The Night Job
by Alan Ealy
After thirty-eight years of suffocating in lecture halls, Professor Milton Greaves retired. He had once filled blackboards with existential riddles and pontificated on morality, but now he sat in silence, alone, withering in a home that felt like a coffin with curtains.
Boredom turned to agitation. Agitation to decay. Until one night, walking past a graffitied underpass, he saw a flyer:
NOW HIRING: NIGHT MIME — No Experience. No Questions. Cash Paid.
The absurdity charmed him. He made the call.
---
Cosmo met him in a basement office smelling of mildew and wet paint. “You want purpose? Mime gives you that,” he said, handing over a canvas bag with gloves, striped shirt, and a sealed tin of white greasepaint. “Apply nightly. Perform in Zone 6. Don’t talk. Don’t break character. Ever.”
Milton obeyed. At first, it felt like a lark. People laughed. Tossed coins. He felt alive. But the paint... the paint didn’t come off. He scraped until he bled. And when he bled, the paint healed over it, thicker than before.
The transformation was slow—silent.
Then came the banker.
Drunk. Loud. Mean. “Clown!” he barked, shoving Milton into a trash bin. Something snapped. Milton mimed a noose and pulled down. The banker gasped. Gurgled. Collapsed. Dead. A smile stretched beneath the mime’s painted lips.
Milton kept performing. And killing.
The real estate agent who laughed too hard? Mimed a gunshot—she dropped, temple cracked on the pavement.
Teenagers who sprayed graffiti on his “stage”? He mimed a wall closing in—screams swallowed in brick silence.
He became a myth. The Red Hollow Phantom. Parents warned their children. “Don’t stay out after dusk. Don’t mock the mime.”
Each victim made the mask feel more real. The greasepaint now pulsed with warmth, as though it breathed with him. Cosmo sent no more messages. He didn’t need to. The job was permanent.
---
Over the years, police tried. Cameras captured nothing. Dogs wouldn’t track the scent. Survivors, if any, remembered only a blank stare and a final mime act—their fate foretold in silent pantomime.
He built a network of tunnels beneath the city—abandoned maintenance shafts, storm drains, cryptic lairs where he could rehearse. His collection grew: wigs, wallets, teeth.
By 2023, the body count was fifty-seven. By 2025, it was over a hundred. And Milton? Milton no longer existed. The paint had absorbed him.
He doesn’t eat. Doesn’t sleep. Just watches. Waits.
---
Sometimes, when the streets are empty and a lone soul stumbles home from a bar, there’s the faint creak of a wooden floorboard, a shimmer of white in the corner of their eye.
A mime. Pale. Smiling. Hand raised.
Pulling a rope.
And still—after all these years—not a single trace left behind. No fingerprints. No footsteps. No voice.
Because mimes, after all, don’t leave a sound.
And The Mime never gets caught.
THE MORTICIAN
by Alan Ealy
The fluorescent lights of Restful Slumber Mortuary hummed with a sickly yellow glow, a stark contrast to the inky blackness outside. For Elias, the 3 am shift was always the worst. Not because of the bodies – he’d long since grown accustomed to the stillness of the recently departed. No, it was the other stillness that gnawed at him, the silence that amplified the whispers in his own fractured mind.
His divorce from Sarah had been a brutal, drawn-out affair, leaving him hollowed out and bitter. The world felt muted, the vibrant colors leached away, much like the life draining from the bodies he prepared. Somewhere along the line, a dark seed had taken root in that emptiness, twisting his grief into something monstrous.
It started subtly. A stray thought, a flicker of resentment towards the living, the breathing, the ones who still had what he’d lost. Then came the opportunities afforded by his profession – the access, the solitude, the inherent trust people placed in those who dealt with death.
The drug was simple enough to procure, a potent sedative that left its victims pliable and unaware. The kidnappings were meticulously planned, the targets carefully chosen – individuals who, in his warped perception, represented the life he felt had been stolen from him. Ten… no, he’d lost count. The faces blurred into a collective symbol of his pain.
