Mud, Blood, and Banyan Roots

The following is based on under-reported hotspots in South Africa...

July 10, 2025.

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Thabiso Mokoena, a burned-out social worker with a rusted Corolla and a restless conscience, didn’t believe in the devil. But the charred bones behind the school, chants carved into abandoned shacks, and a boy who returned with glassy eyes and a silent tongue—those were harder to explain.

“The Inkatha Nyoka aren’t kids with knives,” said a trembling teen at the shelter, eyes flicking toward the door. “They pray with blood... and things answer.”

Thabiso wanted to dismiss it. But he’d seen the marks—burned into skin, scrawled in salt and ash. He’d found the book too, buried beneath a ruined hostel. Thick as a cinderblock, bound in hyena hide, its pages slick with something dark. On the cover: a red sigil stitched like a wound.

The gang’s rituals twisted sacred practices into something feral—muti from stolen organs, animal sacrifice turned initiation. Children chanting in forgotten dialects while smoke filled the air.

Then he saw the video. Grainy, low light. A boy masked in clay, dancing around fire—Sipho. His brother. Missing for two years. The one he’d stopped searching for.

“He’s Mkhulu waMimoya now,” whispered a local priest, standing in the ruins of a burned church speaking of the Great Spirit. “Leader of spirits. It’s not a gang anymore. He’s building something.”

Days went by, and Thabiso didn’t sleep. Every witness gave the same story in different words—riddles wrapped in fear. He traced the path through morgues, sangomas, derelict train stations. Each step blurred the line between reality and nightmare.

When he reached the cult’s gathering place—an old colonial orphanage tangled in banyan roots—he carried the book, a river-mud-soaked blade, and a prayer he couldn’t finish.

He had come to rescue his brother, but instead, he found a god of bones and flesh on a throne of teeth.

“You took too long,” Sipho said, voice layered with others. “Now you’ll serve.”

The Hollow Signal

The following is based on recently unearthed documents, with names changed to protect the innocent...

June 2025.

Hugh Tyler had sworn off the psychic games. Tall, broad-shouldered, with prematurely graying temples, he looked built for physical wars, not psychic ones—but his mind had once been one of the CIA's sharpest weapons. He hadn’t used remote viewing since the Stargate Project collapsed in the mid-90s, leaving him fractured and forgotten. But when a decrypted Cold War document crossed his path—referencing “Base H-7, interior Mount Hayes, neural harvesting ongoing”—something inside him stirred.

“Jesus,” he muttered, thumbing through brittle pages in his frostbitten cabin. “They weren’t kidding.”

The file included sketches: humanoid figures at glowing, circular consoles with thought-maps projected above their heads. Coordinates pointed to the Alaskan Triangle—a vast, bleak swath of wilderness where compasses spun and entire planes vanished without trace.

Enter Jared Augustin. Barrel-chested, mid-forties, with a permanent five o’clock shadow, the former security officer still bore the clipped speech and cautious gait of someone who’d seen too much. Hugh found him near Delta Junction, holed up with three German shepherds and a rusting radar array aimed squarely at Mount Hayes.

“You’re looking for ghosts,” Jared said flatly when Hugh arrived. “They’re real. Don’t think they’re dead.”

“You saw it?”

“Ten years back. Ball of green light split into three. Didn’t glide, didn’t float—snapped across the sky like it was cutting through spacetime. Then it was gone. Took my buddy with it.”

The two men—reluctant allies bound by trauma and suspicion—trekked toward Mount Hayes, snow crunching beneath their boots, radios crackling with interference. The deeper they pushed into the wilderness, the stranger things became. Time warped. Watches froze. Jared swore he saw a version of himself, older and thinner, watching from across a ridge. Hugh’s visions intensified—silver-skinned humanoids communicating soundlessly, hands on biometric orbs, scanning memories like files.

Inside the mountain, they found it—not tunnels, but angled hallways, shaped by non-Euclidean geometry, pulsing with violet light. The air buzzed—not with electricity, but thought. Jared touched a wall and recoiled.

“Feels alive,” he whispered.

Then came the truth.

The base wasn’t alien in any familiar sense. It was a neural farm—a repository of consciousness pulled from abductees and explorers, fed into a collective intelligence older than human civilization. Hugh, once drawn into its frequency through the Stargate Project, had never fully left.

