Category: Short Fiction
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“Three… Two… One… Click. The motion sensor light above the garage was a blessing and a curse. It was sensitive, too sensitive. A moth could trigger it, flooding the driveway with harsh, clinical LED whiteness for exactly ten seconds before plunging the world back into pitch black. But tonight, it wasn’t a moth.”
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“Inside the sealed case, the Great Horned Owl was watching him. Its head was turned a full ninety degrees, and condensation was trickling down the pane… but it wasn’t on the outside. It was on the inside.”
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“I thought I was safe. I thought if I kept the stories centered on the Rock and the bay, the horror would stay within the city limits. I was naive. Last night, I took a drive north… and I realized that I haven’t finished the story. Or maybe, the story isn’t finished with me. The…
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“I thought I was the creator. I thought I was writing horror stories about the fog in Morro Bay. But tonight, during a storm without rain, a blue flash of lightning revealed a tall, thin shadow standing in my living room. And it wasn’t there to scare me. It was there to edit.”
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“They think I am the nightmare. They think I am the reason the hallway temperature drops twenty degrees at 3:00 AM. They are wrong. I am not the nightmare. I am the shield. For forty years, I have been the only thing standing between this family and the Thing that lives in the crawlspace. But…
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“I’ve always been a sucker for a cliché. ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ But anyone who lives on the Central Coast knows we don’t get thunderstorms. Not really. So when the sky over Morro Bay lit up tonight with a blinding, cold electric-cyan light, I knew it wasn’t weather. The ground was bone…
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Gus kept his eyes squeezed shut, praying that the heavy, cool weight draped across his ankles was just a piece of wet driftwood. He lay perfectly still on the sand. The shipwreck had left him battered, salt-crusted, and exhausted, but it was the sound that kept him paralyzed. It wasn’t the roar of the ocean.…
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His hands shot out, pressing against smooth, cool timber. A box. Claustrophobia washed over him, stealing his breath. He thrashed, elbows banging against the confines. A coffin. His heart hammered against his ribs like a caged animal. Then, a presence. His hand brushed something cold and unyielding. Not wood. He recoiled, choking back a cry,…
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I am Malaphis. I am the Shadow in the Corner, the Eater of Bad Dreams, the thing that has made a thousand children wet their beds in terror. I have feasted on the adrenaline of the innocent for three centuries. I have driven nannies to madness and forced families to move across oceans. But I…