His “clients,” as he chillingly referred to them in his mind, were kept in the rarely used, soundproofed cremation chamber in the sub-basement. He’d tell himself it was a twisted form of control, a way to reclaim the power he felt he’d lost. The ritualistic burning, always around the dead of night, was his perverse act of finality. The roar of the furnace drowned out their muffled cries, the stench of burning flesh a grotesque perfume in the sterile air.
Tonight, however, felt different. A new kind of unease prickled at the back of his neck. The shadows in the prep room seemed deeper, more sentient. The silence felt less empty, more… expectant.
He was wheeling in his latest acquisition, a young man snatched from a dimly lit street corner hours ago, when the lights flickered violently and died, plunging the mortuary into absolute darkness. The emergency generator sputtered to life, casting long, distorted shadows that danced on the walls.
A cold draft snaked through the room, carrying with it a scent he hadn’t noticed before – not the sterile chemicals of his work, nor the acrid smell of the furnace, but something ancient and earthy, like upturned soil.
Then, the sounds began. Faint at first, like whispers just beyond the threshold of hearing. They seemed to emanate from the embalming room, then the viewing parlor, a chorus of hushed voices growing steadily louder, closer.
Elias froze, his heart hammering against his ribs. He told himself it was his guilt, his fractured psyche finally conjuring the tormented souls he’d silenced. But these whispers… they weren’t accusatory. They were hungry.
A scraping sound echoed from the hallway, like fingernails dragging across polished wood. The temperature in the room plummeted. He could see his breath misting in the dim emergency light.
Panic seized him. He had to get to the cremation chamber, complete the ritual, regain control. But as he turned, he saw them.
Shadowy figures began to coalesce in the corners of the room, their forms indistinct but undeniably present. They seemed to writhe and coalesce from the darkness itself, their silent gazes fixed on him.
The whispers intensified, swirling around him like a suffocating shroud. He could almost make out words now, fragmented and chilling: “…stolen…life…retribution…”
He stumbled backward, knocking over a tray of embalming tools. The metallic clang echoed through the oppressive silence, momentarily silencing the whispers. But only for a moment.
The figures began to move, gliding towards him with an unnatural grace. Their unseen hands reached out, their touch like a glacial burn.
Elias scrambled back, his mind a whirlwind of terror and dawning realization. He hadn’t just taken lives; he had defiled the natural order, invited something ancient and terrible into his world.
He backed into the viewing parlor, the velvet curtains feeling like clammy skin against his hands. The whispers were deafening now, a cacophony of suffering and rage.
Suddenly, the temperature in the room spiked. The air shimmered. From the doorway, a figure emerged, taller and darker than the others. Its form was vaguely humanoid, but its features were obscured by shadow, and its eyes glowed with an inner, malevolent light.
A voice, cold as a tombstone and echoing with the weight of ages, filled the room. “You have perverted the cycle. You have stolen what is not yours to take.”
Elias tried to scream, but his throat constricted. He could only whimper as the shadowy figures closed in, their touch growing colder, more agonizing. He felt his life force being leached away, his body growing heavy and numb.
The last thing he saw, before the darkness consumed him completely, was the burning gaze of the tall figure, and the horrifying understanding that tonight, the mortician had become the subject. The furnace in the sub-basement would remain cold, for a new kind of heat was about to claim Elias, a fiery justice for the lives he had so cruelly extinguished. The whispers, no longer hungry, were now a chorus of grim satisfaction.
COLD WATERS OF REDEMPTION
Cold Waters of Redemption
Portland was always gray in Carter’s memory—gray skies, gray streets, gray veins. The city’s wet chill clung to his bones the same way heroin once had: slow, numbing, lethal. He had been a ghost of a man since seventeen, floating from squat houses to alleyways, chasing a high that dulled the scream in his head. But that day, slouched behind a trash bin outside the Water Street Fish Market, everything changed.