A voice echoed in his mind. "Return complete."

As he stepped forward, consoles lit up in recognition. His mind flooded with foreign memories—starscapes, dying worlds, warnings lost to time. Jared pulled his sidearm, but Hugh smiled, eyes shimmering silver.

“I didn’t come to infiltrate it,” he said. “I came to wake it up.”

The Dollmaker's Wake

Welcome to The ParaZone—transforming today’s headlines into eerie, esoteric micro-fiction, blurring the line between reality and the surreal. Today, we will dive into a story that sees a skeptic racing to return a haunted doll before unleashed chaos consumes the living.

The following is based on a claim of a missing doll...

May 25, 2025.

Rain struck the van windshield in rhythmic sheets as Teej stared out at the empty highway, fingers clenched white on the steering wheel. “I told them this was a mistake,” she muttered, steam fogging the glass. In the back, swaddled in thick velvet and latched in a crate marked DO NOT OPEN, the doll gave off a hum—not a sound, but a pressure throbbing behind her eyes.

A week ago, she’d laughed when asked to escort Annabelle. “You don’t believe in this crap, do you?” she asked the tour director. He handed her a check and a manifest and told her not to open the case. Under any circumstances.

Louisiana smoked behind her—the plantation reduced to ash, the prison break still dominating every news cycle. “Coincidence,” she told herself for the fifth time. But she’d seen the whispers in every town, seen how animals refused to go near the doll. And she hadn’t missed the sigils—etched, scorched—into the crate’s underside when it jostled open in Shreveport.

“You were locked up for a reason,” she said, glancing in the rearview. The doll sat as always—unblinking, red yarn hair askew. But the glass was fogged. From the inside.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Dan Rivera, all caps: “WHERE IS SHE? VIDEO WAS PRE-RECORDED. ANNABELLE NEVER CAME BACK.”

Teej’s heart dropped. “What do you mean never came back?”

The doll moved its head. Slightly.

She slammed the brakes. Tires screamed.

In the silence, Teej stepped into the storm with the crate in her arms and whispered to the dark, “If you're listening... I'm bringing her home.”

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Exciting news! My book, "Cumberland Chronicles" is now available at Books2Read! If you enjoy the supernatural, horror, and the weird, I’d love for you to check it out. Even if it’s not your thing, a quick share would help me reach the right readers. Thank you for the support!

The Thirteenth Vision

Welcome to The ParaZone—transforming today’s headlines into eerie, esoteric micro-fiction, blurring the line between reality and the surreal. Today, we will dive into the story of a skeptic journalist, who must stop an ancient evil foretold in a mystic's apocalyptic prophecy.

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The following is based on predictions for 2025, with names changed to protect the innocent...

Before 1996.

The wind bit at Elena Markov’s coat as she climbed the cracked steps of the ruined house, the scent of burnt wood and rain-soaked earth lingering in the air. “No one’s lived here since ’96,” the taxi driver had muttered before peeling off, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror as if the ruin might follow him.

Inside, the air thickened with dust and something older—damp pages, mold, time. Her boots creaked over warped floorboards while her flashlight jittered over faded portraits and a toppled rocking chair. Then she saw it: a loose stone in the fireplace. Her fingers trembled, but she pried it loose anyway. Behind it lay a thin, cloth-wrapped bundle, brittle with age. She unwrapped it.

A diary.

Its pages, written in Cyrillic script, seemed to breathe under her touch. The ink hadn’t faded—it pulsed, veins on parchment. Baba Vanga’s name sprawled across the inside cover.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Elena whispered, thumbing to a date: April 14, 2025. Tomorrow.

A low hum rose from the walls, subtle at first. Then, the air shifted. Her flashlight flickered. Through the window, lightning flashed—illuminating a figure in the field, arms outstretched, unmoving.

Later, in her cramped Sofia apartment, she translated the next passage aloud, voice shaking. “When the Earth splits and fire takes the sky, Volkran shall walk once more, born of man’s war and his greed.”

She blinked. Volkran? That word didn’t appear in any Slavic myth she knew. Her fingers darted over the keyboard, searching forums, archives, even blacklisted cryptology servers. But the anonymous message in her inbox froze her.

“He wakes. Burn the diary. Or you’ll be the door.”

