Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

This is why we do it, Sebastian told himself as he looked down the row of leather-bound tomes. To live on. To exist when we stop existing. To be remembered.

Death doesn’t make love stronger. Death only makes things dead.”

Sebastian could remember every single verse, every nod of his father’s head, every drop of saliva from his lips. A man in his sixties shouldn’t have been so sick, but there he was, detached from the world. The worst part had been his father’s eyes, vacantly staring out into the great Nothing, blind to his own son sitting before him. That is horror, he thought. That’s the true awfulness I hope to capture in my books.

Moore pulled her lips tightly against her teeth. “Daniel Slaughter. Exactly who I wanted to see.” “Seriously?” Without another word, Moore marched past him and disappeared into the house. “Oh, I get it,” Daniel said to Sam, “she was just being awful, as usual.”

“This is the key to true horror,” Sebastian said with a confidence none of them could dispute. “If you believe it’s real, then it’s real.”

He came to the house thinking they were entering a gateway to hell, and instead he found himself running a bed-and-breakfast.

the house awoke to the sudden and definite realization that now was the time. It had waited long enough. It was time to play.

If the house wasn’t awake before, it is now.

He had expected death to occur in the snap of a finger. But this was the sensation of his mind powering down, like a computer hard drive spinning to a stop.