The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

It seemed to me that a soul that preferred a cold grave to the white light of Heaven was suspect.

I heard once that there is a curse on Amberville. They said it would burn three times to the ground and then it would never rise again. It’s burned once, twice…

Legend has it anyone who does in Iris Lake’s waters is kept sleeping beneath the surface.

me standing there- just standing there- looking around and thinking, God, I'm not supposed to be here, I'm supposed to be somewhere else, this is wrong, this is *wrong*.

I don't like the way he say you. Like I different. Like I didn't just see one-of-me-like-me beat until she fall. [...] But my boy doesn't see. He can't see. Can't hear, either. He never tried to mimic my words and so he doesn't understand and I see again, why Mama so afraid of Below.

She could weave between peace and poison fluid as a silver fish, and both of them were true. There wasn't a fake bone in her body, but that almost made it worse.

Charlie glances out the window. She doesn’t mean to

The tunnels appear when there’s a choice to be made. And that choice comes with a price. Something—or someone—has to be left behind.

I think that somehow, whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, it can see what’s happened to us… sit knows just how to hurt us the most.

We knew the power within the trees. And we had to keep that safe.

But anyone who’d been to the Bridge could feel that there was… something out there. Something that made your skin rise in goose bumps and your hair spike along the back of your neck.

I want to peel his skin away and find out how he is the way he is, how he convinces people to like him.

They say the house is cursed. Still, people move in. Still, I believe that I’ll be just fine.

The dead are starting to get restless. I can feel them, just under my skin’s like one of Granny’s phantom worms.

They were so afraid of change, so afraid of becoming new people, they’d shackled each other to the corpses of who they’d been before.