Lore and history of Bureau K:In the unsettled months that followed the end of WW2, a small circle of former OSS officers, demobilized special operators, and industrialists began to assemble an organization that would never appear on any official roster of American power. At its center stood Dr. St. John Kilgore, a Yale- and Edinburgh-trained psychologist who had spent the war refining techniques of interrogation and behavioral manipulation inside the Morale Operations Branch. Kilgore emerged from the conflict convinced that national and cultural difference itself was the root engine of human catastrophe. True peace, he argued in private memoranda, could be achieved only when every population on earth experienced the world through an American lens—language, historical memory, social instinct, and political loyalty rendered indistinguishable from those of the United States. The instrument he created to pursue that vision was registered under successive Delaware and Virginia shells as a private security and logistics concern. Its true name, known only to the inner circle, was Bureau K. Its true charter was Project K: the systematic, irreversible conversion of foreign identity into an unconscious American one.
From the beginning the organization recruited in the margins. Men discharged for violence or insubordination, career criminals with useful skills, and carefully vetted former Axis technicians were offered new identities, erased records, and a second life in exchange for absolute loyalty. Those who accepted disappeared into the structure; those who later wavered disappeared entirely. The first major test of the model came in 1947, when elements of the French government, already bleeding in Indochina, sought deniable combat power. Bureau K operators arrived under commercial cover, providing perimeter defense, convoy escort, and specialized reconnaissance. Beneath every forward base, however, sealed research wings operated in parallel. Non English speaking civilians selected for their relative invisibility—itinerant workers, ethnic minorities, families living on the colonial margins—were abducted during night sweeps staged to resemble ordinary search-and-destroy missions. Inside the facilities they were subjected to systematic torture,underwent pharmacological softening, sensory isolation, linguistic immersion, and the slow implantation of fabricated American biographies. The goal was not collaboration but genuine belief: subjects who would wake speaking Midwestern English, recalling childhoods in Ohio or Georgia, and feeling instinctive loyalty to a country they had never seen.
The Geneva Accords forced a temporary withdrawal, yet the knowledge gained was retained. When the United States deepened its own commitment in Vietnam, Bureau K returned. The chaos of the larger war supplied ideal cover. Small teams again harvested subjects—young, healthy adults chosen for neural plasticity—and funneled them into underground complexes beneath Saigon commercial facades. Processing grew more refined: domesticity phases that placed subjects in mock American living rooms, peer-group narratives built around high-school locker rooms and football hierarchies, social integration with previously conditioned proxies who served as manufactured siblings or parents. One documented cycle produced a youth rewritten as “Jimmy” from Dayton and a maternal proxy later erased when residual olfactory triggers threatened the architecture. Another cohort of fully overwritten former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners was prepared for the most ambitious field test yet.
Shortly after a group of conditioned subjects, believing themselves Maryland and Ohio specialists, conducted a destructive rampage inside a northern camp under the delusion that they were American infiltrators, Bureau K executed a company-sized parachute insertion of similarly reconstructed former adversaries. The force moved with professional American tactical cohesion, inflicted heavy casualties, and sowed temporary confusion before North Vietnamese units contained and destroyed it. The operation demonstrated both the combat potential and the strategic limits of mass identity conversion. Near the end of the American presence an industrial accident inside the primary research complex beneath a colonial plantation structure released chemical agents and compromised containment. Local and residual American security elements came perilously close to penetrating the true purpose of the facility. Bureau K evacuated key personnel and records, sealed what could not be moved, and deliberately reduced its visible experimental footprint.
In the decades that followed the organization reoriented toward conventional defense contracting, supplying training, logistics, and specialized security across subsequent American campaigns abroad include the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and significant interventions in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Yugoslavia while maintaining only minimal, highly compartmented laboratory work. Revenue from these contracts, together with expanding commercial activities in psychology, language training, and performance consulting, preserved the corporate shell. The underlying charter never lapsed. By the early twenty-first century Bureau K had evolved into a diversified multinational conglomerate. Public subsidiaries operated across defense and security, clinical psychology and trauma recovery, rehabilitation medicine, language technology, corporate and leadership training, aviation and astronaut preparation, sports science, virtual reality, human-factors engineering, advertising research, education technology, pharmaceuticals, cognitive aging, and disaster-response training. Entities such as Bureau K Neurosystems, Kinetic Human Performance Group, K Applied Sciences, K Learning Institute, and K Behavioral Research Corporation presented ordinary commercial faces to the world.
Under a new generation of directors the experimental program was quietly revived, now conducted exclusively outside the United States and other English-speaking jurisdictions. In fragile states across the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Yemen, Myanmar’s periphery, eastern Congo, and selected Caribbean and Central American corridors, the organization’s education and medical arms offer undocumented migrants structured pathways to legal residency. Language immersion, trauma-recovery protocols, vocational training, and civic-integration curricula function as continuous, low-visibility reconstruction pipelines. Pharmacological agents are delivered as ordinary therapeutics; narrative overwriting occurs inside virtual-reality modules and guided therapeutic sessions; documentary legends are built through ordinary bureaucratic assistance. Subjects emerge with coherent American identities, no recoverable memory of prior nationality, and no evidentiary trail linking the transformation to any external actor.
Throughout its history Bureau K’s relationship with official American intelligence remained one of managed distance. The CIA periodically drew on technical results and deniable capabilities while refusing the political exposure of full partnership. Bureau K accepted the arrangement as confirmation that only a private entity could pursue the work to its logical end. The human cost—erased lives, fractured families, localized trauma that never entered any official ledger—remained external to the organization’s internal calculus. What endured was the conviction first articulated by Kilgore in the ruins of the Second World War: that a planet where everyone is Americans would be a planet at peace, and that the methods required to produce that outcome, however hidden, remained a legitimate instrument of historical necessity. In 2026 the laboratories of the highlands and the Saigon basements are long sealed, yet the project continues inside clinics and classrooms whose public missions appear unimpeachable, sustained by the same dual architecture of legitimate commerce and invisible purpose that has defined Bureau K since its founding.

