The Lightning-Fused Lovers

A teenage guy takes his girlfriend out into the hills one weekend, determined on a bit of midnight action in the predicted storm. The two of them make their way to an isolated spot on the peaks, and wait for the rain to start. Overcome by excitement--and hormones--they strip off and get down to business.

The lightning storm moves on top of them. Bolts of electric light crack down through the sky . . . and by unfortunate chance, one strikes in the exact spot the teenage lovers have chosen for their tryst. Hundreds of thousands of volts course through the pair. The girl is killed instantly, but the boy survives, despite being in awful pain. Worse still, the electricity melted the latex of the condom they were using, fusing the two of them together.

Sickened and horrified, the boy vomited straight onto the girl's face, before passing out cold. When he came to a few minutes later he was no longer alone; a wolf had wandered out from the woods and was licking the vomit from the girl's face. The boy balked in disgust, but managed not to move. It wasn't long before the wolf got bored and left the scene . . . though not before taking a few quick bites at the back of the boy's head.

The night that followed was agonising. Despite the pain and the weight of his dead girlfriend, the boy managed to drag himself--inch by agonising inch--all the way back to the car park. That was where they found him in the morning, bloodied, filthy, barely alive, the corpse of his girlfriend fused agonisingly to his most sensitive of organs.

The Stoned Sitter

A couple are head out for dinner one night, leaving their baby at home in the capable hands of a teenage sitter. The first half of the night passes pleasantly enough, and both of them are thoroughly enjoying their meal, when the man's mobile rings. It's the sitter. She sounds . . . strange.

"The baby's asleep," she said, "and I put the turkey in the over like you asked."

"Turkey?" says the man. "What turkey?" Neither he nor his wife had any kind of turkey in the house.

"You left . . . on the table you left a turkey. You said to, um . . ." The sitter tails off, sounding uncertain. Then she hangs up.

Worried, the couple decide to cut short their dinner and head home. When they arrive they find the sitter curled up on the sofa, crying hopelessly. There's a distinct smell of marijuana in the air . . . and at first the couple think that's all it is. She smoked a few joints and got a little paranoid: careless, but nothing terrible.

Then they go through to the kitchen.

In a flash they see what has happened. Out of her head on the drugs, the babysitter became confused. There never was a turkey. Only their baby. Sitting on top of the oven in a metal dish is what remains of their child, his skin blackened and crisped and cooked.

The Death Car

A young office worker is in the market for a new car. He's mooching around the used-car salesrooms, searching for a bargain, when he spots a slightly-battered-looking BMW on sale for less than half its value. It's a deal he can hardly resist, and he finalises the paperwork later that day.

As he drives home, he's aware of a vague, sweetish smell pervading the inside of the car. Still, it's nothing that a good clean won't solve, and he's too happy with his new purchase to really care.

The next day he washes the car and vacuums and cleans the inside as thoroughly as he can. However, the smell remains. In fact, it gets worse as time goes on. After about a week he can hardly stand it anymore, and he takes the car back to the showroom to complain.

To his surprise, the dealer doesn't give him any trouble. "I knew this would happen," he says. "I just can't get rid of this damn car." He goes on to explain the history of this particular vehicle.

It just so happens that the car's first owner committed suicide inside of it, gassing herself to death in the garage of her home. Unfortunately, nobody was around to witness the woman's suicide, and so by the time she was found her body was long-since decayed.

"Ever since we got it," says the dealer, "that smell has stuck around inside the car. It doesn't matter what you do: change the seats, change the fittings . . . it makes no difference. Ever since we got it that car has stunk of death."

The Chicken-Footed Dancer

A Spanish woman is at the annual dance of her town. She's spent half the evening dancing and is resting for a moment against the wall. She watches the other dancers twirling and sweeping past on the floor. From among them steps a tall, dark-haired man who she's never seen before in her life. He saunters up to her with an easy confidence.

"Would you care to dance?" he asks, holding out his arm. The woman is tired, but for some reason she finds the offer difficult to resist. She takes the man's arm and allows him to lead her into the crowd.

Five minutes later the rhythm of the music is sundered by a scream. The dancer's grind to a halt and turn towards the source of the disturbance. It's the woman, and she's lying on the floor in a cold faint. Her partner is already pushing his way through the crowd towards the exit; he's gone in a flash before anyone can grab him.

