Lazarus Krane

Retired watchmaker Anton Reiss has spent eleven years living above his dead shop, surrounded by tools he no longer uses and clocks he no longer repairs.

Then he finds something beneath the skin of his arm.

At first, he tells himself it is a cyst. A harmless growth. A thing for medicine to name and remove. But Anton is a man trained to notice tolerances, and this growth does not behave like sickness. It grows with precision. It moves with purpose. And one night, beneath his own skin, it begins to tick.

As Anton measures, listens, records, and finally intervenes, he discovers that his body is not failing randomly. It is producing work. Beautiful work. Impossible work. The kind of work no living hand should be able to make.

Cold, intimate, and quietly unnerving, Escapement is a tale of body horror, craftsmanship, loneliness, and the terrible comfort of being useful again.

Mildred is eighty years old and lives alone.

Her days are small and carefully ordered: tea in the morning, a plant on the windowsill, a stray cat that visits when it pleases, and routines that preserve the shape of a life grown quiet. Her children are far away. Her oldest friend calls once a week. By most measures, Mildred has been forgotten.

Then something begins to happen at night.

It is not violent. It is not threatening. If anything, it seems almost kind.

As the nights pass, Mildred finds herself drawn toward a presence she cannot explain, and toward a question she never expected to face.

The Radio at Three Thirteen is a quiet horror story about loneliness, mortality, and the unsettling comfort of being seen.

Months after losing her husband David in a car crash, Rebecca finds herself unable to let go of the small rituals they once shared.

Every evening, she sets two places at the kitchen table. She cooks for two. She talks to the empty chair where he used to sit, filling the silence with the ordinary things she never got to say.

She tells herself it is grief.

She tells herself it will pass.

But the evenings have a way of surprising her.

And the table, it turns out, is not quite as empty as she believed.

Quietly unsettling and deeply human, The Extra Plate is a story about loneliness, the rituals we build to survive it, and the unexpected things that can answer when we have been grieving long enough, and quietly enough, to be heard.

Jack Summers arrives at a remote property in the Pacific Northwest with a camera and a grief he has not yet learned to carry.

His wife is dead. He tells himself the isolation will help.

The property comes with a garden.

Beautiful. Silent. Patient.

He begins to document it and finds he cannot stop returning to it.

A previous owner left journals behind.

What they contain should be enough to make any reasonable person leave.

The Garden is a quiet, devastating story about grief, beauty, and the terrible things a person will surrender to when love is the price.

Vera Moss has spent her entire life feeling invisible.

At work, in therapy, at home alone in her apartment: she exists without truly living.

Then she meets Nathan.

He's different.

Mysterious.

He makes her feel seen for the first time in years.

Their connection is immediate and intense, exactly what she's been starving for.

But something about Nathan isn't quite right.

Something he won't, or can't, explain.

The closer Vera gets to him, the stranger things become.

Details slip. Reality feels less solid.

And Vera must choose: walk away from the only person who's ever truly seen her, or follow him somewhere she doesn't understand.

A haunting exploration of loneliness, connection, and the cost of being seen.

Jenna has worked late before.

The empty office, the flickering lights, the sounds of an old building settling—none of it bothers her anymore.

Tonight should be no different.

But tonight, the building feels wrong.

As midnight approaches and her deadline looms, Jenna realizes she's not alone on the fifteenth floor.

Something is watching.

Something is waiting.

And the familiar colleague she's seen in passing might not be what he seems.

In the space between the overhead lights and the emergency exits, in the hours when everyone else has gone home, the rules change.

Some things that live in buildings like this have been there far longer than any tenant.

Some things don't just watch.

They remember.

After Hours is a taut psychological horror novelette about the terror of working late, the things that hide in plain sight, and the price of isolation.

Jamie Reeves is tired of horror films that rely on cheap tricks.

For his senior project, he's determined to create something different—a film where the terror comes from atmosphere alone, from the wrongness of space itself.

He finds what seems like the perfect location: an abandoned bunker, all oppressive concrete and impossible angles.

Three days of filming. No compromises. Just pure architectural dread.

