Mike came to Saigon to film an abandoned building the locals call the Three Incense Sticks—three thin red towers standing empty for twenty years. No one crosses the plaza. He cut the chain and went in alone. The corridors were low and narrow, the air heavy with mold.

The chickens fell silent whenever he passed. No one would sell him water. A door at the end of the hall stayed locked from the outside. On the second night a fever came, and something walked the hallway on soft chicken feet. By morning the fever broke, the coop was shut, and a dark wet patch lay in the dirt. The village is not on any map. He still listens every time he hears a chicken.

On the ninth day of a promise he never fully understood, a traveler sits on a plane somewhere over the water and tries to set the record straight. After a sak yant tattoo in Chiang Mai began to change on its own, an old ajarn wound white cotton thread around his wrist and told him to wear it for nine days—no more, no less.

I paid for three nights in a cheap guesthouse in Ayutthaya. The owner gave me three rules: don’t open the west window, don’t touch the little house in the yard, don’t leave the door open at night......

I paid for three nights in a cheap guesthouse in Ayutthaya. The owner gave me three rules: don’t open the west window, don’t touch the little house in the yard, don’t leave the door open at night.

Mark, a pragmatic retail inspector on a month-long assignment, moves into a cheaply renovated apartment with two colleagues. What begins as a mundane work trip turns sinister when his door mysteriously refuses to open, feeling as though someone is holding it from the inside......

My mother could read dreams. She had rules: never tell one before breakfast, some dreams don’t count, and a dream is a circle you can stand inside or outside. When she died, the dreams kept coming, the water kept rising, and there was no one left to round them.

On that island, beauty runs backward. The more ruined a face is, the higher you stand. A normal face is something to be feared. Danny learned the rules. He learned how to belong. And when he finally left, he brought the island home with him.

In the spring of 1971, a county house by an old irrigation canal claimed three lives in a single night. Only one person woke up.
Bess Nye was nineteen, working for wages she could not afford to lose. The house came with the job. No one stayed the full year. The locals only said the water was bad out that way......
 
 
 

When the stones that fell from her ceiling seven years ago return to her apartment, nineteen-year-old Emma Mercer calls a radio host and tells him the truth she has spent her whole young life running from: they never really left—and there were always more of them than anyone counted.

In 1913 Yorkshire, a desperate schoolmaster signs a bargain with a mysterious Scholar—and discovers that the heart he receives in exchange comes with a dead man's memories, and a price that cannot be undone.

After his father's mysterious death, Daniel discovers that the afterlife isn't ruled by demons... but by paperwork.
Endless corridors. Silent judges. Corrupt officials. Appeals that never end.
What begins as a desperate search for justice slowly becomes a nightmare where even death has a bureaucracy.

It began with an act of charity: a half-frozen young woman found by the churchyard wall on a rainy October night. They took her in for one night. Then another. Then she never left.
What followed was not grief, and not illness. It was something that wore a human face, painted its own skin by candlelight, and left a hollow where a heart should have been.
 

The Overnight at Willow FarmIn the winter of 1981, four truckers break down in a Nebraska snowstorm and take shelter in a farmer’s grain shed. Inside they find an unexpected companion: a simple pine coffin. As the night deepens and the cold settles in, what begins as grim necessity becomes something far more unsettling.

The Last File on the Kesslers
In the summer of 1987, newlyweds David and Ellen Kessler break down on Nevada’s Loneliest Road. Stranded at a remote desert motel, they meet another couple whose appearance and plans feel unnervingly familiar. As the heat and isolation close in, something far stranger than coincidence begins to surface.