Horror + Thriller

She stood in the attic, holding the thin blanket to her chest, transfixed by the dark stain on the mattress. It was summer and the heat here under the slanted raw wood beams lowered itself like a cape around her shoulders. High up she heard a buzz, a fly banging against the one window, a […]

Notes made by DX (not real name), while observing Geoffrey Sidwell, during the period of almost 2 years in which Sidwell was resident at the care facility: They asked me to watch him and observe from a distance, and paid me good money. I have to make these notes. I am supposed to just sit […]

My ex-wife’s mother is buried in my backyard. And that’s not the creepy part of the story, I’m just telling you that to add a little context to the rest of my story. So maybe you’ll understand things a little better. It’s perfectly legal in some places to bury people on your property. I was […]

This is a simple story: a path, a predator. Here is your bloodred coat. Here is your basket of treats. You know the rules. Good luck out there. # First: the path. A magnificent slick black double serpent that cuts through the land and races between cleaver-sharp slices made into hills, revealing the skeletons of […]

1. Jenson and Liv had been in the cabin for two months when the first note appeared nailed to a birch limb arcing over the freshwater spring. Don’t drink the water. It was never meant for your throat. The handwriting was almost illegible. At first, Jenson worried detractors had followed him from their previous life, […]

Midnight; there is no more perfect hour to explore an aging, seaside manor such as Rosebrae. The heir has awaited this moment since his and his wife’s arrival that afternoon. (Pity, they did not make it in time to bid his dying uncle farewell.) Now there is purple country night in the windows, and when […]

From: cust_service@NickersonFoods.net To: dphil2003@yahoo.net Dear Ms. Denise Phillips, Thank you for contacting us about your recent purchase of Cheesy Crinkles. We are of course deeply sorry to hear about your unpleasant experience, and we will indeed study the photo you sent. With only the remaining half of what you call the “leg” in the photo, […]

1. You. The room is familiar to You. It is a forty by forty square with ten foot ceilings and dusty corners. A single globe illuminates it in a neon violet. You breathe in the scent of bodies, blood, and bleach. It stings Your nostril. Burns Your nose hairs. You sneeze. Three of the room’s […]

Briar coaxed her beat-up Volvo to reluctant life and headed down Route 116 toward the gas station. Briar’s father had run the gas station before the witches killed him, turned his organs to wind chimes that clacked soft music through the woods. They rolled his hair into hay bales. In the dark pre-dawn, Briar drove past their silhouettes, wheels of grass and sinew moist with dew.

There was a time I thought a great deal about our sink faucet. It was a sorry little thing—rusted in some places, stained in others. It sat in the space opposite our kitchen—the washbasin once white, now brown. It’d been touched with hands smeared with curry or paint or snot—and each interaction had left its scar, marked it in a way that was repulsive and pitiful. At one point the handle had gotten so dirty we started to grip it with a rag cloth when we washed our hands. No one wanted to be the one to do the gripping.

Toe-curling things happen down at The Lake House. Sex, of course, and howling and injuries and a couple of disappearances, drownings, and once a kid hanged himself from the loft banister and another time a handful of teenagers tore out of there claiming that the walls had started bleeding, and no, they weren’t high, why would you even ask that.

Harrison Burke sat on a park bench at midnight with a sack of six Burgerito’s bacon double cheeseburgers and a giant alligator.  Harrison had not been sleeping well lately.  Or at all, really.