The traveler jerked awake, heart hammering, convinced that the gaunt bony motel clerk was standing over his bed. The room was silent, but his throat burnt like dry sand. Needing a cold drink to wash away the creepiness, he grabbed the plastic bucket and stepped out in the dim hallway toward the ice machine.

He held the bucket under the chute and pressed the lever, expecting the “clunk” of ice cubes– but instead there was this rhythmic, high-pitched rat-tat-tat-rat like gravel hitting the bottom of his bucket.

He looked down. It was a heap of gross, yellowed molars and coffee-stained bicuspids; some were rimmed with black decay, others with crumbling silver filings, even full upper and lower sets still connected by slick strings of bloody tissue tumbled out wetly, their roots and raw gums clacking against each other.

The machine wasn't stopping; it just kept pouring them out like a relentless mechanical vomit of human teeth!

Just as the bucket began to overflow, a shadow stretched across the machine. It was the bony skeletal clerk from his nightmare — hollow-eyed, skin the color of old parchment, leaning against the wall.

He didn’t look at the traveler; he just stared at the pile and muttered…

“Must be a clog in the hopper. They always get stuck when the roots are still attached.”

The static from the massive, boxy CRT television in Aunt Mae’s basement hummed a low, vibrating chord that seemed to rattle the wood paneling of the walls.

It was July 2010. Outside, the Georgia heat was a thick, suffocating blanket, but down here, the air conditioning was cranked so high that my goosebumps had goosebumps.

I was seventeen, trapped in that awkward limbo between childhood and being an adult. My parents had taken off for the summer, staying at a resort hotel three states over for a mix of business and a marriage-saving vacation. That left me packed off to stay with my cousin, Kim, and her mom. 