At first, she laughed it off. Until the power cut. Until she saw the man from the field—reflected in the hallway mirror, expressionless, pupils pitch black.

The days that followed spun like a reel unraveling. Earthquakes ravaged Southeast Asia. Markets crashed. A NATO convoy vanished in the Carpathians without a trace.

Then came the visit.

An older woman in a wool cloak appeared at her threshold. “You’re blood-tied,” she said in perfect Bulgarian. “You think you found the book. But it found you.”

“Who are you?” Elena asked.

The woman didn’t blink. “Custodian. Your grandmother before you was one. We sealed Volkran. You… opened it.”

Reality cracked, a hairline fracture—enough for Elena to see through. Her family’s strange silences, her childhood dreams of fire and stone—all warnings.

As war drums echoed across Europe and lightning carved symbols into the sky, Elena stood atop the ruins of Rila Monastery, chanting a rite older than empire. Pages from the diary burned in her hands. The air shimmered. Shadows screamed. When the storm died and silence returned, Elena stepped down alone.

Her world had changed. So had its fate.

She had turned the key. Then, in time, locked the door.

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I’m excited to announce that Cumberland Chronicles is now live on Books2Read! If supernatural, horror, and weird tales are your thing, this one's for you. If not, sharing it with others who might enjoy it would be a huge help. Thanks for all the support!

The Last Throne of Saint Peter

Welcome to The ParaZone—transforming today’s headlines into eerie, esoteric micro-fiction, blurring the line between reality and the surreal. Today, we will dive into the story of a reluctant cardinal, who battles prophecy and fate as Rome collapses under apocalyptic, supernatural forces.

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The following is based on a thousand-year-old prophecy...

April 21, 2025.

The Vatican was dark, the kind of unsettling quiet that pressed against your ears, making the air seem heavier than it should be. In his chambers, Cardinal Pietro Luciani sat by the window, his worn fingers gliding along the edge of ancient papal documents. Beyond the glass, black clouds churned with violent, unnatural intent. The storm was coming—it always was, creeping closer with each breath.

"Cardinal," a soft voice broke the silence. Cardinal Maria Verdi, young, sharp-eyed, far too quick to judge, entered the room. "The conclave is beginning. We need you."

Rooted in place, Pietro kept his gaze on the cracked glass, unmoving as thoughts churned beneath the surface. The prophecy—the prophecy—pressed in, heavy and unshakable. One hundred twelve popes. One hundred twelve fates. And the last: Peter the Roman. Rome would burn, Christ would return, and he—he—was foretold to lead them into the fire, if the ancient words held true.

"I know," he said, voice barely above a whisper.

Maria hesitated, stepping closer. "Do you believe it, Pietro? The prophecy? Or are we—"

He cut her off with a sharp glance. "It doesn’t matter what I believe. It’s written. And it’s real." His voice trembled, betraying his calm exterior.

With a hollow rush, a gust of wind swept through the room, rattling the old shutters against their frames. The signs had begun. Beyond the walls, bells tolled, their deep, resonant hum rolling over the city like a slow drumbeat. When the final toll sounded—deafening and sharp—it hung in the air like a warning no one could ignore.

"You think you can escape it?" Maria’s voice was firm, insistent. "They’ll choose you, Pietro. Peter the Roman. That’s what it says. The Church needs you, even if you don’t want it."

"Let them choose," Pietro muttered. "I’ll decline."

Maria frowned. "It’s not that simple. You know what happens to the one who refuses."

His hands clenched into fists. Refuse? Renounce? Could he? Would the blood that had soaked this place for centuries stain him too?

Beneath their feet, the ground trembled—not with the roughness of an earthquake, but with something far more unnatural. Overhead, the lights flickered, casting frantic shadows along the walls. The air thinned, turning bitter and cold. "Pietro…" Maria whispered, her voice barely rising above a breath, her wide eyes snapping toward the door, where something—someone—waited in the gloom.

A shadow flickered between the doorframe like a broken image.

"Is it him?" she breathed.

Pietro’s heart pounded. Out of the shadows, the figure stepped forward—an old man draped in tattered robes, hollow eyes brimming with endless sorrow—Saint Malachy himself, or something far worse. Never had the prophecy been a mere metaphor; Pietro saw it clearly now, written in the ghost’s empty gaze—the cold inevitability of it all.

