I’ll never forget the Halloween I moved to Westport. It was a rough year for me—just barely 12—moving in the hottest summer months to a new town in the middle of nowhere. Coming from the big city, the endless fields and forests were definitely new...
It had been a whirlwind romance. Hakamiah Morrison had been head over heels for Delilah from the moment he first laid eyes on her. He was not greatly skilled in the art of seduction, or indeed even conversation, so it took a few tries to...
There were three things everyone could tell you about David. The first, the one everyone noticed immediately, was that he was handsome. Like, Hollywood handsome. He had a roguish charm, too, a disarming smile that lit up his face and made everything all right. Men,...
I'm from a smallish town. In a town like that, you know everyone's business, for better or for worse. You all go to the same school, shop at the same stores, show up on Sundays at the same churches. More or less, anyway. My town had...
It was just after dark, and I was standing by myself at an abandoned bus stop on an almost equally abandoned street, waiting in near pitch-black conditions for a bus that logically would never come. Most of the streetlights didn’t work anymore, and the derelict...
Captain Saul Saline (also spelled Selene, depending on whether he was feeling salty or loony) took a pair of methodical, tottering steps out of the elevator and into the command module of his scrap trawler, the ‘SS Saline’s Solution,’ more informally known as ‘The Grimy...
The Ontological Vacuum Chamber had been intended to create a pocket of absolute Nothing, in the purest, philosophical sense of the term. It was to be completely devoid of not only mass and energy but space and time as well. This would not be like...
“So… you’re trying to cash in on this whole ‘analog horror’ fad? Is that it?” the eccentrically dressed yet curmudgeonly old shopkeeper asked as he disinterestedly pawed through the jumbled collection of off-brand VHS tapes I had brought for him. I couldn’t say that I blamed...
The stink of cigarettes and stale beer enveloped me as I pushed through the door of The Last Call. George Jones crooned from the jukebox and across the crowded room, Sherry Carter balanced a tray of drinks. She weaved between tables, her red hair like...
Nine Months Earlier A computer programmer working at Simitrek, a software development company, typed at his office computer. He looked at the stack of forms on his desk, then looked back at his computer screen. Suddenly, his stomach let out a gurgling noise. He rubbed it...
Dallas skipped a stone as he sat on the bank of a tributary of the Elk River. His aluminum, two-man canoe gently bobbed in the lazy current. His gear already loaded, he waited for his partner. He yawned, stretched his lanky frame, and scratched an...
“Fine day for a trek through the mountains,” Richard said as his fixed stare burned a hole through the mountains that lay ahead. He and his men had just broke camp and were venturing into the unknown. They were following a crude handwritten map from...
We met as we always did when Dr. Victor Monier returned from one of his grand adventures. Our congregation was small yet fulfilling. He called them sabbaticals or short excursions. He never failed to bring back something tangible along with the most unbelievable stories. But...
What awaits, is waiting for us all along. There’s no changing that. The dug bore well had been on the property for 200 years, they said. It had been dry for over half of that, but folks would come by, toss a coin in and make...
I am as accurate as a bullet without discrimination. I always have been. I am the unpretentious sort with calculated intent. I use big words, little words, sometimes no words at all. I am not the type who likes a face-to-face chin wag. Working the...
The night brings its phantasms, its lucid dreams and devilish nightmares, but it can also wake a sleeping man to sheer terror and mounting confusion, where reality is suffocating and the man prays it is a dream. Delusion; that is what it must be. Peace was...
In the place unseen by the living lies a world so deep that time is forgotten and years are not measured. No longer in the terrestrial, in this existence, it doesn’t matter how badly one behaves; as a matter of fact, bad behavior is readily...
Aldous Woolfe was a man of means. He was a doer and never procrastinated at anything. If he was supposed to do something, you could depend on him to do it. He prized his job as an accountant. He always loved numbers because numbers do...
On Gallows Hill, that overlooked Witches Valley where the verdant Whispering Forest spanned the horizon, Delbert Denton lived alone in a very modest house in a cul-de-sac called Snake Den Road. Delbert was a bachelor, never married and seldom, if ever, dated. No woman had...
Evan Burr found himself out late sauntering down the sidewalk on a night where the weather couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted to rain or not. A light drizzle just made being outside without an umbrella an unpleasant stroll. He spotted a bar...