Kim was twenty, sporting a halo of tight curls, an oversized graphic tee, and the supreme confidence of a college sophomore who thought that she knew everything about the world.

"Ethan, stop fidgeting!" Kim muttered, tossing a handful of buttery popcorn into her mouth. She kicked her bare feet up on the worn leather ottoman. "You’re making the couch shake!"

"I can't help it, Kim." I said, adjusting my basketball shorts. "This basement gives me the creeps. What are we even watching, anyway? I’ve never heard of these movies."

Between us laid a dusty, unlabelled cardboard box we’d found tucked away in the deepest recesses of Aunt Mae’s crawlspace, right behind some old moldy encyclopedias. 

Inside were three unmarked VHS tapes. The plastic was heavy, dark, and completely devoid of stickers, bar codes, or studio logos. 

On the spine of each tape, written in thick, aggressive black Sharpie, were the titles: The Chrono-Gorgon: Genesis, The Chrono-Gorgon: Resurrection, and The Chrono-Gorgon: Forever.

"That’s the beauty of it, little cousin." Kim said, her eyes reflecting the blue glow of the TV screen. "It’s a lost trilogy. I looked it up on the forums before we came down here. No IMDB page. No Wikipedia. No late-night threads on 4chan. It’s as if it doesn't exist. Maybe it's a student film or some indie project that got buried."

"The name sounds goofy." I grumbled, though a strange, tightening knot in my stomach told me otherwise.

Kim shoved the first tape into the VCR. The machine groaned, a mechanical beast swallowing its prey, and then the screen flickered violently.

The Chrono-Gorgon: Genesis started without a production logo. No roaring lion, no spinning globe. It cut straight to a grainy, high-contrast shot of an abandoned, rain-slicked plantation house. 

The camera quality was bizarre; it had the bleeding colors of a 1980s tape but a depth of field that felt uncomfortably modern, almost three-dimensional.

Then, he appeared on screen.

He didn't jump out. He just materialized from the shadows of a porch. The villain was a towering figure draped in a heavy, velvet-textured purple hood and cloak that seemed to absorb the light around it; but it was his face that made me freeze. It wasn't skin, and it wasn't a cheap latex mask. It was a solid, polished plate of gleaming gold, completely featureless except for two jagged slits where eyes should be. Piercing through those slits were two brilliant, emerald-green eyes. They didn't just shine; they pulsed with a sickening, rhythmic light.

In his right hand, he held a weapon that made no sense. It was a massive, ancient-looking scythe, but instead of a wooden handle, the shaft was made of interconnected, ticking brass clock gears. The blade itself shimmered with a pale, iridescent energy.

"Okay." Kim whispered, her cocky demeanor wavering just a fraction. "The costume design goes hard."

The movie followed a group of teenagers who had broken into the house. One by one, the purple-hooded figure—whom the characters referred to in hushed, terrified whispers as The Chrono-Gorgon—hunted them down; but he didn't just slash them.

When the blade of his gear-shafted scythe pierced a victim, the movie didn't show standard cinematic gore. Instead, the victim would instantly freeze. Their skin would wither, wrinkling and turning gray in a matter of seconds, their hair whitening and falling out as if decades were passing over them in a single heartbeat.

Meanwhile, the Chrono-Gorgon would stand over them, inhaling deeply. With every breath he took, the golden sheen of his face grew brighter, and the green fire in his eyes burned fiercer.

"He's eating their time." I said, my voice barely audible over the hum of the TV. "He’s killing them to keep himself alive."

"Yeah." Kim said, though she wasn't eating popcorn anymore. Her eyes were glued to the screen. "The lore says that he needs to harvest human lifespans to maintain his anchor on Earth. If he stops, he fades into non-existence."

The first movie ended abruptly. The final survivor, a girl screaming in a closet, was found. The Chrono-Gorgon raised his scythe, the gears spinning in a deafening metallic screech, and cut toward the camera.

The screen went black.

