Dust and Echoes

When the world refuses to let a star die, it builds something to replace her. After the death of actress Tessa Hawthorne, a synthetic continuation wakes up years later...perfectly engineered to perform, speak, and exist on command. But fragments of memory begin to surface: a childhood trailer in Idaho, a grandmother’s kitchen, a death that doesn’t match the official story. As the line between mach...

In the dead of winter, 1862, Jean Baptiste wasn’t just digging graves; he was harvesting them. To the families of Salt Lake City, the cemetery was sacred ground. To Baptiste, it was a supply closet. He cracked open coffins like walnut shells, stripping the stiffening bodies of the innocent...men, women, and children...treating them as nothing more than mannequins. But the horror wasn't just in the...

Senior Marshal Silas Thorne thought he had seen every kind of evil the frontier could offer. He was wrong. When a simple government task in the remote town of Boulder ends in the brutal murder of his son, Silas abandons the law for something darker. Guided by a mysterious Navajo man and an ancient legend...he carries his boy to the Warrior Cave to demand a miracle. He gets one. But the thing that...

300 Miles through the Apocalypse. 10 Hours. One Way Out. The infection hit fast. The panic hit faster. Now, Jed Thorne is driving a stolen Land Cruiser through a burning Utah, trying to get his daughter to the only safe place left: Dead Horse Point State Park. But the safe zone is closing. At sundown, the military is detonating the only land bridge to the mesa, turning it into an impenetrable isla...

In the isolated settlement of Terth, life is defined by the Burn Line...a shimmering, humming barrier that encircles the town, protecting the last of humanity from the radioactive wasteland outside. To touch the Line is to burn. To question it is heresy. Caleb is a tower mechanic, dedicated to keeping the ancient machines running and the barrier strong. But lately, the silence speaks louder than t...

The Grand Banks, 1755. The fog does not roll; it exhales. And hidden within the stifling gray of the Atlantic, something waits for Lieutenant Thomas Halloway. Halloway is a man of the Royal Navy, a scholar of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the rational world. He trusts charts, sextants, and the sturdy timber of the HMS Acheron. But when the fog clears, it reveals a vessel that defies all rea...

Darius Enlo is five thousand days into a lonely mission to harvest a comet that will exponentialize Earth's AI models. Onboard are the scientists who will execute the plan on arrival, frozen in ice for the long haul. Watching over them alone is Darius, a transit caretaker.  But when an impossible message arrives from deep space claiming the mission is a death sentence for "his people", Darius must...

Stewart believes he is just waiting out the clock. Retired, invisible, and adrift in a life that feels increasingly gray, he drives into the high Utah wilderness not to find something new, but to escape the quiet nothingness of home. He tells himself he is ready for the end. But the mountain has a way of calling a bluff. When a sudden winter storm buries the remote road and traps him in a freezing...

Sent to the dreary, isolated Oregon coast to stay with a grandmother they barely know, two city teenagers find themselves trapped in a war that is older than they are, and far more terrible. Their family's history is the town's curse, and the only path to survival demands that they sail directly into the heart of the darkness. This is a story about the agonizing choice between running from your pa...

Thomas Reid is a literary star, his bestselling novel The Factory Grave, a golden ticket out of his blue-collar past. But the life he built withing a remote mountain fortress, the perfect family, the critical acclaim....it all feels like a fraud. He is haunted by a suffocating "survivor's guilt", a feeling that drives him back to the Utah wilderness for a reunion with Rudy, the best friend he left...

What if you found a VHS tape... that showed you the future? It's 1992, and Clint Mercer is a lonely man living a quiet, predictable life. His only solace is the local video rental store, a relic of a bygone analog era. But when the clerk hands him a mysterious, unlabeled cassette with one word on it ...REWIND! his world is shattered. It's not a movie. It's a prophecy. Clint watches, horrified, as...

Jack's a long haul trucker that's not just hauling freight. He's cursed with a psychic radar for evil...a 'Thump' in his skull that screams for blood, freezes the cab with spectral dread, or heralds true, ancient darkness. Blackmailed by a demonic 'Dispatcher' holding his sister's life as leverage, Jack is now on a cross-country run with an impossible cargo: a sealed, freezing trailer that's a bea...

