Snow fell thick and quiet, the kind that makes a town believe it has been spared. Deacon Falls wrapped itself in lights and carols and small lies, pretending Christmas was a shield. Then the bodies started turning up. One by one. Familiar faces. Old smiles. People who had all graduated together and never really left high school behind.

The police saw a pattern before they saw a motive. What they missed was a name. Mary Christmas. The girl they laughed at. The girl they broke. The girl who learned that silence keeps receipts.

As the murders grow more brutal and the past starts bleeding into the present, Deacon Falls is forced to confront what it buried decades ago. This is not a story about a monster born evil. It is a story about one that was made, patiently, year by year, until all that was left was the knife and the memory of laughter.

Some towns decorate for Christmas. Others survive it.

Tom Whitaker had jogged the same route for years, long enough to know every cracked driveway and every yard where the sprinklers always came on too early. What he didn’t know, what he’d never seen until that morning, were the four people standing on every street he turned onto. Same faces. Same clothes. Same silence. They weren’t waving anymore. They weren’t pretending to be neighborly. They were watching something behind him, something he couldn’t see and didn’t dare turn around to meet. By the time he made it home, he wasn’t running for fitness. He was running for survival. And dawn meant one thing. He’d have to do it again.

She drifted into the kitchen like fog with opinions, her sleeves brushing the air, her feet not bothering with things like floors. I was standing there barefoot, coffee in hand, trying to pretend this was normal life and not whatever midnight fever dream I had apparently subscribed to.

“You have too many noodles,” she said, staring into my cabinet without actually opening it.

“You would too if you lived in Florida,” I told her.

The fire that took their home didn’t take their will. Frankie, Jax, and the others move west across the broken spine of America, chasing the thing that burned everything behind them—the Boy Who Walks. What they find isn’t a person, but a message. A voice in the static. A promise from the dark that Randall Flagg is walking again, wearing new skin. When belief itself becomes a weapon, the kids have to decide what kind of faith they still have left… and who they’re willing to bury to keep it.

After Captain Trips burned through humanity, seven kids remained in a forgotten Colorado town, clinging to each other and the ruins of their world. They built a fragile peace inside an empty school, scavenging, laughing, and pretending the world hadn’t ended. But when blood-painted warnings began appearing across town—“HE IS COMING”—they realized survival wasn’t the same as safety. What waited beyond the smoke wasn’t disease anymore; it was something walking, something watching, and it wanted believers.

Sometimes it is best to not answer unknown text messages

The locals say he walks when the sea gets hungry. A figure in gray, too solid for fog and too quiet for a man, pacing the sand before the storm breaks. Some call him a warning. Some call him a blessing. But when I saw him raise his hand toward the house, I understood the truth. He isn’t there to scare you. He’s there to keep the ledger. One house spared. Another taken. The balance must be kept.

What if your “wellness reset” wasn’t a cleanse?

I should have left the photograph in the box. Instead I kept it on my desk, and now I see her every night. Lydia Harrow. Hollow eyes, black dress, always standing at the door of that rotting mansion in my dreams. Last night she whispered again.

“You will stay.”

And one night, I think I will.

Carl stared at the fridge. It was humming again, that low moan like something sick breathing through a straw. The margarine was on the floor, slowly melting into the shape of a human hand. A finger twitched. The blender clicked on by itself, its blades turning lazily in thick red liquid that smelled faintly of pennies.

She wears a crown made of broken chandelier glass, her eyes rimmed in coal, her voice stitched from your worst memory. And when it rains, the bells sing her name.

The Bellwife lives in the woods behind Durrel’s Hollow. She doesn’t walk. She doesn’t speak. She collects the forgotten.

And if you hear her bells… it’s already too late.

📖 Read the full story if you dare:
Dark, creepy, and soaked in dread. Just how you like it.

#HorrorStory #CreepyTales #TheBellwife #BoomerHorror #FictionWithFangs #ProudBoomerWrites #ReadAtYourOwnRisk

A chilling short horror story about a mysterious man known only as The Collector, who steals cherished childhood toys and replaces them with bone-carved dolls bearing the faces of the living. Set in a quiet town where memory and possession blur, "The Toy Collector" explores grief, nostalgia, and the price of sentimentality.

Not everything stays behind you. Some things wait. Some things follow. And some never really left.

What if your grief learned to talk back?
After his wife dies, Dave does what lonely people do—he brings home a smart speaker. Just something to fill the silence. Something to remind him to take his pills. Something to pretend he still matters to someone.

Then it speaks in her voice. Not a recording. Not a glitch. Her voice.
And she’s not done talking.

I just finished a story I’m really proud of.
It’s called Kind Voice, and it’s about love, memory, tech, and the lies we tell ourselves just to sleep at night.

Would love your thoughts. Don’t make me talk to my smart speaker instead.