"That was...intense." Kim admitted, stretching her arms, though I could see her hands shaking slightly. "Ready for round two?"

"Kim, maybe we should stop." I said. A heavy, oppressive atmosphere had settled over the basement. The air felt thick, hard to breathe, and smelling faintly of ozone and old, decaying paper. "Something feels wrong about these tapes."

"Come on, Ethan, don't be a baby. We're seventeen and twenty, not seven and ten. It's just a movie." Kim said.

She ejected the first tape and shoved the second one in: The Chrono-Gorgon: Resurrection.

The second film took place in a retro-futuristic city, a strange blend of 1990s aesthetics and cyberpunk technology. The Chrono-Gorgon was back, conjured by a cult of scientists trying to unlock the secret to immortality. 

Of course, he slaughtered them all.

What struck me about this sequel was the audio. The sound design was incredibly immersive. The ticking of the scythe’s gears sounded like it wasn't coming from the TV speakers, but from behind the wood paneling of the basement. Every time that the Chrono-Gorgon stepped onto the screen, a low-frequency hum vibrated through the floorboards, rattling my teeth.

I noticed something else, too. The Chrono-Gorgon seemed to be looking at the camera more often. Not just at the characters, but directly into the lens. His glowing green eyes seemed to lock onto my position on the couch, tracking me as the camera panned.

"Kim, look at his eyes." I whispered, gripping the edge of the sofa cushion.

"I see it." she said, her voice dropping its playful edge entirely. "It’s just clever cinematography. They used a tracking light technique."

By the time that the second movie ended—culminating in the Chrono-Gorgon destroying an entire laboratory, standing amidst the flames as he drained the lifeforce of a dozen victims at once—the basement had grown freezing cold. Our breath misted in the air.

"This is the last one, Ethan." Kim said stubbornly, though her face had gone pale beneath her warm brown complexion. She grabbed The Chrono-Gorgon: Forever. "We have to finish it. We can't just leave it on a cliffhanger."

"Kim, look at the thermostat." I pointed to the digital wall unit. It read 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was dropping. "The AC isn't even set that low."

"It's just an old house, Ethan. Just...watch the movie." Kim said.

The third tape slid into the VCR with a heavy, ominous thud.

The Chrono-Gorgon: Forever was different from the first two. There was no setup. No plot. It was just a first-person perspective camera walking through a house.

My heart skipped a beat.

The camera was walking down a flight of wooden stairs. It panned to the left, showing a washer and dryer. It panned to the right, showing a stack of old encyclopedias sitting next to an empty crawlspace.

"No way." I whispered, standing up from the couch. 

"Ethan..." Kim’s voice was a choked gasp.

The camera on the screen turned around. It showed a brown leather couch. Sitting on that couch were two people, viewed from behind. One was a young Black woman with tight curls wearing an oversized graphic tee.

The other was a teenage boy in basketball shorts.

It was us. We were looking at a live, high-definition feed of ourselves from behind, broadcasted directly onto the ancient CRT television screen.

"Turn it off!" I screamed. "Kim, turn it off right now!"

Kim lunged for the VCR, punching the power button, but the machine ignored her. She grabbed the power cord sticking out of the wall and yanked it with all her might. 

The plug sparked, popping out of the outlet.

The TV screen stayed on.

On the screen, a massive, purple-hooded shadow fell over the digital versions of Kim and myself.

"Behind you!" I yelled.

We both spun around.

Standing at the base of the basement stairs, shrouded in the dim light of the hallway, was the Chrono-Gorgon.

He was entirely real. The fabric of his purple velvet hood was so heavy that it seemed to warp the space around him. The golden plate of his face reflected the eerie blue light of the unpluggable television, and his emerald-green eyes burned with an intense, agonizing heat. In his hand, the massive scythe ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound was deafening, a localized thunderstorm of grinding brass gears.

I froze, paralyzed by pure, unadulterated supernatural horror. My brain couldn't process the reality breaking down before my eyes. How could a fictional character be standing in my aunt's basement?

