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Weekly Contest #379
Meg first noticed the man in the beige trench coat outside the grocery store. He was standing beside a shopping cart, pretending to read the nutritional information on a can of creamed corn. He had been staring at her for approximately forty-seven seconds. Meg knew this because she had counted. She was very good at counting suspicious things. She worked in municipal records, where suspicious things were generally limited to missing parking permits, improperly filed marriage certificates, and the occasional complaint about a neighbor's aggres...
Dexter kept a jar of buttons on his windowsill. There were wooden buttons, pearl buttons, brass buttons, and one particularly ugly green button that looked as though it had been stolen from a military uniform. He had collected them over the years, though he couldn't remember why he had started. Every morning, he opened the curtains, dusted the jar, and counted the buttons. There were always 217. He knew because he had counted them every day for eleven years. Sometimes, when the afternoon sunlight passed through the glass, the buttons cast ti...
The first thing I noticed was the silence. Not the ordinary silence that settles over the forest when snow falls or when the owls finish hunting. This was different. It was a silence that arrived with a strange orange glow beyond the trees, followed by a deep, distant thunder that made the earth tremble beneath my paws. I was sleeping beneath the roots of an old pine when the noise came. The birds erupted first. Hundreds of them, bursting from the branches in a frantic storm of wings. Rabbits scattered through the undergrowth. Somewhere near...
Mimi had a drawer in her kitchen dedicated entirely to things she couldn't forgive. It wasn't an actual drawer labeled Things I Can't Forgive. She wasn't completely unreasonable. It was the third drawer beneath her silverware organizer, the one that stuck whenever the humidity climbed above sixty percent. Inside were birthday cards, old photographs, newspaper clippings, a broken porcelain bird, a Christmas ornament shaped like a pear, and several envelopes containing letters she had never sent. There was also a handwritten list. Mimi called ...
Thomas Wong had not slept properly in forty-three days. He knew because he had started keeping track. At first, the sleeplessness had been an inconvenience. A few restless nights, some sweating, and the occasional sensation that someone was whispering from the other side of his bedroom wall. He blamed stress. Then came the nightmares, followed by the headaches, followed by the peculiar sensation that his body was no longer entirely his own. Now, sleep was something he feared. He sat on the edge of his bed in the psychiatric institution, star...
Weekly Contest #378
The first mistake Mirabelle made was hiring a medium who advertised on the back of a carpet-cleaning coupon. The second was inviting her sister. The third was asking the dead a question they were never meant to answer. It had been eleven months since Mirabelle buried her husband, Thomas. Eleven months since the accident. Eleven months since a police officer appeared on her doorstep, holding his hat like an apology. And eleven months since she had heard Thomas laugh. That was what she missed most. His ridiculous, wheezing laugh, the one that ...
There are three fundamental rules to being a successful doppelganger. First, never reveal your true form. Second, never become emotionally attached to the person you're impersonating. Third, and I cannot stress this enough, never impersonate someone who owns a cat. I learned that last rule the hard way. My name is currently Harold Finch. Before that, I was Margaret Ellsworth, a retired librarian with a drinking problem. Before Margaret, I was a particularly unpleasant dentist named Dr. Gerald Pritchard. My actual name is unpronounceable by h...
At precisely midnight, every clock in the village of Grimhollow stopped. Not gradually, nor with the sluggish surrender of failing machinery. Their hands simply ceased moving, as though time itself had been caught between the teeth of some enormous, invisible mechanism. Larry Whitcomb noticed because his grandfather clock had begun striking thirteen. He sat alone in the drawing room of his ancestral home, listening to the final chime reverberate through the walls. Outside, rain swept across the moors, and the skeletal branches of dead elms s...
The dead began singing three nights before the eclipse. Not in the churchyard, where the graves lay crooked beneath centuries of rain, but beneath the earth itself. Their voices rose through the roots of ancient trees, through the foundations of abandoned cottages, and through the cracked marble floors of Saint Oran's Cathedral. They sang without words. And everyone who heard them dreamed of drowning beneath a sky filled with eyes. Dr. Evelyn Harrow arrived in the village of Bellwether on a cold November evening, summoned by a letter bearing...
The first thing Lilian Andros noticed about Hollowwood Manor was that it cast no shadow. The second was that every window seemed to follow her carriage up the hill. Rain crawled down the black stone walls. Dead vines clung to the towers, and the iron gates leaned inward like mourners listening at a grave. Beyond the estate, the village of Morrow's End huddled beneath a sky the color of bruised flesh. No birds flew above the roof. Even the rain seemed to hesitate before touching it. Her uncle Ambrose had left her the house, its debts, and a l...
Weekly Contest #376
The first time I saw Cthulhu, he was crying. I know how that sounds. I have spent the last eleven years listening to people describe the Great Old One as a nightmare made flesh, a cosmic abomination whose awakening would shatter the human mind and drown civilization beneath an ocean of madness. I have read the ancient texts. I have examined the photographs recovered from the wreck of the Aldebaran. I have watched grown men claw their own eyes out after hearing a single whisper from beneath the Pacific. But I was there. I saw the tears. And I...
The first time I stole the moon, I was seventeen years old and desperate to bring my sister back from the dead. The second time, I was trying to save the world. The third time, I discovered the moon had been stealing things from me all along. But I am getting ahead of myself. My name is Eveline Thorne, and I am a witch. Not the sort who sells love potions to lonely farmers or charms apples to keep worms from their skins. I practice the old magic, the kind that demands blood, memories, and occasionally a piece of your soul. My grandmother tau...
Weekly Contest #375
At 8:17 every morning, Daniel Vale bought a coffee. It wasn't an important coffee. It wasn't particularly good coffee, either. It came from a little shop called Bell & Bean, wedged between a laundromat and a locksmith on Mercer Street. The coffee was too bitter, the cups were too thin, and the barista had the unnerving habit of writing people's names incorrectly despite having known them for years. Daniel went there because it was on his way to work. That was all. Until Tuesday. At 8:17, Daniel walked through the door. The bell above it chim...
The smell of burnt cabbage was always the first sign that Sir Reginald's magical protective amulets were of subpar quality. The second sign was the crow. It wasn't just any crow. It was a massive, glossy bird with eyes that gleamed with an unsettling, malevolent intelligence. It had landed directly on the brim of Reginald's polished steel helmet, its talons scraping against the metal with a sound that set his teeth on edge. Then, with agonizing slowness, it had reached down and plucked a single, pristine white feather from the decorative p...
Weekly Contest #163
Caution: A bit of foul language is used in this story. The silence at the table was deafening and awkward. My brothers and sisters just glanced around at one another, waiting for the banshee to start. Cynnth was doing everything he could to hide his laughter while sneaking looks at me, then at our mother. "No! Absolutely not! Have you gone MAD?" my mother screeched at me, her eyes wide in horror and disbelief. "Nobody's allowed to just leave this family like that, Cedric. Nobody! We built this business and this family around all of us helpi...
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