Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars. These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb. Dream carefully. You’ve already made your bed. The nightmares you have now will not be kind. And you have no one to blame but yourself.
The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Still Warm in the Dirt by Kathleen McCluskey
They buried her when she stopped making noise.
The men who had beaten her, and gang raped her dragged her lifeless body into the clearing. They had not intended a ceremony or confirmation. They only needed concealment. When her body ceased its weak, reflective struggling and her breath thinned to something they could not hear over their shovels, they decided she was finished. One of them checked her pulse out of habit rather than mercy, pressing his fingers into her neck until he felt nothing. Then he shrugged and callously wiped mud across her cheek with his boot and told the others to dig.
The hole was shallow and poorly cut. Roots jutted through walls like splintered bones. They rolled her into it face down, arms bound behind her back, wrists swollen from the restraint. A ring remained trapped on her finger, a thick band that cut deep into her flesh that had begun to swell long before the first shovel of dirt fell. None of them noticed it. No one ever looked at her long enough to notice.
They covered her quickly.
Soil struck her back and shoulders in dull impacts, then cascaded around her body and head. Loose earth filled the space beneath her cheek, packed into her nostrils and mouth. Weight accumulated steadily, collapsing against her ribs until each shallow breath became a strangulated effort.
Consciousness did not leave her immediately. It thinned, retreated then returned in fragments.
Pressure came first. Pressure and cold. The earth pressed into her spine and the back of her skull, cradling and crushing in the same relentless embrace. Her lungs fought for air that tasted of clay and rot, drawing in what filtered through the packed soil. Each attempt grew weaker than the last, her body trying to conserve oxygen that she did not have.
Her right arm partially lay twisted beneath her chest. Blood pooled there, trapped by gravity and the restraints. Her fingers swelled until the flesh was fat and shiny. Her ring cut deeper as the tissue expanded, its metal edge carving a slow groove that filled with dark, sluggish blood. The trapped pressure had nowhere to go. Her slow pulse beat against the band, each beat forcing her flesh harder into unyielding gold.
Movement eventually found her.
It began as a faint disturbance near her knuckles, subtle enough to be mistaken for settling dirt. Then came the unmistakable sensation of legs. Fine. Numerous and methodical. They criss-crossed the back of her hand. A millipede had surfaced from the loose soil near her wrist, drawn by the warmth that lingered stubbornly in buried flesh. It paused at the base of her finger, antennae working, tasting the salt and damp that seeped from her skin before continuing to the tight metal circle.
It discovered the wound beneath almost immediately. The metal had already broken the skin there, opening in a thin, wet crescent. The creature pressed into that space, exploring with patient insistence. When it began to feed, the sensation registered as a distant, blunt flair. The pain filtered through layers of shock and suffocation. Her body attempted to react. A faint twitch traveled through her finger. The rest of her remained pinned and unresponsive.
The disturbance attracted others.
They emerged slowly from the surrounding earth, not a swarm but a great succession. Each one drawn by the same signals of heat and moisture. They gathered around the trapped finger, slipping beneath the edge of the ring where the blood collected. The confined space offered shelter and sustenance. Soil shifted as they worked. Mandibles and bodies moving with instinctive purpose. Beneath the band, tissue gave way, what had been trapped began to slowly loosen.
Above her, the ground settled into a stretch of dark earth, undisturbed by wind or witness. The clearing returned to an eerie silence.
Below it, long after breath had ceased and the last spark of awareness had dissolved into suffocating darkness, subtle movement continued beneath the soil. Fingers shifted slightly against the packed dirt. The ring, no longer anchored by living tension, slipped gradually along the damaged finger.
And over time, the earth pressed closer, claiming the space inch by inch as her form weakened beneath it. Moisture, pressure and darkness erased the boundaries that had once defined her. What remained settled into the soil that surrounded it, indistinguishable from the ground, leaving no division between body and grave.
Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.
The Lost Girl A nailed-up door. An inheritance which comes with a ghost. A missing girl. A fifty-year-old mystery. Parapsychologist Berkley Osgood is hired to investigate. What he uncovers reveals secrets the living want to hide and the dead will never forgive.