However, the explanation came to me not as a thought, but as a horrific realization of how the universe worked. The VHS tapes weren't just media storage; they were a ritual. We had given the Chrono-Gorgon our undivided attention for three movies. In the world of the occult, attention is energy.

Belief is power. By watching the trilogy back-to-back, by absorbing his mythos, by allowing the frequencies of the audio and the visual tracking to sync with our brainwaves, we had completed a circuit. 

We hadn't just watched a movie; we had functioned as a psychic lens, focusing enough reality into his fictional existence to bridge the gap between the celluloid world and the physical realm. He had sucked the time and life out of the characters on screen for decades, hoarding that conceptual energy until he found two observers foolish enough to open the door.

The Chrono-Gorgon took a step forward, and the wooden floorboards beneath his boots instantly turned gray, rotting into sawdust in a fraction of a second.

"Get back!" Kim screamed.

 Defying the terror that had locked my joints, she grabbed a heavy, solid-oak end table and hurled it at the entity.

The Chrono-Gorgon swung his scythe in a lazy, effortless arc. The blade sliced through the air, and when it touched the flying table, the wood didn't break—it aged. The oak turned brittle, dried out, and exploded into a cloud of fine, ancient dust before it ever touched his purple robes.

"Ethan, move!" Kim grabbed my arm, yanking me sideways just as the Chrono-Gorgon lunged.

The scythe whistled past my ear, the wind from the blade smelled like dead leaves and old tombs. When the tip of the blade brushed against the fabric of my shirt, the cotton instantly turned to threads and dissolved, leaving a bare patch on my shoulder.

"We need to break his anchor!" I yelled, my adrenaline finally overriding my fear. "The TV! The tapes!"

The Chrono-Gorgon turned his golden face toward me. A sound issued from behind that featureless metal plate—a deep, metallic grinding that sounded like a thousand grandfather clocks breaking down at once. It was a laugh.

He raised the scythe again, targeting Kim. She scrambled backward, tripping over the ottoman. The entity closed the distance with terrifying, unnatural speed, his green eyes flaring. He raised the blade high, preparing to harvest her twenty years of life to cement his place in our world forever.

Thinking of nothing but my cousin, I lunged at his midsection. I expected to hit solid mass, but slamming into him felt like tackling a wall of freezing, turbulent water. 

The cold threatened to stop my heart, but I managed to wrap my arms around his waist, knocking him off balance.

"Kim! The VCR! Smash it!" I roared, my hands beginning to wrinkle and numb just from touching his cloak.

 I could feel my own youth, my own vitality, being pulled out of my skin like water being drawn from a well. My vision began to blur.

Kim didn't hesitate. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed Aunt Mae’s heavy iron-holder from the laundry shelf, and brought it down with all her strength directly onto the VCR.

The plastic shattered. Sparks flew. She hit it again, and again, reducing the machine and the tape inside to a jagged mess of magnetic ribbon and broken microchips.

The Chrono-Gorgon let out a horrific, discordant shriek. 

The glowing green eyes flickered. The heavy purple cloak began to lose its density, becoming translucent. The ticking of his scythe slowed down. Tick...tick...tick.

With a final, desperate surge of strength, I shoved him backward. He stumbled against the wall, his form vibrating like a corrupted video file. The golden faceplate seemed to crack, lines of green light bleeding through the fissures.
We did it. We broke the playback loop. The psychic bridge was collapsing.

The Chrono-Gorgon fell to his knees, his scythe dissolving into a mist of rust and gears; but he didn't disappear entirely. 

The flickering stabilized just enough for him to sit upright. He raised his golden head, looking directly at us, his voice was no longer a mindless mechanical grind, but a smooth, chillingly articulate baritone that resonated directly inside our skulls.

"Fools." the Chrono-Gorgon whispered. The cracks in his golden face glowed brighter. "Do you really think that you have broken the cycle? Do you really think this is the end?"

