Chapter 6Daniels rubs at his eyes, his knuckles dry and stained with tobacco. His mind is slow and woolly, drifting through thoughts like soup. The furniture looks old and ratty in the flickering light, just shapes collapsing into other shapes, like everything else in...
Chapter 5Jesse isn’t standing, isn’t fighting. He’s slumping, slipping, disappearing into a tar-pit of wet, stinking blackness. He kicks, breathes, screams — but everything is soaked, slowed, swallowed. He can feel the mattress pulling him down, pulling him under. No...
Chapter FourHe throws his shoulder into the door, breath in ragged bursts, feet skidding against sticky motel carpet. The handle refuses to turn; the deadbolt, once stiff, is soft and spongy now, like the door itself is rotting in his hands. He can hear the goddamn...
Chapter ThreeHis fingers scrabble against the light switch. Nothing. Darkness oozes into his mouth, up his nose. The neon sign bleeds one last breath of red through the grimy blinds, then flickers, dies. No light, no mercy. Just the night expanding into a long, silent...
Chapter 2The mattress is an open mouth, and Jesse is almost devoured. He sprawls across the sagging center, asleep, but it’s a half-breathing, suffocating sleep, with nightmares curling around his throat like tongues. Sweat slicks his hair to his forehead, soaks...
Chapter 1The night is a velvet black hole, a vacuum swallowing headlights and spilling them useless into the desert. Jesse grips the wheel like it’s the only thing keeping him alive, which maybe it is. A shift in the seat that doesn’t help the pain in his back, a...
The Boy in the BedroomI don’t remember the move-in day. I couldn’t tell you what color the walls were, what furniture was there, or what anyone was saying. I was only three years old. But I remember the boy who wasn’t there. We had just moved into a brand-new house on...
They say the wind knows when death is coming.
In the still hush before a Southern storm, when the cicadas fall quiet and the porch swing creaks without wind, the old folks whisper warnings. An owl at the window. Three knocks at midnight. A black dog no one owns. These aren’t just superstitions—they’re signposts on the road to something final. Passed down through generations like family heirlooms, these omens shaped how rural communities faced grief, mystery, and the beyond. In a land where death often came sudden and unannounced, the signs were never taken lightly.
This article dives deep into those signs—not to prove or disprove, but to understand why they linger.
A single chair. A darkened room. A mirror that reflects not your face, but something deeper—something just beyond the veil. For centuries, seekers have entered these quiet chambers to speak with the dead, to face their grief, or to glimpse a truth hidden in shadow. From the torch-lit halls of ancient Greece to the glow of modern therapy rooms, the psychomanteum has served as a mysterious threshold between memory and the unknown. In this article, we explore its history, its rituals, and the strange, comforting power of gazing into darkness—waiting for it to gaze back.
London, 1921 – The gaslight flickered as a small group of men and women huddled in the back room of an antiquarian’s shop. An auction was underway, but no ordinary heirloom was on the block. On a velvet-draped table sat a sealed porcelain urn, its surface etched with...