floor…
“A graveyard’s cross stood before a hobo. Clouds were gathering in the skies, enveloping the moon – the last source of light in this ominous hour. Maple leaves, red and yellow as seen in the daylight, but all black in the gloom of night, were streaming in the cold autumn wind like mourning banners. The…
27/6/2009 Since quite early childhood, I’ve always maintained a fascination with Area 51. Now, I ought to make it clear that I am not some sort of deluded conspiracy lunatic, although the wild speculations about its activities have equally enthralled me since being very young, and fuelled several of my attempts at short works of…
December 25th, 1976. 11:00 PM. Christmas was winding down for most residents of Whelford. For its burgeoning police department however, the night was just beginning. A call had been received reporting flashing lights and loud noises coming from the abandoned coal mine, which lay just inside the border separating Whelford from the neighboring hamlets. The…
“Okay, Jonnathan, you ready?” He closed his eyes as he nodded and the gas started flowing. Slowly, he lost feeling in his mouth, becoming dazed in the process. Soon he was out, and then conscious again, barely realizing that his wisdom teeth had been pulled. “That wasn’t so bad…” he blubbered. ‘Nope. You’ll be sore…
The hangers are still swinging in my wardrobe and all my clothes are scattered around the room. I’m stood in the doorway trying to make sense of the situation: who the hell has been in here? There is no sign of a forced entry; the door was locked when I came home, exactly how I…
Content warning: this pasta contains some gore. He was born with a caul. That was all we knew, and that was all we needed to know. It was a hideous deformity, an extra layer of skin that covered at birth his face at birth and marked him for what he was. I never even learned…
“How do you know that what you experience is real?” Was the question I posed to my class that blustery Thursday morning in January. I teach psychology at the University of Maryland, in College Park, Maryland, and that day we were beginning our unit on perception and cognition, one of my favorite units. I have…
I love my mice ever so much. You see, I own a little colony containing hundreds of mice, all finely bred and engineered in this very laboratory. But these are no ordinary lab mice, as they’ve advanced far past crawling through mazes for food. What began as a small nest of captured specimens from the…
The young girl made her way through the thick undergrowth. It was not yet dusk, but the sun would disappear quickly behind the densely-packed trees. There is a sort of amplified silence that resonates through woods. All outside noise is cut off so that the only remaining sound is the woods itself. That’s why the…
Let me begin by saying that I absolutely hate running. It’s not so much the grueling, physical aspect but it is just so boring to me. It’s a pointless activity, unless you do it for sport or you’re trying to lose weight or something like that. A lot of people have been asking what exactly…