The Wedding Party

A young couple who have been together for a couple of years decide to get married. Luckily for them, the bride's father is extremely rich, and so they're able to hold the ceremony and the reception in a big old property he owns out in the countryside.

The big day arrives and the ceremony goes over beautifully. At the reception afterwards, the drinks are flowing freely, and both the bride and the groom are pleasantly drunk. The night wears on, and as it begins to get dark the groom comes up with an idea. It's the perfect time for a massive game of hide and seek, he decides. And so everyone runs off and hides, while the groom counts slowly to a hundred.

Over the next hour, one by one the guests are found. All except the bride. As time wears on more and more guests join in the search, poking into every nook and cranny of the house. She's nowhere to be found. The groom is beginning to worry. Eventually the police are called, and it becomes official. On the very night of her wedding, the bride has disappeared.

After a thorough investigation, it is concluded that, for reasons unknown, she must have run away. A search campaign is launched and closed. Her family wait anxiously for her to return. She never does. Her would-be husband goes on living alone, waiting, wondering what could possibly have incited her to leave him like that on their wedding day.

A year later, and the house where the wedding was held has passed on to new owners. A firm have been hired to do a full inventory of all the old furniture. It's one of the workers who makes the discovery. As he's searching through an old bookcase, he comes across a tiny, hidden lever. Curious, he pulls it, and the bookcase swings open, revealing a hidden room between the walls. There on the floor lies a dried and decaying corpse; it's the bride. In her search for a place to hide she stumbled upon the hidden room, only to be knocked unconscious by the bookcase swinging shut behind her. She lies as she did on her wedding night, when she suffocated in the dark only feet away from her searching friends.

The Dog In The Shower

An old woman is settling down for bed one night. She lives alone with only her pet dog for company. Tonight is just like any other night. She's lying in bed, dozing off to sleep. Her dog lies on the floor beside her bed. Lately she's been having trouble sleeping, and so it takes an age before she's finally able to drop off.

She wakes later, in the middle of the night. She's lying on the edge of the bed, her arm dangling over the side. Her dog's licking at her fingers . . . but it's not this that's woken her up. For a while she's not sure what it is that brought her awake.  She lies there while her dog licks her hand, listening, wondering. And then she has it.

Filtering through the wall from the bathroom, there is the steady drip, drip, drip of her shower. She must not have shut it off properly.

Reluctantly, the old woman gets up and leaves her dog and her bed. She puts on her slippers and wanders through to the bathroom. She clicks on the light . . . and screams. Hanging from the head of the shower is her pet dog. Its collar is twisted around its neck, and a steady stream of blood falls into the shower basin, drip, drip, drip.

The woman stands there, terrified. It dawns on her slowly: if her faithful pet dog is here, then what was it that lay on the floor of her bedroom, licking at her hand. What . . . or who?

The Haircut

A barber is at work one day when in comes a man with dreadlocks. The man has decided that his dreads have become too unkempt and dirty, and it's time for a change of style, so he sits down in the chair and the barber goes to work, hacking off his hair. It's a tough job. The dreads don't look like they've been washed in ages, and there's an awful smell coming off of them, but the barber's too polite to complain.

After about half an hour that barber is almost done. There's only one more really stubborn clump of hair remaining. He gets a new pair of scissors and gets to work, chopping away at the tangled net of hair. And as he works the barber starts to realise that there's something in there, something shiny, something weird. He bends down to take a closer look.

Then all of a sudden the man twitches violently. At first the barber thinks he might have cut the guy with his scissors, but that's not it. The man goes into a fit, jerking and convulsing in the chair. He slides to the floor. The barber backs away, frightened, and grabs the phone to call an ambulance.

Before he can the man goes still. All apart from his hair. The stubborn clump that the barber was hacking at is still moving, and as he watches something emerges from it. It's a spider, a massive, shiny backed tarantula, its jaws still dark with the dead man's blood.