“Your problem isn’t the heroin,” said a voice, low and rough like gravel dragged over steel. “It’s that you’ve got no reason to stay clean.”
Carter blinked through the fog of withdrawal and pain. A thick figure in a black peacoat stood over him. The man’s face was seamed with age, but his eyes were sharp as fillet knives.
“Name’s Virgil,” he said, extending a calloused hand.
Virgil owned the fish market. He took Carter in—not out of pity, but because, as he said, “Everyone deserves one clean slate.” Virgil was a Vietnam vet, a hard man with secrets. Over time, Carter learned to gut fish, slice tuna so clean it looked like glass, and, eventually, wield a blade like a surgeon. But fish wasn’t all Virgil dealt in.
One night, after eighteen months clean, Virgil tossed Carter a folder.
“Guy in that file hurt a girl. Bad. Cops won’t touch it. You want to stay clean? Give yourself a purpose.”
The picture inside showed a grinning man in a suit and tie, an address scribbled below.
That was the beginning.
What followed were years of fire. Carter became a ghost again, but this time a weaponized one. Under Virgil’s tutelage, he trained: firearms, poisons, hand-to-hand. He worked his way through Vegas casinos, Dubai penthouses, cartel-run jungles in Sinaloa. Each kill paid well. Women came easily—models, wives, mercenaries—but Carter didn’t get close. He liked the silence of hotel rooms after a job, the cold glass of top-shelf bourbon in his hand, the knowledge that he hadn’t used in five years.
He never touched heroin again. Not once.
But temptation didn’t always come in needles.
One job in Prague, he met Lera, a Russian violinist with ice-blonde hair and a scar on her wrist. She didn’t ask questions. She listened. And Carter, for the first time, began to believe in something beyond blood and ghosts. He thought about walking away, about using the millions stashed in Cayman accounts to buy a vineyard in Tuscany.
But the ghosts weren’t done.
A file came through from a former client—a banker in Geneva with CIA ties. The target: Virgil.
Carter didn’t sleep for three days. The file was clear: Virgil had gone rogue, stolen something that couldn’t be allowed to exist—an encrypted list of every black-ops hit sanctioned off-book since the ‘80s. If the list went public, governments would fall. Hit squads were already in motion.
Carter tracked Virgil to a cabin on the Oregon coast. When he walked in, the old man was waiting with two mugs of coffee and a Glock on the table.
“You here to kill me, son?” he asked.
“No,” Carter said. “I’m here to find out why.”
Virgil’s hands trembled slightly. “Because they used us. You, me, all the ghosts. It was never about justice. It was leverage. And I’m tired of being their monster.”
“You’ll die for this,” Carter said.
Virgil nodded. “I already have.”
They drank in silence.
The next day, Carter uploaded the file to an anonymous server. It never went public. He used it to blackmail the CIA into erasing his name. Virgil vanished. Some say he died that winter in a hunting accident. Others say he’s still out there, somewhere off-grid.
Carter never picked up a needle again. He lives in Spain now, quiet, anonymous. He walks the coast every morning, the salt air clearing what the heroin once clouded. Sometimes he sees Lera, sometimes he doesn’t. But he keeps a picture of Virgil on his nightstand, next to a worn switchblade.
For a man who once lived for death, he’s finally learning to live.
EAGLE CREEK
By Alan Ealy
They called themselves “The Elite Eight” back in college—eight inseparable friends bonded by youth, love, and secrets. Time had stretched them thin, but when Alan invited them to a secluded weekend retreat at an old family cabin deep in the Oregon woods, nostalgia pulled them back together like magnets.
Tee and Alan had always been the closest—best friends since freshman year. Jessica and Steve were high school sweethearts, now married. Kenneth, who they all called “G,” had an on-again, off-again thing with Sherry. Shannon and Brandon were the wildcards—chaotic and inseparable. But everyone trusted Alan. He was quiet, smart, a little dark—but dependable.
The cabin was ancient, inherited by Alan after the passing of his estranged uncle. Weather-beaten wood, dusty corners, and a thick scent of mildew clung to the place like memory. But it had charm. A creek whispered just beyond the treeline. The fire crackled. Drinks flowed.