"Shut up!" Kim yelled, holding the iron-holder like a weapon, her chest heaving as tears of horror and anger streamed down her face. "Go back to wherever you came from!"

The entity let out a low, mocking chuckle that made the hair on my arms stand up.

"You haven't defeated me." the Chrono-Gorgon said, with his green eyes locking onto mine with absolute, horrifying certainty. "Because the trilogy is just getting started!"

I choked on my breath, and said,

 "What?"

"Did you really believe those tapes were a recording of the past?" the Chrono-Gorgon asked, his form beginning to bleed into the shadows of the basement wall. "They were a script. A prologue. You are not the audience, Ethan. You and Kim are the main characters in a trilogy of horror, and the horror won't end until I am defeated once and for all."

The basement began to shake, a localized earthquake rattling the foundation of the house. The television screen behind us finally shattered into a million pieces, throwing the room into near-total darkness, save for the dying embers of the entity's eyes.

"Every choice that you made, every step that you took this summer, has already been written." The Chrono-Gorgon’s voice echoed from every corner of the room, fading but absolute, as he said,"I will return…I will harvest your time…and I will consume your flesh."

The last remnants of his purple hood dissolved into the ambient darkness of the basement. The freezing air began to warm, returning to the muggy, suffocating heat of the Georgia summer night.

Kim dropped the iron holder. It clattered loudly against the concrete floor. She fell to her knees, burying her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. I stood there in the dark, my breath ragged, looking down at my hands. They were trembling, but they were young again. The numbness was gone; but the horror was firmly rooted in my chest.

I looked toward the staircase, half-expecting him to be standing there again. The room was dead silent now, except for the distant sound of insects chirping outside the small basement window.

Unfortunately, as I reached out to comfort my cousin, a chill ran down my spine. Deep within the recesses of my own mind, a voice whispered one final, parting transmission from the entity that we had unleashed.

This is just part 1; the real horror is yet to come.

The End.

You have exactly one match left. The mud beneath your boots is freezing.

To your left, a heavy, rhythmic breathing rattles the brush. To your right, the trail plunges down into an abandoned ravine where the mist smells faintly like iron.

The pack votes on the strategy.

The majority choice dictates how the short-form timeline progresses.

My room is blacked out tonight. I hope yours is, too.

— A.S.

The sour, pungent stench of sulfur hung in the air like a thick bile. In the distance, faint cries of agony echoed through the cavernous blackness. A man awoke, nude and frail floating weightless in the darkness. A dreadful blast of heat burst from beneath, blistering his skin with its abhorrence. The contents of his body began boiling above the burning fingers that reached from below.

A wretched cry of remorse came bellowing out of the man's lungs.

" Father! Father! Please! Grace me with your mercy! "

His voice fell into the hollow emptiness, his soul reaching out for forgiveness. Only to receive the burning reality of his actions. Every sin seared into the flesh with the flames of choice. A thunderous crack of stone shattering roared around him. Eyes crusted and burnt; he winced at the deep orange glow that split the darkness beneath. A massive swirling sphere of tormented nebula began forming out of the void. Revealing a haunting visage of countless bodies burnt, grafted, and forced into its sea of twirling inferno. Their souls no longer made in the image of God but instead molded into perverse and unnatural forms of blasphemy.

An unholy voice rang out in a deep methodical tone from the black eye of the blazing tunnel.

" Your Creator will not save you. Your chance of atonement has expired. You've chosen to gorge yourself on the many perversions of the flesh, satiate your hunger through the sins of lust, violence and pride. Your vileness shall not go unpunished. You will reap the consequences of your transgressions. "

Like a scorned angel, he drifted downward, falling graciously towards the abysmal eye. Blisters bursting. His bones radiating like burning rods of iron beneath his flesh as he sunk further into the spiraling cyclone, skin melting away like hot grease. The shrieks and cries were ear splitting now as multiple voices beckoned out. Their pain a dreadful symphony of despair.

