Hiking has always been a hobby of mine. Every year I try to find new trails, seemingly untouched by man. I’ll travel across the globe in search of the best, most scenic views you can imagine. Bangladesh, Fiji, and the alpines are some of the...
Emery let out an aching groan as she slowly ebbed back into consciousness. Squinting in the near-total darkness and coughing up dust, she scrambled to get some sense of where she was and what had happened. The sharp, uneven edges of shattered bricks and splintered...
I was just fifteen years old when I learned monsters were real. That day, a Tuesday, I recall, I was a little later than usual coming home from school, on account of joining the Science Club. I’d just recently watched Donnie Darko for the first time,...
When you’re bad, you get thrown in jail. When you’re really bad, you get sent to prison. When you’re unspeakably bad, you get sent to maximum security and they throw away the key. When you’re the devil incarnate, well, nobody really knows what happens to you. Sometimes it’s...
I received the following email from Stewart, an old friend I haven't spoken to in years. At first I thought some spammer had gotten a hold of his address book. Within a few sentences, however, I knew it was written by Stewart himself. A long...
It was late when I saw the creature, running flat out down the middle of a country highway somewhere up in the Alleghenies. I had gotten off the interstate. Hitchhiking on the four lanes was illegal. Last thing I needed was to get myself picked...
I saw something back in 1990 that has haunted me ever since. We were a Boy Scout troop of sixteen boys between the ages of 13 and 17, going on a two-day hike along a trail that ran sixty miles from Richmond to Marion in Indiana....
I was always told not to look out a window at night, because you might not like what’s looking back at you. They call this an “old wives’ tale” or something like that, but for me, it was just a bunch of silly crap, so...
My family lived in Vermont for a number of years, in a small town called Northfield, south of Montpelier. There’s a local legend in Northfield, of a thing known as the Pigman. The story has multiple versions, as most do, but there are some parts that...
When you’re a teenager, everything is unfair. You can’t do this, you can’t go out, TV has to be off, and people just don’t understand how tough life can get. My parents always say I have no idea what “tough” is. But I think I do...
I remember each dream quite vividly. They were the kind you have where everything seems so real that when you wake up, you struggle to differentiate between the waking world and the dream world. The first night, I woke up and the sun had already risen....
An illusion it will be, so large, so vast, it will escape their perception. Those who will see it will be thought of as insane. We will create separate fronts to prevent them from seeing the connection between us. We will behave as if we are...
You think good and evil don’t exist? That ain’t true. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve even seen the Devil. Our family was small; just my parents, my older brother Jacob, and me. Ma always doted on me, being the baby and all, much...
Jessie wondered if she and her brother would have more in common if they had been identical twins. The differences didn’t surface unless you spent several days watching them. Minus the lack of identical faces, they seemed to have the same bond that every other pair...
It is the night of Bacchanalia, and we are heading to the celebration. The woods are dense, but the path has been clearly marked with torches leading to the glade. We arrive – I, my wife, and our four children – dressed gaily in warm...
Our beautiful Kathryn, My life was just about perfect, as close to it as it could be without actually being so. I was young, with a promising career ahead of me, the love of my life by my side, the whole world at my fingertips. I...
Grace Merritt almost choked to death on a Saturday morning, roughly 2 a.m. She awoke to a burning anger in her stomach, a sharp twisting feeling that felt as though her innards were looping into bloody knots. Ignoring it and falling back to sleep was...
My upbringing was about as traditional as an upbringing gets. My parents were married, I had a younger sister, we lived in a nice suburban neighborhood, I had friends at school, all the trappings of a normal, healthy childhood. But there was one thing. One rule. One rule...
The terrible thing happened at night—as most terrible things do. While I click-clicked away at my home job as a transcriptionist, I’d often watch the boys playing in the backyard. They’d be at it for hours, acting out some scene with foam swords and plastic guns,...
I’ve been here since I was two years old, and by all accounts, I had a normal upbringing. That’s owed to the fact that this is an altogether normal place. The people work in other nearby towns or craft wares here that they sell in...
