#horror

Welcome to Part 2 of The Book of Broken Trust (Ash). This is a continuation of Chapter 10 through Chapter 20.T Hope you enjoy. ~ The hallway swallowed Hellen's footsteps the moment she turned the corner. The door to the judges' room remained shut, but the air around it fell thinner now, Like the building itself had leaned in to listen. Inside, papers rustled. A chair was scraped. Someone laughed too loudly, trying to force the sound back into something normal.

The legend of the cursed samurai is a legend as old as time. An urban legend that tells the tale of a lone swordsman who is possessed by the ghost of vengeance and doomed to forever travel the nine realms in search of monsters, evil spirits, and unwanted creatures to vanquish with a single slash from his trusted spirit sword.

Bloody and beaten from the journey you’ve had, you finally arrive. A haunting, immense palace of the long fallen kingdom comes into view. Crumbling staircases and ornate statues in every direction you look, each statue represents something, this kingdom… was built on fear. Fear of dying out. As you climb the stairs, you look at each engraving in the cracked stone walls. Horrific experiments displayed, various ways they have tried to impregnate their females, mutilation, torture, mutated…

Ice spread from within my soul. I felt myself falling in silent darkness. Cold... it's so cold... I can't breathe and I can't move... I tried to fight: to open my eyes or recall what happened that rendered me at such a state, only to find my mind equally rigid and frozen. The coldness webbed around my body, squeezing air out of my lungs. It's too cold... My arms reached out in the dark void. Seeking, grappling, pleading for something -- anything, to stop the freeze.

“Peter, can you even see anything up there?” Harry, the oldest yet least mature forest Ranger, said over the two-way. High on my perch in Tower 3, I had a full three hundred sixty degree view of A_____ National Forest that stretched out to the horizon. This was a dumb joke he liked to ask every time I drew the short straw for this position. “Yes, vision is clear. No smoke. No fires. No adverse weather conditions.”

I didn’t want to leave Miller County High School. I didn’t want to leave my friends and essentially leave my whole social life in Colquitt, Georgia behind. My stepdad got a new job in Columbus, Georgia. I guess the pay was great, the new house amazing. So naturally my mom talked my younger brother Jimmy and I into the move. She had a new job as a middle school secretary already lined up too so neither my brother nor I had a choice really.

Every man fears something, whether they want to admit it or not, and I must admit that I myself am still afraid of windows 10 years after what happened to the Surfadelics. I'll recount what happened that night in the most detail possible, just to see if anyone could possibly relate or share a similar experience to what me and my friends had gone through.

The wind howled outside the old farmhouse windows, but the silence inside was far more deafening. Sixteen-year-old Mariah sat frozen on the edge of her bed, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

There was a sound, once, in Black Hollow that wasn’t made by men. Before the pickaxes and drills, before the coal trains and dead canaries before the mountain was stripped naked and hung with wires there was something else. The old ones called it “The Hollowing,” a word whispered by toothless women by firelight. They said it came when the ground was too deep, the hunger too great. Not a cave-in or gas, not even hell. Something worse.

Hi, my name is Michael. This happened a few years ago, on Halloween. It’s something I haven’t told anyone properly. Not like this. Not in full. But I think about it almost every night… and it doesn’t feel like it’s fading. It was supposed to be a normal Halloween.

Hi, my name is Mandy, and ever since I was little, I’ve loved Barbie dolls. Honestly… I still do to this day. One time, when my parents went on vacation and I had to stay home alone, I got really bored. At first it felt nice, but after a while there was nothing to do. So I started browsing the internet, searching for random things, just trying to pass the time.

My cousin told me it happened in a very small village in Mexico, the one our grandfather grew up in. Late one night, a young man was leaving a friend's home. Despite the late hour, he insisted that he could walk home. After all, his own abode was only a mile away. Stepping out into the quiet streets, he started his journey. Breathing in the humid summer air, listening to the buzz of the street lamps mixed with the crickets and his own footsteps on the gravel ground.

“This is still dumb,” says George.  He holds up the stack of note-cards, squints at them through the flicker of the firelight.  “I mean, it’s real dumb.” Our campfire has started to burn low in the gathering dark, and the embers swirl up and away in a sudden gust of autumn wind.  I shiver, and I pause the video I’m recording long enough to pick up another log.

Returning from the Amazon was one of the most exhausting and exhilarating experiences of my life. That trip to South America had been the perfect escape from my suffocating routine as a rising attorney in the United States. After years of hard work, I’d secured a solid position at Marston & Associates, and with a recent promotion offer, life finally seemed to be heading in the right direction. But since I returned, something hasn’t felt right.

Nineteen straight days. That’s how long this storm’s been sitting on top of us. The view outside my duplex is nothing but a grey smear, I can’t even make out the other houses. Roads are flooded, power’s out. It's just canned food and cold water now. They tried having us work from home at first, but that didn’t last long. Paid leave’s not the worst outcome, I guess even torrential storm clouds have silver linings.

There’s no way I could be alone in this. My family wanted to send me to the psych ward when I told them. And I am not delusional enough to believe that if evil existed in this universe or any other, it would only have eyes for me. So I'm throwing this out into the ether of the internet. If you have ever found yourself on the outskirts of the bends of Oklahoma and happened upon a similar place. Please, I’m begging you, share your story as well. I need to know I’m not crazy.

Think about this for a second, when you delete a file, a video, an image, literally anything on the internet, where does it go? Is it technically still out there? Is it in the hands of someone else? Well, I sure as hell found out.

Interviewed: Patient No.00129 [Natalie Ouelette] Interviewer: Dr. August Hooper Patient Notes: Patient No.00129 has been diagnosed with PTSD and Delusional Psychosis by Dr. Meryl Walker.

I usually don’t write my experiences down in journals like this. Typically, I’d prefer to just keep my unsavory memories in my head to let them rot away over time, which makes the pain easier to cope with. However, with everything that has happened to me recently, I’d feel guilty if I just let all those traumatic experiences simply be forgotten about, especially since they involve friends and people so dear to me… So, I shall tell the story of that godforsaken Airbnb and how it led me down a…

Mystery of the Courtyard is a horror and emotional fanfiction by Joseph Arrington (JosephTheSnail), inspired by the Super Mario 64 urban legend “L is Real 2401.” During Bowser’s attack on Peach’s Castle, Luigi is trapped within the courtyard fountain and left behind as Mario continues his journey to save the princess. Presumed missing for decades, Luigi survives in silence until his body finally gives out, binding his spirit to the fountain itself.