The Voice In The Night

A young boy is trying to get to sleep one night. His parents are watching TV downstairs, but it's not the noise that's keeping him awake. It's the voices. The boy is sure he can hear someone whispering, indistinct but definitely there. He ignores it though; he's too old for nightmares. He pulls his pillow over his ears and tries to go to sleep.

But the whispering doesn't stop, and every so often he finds that he can hear a bit of it clearly. One moment he's sure he hears a faint voice calling, "Coming to get you. Ten miles away." A little while later he's almost certain he hears that same voice chanting "Coming to get you. Six miles away."

He glances out his window, but the street outside is empty. And it's not the TV, he's sure. When he hears the voice again, this time calling "Coming to get you. Two miles away," he starts to get a bit freaked out. But there's no way he's going to go crying to his parents over some silly noise.

He lies in bed, waiting. And the voice comes again: "Coming to get you. One mile away." He's certain that he hears it, and equally certain that it's not real. The boy is torn. On the one hand he's frightened out of his wits, but on the other he doesn't want to look like a scared little baby, even to his parents.

And then it comes again. "Coming to get you. Outside the front door." The boy sits up straight in bed, but before he can react the voice sounds again: "Coming to get you. In your hallway."

The boy doesn't care about looking scared anymore. He wants his parents. He gets up and runs onto the landing. As he's going downstairs he hears the voice one last time: "Coming to get you. In your living room." And he freezes dead. The living room. Where his parents are. For a long time he's too scared to move, but at last he forces himself to continue downstairs.

"Mum," he calls, as he pushes open the living room door. "Dad?" He enters and stands staring at his parents. They lie slumped on the sofa, lifeless and blue.

The Mystery Caller

A teenage girl is home alone one night, watching TV and waiting for her mother and father to get back. It's getting late, and the girl's starting to get sleepy, when the phone rings. Thinking it must be her parents calling to tell her that they're on their way, she runs to pick it up.

But it's not her parents. In fact, all the girl hears at first is heavy breathing.

"Hello?" she says. "Hello? Who is this?" But there's no answer; just more breathing. Eventually the girl hangs up and, feeling a little uneasy, goes back to the TV.

The phone rings again. This time the voice on the other end is laughing at her. "Scared?" it hisses.

"Who is this?" demands the girl, but the only answer she receives is more laughter. She hangs up, checks that the front door is locked, and goes back to the TV.

The calls keep coming. More laughter. "You're home all alone," says the voice. "All alone." The girl can't ignore it anymore. She hangs up and calls the police, telling them what is happening. The police promise to trace the call next time he rings. Reassured, the girl hangs up.

Sure enough, the creep calls again, and after a minute or two of listening to him giggle down the line, she hangs up. Almost at once, the phone rings again, and she snatches it up. It's the police this time; they've traced the call.

"You've got to get out," cries the operator. "He's calling from inside the house."

And at that very moment, the upstairs light flicks on, and the girl hears footsteps on the landing above her head.

The Security Guard

A young man is working as a security guard at a telephone relay station. It's not a bad job, but it gets boring sometimes. It's particularly bad during the winter months, when it's freezing cold as well.

With nothing else to do during the long nights, the young guy takes to exploring the station. One night he finds the keys to a maintenance catwalk that runs along above a satellite dish. He goes exploring, and notices that at a certain point on the catwalk, right above the centre of the dish, it's actually quite warm.

He spends the night stood on the catwalk, bathing in the warmth from the dish. He feels fine in the morning, and nobody notices, and so he starts doing this every night.

For a while things are fine, but then Christmas rolls around, and the young man draws the short straw. He'll be working on Christmas night. He's reluctant, but it's double pay. What the hell, he figures. And so he brings along a deckchair and a couple of beers and sets himself up on the catwalk to wait out the long night.

What he doesn't realise, unfortunately, is that the reason that the area of the catwalk right above the dish is so warm is because it is the focus of the dish's microwave rays. And what he also doesn't realise is that in order to cope with the greater seasonal demand over Christmas, the dish is transmitting at ten times the usual intensity.