"You cannot run," the figure rasped. "Fate binds you, Peter. You will wear the crown, and the fires will consume all."

Pietro rose slowly, legs unsteady, the weight of history pressing against him. "Then let the fires come," he said through gritted teeth, stepping past Maria and into the hall. "Let them come."

As the shadows thickened, the storm roared in an unholy chorus overhead. From the heart of the city, the bells tolled again—louder, heavier—each strike signaling the end of something: an era, a prophecy, perhaps even his soul.

"Rome is already lost," he muttered. "And with it, my soul."

Outside, the world had already begun to break.

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Exciting news! Cumberland Chronicles has officially launched on Books2Read! If you're a fan of supernatural, horror, or weird stories, I’d love for you to give it a read. If it’s not quite your style, a quick share would go a long way in helping me connect with the right audience. Thank you for the support!

The Rougarou Heist

Welcome to The ParaZone—transforming today’s headlines into eerie, esoteric micro-fiction, blurring the line between reality and the surreal. Today, we will dive into a desperate young drifter who seeks a quick score to escape poverty, but when he dons a cursed werewolf mask that begins to consume his soul, he must fight the growing beast within or lose himself to an ancient hunger stalking the shadows of New Orleans.

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The following is based on a report in the New York Post...

April, 1:15 am.

Along Chef Menteur Highway, the air reeked of saltwater rot and long-buried secrets. In the hollowed-out shell of a once-bustling corner store, Keddrick Demon Jones Jr. crouched by the back fence, eyes scanning the empty street. He was tall—too tall for his frame—but it didn’t matter. After the storm swept through, it stripped away any hope of a quiet life, leaving hunger and frustration to gnaw at him from within. 

He glanced over his shoulder, made sure the street was empty, then slid the mask over his face—a moldy, cracked thing he’d found in a voodoo shop’s forgotten chest. Dark and tattered, it resembled no man, more beast: a rougarou, a shapeshifter cursed to haunt the night.

When the mask settled in place, something stirred within. From his backpack, he pulled the crowbar and crept to the shattered door. Inside, cold emptiness pressed in as he moved with quick, practiced motions—smashing glass, rifling drawers, and stuffing valuables into black plastic bags, scavenging the easy pickings of a forgotten world.

“You won’t get caught,” Keddrick muttered, but his voice sounded hollow, distant, as if it came from somewhere deeper. The mask pulsed against his skin, the stench of old leather filling his nostrils.

As the crowbar struck the register, the mask’s edges curled, tightening around his skull. With a sharp, quick tremor coursing through him, his breath hitched—not from bodily unease, but something deeper. Something else had awakened. Something old.

When the alarm screamed, Keddrick didn’t flinch. He moved faster, grabbing the last bag of cash, bolting for the exit. “Not today,” he muttered again, but his focus slipped. 

Near the fence, he heard it—claws scraping concrete. Not his. As his heart pounded fiercely, he pressed on, unable to pause. Against his face, the mask pulsed, while his trembling hands betrayed his resolve. The stolen bags dragged at him.

He ducked beneath the fence, stumbling into the alley. As he ran toward Stemway Drive, the darkness seemed to close in, curling at the edges of his vision. Something followed, breath hot on his neck. He turned—nothing. Only moonlight, filtering through thinning trees.

“Dream,” Keddrick whispered, wiping sweat from his brow. But the mask—the thing behind it—wasn’t listening. It waited. Every step dragged him deeper into the myth.

At the end of the street, the bags were gone. The hunger, the feeling of being hunted, hadn’t faded. It had only begun.

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Exciting news! Cumberland Chronicles has officially launched on Books2Read! If you're a fan of supernatural, horror, or weird stories, I’d love for you to give it a read. If it’s not quite your style, a quick share would go a long way in helping me connect with the right audience. Thank you for the support!

The Howl Beneath the Ice

Welcome to The ParaZone—transforming today’s headlines into eerie, esoteric micro-fiction, blurring the line between reality and the surreal. Today, we will dive into a story that sees a geneticist who unleashes cursed dire wolves and must sacrifice herself to seal their ancient evil.

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The following is based on research and development at Colossal Biosciences...

March 2025.

