It was one of those times when you start awake suddenly with the feeling of being watched. You know – you might be in an uncomfortable position, the covers may have slipped to the side leaving part of your back exposed, but you refrain from shifting position so as to not provoke your dark, intangible…
Paolo fed me one last strawberry from the painted clay bowl. He let the juice drip down my chin and then kissed away every last trace. For a moment I was lost in the beauty of his herculean bronzed skin and the sound of the ocean crashing on the shore. A warm breeze blew into…
I’ve spent a good portion of my life out in the Australian bush, enough time that there is very little left out there that can surprise or scare me. I’ve tussled with massive scrubber bulls and lived to tell the tale and I’ve even come across good sized king brown snakes and funnel web spiders…
I had a nightmare earlier this week. I say nightmare, but I realise now it was more like a vision, a vision of the horrors yet to progress. I was alone in my house, like I am every day of the week, because my mum has to go to work. My best friend, Immy, was…
Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Bartholomew Jackson and I desperately need to get this story out by any means necessary. Your belief on the matter that follows is not required, but I would indeed appreciate it if you were to bear with me. I’m afraid I must inform you that your convictions…
They say that the hour of three A.M. is the time when spirits can become active, and I’m sure of that. My apartment was always a little too quiet for one in the city, especially at night. No drunk shouting in the street at that time, no sound of car horns and alarms could penetrate…
GET HELP. You start noticing those words when you’re going about your day-to-day business – just flipping through the classifieds, or posted on telephones near bridges. Normal places. Just words that seem to be catching your eye. Then they start appearing more randomly: the first seven tiles you pick in Scrabble, the first spoonful of…
The house was nestled into the depths of the woods, and from a certain distance the only evidence it existed was a small column of smoke in the evenings. No one ever went that deep, though. The woods themselves were believed by the locals to be haunted, though the specifics of the hauntings vary to…
I would ask that before you read this you switch off all the lights in the house . As you will soon find out, you are perfectly safe. We have always found comfort in light. For early man it provided security and protection from nocturnal predators and, in the form of fire, a source of…
Mirrors surround us, human beings, through all our history. Even before the first mirror was invented, one could see his reflection in some body of water. Whatever happened in the world, the mirrors would reflect everything and everyone. They have retained the millions of faces including the ones that belonged to madmen, miscreants and murderers….
It’s been a while since I wrote anything. I apologize to my fans for making them think I have writer’s block or something. I can assure you that I haven’t lost my touch, and I’m full of inspiration. Something just… came up. You see, I’ve been doing some research lately. You know, for my new…
The power does it to everyone. It corrupts us all, or at least those of us who embrace it. Although we dive right in to be swept away by the black waters of necromancy, it’s not easy for us to stay afloat. Our humanity is the coastline, the palm trees, the dry land itself. You…
The tropical waters were warm, even on a night dive, but Aaron still wore a wetsuit. He switched on the video camera attached to his mask, then pressed the start button on his waterproof wristwatch. 70:00 popped up in black against a staunch grey background, and quickly turned to 69:59, then 69:58, 69:57. The countdown…
It was in the last day of the year 2015 in which we received our message. We were preparing for a New Year’s party, and we were cleaning out the attic. We thought there’d be chairs. What he thought instead was a cassette tape player; it was, no doubt, from at least the 80s. My…
This is the story of one boy’s suffering. One boy’s suffering that was with him from the beginning, that gripped at him ever tighter until he could no longer escape it. One boy’s suffering that left him robbed of himself, forever changed by the events that overwhelmed him. That boy is me… Or rather, it…
I don’t know how long I’ve been running, nor do I care. I just know I have to get away, escape from the creature and its rancid, hot breath. I can almost hear its heavy paws giving chase, snapping the slender branches on the ground as it covers the distance between us. The hair on…
A gentle breeze blew through the little valley, pushing the perfectly formed clouds leisurely across the sky. The tall, green grass echoed the movement in the sky above, swaying gently as the cool sunlight reached across to the distant horizon. Birds sang soothingly in a tree atop a slight hill, casting shade upon a lone…
This is the tale of an incident that occurred to me a few years ago, when I was a younger man, and convinced that the world was exactly as I saw it, and worked exactly as I was told it worked. I had just finished my undergraduate degree at a college I shall not name,…
“Well, this is embarrassing. Usually, I check on the new arrivals, and they’re already begging to make it all stop. I mean, even if they had no regrets before, they sure do now, right? But this… this is new. Just a room with blank walls. I haven’t seen an occupied room that didn’t at least…
The bitter cold gusts ripped through the thermal underwear he wore underneath his camouflage, biting into his very bones. He had climbed into his tree stand about thirty feet up a yellow-leaved cottonwood and had huddled with his knees to his chest to fight the freeze. As he scanned the open field in the midst…
I woke up in a room that was all too familiar. “I’m having the dream again,” I thought to myself, the same dream I’d been having for weeks before that. Each time I had it it, I was filled with the same sense of terror. I was in a dome shape room about ten feet…
A few months ago I was watching television in my living room when I heard the first howl. It reverberated through my bones like something from my darkest nightmares, leaving me temporarily immobile with the shock of it. After a few moments I tried my best to regain my composure, reassuring myself with a forced…
“Lucy said I wouldn’t even make it to the front door,” I mumbled as I retrieved my sleeping bag and flashlight from the back seat of my car. “Well I’m here now, I’ll stay here ‘til morning, and I’ll be at her house bright and early to pick up my 100 bucks.” With sleeping bag…
There is a school somewhere in the midwest. It’s a boarding school, that used to be widely known for taking in the troubled youth and attempting to restore them to a normal functioning level, and re-released upon the masses. Because of the precarious nature of a majority of the students, this school is located among…