On the first night, Shannon disappeared.
They searched the forest with flashlights and hoarse voices until sunrise. No signs. No footprints. No blood. But the next morning, her phone was found in the basement—screen cracked, battery dead, and covered in something brown and sticky.
By nightfall, Steve vanished. Brandon was found screaming in the woods, clawing at his own face, muttering nonsense about “red eyes” and “a voice from the walls.” They sedated him, but come morning, he was gone too.
Then it hit Tee.
Something was wrong with Alan.
He was calm. Too calm. When Sherry went missing and G found her torn shirt nailed to a tree, Alan didn’t flinch. When Jessica accused him of lying, he just smiled and said, “It’s just the woods. They get in your head.”
That night, Jessica and G were dragged from their rooms.
Tee tried to run. She didn’t make it far before the blow to her head came. When she awoke, the basement was dark, damp, and humming with muffled sobs. She was tied at the wrists and ankles, duct tape over her mouth. Around her lay the mutilated bodies of their friends—Brandon strung from a hook, Jessica barely recognizable, Steve’s wedding ring still clinging to his broken finger.
Alan stood above her, wearing a tattered black coat, eyes glassy.
“It’s the bloodline,” he whispered. “My uncle taught me. The cabin takes what it’s owed. Every generation must feed it. You should be honored.”
But Tee was smart.
When Alan left to prepare “the final ritual,” she broke a pipe loose and used the jagged end to cut her bindings. She fled through the cellar door, into the forest, and stumbled upon an old ranger station. She screamed until someone listened.
By the time help arrived, the cabin was ash and cinders.
No trace of Alan.
No bodies.
Only Tee’s bloodied clothes and a rusted knife in the basement.
The police didn’t believe her. No records of Alan Ealy inheriting the cabin. No family deaths in the area. No Elite Eight. The photos she had were “clearly fabricated.” They said her trauma had fractured her sense of reality.
She was diagnosed with acute dissociative psychosis and institutionalized.
Years later, a new nurse found a drawing in Tee’s cell. A sketch of a cabin. A creek. Eight figures in a circle. One shadowed figure above them all.
At the bottom, in jagged handwriting:
“The cabin lives. Alan waits.”
Play or Pay
Play or Pay"
By Alan Ealy
The storm rolled in around midnight, crawling across the sky like something with claws. Inside the house on Ash pine Lane, four friends huddled together beneath flickering candlelight. The parents were out of town. The house was theirs for the weekend.
It should’ve been perfect. But then Ty brought out the board.
It was no ordinary Ouija — hand-carved, blackened with age, and cold to the touch no matter how long you held it. Symbols surrounded the letters, not quite human, not quite readable. He said he got it from a guy online — someone who claimed it came from the tenant who hung himself in the attic ten years ago.
Jade rolled her eyes. Mason told him it wasn’t funny. Lena, always the sensitive one, said the board smelled wrong. Like mold and metal.
They played anyway.
The planchette moved fast. Too fast. At first, they blamed each other. Then the power died. The candles blew out. The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was watching.
“Who are you?” Mason asked.
The board spelled: I A M D E B T
They all stared. No one laughed.
Then came the messages.
P L A Y O R P A Y
Y O U R S I S T E R
Ty’s phone buzzed. A picture. His little sister sleeping in her bed — a live feed. She was alone in her room.
And someone — something — was in the corner.
That was when they realized they couldn’t stop. Not without consequences. The board wouldn’t let them. Every time they tried to destroy it, it came back — in the fireplace, on the kitchen table, once even in Jade’s bed. No matter what they did, it returned, whispering silently in the spaces between seconds.
Then Jade remembered something.
When her family moved in, she found a shoebox in the attic. Inside: teeth, a mirror shard, an old photo with a burned-out face. The name “EVAN” carved into everything — over and over again.
He hadn’t died by suicide. He’d tried to end the game.