Spindleshanks Adam is having nightmares about a skeletal shadow figure, who he calls Spindleshanks. Soon his whole class are sharing the same nightmare. Adam’s dad, Rob, knows that Spindleshanks can’t be real. But is he? One terrible night Rob has to face his son’s nightmare creature and fight for his son’s life. What would you sacrifice to have your child back safe?
“A decent two-for-one. Alyson Faye brings the engaging and eerie in equal measure.” CC Adams – horror / dark fiction author
The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
False Flag by Kai Wilson
I feel this story should have a trigger warning for infant loss. Please proceed with caution if that is upsetting for you.
The inner blast door loomed before me—a slab of cold iron scarred with dents. An acid taste coated the back of my throat, and I shot a baleful look at the basket.
This was all for my baby sister – guilt, anger and loss washed up, meeting the acid in my mouth. I’d given her my last real wool—guilt-tripped into it—only for it to end up here.
I rocked and began to hum quietly, and waited for the yellow light to turn green, thinking about colours. About our flags. T I am red. Not worth risks. Not worth resources beyond the meagre items for survival. We were waste handlers, we did the dirty, dangerous jobs. But…my green-flagged sister and her partner had created something with no flag at all. Something we weren’t to talk of. Just remove. As if echoing my thoughts, the light shifted. It completely switched off, the hall black. Then it lit. Green for go, get out.
I gripped the wheel, twisting until it squealed, pulling the door open a crack, and slipped inside, barely lifting the basket over the lip. The heavy metal groaned shut, sealing me in the transition zone. I raised a bare ghost of a smile.
The hall behind me smelled of sweat, fear, and too many bodies; this room smelled of ozone and silence.
“Airlock decontamination cycle, in to out, two minutes,” a pre-war recording chimed. Static followed, a different voice overlaid. “Out to in, twenty-two minutes.”
Those twenty-two minutes were worth it. Others might not think so, but I did. I got to breathe fresh air. Even if it tasted like pennies, even if I was blasted for 22 minutes with precious compressed air. I made the best of it. I didn’t use guilt to get what I wanted.
I peered out the porthole. The mist curled around the pier like a thrown-off duvet, isolating the world beyond. It was crumbling into the water, but I could still make it most of the way out. My glance moved to the Geiger counter on the wall. I was used to the slight tick. Everyone was, really. You could see people inside moving unconsciously to that rhythm. The tick and our heartbeats were the same now.
I wrapped myself tighter in my shawl, hearing the gentle ping of a thread letting go. Then another.
I sighed, glancing back at the basket. I’d had the chance to repair this shawl with that yarn, and I’d passed. For no reason other than this. But the yarn…I looked down, and then pulled that meagre blanket off savagely, despair and anger mingling with that acid taste in my mouth, metallic copper beyond conscious thought, seeing red, BEING red.
My throat tightened as I cranked the handle. The door swung out, and the Geiger counter’s tick screamed up into a mechanical whirring scream. I stepped away from the door, down to the jetty where it was a matter of balance and a couple of steps to reach the furthest usable point, a flat portion much bigger than the basket. I was just about to place the basket at the end, when my breath caught.
A two-fingered hand had forced its way out of the bundle, waving dumbly, pushing the swaddling away. Wide, white eyes looked back from a doll’s perfect face whose colours were wrong. It was beautiful, aside from the lack of pigment. Its stare was…wrong. Its grey mouth rooted blindly for a mother almost gone too.
Not quite gone enough to take them out together, the bitterness rose like gorge.
“Sorry, little one,” I whispered. The tingling across my skin made me tense. It was probably imagined, but it was real enough to keep me RED. “This really is for the best…”
I rose and turned before I could falter. The walk back to the airlock felt more unsteady, and much longer than the walk out. It was punctuated by only one cry—a sob escaping my own throat, as harsh as vomit as I stepped off the jetty. I didn’t look back until the door was sealed and the pressure began to rise, the uneven blast of air puffing and sucking my grief with it. Through the thick glass, I watched the mist swallow the end of the pier, the blanket of the outside stealing it all away. Wiping away tears, my eyes fell to the bench. It was already unravelling. What a waste. I’d use the yarn to repair my shawl. Maybe in a month or so.