When the cleaner comes in at six the next morning the station is quiet. There's a smell like roast turkey, permeating the whole area. Thinking that it must be the young security guard preparing some kind of Christmas roast, he wanders through to the kitchen, but there's nobody there. It's only when he goes out onto the catwalk that he discovers the truth. There lies the young security guard in his deckchair. The beers he brought along have exploded. The man is dead, thin streams of smoke pouring from his eyes and ears and mouth.

The Ant Nest

A student is staying in a shared house with a couple of his friends. It's not the cleanest of places, and at the moment they happen to have quite a severe infestation of ants. One night, the student falls asleep on the sofa. He was drunk the night before, and so it's a fairly heavy sleep. When he finally wakes, he's aware of a slight tickling sensation in his ear, but nothing more than that.

Thereafter, his health starts to go downhill. He suffers from near-constant headaches, cannot concentrate on anything or sleep, and occasionally passes out cold. His friends persuade him to go to the hospital, where an x-ray is taken of his head.

Before they can get the results however, the student collapses in the waiting room. The nurses begin the process of reviving him, but it's looking bad. While he lies there unconscious to the world, the doctors go to retrieve his x-ray results. They see then that there's something very badly wrong. They have their suspicions, but with just an x-ray they cannot be sure.

The student, still unconscious and barely alive is hauled in for emergency surgery. They cut his head open and take a look inside, expecting to find a tumour or a cyst. What they find instead is a tiny nest of ants, the busy little creatures scurrying here and there, feasting hungrily on the grey matter of his brain.

The Face In The Tiles

It's the boy who sees it first. He and his mother live by themselves in an old Victorian house on the outskirts of the city. One night, as the boy is finishing his chores, he happens to glance down at the floor. What he sees makes him scream and drop the plate he's drying. Staring back up at him from the floor tile is the very definite impression of a face. It sits there, immobile, as if made from stone, drawn into a terrible grimace. It looks as if someone is trying to push their face through the kitchen's tiled floor from beneath.

The boy rushes from the kitchen to tell his mother, but by the time she comes to look the face has disappeared. She writes off the strange face as the boy's imagination. That is, until it happens again. It's the mother who sees it this time; a grim, stony face peering up through the floor. There one minute and gone the next.

It becomes a regular occurrence. Neither the mother nor the boy can come up with an explanation for it, and it scares them both terribly. The boy starts having nightmares and the mother begins losing weight. At last she decides that something must be done. She hires some builders to come in and pull up the floor. All day she and her son wait anxiously in the lounge while the men work at pulling up the old stone tiles. Finally, thinks the mother, the face will be gone.

But around an hour into the work, there's a cry from the kitchen. One of the workmen comes stumbling out, looking sick. Before she can stop him, the boy has darted into the kitchen to see what they've uncovered beneath the floor. The mother has no choice but to follow.

There, in the middle of the floor, surrounded by chipped and broken tiles is a large, dark, hollow space. It's clear that the builders must have broken through to it as they pulled up the floor. The boy's standing by the edge looking in, an expression of sick horror on his face. As she goes to pull her child back to safety the woman glances down into it too. At the bottom lies a huge mass of yellow-white bones. It's a mass grave; the pile's surmounted by the grinning, hollow shapes of a dozen human skulls.

The Chicken Burger

A woman heads into a fast food place and buys a chicken burger. Sitting down at the table, she bites into her meal . . . then immediately spits it out again. There's something sour in there. Looking at it, there's some kind of whitish sauce coating the chicken. She didn't order mayonnaise. The woman takes her burger back to the counter.

The boy behind the counter takes back the burger and gives her a refund. He's puzzled though; he knows they don't even have mayonnaise in at the moment. He saves the burger and shows it to his friend after their shift is over. The friend pokes at the white stuff and wrinkles his nose.

He's heard of this before, he explains. The chicken that went into the burger must have been sick; a tumour or a cyst or something. The blister survived the slaughtering process intact and made it into the burger. When the women bit into it, she must have burst the cyst. "Yep," says the friend, "that white stuff is chicken pus."