But as Jamie pushes his crew deeper into the structure, the building begins to reveal its true nature.

He's about to learn that some obsessions come with a price, and some places never let their subjects leave.

From Lazarus Krane comes a chilling story about artistic vision, reality distortion, and the things that wait in spaces designed to be wrong.

Elias is a light sleeper in an apartment with paper-thin walls.

For six months, he's cataloged every sound his elderly neighbor makes—the coughing, the footsteps, the nightly hymns. It's annoying, but familiar.

Until Henderson dies.

The apartment next door falls silent. Then, at 2 AM, the sounds begin.

Scrubbing. Rhythmic and methodical, coming from the empty, police-sealed apartment. Focused on their shared wall.

Elias tells himself it's a cleaning crew. But the landlord insists no one has the key. No one has been inside.

Night after night, the sounds continue. Scrubbing. Sliding. Breathing.

Something is working at the wall between them. Something patient. Something that doesn't need permission.

And it's getting closer.

The Shared Wall is a chilling horror novelette about isolation, vulnerability, and the terrifying intimacy of thin walls.

Michael Smith has spent fifteen years writing horror stories that no one reads. A master's degree gathering dust, a part-time library job, and an inbox full of rejection letters.

Then the invitation arrives.

The Blackwood Prize is an exclusive competition for horror writers. Six levels. Seventy-two hours per story. Fifty writers invited. One winner. The prize: $100,000 and recognition from people who understand what he's capable of.

The prompts are unusually detailed. Real names, specific locations, precise routines. Michael's AI writing companion, Meridian, finds this troubling.

But Michael is winning. Finally.

By the time he realizes what's really happening, it's too late to stop writing and far too late to undo what he's already written.

The Completion is a psychological horror novella about ambition, complicity, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive what we've done.

Some things should never be touched.

When historian Rebecca Mitchell documents artifacts at a remote Vermont site, a moment of contact changes everything. The dreams begin that night, visits from something that wears beauty like a weapon, offering pleasure that feels like drowning in light.

Each encounter costs her. Memory. Time. The boundaries of her own body. Churches and spiritual groups promise answers but only pull her deeper into dissolution.

Desperate to feel real, she reaches for human connection, the only anchor back to herself. And when she discovers she can fight back, she does.

But victory against the incomprehensible is never as simple as it seems.

A psychological horror novella about consent, possession, and the razor's edge between transcendence and annihilation.

Tom Reed has a good life — a loving wife, two kids, a stable job. So why can't he feel any of it?

When emotional numbness drives him to a cutting-edge neurofeedback clinic, the treatment works. Colors return. Joy returns. For the first time in months, Tom feels like himself again.

But as his awareness sharpens, he starts noticing things.

And his therapist has an explanation for everything.

Tom is faced with a choice no amount of therapy can prepare him for: trust what he's being told, or trust what he's starting to see.

Null State is a psychological horror novelette about the terror of getting exactly what you asked for.

After a midnight horror movie, John and his best friend Brad return home for coffee and conversation. The banter is comfortable. The friendship, fifteen years strong. Everything is normal.

Until it isn't.

Brad's jokes grow strange. His voice mimicry becomes too perfect. And that wet, patient sound from upstairs... the one John keeps dismissing... won't stop.

By the time John realizes something is wrong, it may already be too late.

Some things don't announce themselves. They just wait. And watch. And get closer while you're not looking.

Still Here is a story about the horror of gradual wrongness, and the realization that some things never really leave.

Idris has spent twenty-two years in his grandmother's house at the edge of the forest, caring for the woman who raised him. When she dies during a violent storm, he thinks grief will be the hardest thing he'll face.

He's catastrophically wrong.

What happens in the hours after her death destroys everything Idris thought he knew about his grandmother, their home, and the ancient forest that has always pressed too close. The horror is immediate, visceral, and impossible to rationalize away.

His grandmother spent eighty-three years in that house. His great-grandfather before her. Old Yong in his place across the woods. They all knew something Idris is only now beginning to understand and the knowledge comes far too late.

The Lapping is a folk horror tale about family legacies we don't understand until we've already broken them, and the attention we fail to pay to those who protect us.