The Ladies of Horror Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Of Black Cats and Bards by Alex Grehy
“I’ve always been unlucky in Wales.” the Devil mused.
“Indeed you have.” said the bard, whose banishment to hell for his sharp and ready tongue had taught him nothing.
“Are you laughing at me?” the Devil asked.
“No, no!” replied the bard, “I mean, that old lady who asked you to build a bridge for her in exchange for the first soul to cross – it was obviously all a misunderstanding. In fact, she did you a favour, as I’m sure the soul of the goat she sent over was less ornery than hers would have been.”
“It wasn’t a goat, it was a dog! If you must speak, at least get it right!” the Devil growled.
“My pardon, dread father of lies, it was indeed a dog, but I didn’t think you’d want me to repeat how its innocent, loyal soul was destined for Hea…”
“Careful…” The Devil grumbled.
“Talking of…him upstairs…you can’t know everything and Welsh place names are tricky. How were you to tell the difference between these villages, all grey stone houses and not a vowel in their names.”
“What? What? Where are you going with this? I weary of your wordplay.”
“Weary, indeed master, it IS wearisome to traverse Wales with a shovelful of heavy earth wondering which river to dam and drown the benighted souls upstream. Thank heavens the cobbler saved you the trip. Why, if he hadn’t shown you that bag of worn shoes as proof of the vast distance he’d walked, you might have carried that soil until you swooned from exhaustion. I mean, what other reason could there be for a mender of shoes to be carrying a bag of them? You were so wise to dump the soil there and then, just where the locals would find the hill useful.” the bard said, innocently.
“Bard!” the devil growled, “You were sent here to be punished, yet it is I that am suffering. Will nothing silence your troublesome tongue?”
“I am a bard, Sire, it is my nature to delight my audience.” The bard bowed to the assembled imps and damned souls, who were smirking and giggling at the Devil’s discomfort.
“ENOUGH!! roared the Devil. “I shall have my revenge. Third time’s the charm, or so they say. You, Bard, shall return to your homeland, transformed. Wordless, friendless, cursed, there you shall do my bidding and bring the souls of the Welsh to me.”
The Devil snapped his taloned fingers and the Bard disappeared.
***
A tiny black kitten appeared in the cobbled farmyard at midnight, as a glacial wind wove threads of icy rain between the farm buildings.
“Meeep” said the kitten, looking around curiously. He tried his new voice again.
“MEEEEEEP”
The farmhouse door crashed open. Haloed by the golden light within, the farmer’s wife, in her voluminous nightgown, cast a shadow, vast and angelic.
“You poor thing!” The farmwife ran out in the weather, scooped up the cat and brought it inside.
The bard mused that this one utterance he’d been allowed had achieved quite a lot, so he tried it again.
“Meep!”
The farmwife rushed to wrap him in blankets and place him in front of the fire. A bowl of warm milk soon followed.
“Meep” said the kitten, content.
***
The years passed.
The huge black cat, sleek, glossy, full grown, sat on a wall and surveyed his domain. He purred in satisfaction, his work was well done, for who could even count the number of souls he’d sent down.
The cat grinned – third time’s the charm. Though the dark lord, in his hubris, would never understand the power of three in this mythic land. For firstly, the Devil had failed his due diligence, for in Wales, black cats are regarded as charms of good luck, welcomed, cossetted, treated like kings.
The bard was the Devil’s second mistake. For who could imagine that cats were less eloquent than a master of words? The bard had never been so revered. With a twitch of his tail, or a flick of his ear, an imperious miaow, humans rushed to his devoted care.
And as for the Devil’s third and biggest mistake? Satan raged and commanded, his kingdom overrun with the souls of the rats and the mice the cat had dispatched, let’s not mention the moles and the voles. Thousands! Millions! Countless! In desperation, the Devil begged the cat to stop, but in vain. For who else would believe a cat might be obedient to anything but their own needs?
So the bard cat lived a fine life free of fear, and the Devil was thwarted in Wales once again.