He failed.
That night, they climbed into the attic. The box was still there — older now, but unchanged. When they tried to burn the items inside, the shadows screamed. The board bled. The air went cold — so cold Lena sobbed into her hands without realizing it.
And then… silence.
The next morning came gray and quiet. Birds sang outside like nothing had happened. Ty said it was over. Mason wasn’t so sure. Lena hadn’t spoken a word.
They thought they’d won.
Then someone knocked on the door.
Three times.
A package. No return address. Just a note taped to the top:
> “You burned the pieces. But not the board.”
“Your turn is over.”
“Now it’s theirs.”
Inside was the Ouija board. Polished. Pristine. Waiting.
Jade’s phone rang.
Her mother’s name appeared on the screen.
She answered.
No one spoke.
Just the sound of breathing.
And then, a whisper — low, patient, and far too close:
“Play… or pay…”
Jade’s hand trembled. She turned toward the window. Her mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway.
The reflection in the screen showed a figure standing behind her.
Watching.
Smiling.
The Last Call
The Last Call
A.EALY
The 101st
They warned me about Sherry.
Not with words, not really. It was in the way the regulars went quiet when she passed. How their eyes flicked toward the door when she smiled at someone too long. How they drank fast, tipped heavy, and **left early**.
But I was new in town. And stupid. And drunk.
Sherry was behind the bar at **The Hollow Tap**, pouring drinks with hands too graceful, too precise. Her black hair fell over one eye, and when she laughed, it felt like she was unzipping your soul just to peek inside.
She noticed me watching.
“Last call,” she said, sliding me another bourbon.
“I could use one more,” I said. “And maybe… company.”
Her smile curled, slow as a noose.
“My place, then.”
---
Her car was old, silent, and smelled like copper and roses. She didn’t talk. Just drove, eyes locked on the road like it might bite her if she blinked.
The house was buried in trees. Tall, skeletal things that scraped the windows like they were trying to get in—or out.
No lights. No neighbors. Just the creak of old wood and the whisper of wind that somehow sounded like _breathing._
Inside, everything was **too clean**. Not like someone lived there, but like someone scrubbed away all evidence that anyone ever had.
The walls were pale, almost grey. Like flesh. I saw claw marks on one doorframe, and a patch of floor that had been bleached so many times the boards warped.
“Wait here,” she said, her voice flatter now, like it had forgotten how to be human.
She vanished down a hallway that seemed far too long for the size of the house. I sat. Waited. Something moved behind the walls. Slow. Wet.
The air shifted.
And then I saw the pictures.
They weren’t on display. Just barely visible behind a cracked cabinet door. Hundreds of Polaroids. Each one a man. Each one wide-eyed. Drunk. Smiling.
All numbered. _1 through 100._
They all had the same thing: carved symbols in the corners. Symbols that pulsed when I looked too long. Like they were breathing. Watching.
And then I saw the newest photo. On the table beside me. Fresh. Still damp.
It was me.
_No smile._
No eyes.
I turned to run—but the hallway was gone.
In its place, a staircase spiraled down, impossibly deep. And something was **coming up.** Heavy, wet footsteps. Too many legs.
I ran toward the door—bolted. Windows—nailed shut. The walls pulsed. Breathed. Something whispered in my ear with a tongue made of cold air:
“She doesn’t live alone.”
Then I saw her again.
Sherry.
But her eyes were gone. Her mouth stretched too wide, jaw unhinged. Her hair slithered like worms in water, and her limbs bent in ways I can’t describe without screaming.
She floated.
She _smiled._
“You’re number **101**,” she said, her voice filled with static and rot.
And then the walls began to scream.
---
I don’t know how long I’ve been here.
The others won’t talk. Most don’t have mouths anymore.
There’s no time. No sleep. Only the humming. The chewing. The voice that whispers under the floorboards, counting down, always starting from 101.
And above it all, Sherry, still smiling behind that bar in town. Waiting for the next man to say:
_“I could use one more.”_
---
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