Welcome to

Most kids enjoy Christmas the most. Not me. Maybe it’s because my family is poor, and we can’t afford good presents for each other. My favorite holiday is Halloween. Not only can I dress up as my favorite scary movie character, but I get free candy out of it. It’s a double win.

If you've ever done a walking tour of the Derry Walls, there's a fair chance I've told you about the fetch.

The wind is cold. The late autumn night wind drilled through the battered glass window of the small eatery, scraping against faces with a dull, lingering ache. The diner's old incandescent bulb flickered erratically. Its light fell upon two bowls of steaming rice on the table, and also onto the bowed head of the student. No one knew that this seemingly silent high schooler, always wearing a washed-out school uniform, was already rotten to the core.

Not by much. You would not notice it walking through. You would notice it if you were sent to fetch something and had to count the doors, and the count came out wrong, and you stood there with your hand on the light switch, doing it again. Four doors on the left. Three on the right. The hallway had been built in 1962 and there had never been a fourth door on the right. My mother said this the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times. The sound came from that wall.

The note was folded into eighths, small enough to sit in a coin pocket, and it was in the shirt I had just hung up. I found it because I do a stupid thing: I check pockets twice. My mother did it. Now I do it, and the second check has never once caught anything. That night it caught a note in my own handwriting. Do not take the 7:40. Wait for the 8:05.

The widow, Laura, walked into the garden. Cracked Stone walls surrounded her, their green vines slithering toward bushes plump with blood-red berries. At the center of the garden stood a rectangular stone basin shaped like an angel. It knelt before the pool as if to deliver water from its mouth. Yet what flowed was bleak black water, filled with sticks and the smal bodies of dying insects. When she was younger, she remembered tossing coins and watching them sink into the water's darkness.…

Amitriptyline, 25 mg. Her dose. Her name on the label, spelled the way only she spelled it, with the small accent she'd added at the DMV and never let anyone drop. I hadn't refilled anything. I hadn't opened the app since the funeral. But the receipt said the order was placed five days ago, from my account, and the pickup was authorized with a short code I did not remember choosing.

“HELP!” I yell, at least I believe I’m yelling, the feeling of my skin bubbling, is it bubbling… I don’t know. I can feel it, but I don’t know if it is what I think it is. I am or at least what I believe I am… I don’t know. It’s cold wait what does cold feel like again sigh I think I sighed. My body grows old and decayed, my flesh turning a colour I cannot perceive, my hair falling out of my grotesque scalp or what’s left of it. He… no, IT did this. My senses have been stripped away from me, I…

There is a level of great genius one may reach that far surpasses that of burning madness. There is madness, and there is animo. In a frigid, foreboding cave, a hypogeum of petrified stillness, disguised carefully as a luxury property, hidden somewhere within deep glacial valleys of scenic Swiss mountains, you can find a mechanical man, with a mechanical plan.

“Be one second smarter!” whispered Kippy-Kip to the viewers, leaning in. His face filled the entire screen. After licking the camera lens and leaving it drenched in slobber, Kippy-Kip jumped backward three times, stepping away and leaving the rest of his crew to show off and do their juggling tricks.

There's a name tattooed on the inside of my left wrist.

I was eleven years old when it happened. It was Halloween night, and my parents had gone out with my aunt to a party across town, planning to stay overnight at a hotel and return the next afternoon. That left me at home with my seventeen-year-old sister, Jessie, and our older cousin, Hannah. I absolutely adored Hannah; she was the fun, cool older cousin who always brought us treats and took us on adventures.

"What are you gazing at...? What's there outside the window...?" "Outside the window...? Nothing." "Nothing? Looking at nothing?" "It's her... my... my ghostly girl." Beloved women... They, like a sudden downpour, come, turn you into themselves, and vanish… leaving you… leaving you alone with your own shadow called sorrow.

The email from Becca arrived at 3:14 AM, blinking on the screen like a dying pulse. It contained a single, corrupted video file and a trembling plea: “My little sister Kaylee went missing after she found that tape. Please... find her. Don't let them put her to sleep.”

In shadows of October dawn Was when the sickness came Foul breath of death wanton Denizens plagued in blain . I saw from high window As death drew nigh in tow Courier sent afar Then close my door ajar . As the leaves grew redder And the days grew dire My flock grew fettered Flayed upon the pyre . Cast in glow of dying wick I, too, could feel the sick Solitude in this shadowy hour Locked away inside this tower . Rolling past autumn plains Haze of grey sinks low

"Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?" "Someone's in my house." A woman, maybe fifty, steady. "In the hallway. I can hear him breathing." I ask for the address and she gives it, slow and clear, and I type it into the field, and the field does something it has never once done: it stops me. The cursor goes red before I finish. A note unfolds under the line, the way the system writes when it's telling you something is over. PREMISES LOST. FIRE. 2019. NO SURVIVORS.

We moved in on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had learned the house repeated me. Not everything. It was selective, like a bad line that only keeps the important words. I would be at the sink and hear, from the landing above, my own voice at low volume, finishing a sentence I had not started. The first time I thought it was a phone, a radio, a neighbour's television bleeding through the wall. We had no neighbours. The house was the last on the road and the woods did the rest.

The listing said SLEEPS 2 in capitals, the way you write a warning before you understand it. Mira found the cabin. Four hours north, at the end of a gravel road that gave up and became a suggestion for the last half mile. No neighbours in any direction. A woodstove, a hand pump over the sink, and two mugs on the shelf. Two chairs at the table. Two plates, two forks, two towels folded to the same width. Two of everything, arranged like an answer to a question nobody had asked.

I I wished it with my whole being, which is to say I wished it with something I didn't know yet was a cage. Let me tell you about Delia first. Not because she's the main point—she isn't—but because you need to understand my obsession. Delia is the kind of pretty that makes pretty people feel plain. She wakes up, and her hair is already in order. Her laugh hypnotizes you and puts you in a trance. People lean toward her as plants do toward light, without even knowing it.

"The last few nurses we've hired have all flaked on me," Jim said with an exhausted sigh. "Please tell me you don't plan on flaking."