Thriller, Horror, and Suspense author
“Welcome to the history section,” the librarian said. “Is there something I can help you find?” Anne smiled, allowing herself to lean against the polished wooden counter. It was a cold day outside, and she was tired from the walk — not that she was complaining, mind you. There was so much beauty in the world, even when you were in your seventy-eighth year on Earth. Her walking stick was her trusty…
The knock came late in the evening. The weather was calm and clear, and the sky was already dark. The house was quiet. The child’s parents were downstairs — two storeys below, not just one, because the house was old and cold and vast, with too many rooms — and they didn’t hear anything at all. The knock was restrained, and polite. The knock came from the cupboard door. The child opened her eyes,…
Somewhere overhead, a fluorescent light was buzzing. The irregular pattern of light and dark was visible even through his closed eyelids. An image chased through his mind, too quickly to grab hold of, and then it was gone. Something he ought to remember. He opened his eyes, and there was pain. The lights were too bright, even though one of them flickered on and off. The pain was in his head, on…
It was a beautiful summer evening on the day when I learned how to see inside. I had to go back into work, even though it was a Friday and already past 7PM. An alarm had tripped on the monitoring system for a rack of backup servers we run, which are used by several different clients. It’s a tertiary backup, so there was no immediate danger, but the point of backups is redundancy. So, we treat…
For several years, I’ve been writing weekly flash fiction: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including science fiction, horror, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time . You can receive a new story each Monday morning via email , if you like, or you can read the story archive online . I’m pleased to announce that now there’s another…
All software has bugs , the sign says. I walk past it every morning on my way into the building where I work. Sometimes the sign makes me smile, albeit in a slightly preoccupied way. Sometimes it makes me frown. It just depends how I’m feeling. It’s a strange thing to always start the day not knowing what your job is. I know that it’s normal for me. I know that someone — my boss, that’s right; it…
One hundred and four seconds. Not a long time. Or is it? It’s less than two minutes, but it could be an eternity under the right circumstances. Press your hand to a hot stove for a minute, and it’ll seem like an hour, as Einstein noted. But one hundred and four seconds is only the blink of an eye within a human lifetime. It was a cyclist who found me, so I’m told. It wasn’t like in the news, where…
Wednesday, 11th April, 1821 My dear friend William, I hope this letter finds you in both good spirits and rude health, and I must convey my most sincere apologies for the unavoidable delay in sending it. I find myself at last back on the mainland, and have dispatched this letter from a small town but scant miles from the port where I spent last night. Our ordeal in reaching it was considerable,…
The younger man looked nervous, and his supervisor was only marginally less so. Their visitor passes read ESA , and bore a small holographic mark which they had both assumed was standard, but it had drawn expressions of quickly-concealed surprise from more than one person they’d passed on their way from the building’s grand entrance to the office on the sixth floor. There was no plaque on the…
The service was humanist instead of religious, which surprised no-one who was present. The young couple were just that — young — and for them, religion’s trappings seemed as faintly disquieting as they were ridiculous. The couple themselves had attended three other weddings in the last eighteen months, of their mutual friends from university, and not one had taken place in a church. Lavish venues…
In London, only a few minutes’ walk from the Ministry of Defence, Downing Street, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, there is a building which blends in perfectly with those around it. The same white stone and grand but anonymous frontage. The same brass railings, polished periodically but not obsessively, framing the four wide stairs up from the pavement. The same windows mostly obscured by…
The brain surgery was experimental, they said, and I laughed. Surely all brain surgery is experimental, I said, and they laughed, but their laughter was the uncomfortable kind. I told them to go right ahead, and I signed all the forms, because what the hell else was I going to do? They talked to me about the risks, but none seemed — in my layman’s understanding — to even remotely compete with…
When the doors of the lift opened, Darren Grey stepped out, walked for about ten feet, and then stopped. The ground floor of the shopping centre was almost indistinguishable from either of the two levels above, except that the shops were a little more noticeably low-rent. In this particular area, he had three possible destinations within sight: the exit, a chain coffee shop, or a pretzel stand.…
The evening sky was as purple as the heather that stretched out before me, but it had bands of red and gold too. I’d hiked almost ten miles that day, in a long loop that would eventually bring me back to the car in another forty-five minutes or so. The light was fading, but I’d have more than enough time to make the trip safely. I’d even done plenty of night hikes before, though I’d never been so…
Everything has to happen sometime. I mean, not everything that could happen actually comes to pass, but the stuff that does happen always has its time and place. It’s easy to forget that, in retrospect. The biggest events of human history were also just somebody’s Monday morning, or their Friday afternoon. Or somewhere in the middle. It was a little after 8:30 PM on a Wednesday night when they…
The first thing that surprised me was that she smoked. Not a vape, or an e-cig. I see those all the time, but generally Edinburgh isn’t really a smokers’ sort of place. No, I mean that she smoked like a European tourist — actual cigarettes, in the little box. A lighter, too. Pretty rare sight in 2018, unless you’re walking past a pub somewhere outside the city centre. That was the first thing, but…
The Reverend Jim Miller was a blessed man, in every sense of the word. He had dedicated his life to his divine calling: ministering to those in need, spreading the good word of God, and serving both the community and the Lord tirelessly and in any way that he could. He was the reverend of St. Brigid’s in the same small town that he’d grown up in himself, and though he had travelled to many places…
Some deaths are someone else’s fault, and they’re probably the easiest because at least you can assign blame. That was the thought that had fastened itself onto Scott Russell’s mind, going round and round like a mantra, or a stuck record. He took another sip of the vodka and coke he’d been nursing for the past hour, wondering when the day would end. He didn’t usually add mixers to his drinks, but…
Toby Collins bought the house against his wife’s advice, but then he’d done a lot of things against his wife’s advice already. That was why Anne would very soon be his ex-wife, and had gone to live with her sister after sixteen years of marriage. Collins still wore his wedding ring, and made a point of calling Anne once a week with the intent of begging her to take him back, but she never answered…
I look up from below, at the patchwork of shapes above me. They come in all forms, and all geometries, some moving and some perfectly still. Many have a human shape, or the shape of a tree, or a building, all with skewed angles that shallow and then deepen as each day dawns and passes. To me, they’re like clouds; black clouds on a negative sky, far above me but all within reach. I need only look…