horror

Eyelids of an Aristocrat

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Everett finds himself trapped underground, prisoner of a most peculiar family, missing their sanity as well as a few other pieces…

(reading time: 54 minutes)

Eyelids of an Aristocrat

by

Blaine Arcade

Overboard

This account exists, in various lengths, a hundred times over, and the world over at that too. I suspect this will be the longest version of it, and the most difficult to stuff in a bottle or box, but I’m going to bury it the deepest as well. It brings me joy to imagine the sense of reward of reading it to be directly proportional to the effort put in to acquire it. Continue reading →

I Thought it was the Cat

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 5 minutes)

I Thought it was the Cat

by

Blaine Arcade

Demoted for a raise. Strange I know, but it’s the only way to put it. They wanted me out of the building after the ‘softball incident’. I won’t go into detail about it other than to say they’re all sore losers.

It was mutual. I get an extra five K a year and I use it to pay the price of being near all our distribution centers on the East coast. Being equidistant from three truck stops in the middle of nowhere puts you, you guessed it, in the forgotten rusty storage shed of nowhere’s overgrown backyard.

No partner. Had one, but they also didn’t care for my gloating after the softball incident. So when I got there, town called Cracklebranch, my roommates were a pair of suitcases. Got a tiny house on the cheap. Couldn’t hear anything at night. No crickets. No birds in the morning either. Continue reading →

Cracker Warmer

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

Author’s Note: This story is closely based on a nightmare I had, written up the following night and only modified enough to make some amount of sense.

(reading time: 12 minutes)

At sixty-three it was the oldest thing out there, living or inanimate.  The house behind it was only forty-two.  Everything older was off in the dark trees, grumbling, bundling up for the whipping wind of the late November night.  The device was ready for anything, having weathered plenty of Cayuga winters already. Continue reading →

Chat-your-own-Adventure #33: Pinky Promise

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Author’s Note: This story was written live on stream with the audience voting to determine the path of the story.  The underlined phrases in the choice of three were the winning pathways.  Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d ever like to participate in our interactive fiction.

King of Horror                                 Nutella Game                    Texan’s Rough Life

“Sire, you can’t remain in here all day,” Attendant Syrril said. She walked over to the king’s four poster bed and pulled back the curtain. The king was a young man, but the recent stresses had aged him noticeably. His dark eyes took a moment to focus on his loyal attendant’s face. She couldn’t even guess what he thought he was seeing: a ghost, an otherworldly ectoplasm, or perhaps some kind of giant speaking insect with an odd number of legs. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Clown in the Trunk

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: The dark carnival and its clowns have come again.

The ticket had no information on it at all. It was a pale orange stub of paper. Jeremia had tried a few things to get a date out of it. He had licked it, but that did not reveal any invisible ink. He put it over a candle flame, but the heat produced nothing. He didn’t have a blacklight, so he had to go over to the neighbor’s and borrow his. Continue reading →

Chat-your-own-Adventure #18: Skink Theater

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Author’s Note: This story was written live on stream with the audience bidding tokens (earned while watching) to determine the path of the story.  The underlined phrases in the choice of three were the winning pathways.  Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d ever like to participate in our interactive fiction.

Skink on Mirror                            Finch in Popcorn                            Bat in Lights

He thought only geckos could stick to surfaces like that so successfully, but the skink was intent on proving Darren wrong. It scurried across the surface of the long bathroom mirror, avoiding his attempts to snatch it with a brown paper towel. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Lurker in the Laundry

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A boy hiding in the attic of his family’s old house finds an intricately carved wooden laundry hamper and discovers it has a genie inside!

His family didn’t own anything nice. His parents were trapped in the nineties, obsessed with colorful plastic, and they never bought each other jewelry or fancy dishware. They lived in a small house, hoarding their money, waiting for the inevitable car crash or cancer that would suck it away. Continue reading →

Chat-your-own-Adventure #15: The Hog does Birthdays

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Author’s Note: This story was written live on stream with the audience bidding tokens (earned while watching) to determine the path of the story.  The underlined phrases in the choice of three were the winning pathways.  Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d ever like to participate in our interactive fiction.

Seedy POV                          Spoiled Rotten POV                               Sky Writer POV

It was the autumn. My sixteenth birthday approached rapidly on the horizon. As the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in all of the town of Tinstar, my party was to be quite the event. Not only would it certainly get written up in the local paper’s society and culture section, but my birthday, as it did every year, fell upon the night prior to Halloween. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Healthy Cousin

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

The electricity surged through his brain, speeding his recall even as it cauterized the loose flapping edges of his soul. The memories revolved around each other, spinning and picking up speed. He remembered losing his mother to cancer. His aunt. His best friend. There had been something in their water from the new factory.

He hated the year 1916. In his neighborhood at least, that was when the factories appeared in full force, like glaciers of garbage suddenly on the horizon. They’d eaten up the work, the sky, and then his family. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Recognizable Scratches

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Six little pairs of shoes hovered a foot off the old wooden floor of the schoolhouse. The seventh pair belonged to an adult and shuddered up and down where the others were deathly still. Four button noses were pressed against the peeling paint, flakes falling faster than ever thanks to their giggling. One of the girls tapped on the wood and waited for a response.

Clop clop clop, the wall responded, exactly like the hoof stamps of a pony. Their giggles answered it back. The girl tapped on the wall twice more. Clop clop. Continue reading →