She steps out of the restaurant and finds a sidewalk full of paparazzi, as usual. Just as they start all their shouting and camera flashing, though, they freeze–abrupt, in utter unison, like someone hit a pause button. She stops, too, but she’s seen videos of things like this; it’s an old meme, or something, or so she thinks until someone steps forward from the crowd, silhouetted by a camera frozen mid-flash. “Been looking for you,” he says, and his voice…
This story will also be read aloud on the Alone In A Room With Invisible People podcast on Halloween! Rachel dreamed of a man she’d never met. She never understood what it meant—he just silently led her down the stairs by the cliff and into the old smuggler’s cave that everyone said was haunted. And the last girl to say she’d been having strange dreams had gone missing months ago—run away in the night, they said, but her parents didn’t…
The slap of my boots against worn concrete echoes hollowly in the too-silent hotel stairwell. The quiet means the fans are out, and if the fans are out the gases they keep to the lower floors will rise and kill everything they blanket—and dead guests are bad for business. There are few enough as is. Worse, on the seventh floor I find sparking wires where the alarms should be. If some asshole’s gonna tamper with one of the few habitable…
The island birds squawked of an intruder, and the Witch of Gull Rock creaked up out of her chair with a sigh. “It’ll be another seal,” she muttered aloud as she wrenched the door of her lonely shanty open and hobbled carefully down the stone stairs to the rocky beach below. “Or perhaps a beached whale, hm?” A child, after all, would be too much to hope for, but she always checked, in case the gods chose to smile upon…
“I can grant you what you seek,” the demon tells me, “but you must give me something in return.” Well, duh. But I suppose not every summoner can be expected to have actually done their research. You’d think they would, but I’ve spent enough time in customer service to know people are idiots. (Not that software QA is any better.) “My firstborn,” I offer. Traditional, and I’m not planning on having kids anyway. Ha. The demon grins, and I think…