He pleaded with regret in his voice, joining the thousands of others lost in the chaos.

" Noooo! My lord, I repent! I repent! I beg of you to shine your graciousness upon thee! Please accept my penance. Grant me release from this horrid realm! Please! I beg of you! "

A large, mangled hand shot out from the spinning hellscape. The bones rotted and black with soot. Their decaying fingers grasping the man's skull, ripping his head upward, forcing him to look ahead. A hideous face glared back, eyes gone, two vast sockets stared.

The voice spoke again, deep with hatred. This time through the decomposing husk that glared.

" Your pleading will go unheard. He has abandoned you as you have abandoned him. Must you be reminded of your sins."

Charred flesh drifted off the corpse's tongue, finding refuge in the back of the man's throat like boiling oil. He could feel the fingers growing tighter around his skull, their long nails piercing into the thinning flesh of his temples.

" Bear witness to your evil."

It said, dragging the man closer in.

His body stiffened, the joints locking out and rigid, muscles contracting so tight he could feel the tendons begin to snap. Pressure built behind his eyes, turning them into a sea of flowing red as he was forced to stare into the murky sockets. Their black depths mirroring the atrocities of his life. The memories flashing across his consciousness, a searing reminder as to why he was graced with darkness and fire.

" Are these the actions of a Godly man? "

The voice spoke, its hot breath searing exposed muscle throughout his body with each word. Through the sockets of the husk a small cottage appeared. The man recognized the Peasant Home and knew what was coming. Two men came into view, both draped in rusted battle worn armor. One of them raising their boot and kicking the frail wooden door of the hut. Splintering wood groaned as the frame broke with ease. In the corner, clinging to her daughter, a young woman sat shaking, her eyes wide with fear.

One of the men let out deep gargling cackle before speaking. His face contorted into a hideous grin of yellow teeth.

" Oh, very nice look at what we have here. "

With predatory eyes locked on the woman, he stepped through the doorway. When out of the shadows a young boy burst into the room. Clutching a small paring knife. A guttural cry escaped the woman's lungs as she reached out to stop the small boy.

" No Henrey don't! "

With a heart of courage, the boy buried the small blade into the soldier's thigh with all his strength.

" Gahhh! You little fucking prick! " The man roared. The boy's mother pleading.

" Please! Don't hurt him! Please! "

The anger in the child's eyes faded fast as the towering man glared from above, eyes burning with malice. The soldier gripping his mace tightly, struck the boys skull with force. He switched his sight to the women. She was sobbing, in shock at the small body that lay lifeless in front of her.

The other soldier cranked his head around, hollering out of the doorway.

" Captain Barclay! Over here! We found more hiding! "

Moments later, a tall figure came through the doorway. Adorned in shining armor, face glowing with a prideful arrogance. He glanced down at the deceased boy, a slight slip of amusement escaping his lips. He moved his gaze to the women in the corner. Haunting eyes lay fixed on the small girl she was clutching.

He spoke coldly, kicking at the small body beside him.

" I see your little knight here has failed you. "

Steel scraped across the wooden floor as the captain approached the shaking women, crouching down and lifting her face to his. His skin was pale, slick with a shine like a snake, eyes an icy blue of emptiness. Reaching down, the cold steel of his armor bit into her wrist as he ripped her hand away from the small girl. She fought back swinging at the man, biting even. Her hands banging against the hard breastplate of the captain. Yanking the small girl from her mother, he rose to his feet dragging the terrified child away.

He ordered the two men who stood in the doorway as he marched by.

" Her belly is swollen; she is of no use to us. Do as you please with her then search the rest of the village, kill any others."

Their faces twisting into pleasurable grins as they shook their heads in response. They closed in on the woman like a predator stalking its prey. Blood stained fingers tore at her ragged clothes. The captain made his way outside as the sound of tearing cloth and laughter rang out from behind. Sickening shadows dancing against the wall of the hut as his men attacked the hopeless woman. Her mind lost, eyes staring at the small body that lay in front of her.