A collection of some of my favorite original short scary stories, volume 1.  What if the things you trust most...the deep silence of the woods, the familiar voice of a loved one, a desperate cry for help in the dark...were all just bait? For this special episode, Dust and Echoes presents a triptych of terror. Three Original Tales of Terror from author James Cawley that explore the unsettling truth...

Seeking total solitude in the vast, silent corners of the Utah desert, a traveler believes he's finally alone. But the darkness is listening...and waiting.  When a relentless siege begins against the thin fabric of his small tent, he is forced to remember the ancient, whispered rules of the night: Don't speak, don't whistle, and never, ever tell the darkness your name. This is a terrifying psychol...

REDEMPTION An Original Dust and Echoes Cinematic Western by James Cawley Under the searing Utah sun, where the San Juan River cuts through stone and silence, a quiet frontier life is set ablaze. When a brutal betrayal rips her world apart, Emma Hawthorne rises from the ashes...scarred, armored, and guided by something far older than the church bells that once tried to tame her. Redemption is not y...

After the funeral and the estate sale Thomas stays behind to spend one final night alone in his childhood home.  To say goodbye before it's sold.  The rooms are now empty. But something still moves in the silence. As he clings to fading memories, something within the house begins to respond. A slow-burning tale of guilt, loss, and the dark things that wait in places we think are safe. Written and...

Some roads lead to what people would rather forget. In the backroads of Indiana, the corn grows high enough to swallow the horizon. Mile after mile of silent rows, where sound dies and even daylight feels heavy. Farmers tell their children to stay clear of the fields after dark. Hunters avoid them altogether. And still, the missing persons reports grow. This is the story of what Jenson and Susan M...

Three hundred years after the fall of the old world, the survivors live not in cities… but inside their skeletons. High above the vine-choked ruins of what once was Manhattan, the Stone Tree Clan endures among the rooftops guided by firelight, memory, and the stories passed down since the first flames were lit. Stories that remind them of the sins that burned the world… and of the one law that has...

Some places will never let you go. Jeff Bauer thought he escaped his hometown of Burley, Idaho. He traded wheat fields for Hollywood lights, childhood ghosts for film scores and awards. But a phone call from an old childhood friend drags him back into the nightmare that he thought he'd escaped.  Developers are unearthing the farmland where two kids once hid things that they hoped would always stay...

Long before covered wagons creaked across endless sagebrush and steam locomotives chased the horizon...something ancient arrived from the cold stillness between distant galaxies, and it buried itself deep into the red clay of Shoshone land.  And there, it waited for the old man and the girl.  Generations later, Dzoon awakens it. The visions it brings are unlike anything he’s ever known...not memor...

Dust & Echoes is a fiction podcast blending horror, mystery, adventure and suspense in original short story form. Each episode is a cinematic, immersive experience drawing you into tales of the strange, the forgotten, and the haunted parts of being human. Written and performed by author James Cawley, Dust & Echoes delivers a modern campfire experience, one story at a time. Unheard. Unpubli...

When neurosurgeon Garrett Goodwin boards the Celestia Maris with his family, he’s looking for quiet. But in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, the ocean gives him something else: silence. The kind that feels… alive and watching. As strange orbs appear on the horizon and a boy in the ship’s medical wing whispers in someone else’s voice, Garrett is drawn into a nightmare of reality that science can'...

He took the deckhand job with no experience and no questions asked. Just a one-way ticket to somewhere quiet. A chance to disappear. After years of bad choices and time served, Joey’s ready to leave everything he broke behind. But the further the small fishing boat he gets from land, the more dread builds inside Joey's mind.   What begins as a quiet escape drifts, in thick fog, into darker waters....

In a remote desert canyon lost to time, a weathered archaeologist uncovers the final thread of a mystery he’s chased his entire life, a forgotten Indigenous city hidden beneath the stone. But when a mountain lion encounter leaves him broken, bleeding, and alone, survival becomes a brutal reckoning. Blending myth, memory, and a fire-lit confrontation with the past, Library in the Desert is a viscer...

Out in the wasteland, something still ticks, a briefcase unshackled from a dead chief’s wrist, armed with codes from the old world. Now, a Tribal sheriff must race through a post-apocalyptic Vegas to stop a warlord wearing a stolen face. This isn’t hope. This isn’t redemption.  This is Humanity’s last stand, and it rests on the back of one man. The Fifth Number is an original story by James Cawley...