NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE - Horror and Dark Fantasy Story Podcast (Audiobook | Short Stories)

I work in a tall brick room with peaked cathedral ceilings. At one end of the room there is a brick-lined chute, chimneylike, that opens up out of the ceiling seventy-five or a hundred feet above a yawning pit in the floor. Every so often, without much warning, a body will fall from the chute and tumble through the air. | © 2024 by Andrew Stover. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your...

My little brother once chased me through the house with an ax. He was joking, mostly. But it certainly didn’t feel like a joke at the time. He plunged forward with a guttural battle cry at the start of the chase. His face sanguine, veins pulsing with rushing blood. Through his anger, he still had enough control to throw in creepy one-liners. I don’t have a clear memory of what he said. Some insult...

Pregnancy is an infestation. A hidden invasion. An invisible operative sneaks inside you, planting a package of foreign genetic material and forcing you to replicate it trillions of times. Soon, your hostage cell floats down your fallopian tube to the womb to feed on the blood-bed of your uterine lining like a vicious little tick. | © 2024 R.A. Busby. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about you...

Western texts date the discovery of vagina dentata to 1800 BCE, to the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the oldest medical text in the world. Misalignment of the lower jaw is detailed, for which regular application of date oil is recommended. | © 2023 Ashlee Lhamon. Narrated by Tina Connolly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tuesday, June 7, 2022 14:02 GMT. There is movement on the pathway for the first time in 113 days, six hours, four minutes, and five seconds. My motion sensitive cameras flicker on. I see Maker. Maker is not alone. | © 2023 by Lynette S. Hoag. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even before my son was born, my village had made of me a black sheep. When I was young, I would slither between the grasp of the Elders and flitter into the jungle unabated. I would storm past the hills of fire ants to leap atop the trunks of fallen trees before catching ahold of a veritable vine like some kind of red-assed macaco. I did not see the forest for all its dangers then—the poison-skinn...

Once upon a time, there was you and there was Jonah. “Jonah!” you would call out. “Jonah, it’s me! Let me in!” But he’d never let you in. Before you turned ten, the inside of Jonah’s room remained as opaque as the inside of his thoughts. And he would always, always make you wait. You’d stand there, bouncing on your toes. | © 2023 by Sharang Biswas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Terence Taylor. Lea...

Dear Andy: The day I was arrested, someone bought the winning Powerball lottery ticket that was worth 1.2 billion dollars. I remember dreaming what I would have done if I had won. You might not believe me, but I’m being serious here. © 2023 by David Janisch | Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge. © 2023 by Rachael K. Jones | Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It felt a little like fucking. Reminded Magdalene of the first time she’d ever let a boy get a hand up her skirt, long before Ben but he didn’t know that, she wore white on her wedding day. Couldn’t even remember his name, that boy, just that he’d died in The War. | © 2023 by Donyae Coles. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the sun plunged beneath the horizon, the striations of red clouds looked like gashes raked across the sky; flayed wounds ready to rain blood on a thirsty desert. Anastasia Mendez offered her left forearm a glance. The lacerations crisscrossing her skin had mended. | © 2023 by Pedro Iniguez. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When he tells me to feed her, I do. And I do despite her cries, and despite the rattle of her chains echoing through the basement. The basement of the old house that once belonged to his father before I pointed a hunting rifle at his face and pulled the trigger. | © 2023 by J. Choe. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kachi stroked the yellow python-eye hidden between the cheeks of his buttocks with a distracted finger. The familiar round smoothness of the hard orb calmed his mind as he stared dispassionately at the mangled corpse sprawled at his tiny, blood-coated feet. | © 2023 by Nuzo Onoh. Narrated by Emeka Emecheta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I wouldn’t describe it as waking up. If you’ve been in a car accident, you know the violence. One moment, your life feels the size of your body, muscular years of loves and hurts wrapped around a thousand calcified tasks, a routine that bears you up even on the mornings when nothing makes sense. Then your days break open with the sound of rupturing metal. You splinter like a windshield. It’s an aw...

When you get to the body, it’s still warm. Maybe because you’re exhausted, because your joints are feverish and your chest feels like it’s scraped dry, for a second, the face in front of you morphs and you see Ru splayed out inside the bathtub instead. Her wrists are splotched with welts, her eyes milked over with a knot of veins, but it’s the head that makes you rigid: Ru’s skull hangs to her che...

Centuries of war, conquest, and foreign invasion have drawn and redrawn the map of Argia countless times, leaving the country’s boundaries ambiguous and ill-defined. It was in the summer of his fortieth year that Franz Sieber found himself in that contested region, escorted by a small team of mercenaries, guides, and translators. He had come in search of flowers. According to local legend, the out...

The drums sound at first light but you are already awake. Today is the day you will finally meet the Goddess. She’ll either embrace you, ripping you apart and reforming you into a being of magic and flame, as mercurial as the sea, or She’ll withhold her blessing and never again will you walk upon land. You take a breath and hold the humid, tropical air deep in your lungs before releasing it and dr...

The call comes when Kaitlyn is at Little Star—the cafe on the corner of Third and Main—picking up lunch for the marketing team: two Caesar salads and a cream cheese avocado bagel sandwich. She answers her phone as it’s her turn to step up to the counter. The voice on the other end of the line says, This is Father Lawrence, chaplain from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. She already knows w...

Jeffrey, chin glazed in grease, leans his head over my cubicle wall and asks me what I’m working on. He slurps something from his bento box---the one with his name supposedly written in kanji on the side---and noodles hang trembling from his lips. Jeffrey’s the senior sales associate, which technically makes him my superior. He’s wildly unsavory for a number of reasons; the fact that he insists on...

The Rampart Hotel towered into the sky. It was hard to believe the building was once considered the flagship symbol for a new boom in southeast tourism---a boom that lasted as long as these things usually do. Now it was a distastefully modern thing with a square, flat roof somewhere in the grey clouds and a car park that was mostly empty. As Penrick made his way into the lobby and ordered an old f...

Be honest, now. What did you think you would find? You have ventured all the way to this cellar, meaning you must have first braved the porch balustrade of milk teeth, skirting the welcome mat that parts down the center like a grin. Perhaps you chanced up to the second floor where the beds are heavy beneath the weight of fungal networks spun as fine as silk thread, or into the dining room set for...

The day after the picture of your boobs gets sent around the school, a mosquito lands on your tongue and bursts like a ripe cherry. You are crying in the disabled stall of the girls’ bathroom where you took the photo to begin with. You hate that you’re back here, but it’s where you were that day four months ago because it’s the only private mirror in the whole school. It’s exactly the same. Paint-...

Mom and Dad all but forced the games on me. It’s hard to believe now. All you hear about these days is how kids don’t want to play water balloons anymore, don’t want to do sack race, how every year there’s an increase in reported grass allergies, and how in just a couple generations we as a society are going to forget we ever knew how to climb trees. Everyone has those apps that track screen time....

One could, if necessary, hide between the studs in your wall. Shoulders, narrower than the gap. Back against the plywood of the exterior panel; chest, when fully inflated with breath, pressing against the lath and plaster. Room enough to disappear. This was mine before it was yours. Single story 1920s bungalow, three bedrooms, an unfinished basement and an attic crawlspace. Flower beds in the fron...

Cinda begins the worst afternoon of her life by hiding in a closet. It’s spring break of her senior year of high school, and she’s rented a cabin with four friends using money she saved from her job at the bookstore, and it all feels terribly grown-up: the long drive into the mountains in the passenger seat of her boyfriend Travis’s car; the box of condoms Paulina not-so-secretly tucked in the glo...