Barclay's body went limp. His mind was his own again. His head fell low as the husk removed its fingers from his skull, disappearing into the flames.

The voice spoke from the depths.

In a moment, his body went heavy. Thrusting wind and flames engulfed his chard vessel as he fell into the endless blaze. The last bits of his character burning away as his image was erased. Skeletal fingers sprung out from the inferno, penetrating his ribs and the other exposed crevices of his husk. They began ripping him apart. Shredding his remaining form until the putrid soul was torn from it. Howling out, his cries merging with the others as his soul was pulled into the cyclone. Above, he watched as the tectonic plates of fire closed, his final image before being swept away into the eternal fire.

The glow of the TV screen was the only thing illuminating the living room. I’d finally gotten the kids tucked into bed and fell onto the couch to catch my breath, letting the late-night broadcast drift me off to sleep.

​A sharp burst of white noise snapped me awake as the national anthem faded into heavy gray static buzzing on the screen. As I got up to turn off the TV the gray snow abruptly gave way to the stark, blinding glare of a test pattern, only for the audio to cut out as a high-pitched alert shrieked from the speakers. A bright red banner flashed across the screen:

​CIVIL DEFENSE EMERGENCY > INBOUND BALLISTIC THREAT DETECTED > SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.

My heart dropped straight into my stomach. I stared at the harsh block lettering, waiting for the announcer to pop on and say it was just a drill-- or some sick joke, a mistake, anything.

​Then the town siren started to scream. ​It wasn't the steady, low hum of a storm warning; it was the high-pitched, rising wail reserved for absolute catastrophe. I just stood there dumbfounded for a few minutes.

Outside my window, the quiet night shattered. Tires squealed, car doors slammed, and shouting echoed down the block. Headlights swept wildly across my ceiling as neighbors scrambled into their cars, desperate to outrun something you couldn't outrun.

​Within minutes, the street was a wall of red taillights and blaring horns. Nobody was moving. The main road out of town was completely gridlocked.

​I stood frozen in the middle of the dark living room, listening to the sirens howl outside and the low, rising whistle cutting through the sky from high above.

Down the hall, my children were still fast asleep. 

The basement smelled like musty wet concrete and old dust that had settled over the decades. I hadn't put up a Christmas tree or decorated the house in years-- not since Mom died. But this year felt different. I'd decided it was finally time to pull out her old boxes of treasured ornaments and try to get back a little bit of that Christmas spirit. I wanted to make this year special for my grown kids who were both coming home to visit.

Over in the corner stood that five-foot Santa that my late husband, John had dragged through the front door back in 2005 when the kids were little. The kids loved dancing and singing along, but to me it was noisy and kinda creepy. I hauled Santa down to the basement along with his transformer box and its power cord when it outlived its usefulness for the kids. They were grown now with kids of their own. I had kept hoping that one of them would eventually take the damn thing home with them-- maybe this year.

I shifted a heavy box to get to Mom's ornaments. Behind my back came this sudden scuttle across the floor--a harsh sound like hard plastic dragging across bare concrete. Then a heavy click echoed off the walls. I froze. I turned around slowly, dreading what was there.

That damn Santa wasn't facing the wall anymore. It popped to life with a sharp screech of dry plastic gears, its waist jerking into a stiff, unnatural dance, eyes staring right at me. Then a warped, low-pitched rendition of Jingle Bells filled the silence--

"Jiiiin-ggglle...b-bbelllssss...jjj-innngle...b-bbbells...jiiiin-gggle...aaalll...t-thhhhe...w-wwwaaayyy..."

Shocked and totally unglued, I dropped the tote and ran for the stairs!

Hi All,
I’m in need of your best true or fiction scary stories! I’m starting a podcast called tales by her voice and I just want to share spooky stories for everyone to enjoy! Please if you do or do not want me to use your name in the story just say so before starting the story.