Part I The night the boys broke into the Sanctuary, the Covenant bells had barely stopped ringing. Sherman Cantrell sat through the last of the evening prayers with his head bowed and his chest aching, listening to Elder Lamont Havel drone through the closing litany. The old...
Part I Sara didn’t realize how much of the town was gone until she hit Main Street and found more plywood than glass. The old diner was a vape shop now. The hardware store her mother used to drag her through on Saturdays stood empty, windows painted...
Part I Dana Quill first heard the name in a voicemail that cut out halfway through. “The Pit,” the caller said, his voice low and ragged. “They’re not doing cage fights down there. They’re… growing things. If you want a story, this is it. But don’t come...
Part I Shawna Coleman rode home from her own wedding with the bouquet in her lap like contraband. The car’s interior still smelled faintly of hair spray and champagne. A few stray grains of rice clung to the fabric of her dress. Drew drove one-handed, his tie...
Part I Dr. Meredith Rowan preferred to schedule new patients at the start of the week, when her mind felt the cleanest. Mondays had a crispness to them, a sense that the slate had been rinsed overnight. By Thursday, the edges often blurred. Trauma work could...
Part I Stephen Hampton didn’t expect to find himself back in uniform, even part-time, but his phone began vibrating on the kitchen counter just after six in the morning. He recognized the number—Patricia Simmons rarely called him outside of holidays or bad news—and answered before the...
Part I Christian Ward had driven into strange towns before, but Hollow Creek greeted him with a kind of quiet that suggested the place was thinking. The highway wound through the Appalachian foothills in a series of broad, predictable curves until the last stretch, where the...
It was supposed to be the summer that finally gave him a chance at feeling normal. In 1984, sixteen-year-old Wyatt is sent to Camp Chattahoochee—an escape from the state home, from cruelty, from the ghosts of the family who abandoned him. Instead, he finds first...
Samantha Barkley has spent years fighting to keep her home bakery—and her family—from collapsing under the weight of impossible expectations. When a vindictive client destroys her reputation overnight, Sam finds herself desperate, exhausted, and cracking under pressure. Then a stranger tells her about someone called...
Part I I work nights at our old middle school. It’s a small place—two floors, one gym, a cafeteria that still smells vaguely like canned green beans even when it’s spotless. Budget cuts mean the day crew leaves at five and I handle the late shift...
Part I The tires hissed over gravel as Alexis Kidd turned off the county road and followed a winding lane that sloped toward the lake. The air cooled the deeper she went into the trees. A thin mist hung in the birches like gauze, and the...
There was a time when I could still tell the difference between work and distraction. Now, they’re the same thing. Lines of code, endless and sterile, fill the hours I used to spend sleeping. The glow of my monitors paints the apartment in perpetual dusk. Dust...
I don’t post here often, and when I do, it’s usually dumb stuff—neighbor drama, weird noises in the old building, that kind of thing. This one isn’t that. I’ve been sitting on it for a few days, trying to talk myself out of even typing...
“Farewell, happy fields, where Joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors, hail!” — John Milton, Paradise Lost Standing under the glow of a flickering streetlight, John Avery’s hands shook as he tried and failed to light the cigarette they held. With a mumbled curse, the stubborn smoke finally caught,...
The…the dark. God, so dark. Can’t feel, can’t think, can’t… I’m floating in the black. No, not floating. There’s something under my feet. My God, there’s nothing here but me. Am I dying? Am I…dead? Can I move? I lift my hands in front of me. Don’t want to...
When insurance assessor Logan Pritchard takes a detour into a small Wisconsin park, he expects nothing more than a quiet evening walk before heading back to his motel. But when a ranger warns him to stay off Wolf Path after dark, curiosity wins over caution—and...
When freelance designer Marshall Blake rents an old farmhouse outside Kubrick Creek, he expects peace, quiet, and time to rebuild his life. What he gets instead are sleepless nights, phantom words written in a stranger’s hand, and the growing sense that something buried beneath his...
Part I The sky over the Pacific was clear that night—clear enough that the control tower at Haneda could see the last blinking lights of Flight 717 as it climbed to cruising altitude. A Boeing 747, call sign N734PA, bound for Los Angeles. 324 passengers, 17...
Ma was a simple woman and I don’t think she would’ve minded the plain wooden cross we put up on her grave a year ago. It was just a two-by-four that we had laying around that we split and nailed back together to make the...
“Hot Damn!” John said looking out of my second floor window, eyeing my next door neighbor. My mother and I had recently moved here about six months ago. John and I were in the same high school Senior class and quickly became best friends. We...
