#thriller

I was in the schoolyard when, suddenly, my friend Christopher Satin or as i call him, Chris, told me: "Damian, I have something to tell you. I’ve known you since we were little, so I wanted you to be the first person I told." Chris was always one for jokes; his personality matched his appearance—a skinny, 5'7 guy with curly, shoulder-length blonde hair. Seeing him look so serious worried me; he’s usually terrible at acting serious, so I had a feeling he was probably not faking it.

For three days after I found the rabbit, nothing else had happened. That frightened me more than the noises had. The woods had gone quiet. Not truly quiet. The birds still called in the mornings. Cicadas screamed from the trees in the afternoon. At night, the frogs took over the creek. But the other sounds stopped. No howls. Not footsteps beneath my window. No knocking against the walls. Nothing watched from the pasture either. Nothing moved in the tree line.

By the end of our first week, father had stopped talking about Boston. That was how I knew he was happy. Every morning he woke before sunrise, dressed without lighting a lamp, and went outside with an axe over one shoulder. By breakfast, he had already split enough wood to last us for several days. He repaired the barn roof. He cleared the weeds from the garden for mother. He even found an old plow beneath a pile of rotten boards and spent the better part of two days repairing it.

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.

I used to think the worst part of my job was the blood. The stink of it, thick and metallic, clinging to my clothes, clogging my nostrils. It soaks into everything, wood, concrete, carpet, skin. You scrub it off, bleach the scene, pretend nothing ever happened. But doesn’t lie. It leaves stains, no matter how hard you try to erase them. It tells a story, even when no one don't want to listen. Yet, it's not the worst part, the worst it 's the silence.

I was seventeen years old when my father took us out of Boston. I loved the idea! Or at least I thought I would. For many years afterward, whenever someone asked where the trouble began, I told them it began in those mountains. That wasn’t true… It began long before we saw them.

The release wing door buzzed before it opened. There was no ceremony to it. No applause. No relief. Just a metal door that opened and closed without emotion. Daniel Danvers stood beside his car in the visitor lot, cigarette balanced between his fingers, smoke unraveling into the cloudy afternoon sky. The gravel shifted under his shoes when he adjusted his stance. He checked his phone again. No new messages from Alexander.

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 always hated my job for one simple, yet insurmountable reason: nothing ever happens. Imagine spending nine hours. NINE freaking hours. Locked inside a concrete bunker, listening to the universe breathe into your head through an oversized pair of headphones. The higher-ups like to pretend this is some kind of essential service. That my job is somehow paramount to the advancement of the human race. It isn't.

Mr. Pike arrived shortly after noon. I knew it was him before father said anything. There was something about the way the man approached the house that made him uneasy. Most visitors, as in would imagine, would look towards the farmhouse first. Not Pike. He looked straight to the woods. He came up the road in a dark green truck that coughed smoke behind it and rattled like loose bones. The truck stopped near the barn, but Pike didn’t immediately get out of the truck.

“Hey y’all, it’s Red, White, and Ruin here with a new ghostbox urban exploration for you to watch from the safety of your home. Lucky you! Today, we’re walking through the dead Cherry Hill Mall. Let’s take a look, huh?” I said in my chipper announcer voice. I hit stop on the video I was recording and sighed. Being this perky all the time was exhausting. I sighed, took in my surroundings, and frowned. “Jesus, what a dump.”

They tell you nostalgia is a warm blanket. They lie. Nostalgia is a rotting canvas, and the paint never quite dried.

Hi, I’m Zack, and I’m going to share my experiences with Carbon, a high-tech security lab. Though I’m sure you know me for my experience as a security guard watching over an abandoned Disney park that had lured children to their demise. I had never wanted to talk about any of my other experiences before, but now that I’ve said my first one, I think it’s time for me to explain.

It's been a week since my wife died, and it was my fault—all of it. I still remember that day, detail for detail: the sound of metal and nature meeting, the smell of gasoline and pine needles meshing together, and the revolting taste of iron that danced on my tongue. I survived for one reason, a sickening reason: at the time of the crash, I was inebriated. As for my wife... she died on impact. I tried everything, pleading and even praying to God that she wasn't dead; I guess God ignored my…

The first thing you notice isn't the cold or the smell of damp concrete it’s the silence. When you finally blink your eyes open, the world is a blur of grey shadows and a single, flickering lightbulb hanging from a low ceiling. Your wrists ache, and when you try to reach for your phone, the heavy rattle of a steel chain snaps you into a cold reality. You aren't in your bedroom. You’re in a basement clean, organized, but windowless. There’s a plate of your favorite food sitting on a small wooden…

“Hey sweetie, are you gonna open your eyes for me now?” I heard his voice. It was all sweet and nice, making my stomach feel sick. His hands were on my shoulder, squeezing slightly, shaking them side to side. I could feel a groan pass my lips and my eyes struggled to unstick themselves. “Yeah! There we go, I'm sorry about that special candy, I guess you're just a little bit smaller than the dose is made for.” He laughed, it's a quiet, airy laugh, making my stomach tighten again. I blinked,…

"Vincent, I got a job for you!" someone shouted from the other side of the bathroom door. "For me!? Can't you give it to someone else!?" "They asked for you, it seems to be one of your clients!" "Damn it, I want to go on vacation for once." His colleagues started to laugh. "That's the downside of being famous in the business" yelled one of them over the showers noise.

Tap tap tap. James peels his gritty eyelids back and stares up at the blank ceiling. He considers putting something up there. A poster maybe, like he had as a child. It would make sense, given how much time he spends staring at the ceiling above his bed. Sleepless nights, bed rotting, and the three AM wake up call from some animal tapping its way through the walls.

There was this tiny indie horror movie that basically nobody had seen. I don't even remember how we found it. Maybe TikTok, or maybe someone on Reddit recommended it. It had one of those titles that sounded way cooler after you finished watching it than before, and it looked like it had a budget of maybe twenty dollars. Somehow it still worked. It wasn't really scary in the traditional sense. There weren't any monsters or cheap jump scares. It was just... unsettling.

I still can’t sleep with the basement door shut. Even three years later, every time the house settles, I find myself staring at the handle, half-expecting it to slowly turn.