I: Breathe “What is it you want?” I whispered, hands hovering over the melted sugar, eyes fixated. The first time I performed the spell, I burnt off the tips of my fingers with the prints singeing right off. Soot rested on the ground along with dead skin. The raw flesh sat exposed for a month […]
Before the archaeologists contacted you—a cryptozoologist—they initially reached out to an entomologist, since the first creature appeared to be, mostly, an insect. The peat bog in Sumpit had brined an unusual body, preserving the chitin wings and exoskeleton just as well as similar anaerobic environments in other parts of the world conserved hair, skin, primitive […]
Mara was thirteen the first time she whispered her hatred into the ground, her fingers earth-stained as she tore a squirming, pink worm into smaller and smaller pieces. “I want her to hurt,” she said and then dug until her fingernails cracked, the delicate skin beneath raw and bleeding, before dropping the pieces into the […]
Sooner or later it might have occurred to students to resurrect the Ghosts & Ghoulies club on their own, but it was a major donor to the university who made it happen. Harry got involved not because he believed in paranormal phenomena, but because it was the ostentatiously-named Carrington Quickenden whom the university chose to […]
In the quiet, you will hear us, our voices rising above the hush. How do you tell the difference between thinking and hearing? It used to come so naturally. Clarence had lived alone for some time. It should have been easy. One weekend he tried counting all the people on his picture wall he knew […]
She calls them pig-oons instead of pigeons. “Look at the pig-oons!” Does it with a little sly smile every time, waiting to be asked why. She’s scattering seed all over the place, all over the lawn, so next year it’ll be sprouting thick-shafted wheat and barley in amongst the grass. Not much of it, though—the […]
Sommerset House is enormous. A white rectangle, two storeys and an attic high, columns wrapping all sides, sash windows, dark shutters. Manicured lawns. Innocent-looking as if its history is nothing to do with it; the outbuildings dismantled some while ago. Nothing to see here. Rather like a man pretending he hasn’t just stepped in dog […]
Anon, Agnes could never say which came first, the tale, the witch or the snatchings. By the end of that year, the Year of Our Lord 1598, the elders themselves fained not to speak of it and that autumn became a tale in itself. All told, Dannet was a humble place, a hamlet on the […]
Houmi woke up with a thousand arms today, though she usually woke up with this many—give or take a few. On certain days, perhaps she could even get the number down to the mid hundreds. But only on a really, really good day. Before she made her morning tea—chamomile for the headaches caused by the […]
Everything has a purpose, Ayaan’s mother would say, and a man usually finds his through marriage. Which is what brought them to the matchmaker whose diary had been lined with names and mobile numbers in ballpoint ink. That detail had struck Ayaan. In this day and age he’d just assumed everything was in an app. […]
