Category: Horror

All Stories, Horror

Danny by David Henson

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After a groan of a day at work, Harmon Donovan riffles through the musty comic books he salvaged from his mother’s estate sale. He feels something under the stack. A beak? Of course—Danny. Harmon turns the toy over in his hands. About six inches tall, the wooden duck stands upright. Harmon traces his finger down the head where the blue-green paint is chipped and fading. The plaything transports him to simpler times. Before his boss, Mr. Murphy. Before—

“Harmon, are you going to mow the lawn or not?” His wife’s sharp voice from downstairs pops his daydream.

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All Stories, Horror, Short Fiction

By The Colour of Our Coat Shall You Know Us By J.S. Watts

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Where to begin? ‘Where’ being the significant word.

Some places seem to have been created to be a home for the disconcerting and unknowable. Dartmoor was the natural petri dish for The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is so… elemental. The dirty, dark and narrow alleys of Victorian London’s East End spawned Brother Jack, whoever he was, or might still be. But other places are so mundane you can’t imagine anything beyond the norm happening there.

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All Stories, Horror

Solaritude by Robert Reece

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Purification through fire. This was the last thought in a long, meditative contemplation of methods to ease the pain.  Ideas burned consuming. Golden aureole ablaze, she would be light cutting through prosaic night stupor.  Simple, pure. A luminous non-entity. She remembered the photo her father took of her on her 7th birthday, the candlelight reflecting in her mossy eyes. He said they looked like copper pennies. He left 3 weeks later. Why didn’t he follow that melancholy flame back home like a meager lighthouse? Maybe she was supposed to trudge after him into the vacant nightness instead.

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All Stories, Historical, Horror

Ends by Matthew Roy Davey

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The cart creaks, pitches and yaws. A whip cracks up ahead. Four women sit on the floorboards, grey uniforms muddied. Sitting is not an act of mercy, they cannot stand without falling, their hands bound behind their backs. Ruth glances at the other women, but they are all within themselves, eyes unfocused. They have spent many hours together: on duty, in the mess, in the barracks, have shared laughter, secrets, tears. Now they are bloodied, bruised.

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All Stories, Horror

Hades Lounge by Jacob Otira    

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Part I:

HELLS KITCHEN

An arachnid-type beast roasts portions of sin-marinated corpses from inside a furnace in hell. Its tentacles slither along the hallways that connect Hell’s kitchen to the abyss, while holding onto non-silver platters filled with well-done souls for beings of the underworld to feast on.

As a passerby behemoth helps itself to a portion of sin-glazed appetizers, an ascetic’s essence is delivered as an array of gourmet selections to the holiest orders in Hades’ lounge. The martyr’s soul bears too much essence for Beelzebub and his priests, and so most of it is served to visiting heathens from heaven.

It’s here in Hades’ lounge where all energies made manifest by man’s thought, word, and emotion are fed to the holiest of deities after death—to again manifest life through rebirth.

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All Stories, Horror

Aeris by Zachary Schwartz

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They broke through the jungle canopy at midmorning, damp with sweat and soft declarations of wonder. The jungle made everything softer. The air, the light. Even thoughts, if left untethered long enough. The air was thick with that sweet, vegetal stillness that only comes miles from roads, wires, and clocks. Every breath tasted green.

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All Stories, Horror

Beetles by Brandon McWeeney

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The beetles live in the stump out back, festering beneath the rotting remnants of an old dule tree. I call them, and they rise—the black coil of death—thousands of them climbing up, up, up and over each other, hissing and clicking, putting her together like sentient fog. Black fog. Only sometimes, especially when they’re hungry, they don’t quite get her shape right; I appreciate their efforts and reward them dearly, but when they get her wrong, I want to scream.

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All Stories, Horror

The Breather by Rebecca Petty

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Evelyn stared out the kitchen window willing herself to ignore the breathing coming from the living room.  It was a wet labored breathing. She wiped the last dish and set it in the rack. Another breath was pulled from the lungs in the other room.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

Where the Dead Live by Jennifer Maloney

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My mother lives in the next town over, but she’s dead. My dead father lives with her.

Their house is small, and silent because it’s empty. The dead are quiet for the most part, although sometimes there is a sound like weeping in the bedroom and once the bathroom door slammed so hard it cracked and then there was a hole in it big enough to put your foot through, but it’s the just the wind, murmurs my mother, the same wind that skirls along her teeth, hissing through the dark cavern of her yawning jaw, a wind that bobbles my father’s empty skull and makes it nod along in agreement.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Horror

After Lloyd by Christopher J. Ananias

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Disturbing content – see tags at the bottom of the page.

Gil doesn’t talk, just sits there drawing demons. Mr. Ny clapped his erasers together and called Gil to the blackboard for one of his impossible Geometry theorems. Gil snatched up the chalk, like a pissed-off Picasso, and made quick hard chalk-chalk marks, and it was solved. The last bell rang and the mad dash.

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