You are not afraid of wolves.
You have no reason to be. Encounters with wolves are extraordinarily rare.

Friend, you are afraid of the woods.


DOF internal memo, unclassified

Margie-

Found this book in the woods on a creepy little shelf nailed to a tree next to MEC-B 7. Got a bunch of weird stories. Some sound like DOF business, including Unevents —URPG, both Cave cases, the Harper, Tennessee incident, the bit with the Centrifuge facility, etc. Knows some stuff it REALLY shouldn’t, especially… well, you’ll see. Recommend investigation and filing, class F urgency. See you when you get back from vacay.

-Jakyla

This and Every Year

A soldier finds an urn hidden away in a desert cave. Something inside whispers dark deals in their ear.

Company Line

Trinidad Wyatt wakes up in a strange facility to find he is a living transistor in a computer made of people. As he struggles to escape, he ties together his strange circumstances with seemingly innocent events at his desk job over the past few months.

Silently

Lester, a laid-off physicist, tries to make the best of things as he starts a new job in a lawnmower factory. But, the factory is run by a paranoid man who forbids talking on the factory floor for fear that the employees will whisper about him. In the crawling silence, Lester finds a fantastic ability that lets him escape.

Monitors

An indie developer makes a hit game that lets players easily upload their own creations. Things are great until the game starts behaving oddly.

Friends

Be good to your friends. It’s harder than it seems.

Family Recipe

Small-town newspaper reporter Esther Beck is assigned to cover the phenomenon that’s turned Harper, Tennessee into an urban legend overnight: dead animals floating in pools of blood have begun mysteriously appearing in random, empty spaces around the town. The strange events awaken old memories buried in the back of her mind.

And

College life is weird, especially if you live in the dorms. Sometimes you see someone cooking in the bathroom. Sometimes you see two men carrying an unconscious woman into their room.

All the Rot in the Walls

Oren Hobbs is racist, but doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He inherits a house just in time for his retirement. Everything would be perfect if it weren’t for a rotten smell coming from a cave on the estate.

That’s the Way Things Move in the Ocean

Natalie Townsend’s famous oceanographer mother died six months ago. Now, Natalie must brave the cold ocean to find a message her mother left for her that was lost to the waves. In a nod to Stephen King’s style of short story collections, this more literary story is not about horror, but it is about fear.

Dear Madeleine

Letters to Madeleine, written on a journey that will never end. She will never read them. That’s not really why they were written, anyway.

Because it’s Beautiful

A woman uninterested in art becomes obsessed with a cast-aside sculpture in a gallery after she is told it is “cursed.” When she asks the flirtatious museum guide why the museum would keep a cursed piece, he answers with the obvious: "Because it’s beautiful."

Of Sand

In this nearly-novella-length story, strange things begin happening to a quiet slacker after a traumatic encounter with Hans Christian Anderson’s Ole Lukoie.

You Never Know

Redmund Coste lived a good life. His doctor ordered him to exercise. On his first jog, he sees a dog he does not recognize.

(Cover art by Mona Moon, artist for the webcomic Dan the Snowman.)