Dr. Evelyn Marris stood in the cold, sterile light of the lab, her fingers trembling slightly as she reviewed the data. The pups—those unnervingly large, white-furred wolves—had grown at an exponential rate. Only six months old, and already, they were the size of full-grown gray wolves. She tried to tell herself it was normal. After all, she had engineered them to be genetically superior, their cells altered with ancient dire wolf DNA. But nothing about them felt natural.

"You saw it, too, didn't you?" Dr. Rhee asked, his voice tight with tension as he approached her side. His eyes flicked nervously to the monitor, then back to the trio of wolves pacing in their pen. "Their eyes... they don't look like wolves anymore."

Evelyn didn’t respond immediately. She just stared at the pack, their amber eyes flickering in the dim glow of the observation room. The way they moved—too deliberate, too aware—sent a chill down her spine. "It's just a side effect of the gene-editing," she said, more to herself than to him, though even she didn't believe the words. "We’ve altered their brain chemistry. They’re smarter. More... perceptive."

"Smarter doesn’t explain the way they’re watching us," Rhee muttered, his voice cracking.

The door to the pen rattled, and Evelyn’s eyes shot to the steel frame. The youngest pup, the one with the scar-like marking across its snout, had its nose pressed against the thick glass. Its head tilted, ears back, as though studying her. As though understanding her.

It wasn’t until the first disappearance that the fear set in. Dr. Jacobs, one of the senior geneticists, had gone missing without a trace, the only clue a smear of blood on the fence surrounding the preserve. Evelyn had chalked it up to a freak accident—until another team member vanished, and another. There were no signs of struggle, no bodies, just... absence. 

"We should have shut this down weeks ago," Rhee said, pacing now, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the desk. "What the hell were we thinking, Evelyn? This—this was never supposed to be possible."

Evelyn swallowed, her throat dry. "I don’t think it was us... not entirely. This wasn’t just science. There’s something else here."

The walls around them seemed to hum, a low, vibrating frequency, and the wolves, now gathered in a perfect circle in the pen, turned their heads toward the lab. Their bodies rippled beneath the fur, muscles shifting in unnatural harmony. 

"Listen to me," Evelyn whispered, gripping Rhee’s arm as she pointed to the monitor. "My brother... he left something behind. In the journal, he described the curse—the Vargstyrka. The ancient spirits bound to these creatures. I think... I think we’ve unleashed something that’s been dormant for millennia."

Rhee’s face went ashen. "You have to be kidding me. You're saying these things... they’re—what? Possessed?"

"I don’t know," Evelyn muttered, shaking her head. "But I’ve seen the signs. The claw marks on the doors... facing inward. The howls at night, only they don’t sound right—too deep, too... human."

A scream echoed from the compound's east end, the sound distorted, cut short. Rhee took a step back, panic flooding his features. "We need to get out. Now."

But Evelyn remained rooted in place. "We can’t run. Not anymore. If we don’t stop them now... they'll spread. They’re not just wolves. They’re something... older."

As the storm outside intensified, the wind howling against the windows, Evelyn’s voice dropped to a near whisper. "We have one chance. If I perform the ritual—the one in his journal—I can trap them. But..." She hesitated, her gaze meeting his. "I’ll have to stay. Bind myself to them, like he did. If I fail, they’ll take us all."

Rhee’s eyes widened, his lips parted to argue, but the words died in his throat as the wolves’ eyes glowed brighter, more intense, their howls rising in unison. The air grew thick with an unnatural weight, pressing down on them, suffocating. 

“I’m not letting them take you,” Rhee said, his voice hoarse, but Evelyn was already moving toward the door, pulling a vial from her pocket. Her brother’s relic—a bone carved with symbols, pulsing with a faint, eerie light.

"You have to trust me," she said, her voice steady as she turned to face the wolves. "This is the only way."

As the first howl split the air, Evelyn closed her eyes, preparing to sacrifice herself to the spirits she had awakened, and as the wolves charged, she felt her soul rip free—pulled into the darkness, bound to the pack forever.

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Big news! My book, Cumberland Chronicles, is officially available on Books2Read! If you're into supernatural thrills, horror, and the weird, I’d love for you to dive in. Even if that's not your usual read, a quick share would mean the world to me. Thanks for helping me spread the word!