#creatures

I wake up feeling a small pain on my upper back. It’s tiny, but noticeable. I know what to expect now. It’s going to be yet another small scratch that seemingly came out of nowhere. My logical mind tells me that it was only me scratching my back while asleep, or my skin just being too sensitive for the sheets and getting cut. I believe my mind, but I still have an eerie feeling about these small scratches. I get up, hobbling over to my bathroom door, sliding it open, hopping up on the counter,…

Your Majesty, I do not mean to interrupt. I do know that today is a day of celebration. That this feast you have thrown has been in my honor. But I bid you give me the floor. For there is no cause for celebration. You celebrate today for the death of a beast, and yet I aim to make amends. For you see, the beast lives on. I can see by the look on your face that you are confused…and perhaps you feel you are owed an explanation. If it pleases Your Majesty, I will give you just that.

You take the pills to keep them away. That’s what we were told when we were first brought down here--down through the sterile white halls with their flickering fluorescent lights, and our small, Spartan cells. Down into the nightmare. Why would we agree to this?

The farm was left to him after his mother passed away five years ago. He was still in Afghanistan however, so he was unable to make it to the funeral. When he returned back home a year after his mother’s death, there was nobody to meet him at the airport; but Derby Matthews didn’t mind. He never did. Retired now, with fifteen years of military service as a field surgeon under his belt, Derby tucked himself away on the large, lonely farm for what he assumed would be the rest of his life.

Death comes for us all. The intricate design of Death's web spares no one. It is the inevitable reality we all face someday, some sooner than others. But not all of us are unwary of our demise. Not all of us are fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance, unaware of our own mortality. But once you are caught in the web, like a hapless fly watching as a spider descends upon it, you will see how finite life is. For as easy as life is granted, it can just as easily be taken away.

The whistle is considered one of the happiest sounds on earth by many. I'm not one of those people. I hate the sound of whistling. Another thing I hate is the tune of "Oh, Susanna." I can't bare to hear the two combined. Not after that night.

The digital clock read 3:15 am. I was lying awake, restless, in my bed. There was nothing I disliked more than a long, dreary, and silent night. I sighed, recalling that the nights prior to this one shared a common dullness. I adjusted the sheets in an attempt to cover my exposed feet from the biting cold that the night brought with it. Everything was pretty mundane, until I heard a knock in my room.

“I remember when you were just a little girl. Your mother and I tried our best to give you a home where you couldn’t be hurt, since we lived in a bit of a… shady part of town. When you were just a toddler, you would always follow me around the house with that cute little smile of yours, showing me that you still loved me, even after what I had done to the family. Maybe you didn’t know that I divorced your mother and took custody of you because of your undeveloped brain. No, a child naturally…

It was a cold winters afternoon, soft flurries of snow were gathering on the boys window sill, much of it piling in a clump on his timbered bedroom floor, unfortunately his window panes, which were designed to keep him from catching a flu, had been shattered.

Ever had a fear of monsters under your bed? Like you could have sworn you saw what seemed to be a shadow moving down there, or freaked out when you heard a noise under the bed and was scared to look?

"So tell me Mr. Harold, what ha-.." "M-Marcus is fine.." The psychologist was interrupted by the shaken man in the seat before him. He was shaking, head pointed towards the floor, staring into space with wide eyes as his clammy sweaty palms were clasped together tightly. "Ok, Marcus then. Can you tell me what happened on the night of April 23rd, 2014?" The psychologist finished his sentence and fixed his gaze on Marcus. Studying his body language.

Min-Jun awoke, gasping for air as he flailed in the shallow water. His vision blurred by the salt water, he flung himself ashore, and lay face first in the sand. He swabbed away the water from his eyes and attempted to open them. His eyelids fluttered until he finally was able to keep them pried. Min-Jun looked around at his surroundings.

They are here, banging on doors, windows, pipes, walls, vents. They have nowhere else to go, no one else to torture, their only way left to get to me is to torture me slowly, until I cannot wait for death to release me, as I am sure they will do. I have very little time to type this, so let me explain as quickly as possible.

When Felix Agnus put up the life-sized shrouded bronze statue of a grieving angel, seated on a pedestal, in the Agnus family plot in the Druid Ridge Cemetery, he had no idea what he had started. The statue was a rather eerie figure by day, frozen in a moment of grief and terrible pain. At night, the figure was almost unbelievably creepy; the shroud over its head obscuring the face until you were up close to it. There was a living air about the grieving angel, as if its arms could really reach…

If you venture deep into the forests of the Appalachian Mountains, you must wear tight-fitting clothes at all times. Make sure that your pant legs are tucked into your socks, and be sure to wear heavy boots. This is very important. Because what many don't know, is that there is something stocking these mountains. A creature with a voracious appetite, for human flesh. They hide all around you; in bushes, under rocks, or in the branches of tall trees. Their dark eyes leer out from under their…

I've been working at a police station in Massachussets for the past ten years. No, I'm not an officer but rather a First Responder. It's...not such a big job, or at least to me anyway, because my family lives in mid-sized city. Average 20,000 people. The most important calls I get include robberies and house fires. And then there are the pranks that teenagers play on Halloween and such like that. I'm recording all of this. The reason why is because I'm scared like hell. Still scared.

I was so happy to get this computer. For the last three years I’ve been on a laptop. Long story, boring, but let’s just say a fire took out my desktop and half the apartment complex I lived in while I was at school, and the insurance money would only cover a laptop.

In the summer of 1996, the town of Newport Bay was struck by an odd and gristly phenomenon. Earlier that year, the employees of a small animal shelter had been found mauled and eaten, by what appeared to be a rather large animal. The location and severity of the wounds added to the already powerful feelings of dread, fear and paranoia the residents were experiencing. Being eaten alive is often thought to be one of the worst ways to go, and while everyone has their own opinions on the worst ways…

People always have pondered what another intelligent being would be like. They’ve always theorized that these beings would be light years away and that us, humans, would be dead a very long time before we ever made contact with them. Other people say that they have already met them after being abducted and experimented on. Then some will say that we are the only intelligent being there are or ever will be. Well, I can say one thing for sure and that’s no one was right. We were all so very wrong…

The sun was dancing on the horizon, shadows lengthening and the light beginning to fade. Inside the pure white room, only a table and two steel chairs furnishing it, stood a girl no older than sixteen in a shirt and pants the same hue as the room.