Alex Grehy(she/her) enjoys writing quirky, thought-provoking horror and is a regular contributor to The Sirens Call and Ladies of Horror Flash Project. Her fiction and essays on being a lady of horror have featured in a range of publications, including Spread: Tales of Deadly Flora. Alex’s first poetry collection, Last Species Standing, which explores mankind’s relationship with nature and technology, is available on Amazon.
The Ladies of Horror Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Crickets by Mary Ann Peden-Coviello
I float in a cloud, amongst many others just like me. When we first got here, we were panicky and tried to find out why we were here. But They fed us and occasionally took away some of us. Now it’s all routine.
Well, until this morning, when I was scooped up with some others and taken away in a box. Now I don’t know where I am or what’s going to happen to me. I hear the Big Voices rumbling, but they sound like thunder over the hills. I can’t tell what they are saying.
The top opens up and a huge hand scrabbles around. We try to escape. I am caught between two enormous fingers and lifted out of the box. I squirm and wiggle, but the fingers clamp more tightly. A monstrous round face peers down at me, grinning.
“See there, Petey, ya gotta hold ’em tight, but not too tight. Ya’ll squish ’em if ya hold ’em too tight.”
“Yeah, I see, Granddad.”
“Then ya take the hook and slide it right up ’em.”
I feel a sharp pain between my legs, then agony slices up my body. I thrash my arms and legs. I shriek and beg. But the horrible thing holding me takes no notice of my struggles and can’t seem to hear my cries of agony.
Then the hook slides up my throat and out my mouth, silencing me. My vocal cords are dissected.
“It looks almost like a little person hanging there on the hook, Granddad.”
I am a little person, you fiend! I scream, soundlessly.
“Ain’t you got some imagination, Petey?”
I feel myself fly through the air. I plunge into the water. I do my best to breathe in the cool water and drown myself. Anything is better than the agony searing my hooked body. But no, I speak too soon. I am yanked viciously out of the water, flung through the air again, and once more sink into the water. Beneath me rises a fish, mouth agape.
Fright Mare-Women Write Horror Short Story: One Hour Before the Dark
Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote FRANKENSTEIN. This anthology is to highlight the fact women write great horror and to kill the fallacy that they aren’t in some way up to standard. They are. Read here stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lucy Taylor, and a plethora of other great writers as they work on your nerves, get inside your head, and bang out some of the scariest tales written today. I’m proud to present these women for your consideration, as Rod Serling might say, as I ask you to step into FRIGHT MARE. Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it’s not real. It’s not real. Midnight awaits, monsters scheme to take you away, the strange and weird wait in the shadows, but it’s not real. Is it?
Edited by Billie Sue Mosiman, the author who brought you the SINISTER-TALES OF DREAD collections and her latest suspense novel, THE GREY MATTER.
he Ladies of Horror Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Hooked On A Feeling by Kendra Smart
Take me home tonight. I promise you need me, isn’t there a special space you would want to place me? Wouldn’t I just fill that space on the counter in the bathroom, or what about that spot you just cleared away on your dresser? You came to this hole in the wall looking for a piece that spoke to you. Can you not hear my cry? My call to you, longtime listener…first time caller.
Come over here, closer. Give yourself the opportunity to really see me. Up close. Personal. Look at the details in my metal, how long the artisan toiled as the fire made the metal hot and malleable. Can you tell the care that went into each stroke, the sweat and blood that went into the completed reality that is me? Do you feel the pain that came from my artisan? There was so much she needed to release.
If your eyes are eagle sharp and your knowledge in metal work decent, you will be able to tell that while yes these beautiful swirls are from the countless hours getting the damascus just right but in some spots the swirls are from her tears as her pain flowed. She released all of it into me and I…I achieved being.
Formation on more than one level, a creation from the deepest felt despair and desponded nature. I became a Pain Eater and the world became my buffet.
Give me your woes, lose sight of the real world. Let the grief leave you and become something tangible, a nourishment for me. Feel it but once and then pour it into me.
From under the heavy and brutal depths, let me help you rise and taste the sun. Live in the warm moments instead of the polarizing arctic depths to which your illusions have taken you to.
