The World of Lore: Dreadful Places (The World of Lore #3)

by Aaron Mahnke

I’m going to be honest with you: James Stark was a bit of a jerk.

This does not bode well

So much so that he carried on an affair with her, right under the same roof as his wife.

Why is it always an affair?

Humans aren’t just debris floating through life on a river of tragedy; most of the time, we craft that pain ourselves.

They say it was a hulking creature, covered in strips of decaying flesh, with sharp teeth and a crazed look in its eyes. And because witnesses reported that blood was flowing from its mouth, many have since referred to it as the Richmond Vampire.

Folklore is like water, forever shifting to fit the crevice as the rock breaks down.

A lone survivor did crawl from the wreckage, as the story tells us. His teeth were sharp and his mouth was bloody. Even the condition of his skin, hanging from his body like wet linen bandages, is documented fact. But the survivor had a name: Benjamin Mosby.

Why couldn’t the author just bring this up before? He made it sound like it was end of the story.

Natural disaster is one of those agents of tragedy that seem to sneak up on us and bring ruin into our lives.

The older the place, the deeper the pain.

No matter what the cause is, every location will eventually receive a visit from adversity.

But the reality is that sometimes the only evidence of something historical is the folklore that it leaves behind. It’s like a shadow, in a way; it hints that something bigger and more real is there, even if we can’t see it. And in this case, it’s a story that’s worth repeating.

As the story goes, Melanie hacked off her long hair with a knife, dressed up in a man’s clothing, and then tucked a pistol and hand axe into her belt. I can’t think of anything more hardcore, honestly. This was a woman on a mission.

Maybe the story, like so much of folklore, was born out of a need to explain things.

Think of it this way: our houses are really nothing more than walls and floors enclosing a space. But that’s not what makes a house a home. It’s the people inside, the personal touches, the familiar objects. They transform a building into a home.

Others have heard voices. Sometimes it’s just a faint whisper, while other times it’s a frightening cry for help. Most people, though, just sense an overwhelming air of darkness.

THE SETTING OF a story is everything. It creates mood and atmosphere. It triggers memories and helps our minds fill in the blanks, adding tension and suspense where there were only words and images.

The past is like a shadow, following us wherever we go,

Sometime shortly before 7:00 p.m., Bareis and an accomplice entered Griggs’s room and began to beat the sleeping man. Something snapped inside of Griggs, who jumped from his bed and fought back. He tossed Bareis into the hallway like a rag doll, and when the younger man got back up, Griggs leveled him with a punch to the jaw.

That's what you get.

him. Maybe it was just a classic case of old habits dying hard, or perhaps the shadows of Waverly Hills held some sway over him. If the stories are true, those shadows still roam the halls today.

No. The guy was just a goddamn jerk and being a bully, and he decided to fight back like a normal person.

We’re obsessed with those who venture out into the wild.

Not me

For some people, nothing is more frightening than when the natural world reaches out and crushes our best-laid plans.

Some say they were given poisoned wine, while others say they were murdered in their sleep. Either way, the MacMahons never left Leap Castle alive.

Red Wedding

Evil events have a way of filling a building like explosions; while the initial shock might eventually fade away, the echoes can still be heard ringing through the halls long after it’s over.

ending we’ve come to expect from books and film.

Fear, after all, is a universal language.

Faulty short-term memory, or the ghost of Nelson Smith hard at work on another project? We’ll never know for sure. What we can be certain of, though, is that Sheffield Island is a place where the past floats very close to the present. And if you lean into the wind, you just might hear it.

Both stories agree on one thing, though: there was a curse.

There's always a stupid curse, so people can blame their problems on superstition.

And that, my friends, is the naked truth.

Wooooooow.

LET’S BE CLEAR before I tell you this story: I have very little evidence it’s real.

That's really annoying. I don't really care if it's real or not, and you don't have to keep telling me otherwise. I feel like it's now just an annoying justification not to read anything into it.

So word spread. Rumors always follow unusual events like that. They are the leaves on the ground that tell us what the tree once looked like. They are the footprints in mud that help us track the animal. They hint that something else is going on.