Humid winds howled through the canyon, throwing up plumes of black dust. The particles clinked against the reinforced glass of my goggles as we trotted across the terrain. A set of specs and tightly-woven coverings were necessary when you’re hoofing it across the wastes. I was glad to be properly
St. Bruvia was always a hungry town. It was an old place, older than most of its residents, with crooked wooden houses leaning toward one another beneath heavy snow and onion-domed churches whose ringing carried across the river. Whenever a family moved into a new house, they left something beneath
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The door creaked open on its own, barely affixed to its own hinges. The dead, drooped eyes of one Nicolas Sullivan stared off into the distance, mindlessly fixated on the wall in front of him. If he were actually paying any attention, maybe he’d care about the festering mess on
I grew up in a quaint town. The kind where everyone knows everything about one another, truly hellacious. As a child, I was reclusive, so you can imagine I hated it whenever anyone butted into my business. I would just shyly walk away until I found a quiet spot to
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Growing up, my family used to joke that I slept so deeply even a brutal murder couldn’t wake me up. I now know that’s not true. Screams echoed through my apartment from the unit below mine, five tortured voices piercing through the floor at such a volume I could only
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On the 23rd of September 2025, I died. It was sudden and painful, but brief. For some reason my just heart gave out. It ticked away for years without issue, just for the gears to break when it decided my time was up. Dying young is often seen as unfair,
We Share Intestines Read More »
We stand in the overgrown lot, staring at the cluttered remains of the large wooden building in the deep reaches of the West Virginia Mountains. Nature had taken most of the area back, with just a few remaining structures of the old town left. If you didn’t know it, you
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I heard the crowd murmur. Men stood outside, drinking coffee, smoking, laughing, reminiscing. Inside woman fawned over fresh babies and children, gossiped and ate lemon cake. It was as if no one had died. They were happy, pleasantness waved over the packed funeral. Still people continued to pour in. The
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I knew I was going to hate it the moment I walked through that door. The cramped entrance hall was already thick with the musty smell of old carpet. I kicked off my boots and stepped into the living room-bedroom hybrid, taking in the depression that seemed to emanate from
If you are reading this, then I am more than likely dead. I want you to understand something before you read any further. I am not a dramatic person. I am not the kind of man who makes things up or tells tall tales to get attention. I have lived
Memories are fragile, but a photograph lasts forever. That’s why I never went anywhere without my DSLR. I needed to capture everything—the old hardwood floors of our house, the strange, keyhole-shaped pupils of our matching eyes, and the quiet, empty afternoons spent with my home-schooled younger sister Lucia. She was
A Perfect Exposure Read More »
Waylan stood in the dim light of the early morning, his truck parked at the edge of a forgotten dirt road. He bent down and laced up his knee-high snake boots, pulling the strings tight to make sure they fit just right. The boots were tough and made for rough
Read Part One here Read Part Two here “You can’t fight what you can’t see or hear.” – Marion Strickler “For good to have any chance, there needs to be something pure.” – William Rayne “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are
The first tooth arrived in the heart of a pear. Years later, whenever Adeline tried to explain everything that had happened, she always found herself returning to that afternoon, though she knew the true beginning might have been much earlier. Perhaps it began in the graveyard behind her grandmother’s house,
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My attention is occupied by a nature documentary at low volume. It’s late spring and raining lightly outside. The narrator’s reassuring received pronunciation introduces tonight’s protagonist, a rare species of desert-dwelling toad. Greg once told me, after a few Japanese highballs, that participating in the illegal trade of exotic amphibians
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Horror begets horror. Seldom do instances of demoniacal dread possess the common courtesy to inflict themselves upon us in isolation. Rather, they enter our world accompanied by all manner of nighted terrors and hellish abnormalities. What at first appears to be a unique and singular event leads down only to
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Shaleville Police Department Date: July 15th, 2025 Lead Case Investigator: Detective Lance Giles Evidence: A brown leather bound journal with a number of diary entries by one Jamie Trench. Case Notes: In relation to the missing persons file reported by one Sherry Trench, for her son Jamie and his fiancé
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Most people in North Carolina had heard of the Reed mine by 1831. The story of the boy who found a yellow rock the size of a smoothing iron had already strained the patience of preachers and tavern keepers alike. They repeated it often, their voices rising with the part
The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me.The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor had a few bloggers who had taken an
It was summer 1997 when I moved to Evansville, Colorado. It was supposed to be a pit stop, a cheap place along my route, hopefully to make some money to take me the rest of the way to California. I had some friends living in San Francisco that I’d planned
Lakeshia was not sure of the time; she did know that it was very late, and dark according to the window. Rain came in a steady drizzle outside. Droplets which reflected orange colored light pelted the thick glass. The hospital, unusually quiet now. Her window displayed mostly darkness, aside from
Now I’m gonna start this saying I’m not the smartest man in the world. I never did well in school, always getting in trouble of one sort or another. I barely graduated and that was only because there was a teacher who saw some glimmer of hope within me and
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I had not known initially what to make of the pile of mucus and flesh that befell my doorstep as winter arrived. Snow had yet to begin, but cutting gusts of frigid air whalloped my front door to be let in, only allowed to when the mail went too long
The camera didn’t look like something that should still work. Didn’t feel right from the start. When my sister handed me that box on my birthday, I could tell it’d be a pile of garbage. She’d always been a cheapskate, the woman can’t walk past a yard sale without stopping.
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