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It sits. It waits. It calculates. Watching your every move. Waiting, impatiently. It fumes. It hates. It salivates. Dreaming its terrible dreams. Scheming, contentiously. It strikes. It takes. It dominates. Doing what it does best. Feasting, voraciously. It lures. It baits. It escalates. Mauling a helpless victim. Laughing, fiendishly. It hides. It shakes. It regulates. Changing into something new. Shedding, relentlessly. It sleeps. It breaks. It elevates.

At the outset, I should tell you I’m a thief. Not a classless “smash and grab” guy or a lowly pickpocket. Those require no planning or strategy beyond “move quickly and be ready to run.” I’m a fourth-generation cat burglar. I’m very good at my job. If everything goes right, you don’t notice I’ve been there for weeks. If ever.

by Tristan Mason “I swear I’m dreaming of someone else’s memories,” Samantha told her fiancé on the anniversary of their engagement. “I know I sound crazy. It’s just that—” Caleb took another bite of his burger, leaning over the stainless steel table, and smirked. “You’ve said crazier things.”

The job was simple. It paid well enough. Even if it hadn’t, I would have taken it anyway. After nine months of unemployment, choice stops being a luxury and starts feeling like arrogance. I started on a Tuesday. Odd, I know. They said they were in a rush—something about the previous guy leaving without notice. Apparently the guy just walked out mid-week and never came back. A red flag, sure. But red flags fade when rent is due.

I’ve been a Cleaner at the Association for six years now, and in that time, I’ve seen my fair share of strange and horrifying things. I still can’t decide what’s worse—the half-decayed corpses of creatures that shouldn’t exist or the Wardens, walking around freely, who can transform into absolute monsters in the blink of an eye. But the strangest, most unsettling experience of my life didn’t involve blood or gore. It involved a series of conversations I’ll never forget.

You know, I never thought I’d end up as a glorified janitor for a secret organization. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a firefighter or maybe an astronaut. Something cool. Something heroic. Instead, here I am, scrubbing ichor off walls and hauling mysterious black garbage bags to incinerators. But hey, life takes you places, right? And to all those comments asking, “How’d I got recruited by the Association?” … Well, buckle up. your prayers had been answered.

Do you remember the games you played as a child? Running around outside, making up rules, inventing magic where there was none? Maybe not. Maybe that era was already gone by the time you grew up. But I’m sure a few of you—old farts like me—still remember. Those days were magic. We’d stay out past sunset, climbing trees, chasing each other barefoot through the grass, playing whatever game we could dream up on the spot. But there was one we always came back to.

I’m a trucker. Been one for almost twenty years. I’ve seen a lot of strange things on the road—but nothing like this. It happened during my early years, when I still ran long international routes. The kind that cut through nowhere, threading across mountains and ghost towns. I was somewhere in northern Spain, driving through the Babia y Luna Natural Park, heading toward Portugal.

Halle and I had only been living in Brunswick, Georgia for a few months. We moved here from Tallahassee over the summer and honestly, we missed home. But hey, the area had grown on us. We liked the beaches and the culture. But one place we hadn’t checked out yet was Jekyll Island. Jekyll had a mystique to it to say the least. It had history given that it once served as a vacation destination for many of America’s wealthy elites during The Gilded Age. The opportunity to visit said island arose…

While I was just playing games in my room the lights turned red and these red ghost came out and slowly kill me one by one

Plot: It is the year 1929. Stanley Fontaine, an American writer of mystical horror novels, is forced to leave his city after losing his inspiration. After many years, he decides to travel to Louisiana on the Eastern Express, where the staff is of the highest calibre and nothing seems to foreshadow any misfortune. Yet soon he begins to realise that what we see is not always reality, and that most people have grown accustomed to living in sweet flattery. This very carriage conceals a multitude of…

I'm a Disney fanatic; if you were to ask me something, I'd know it. But sometimes you don't know EVERYTHING Disney does..

After they came to our door, my sibling stopped being a “problem.” That’s what my parents wanted, at least. But all I can remember is them being a normal kid. Yeah, they caused trouble sometimes–but they were young. That’s it. That’s all it was. Nothing that wouldn’t have passed on its own. And that’s exactly what those two people promised when they showed up. They didn’t look strange at first. Just calm. Polite. Like they’d done this a hundred times before. Five minutes, they said.

In June this year, my son came up in one of my lobster pots. He'd been dead nearly seven years. I'll explain that. But I wanted you to have it first, the way I had it, on the deck of my boat at half five on a Sunday morning in June, with the tide going slack in the Narrows and the gulls screaming and the pot coming up over the gunwale dripping, and something in it that wasn't a lobster. Once you know the rest, you'll not hear it the same.

He smelled like blood. I could smell him from a good distance away. The scent lingered in the air well after he’d gone - a coppery tang mixed in with his cheap perfume. It was that smell before I first looked upon his face that told me there was something very wrong with him.

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.