Give yourself to me. Whole or in pieces, take your time. I have as long as it takes.
Let me in and be mine. Don’t you want to be mine?
It won’t hurt, that fog that will seep in slowly. Soon it will be as it is, a blanket to cover you. Is it really lost when this is what you wanted?
To forget, to not feel. The complete abandonment of self, those memories that flayed at you now gone. Never to be known or lived through again. Isn’t it such a comfort not feeling those negative things?
I can taste you, like cinnamon gum…spicy but so sweet. Your tears a balm on my incandescent surface, how I have missed the taste that sorrow brings.
My last owner was so sad, her depression fed me for years as she used me for sugar. So many baking adventures, each one so sweet even with the naturally added sodium. Sustained me until she could no longer give of her essence.
A dry husk sleeping peacefully amongst the chocolate chips, a flour angel on the flour.
‘Just Emotions‘ is exactly as it states, a group of writers who had feelings they wanted to express in poem form. Inside, there are a range of emotions to explore. Each writer has given a bit of themselves to you, each in their own way.
We hope that you enjoy these writings and that among the poems you may find some thing you can identify with or relate to. Thank you for giving us this chance to open the catacombs and share with you.
The Ladies of Horror Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
What Lingers by A.F. Stewart
We lived here once.
Back before the dense rolling mists and the cold dark water covered the land. Bustling life, along the river and small lake, sweeping over rolling hills, spilling from rows of cottages. A small rural town of farmers, fishermen, and artisans.
Now it’s gone.
Nothing’s left but the inland lake and a few crooked planks that used to be the wharf. One day, one hour, that is all it took to break everything. Lives, security, trust. Because we believed what we were told. We believed we were safe.
Until the day the dam broke.
No warning, no hope of escape.
Our little town vanished, submerged under a deluge of water, lies, and hubris. Homes smashed into debris, bodies drowned in the flood. Screams, cries for help, and then silence.
The calm, crushing hush of death.
Then the black headline: No Survivors.
And the world moved on.
Yet, we’re still here. Under the water. Hungry, angry spirits, roaming through the currents, in the murky depths, past the decaying remnants of our lives.Years trapped under the cold press of water, under the instrument of our demise. Ghostly fingers beneath the surface, reaching for the sun, reaching for an answer, reaching for a justice that never came.
Now we have settled for revenge.
We are patient, we will wait. Until they forget. Until they come back. Reshape the flooded land into a new home, rebuild over our graves.
Tragedy spares no one… and takes no prisoners. In the twilight shadows, secrets are revealed past the whispers of madness.
Wander into the realm of the old gods with Elenora, where humanity and marriage are a prison. Step through a looking glass of dark horrors with an Alice you never knew. Join with Zenna to seek the truth as her death by magic grows closer. Journey with Olivia as she crosses paths with a monster of the forest and runs for her life. Watch Isobel summon the faerie to solve her problem of an unwanted husband. Shiver as Doctor Killbride experiments with corpses to create life from death. All that and more await within the pages.
Ten stories. Ten women. Who will survive? Who will fall? And who will succumb to their inner evil? Find out in Visions and Nightmares.
Warning: This book contains disturbing scenes that may be upsetting to some readers.
Poems exploring hell and damnation. Tales of sorrow, vengeance, betrayal, and redemption. Ghosts, ghouls, and demons stalk these pages. Don’t read in a lonely house…in a darkened room by a single candle…
…unless you like the touch of an icy finger up your spine.
Nyctophiliac Confessions: Poems by Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee
“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).
Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty-six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee, interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes.
Nina D’Arcangela is a quirky horror writer who likes to spin soul rending snippets of despair. She reads anything from splatter matter to dark matter. She's an UrbEx adventurer who suffers from unquenchable wanderlust. She loves to photograph abandoned places, bits of decay and old graveyards.
Nina is co-owner of Sirens Call Publications, co-founder of the horror writer's group 'Pen of the Damned', and if that isn't enough, put a check mark in the box next to owner and resident nut-job of Dark Angel Photography.
Spreading the Writer's Word 