Smelling salts are fetched and the woman is eventually roused to consciousness once more. She's deathly pale, and looks terrified. It's a long time before she can explain what happened, and when she does the listeners that surround her don't know whether or not to believe her. It was the handsome man, she tells them. They were dancing together, quite happily, when she happened to glance down. There, in the place where his legs should have been were a scrawny pair of chicken feet, thick horny claws and all.

The listeners withdraw in fear. This can mean only one thing; a man with the feet of a chicken can only be the devil.

The Halloween Apples

It's Halloween, and a bunch of children are out trick-or-treating with one of the kid's uncles. All night they've been making their way through the neighbourhood, banging on doors, collecting a sizeable pile of handouts. Towards the end of the night they stop on a corner to count up what they've got. Most of the kids seem to have amassed a good pile of sweets, along with a few small toys and a number of differently-sized apples from concerned members of the healthy eating brigade.

Satisfied, the kids and their chaperone start to head back to their home neighbourhood. On the way, the kids start in on their haul, munching their way through various sweets and snacks. They're almost halfway back when one of the boys yelps and drops the apple he'd been chewing on. Blood is dripping from his mouth.

Concerned, the uncle crouches down by the boy and inspects the injury. It looks like he cut his mouth on something. The uncle comforts the boy until the crying stops, then snatches up the apple from the pavement. There's something metallic stuck in there, he sees. Squinting closer, he sees to his horror that the metal thing is a razor blade.

The first thing he does is collect the apples off the other kids. With mounting horror, he sorts through the fruits, finding first one then another with a little telltale slash in its skin.

He's panicking now. So many people gave apples this year there's no way he can tell who the perpetrator might be. And who knows how many more of these doctored apples are out there? Thought whirl around his head, but one is most prominent of all: which of all the nice, normal-looking houses they stopped at tonight was the house of a lunatic?

The Microwave

It's raining buckets. A young blonde woman has left her umbrella behind at work and so has to run all the way from the bus stop to her house. By the time she gets in she's soaked to the skin. Worse still, she has a date set for that night. She needs to dry out her hair quickly.

She's heard from a friend that you can use a microwave to dry things out: towels and items of clothing and such. Surely it would work the same for her hair . . .

Her date arrives an hour or so later and knocks on the door. No answer, and he can smell something burning. He wakes her neighbour, who calls the blonde girl's brother, who comes around in his car. In the intervening time the smell of burning has only gotten worse. The brother lets himself in and follows his nose to the kitchen. And there she is, the blonde girl, his sister, slumped over dead with her head wedged inside the microwave, dark streams of steam and blood running from her eyes and mouth and ears.

It turned out that she'd forced the door control with a spoon so that the microwave would run, even with the door open. She died of a fatal haemorrhage within seconds.

The Elevator Angel

A young secretary works in a high-rise office building in the middle of the city. One night she's at the office late, catching up on some paperwork. When she finishes, finally, she packs away her things and heads for the elevator. It's almost ten o' clock and the building is eerily empty, just her and the security guards. She hits the button and waits for the lift to arrive.

Her mind is still on her work, but she's fairly sure she's the only one waiting on that floor. That's why she's so surprised when the elevator arrives and, just as she's about to step inside, someone barges past her into the box. She's so surprised that she stops dead, staring at the man who has pushed past her. He stands in the middle of the lift, smiling benevolently at her. He's not a worker, and he's definitely not a security guard. In fact, she's never seen him before in her life.

Before she can react, the metal doors scroll shut and the elevator starts to descend. The secretary just stands there, bemused. She takes a step back . . . maybe she should take the stairs.

Just then there's an almighty bang, and a rattling from the lift shaft. A siren sounds. A thud echoes up the lift shaft.

Later, down in the lobby, surrounded by police and fire officers, she tells her story. About the man who pushed past her, how she was seconds away from getting into the lift herself.

"You were lucky," says one police officer. The lift, he tells her, has plummeted all the way to the ground floor. If anyone had been inside, they almost certainly would have been killed.

"If?" says the secretary. "But there was someone inside. I remember; a man pushed past me just as I was about to get in."

The police officers just shake their heads. "No," they tell her, "that lift was very definitely empty." And when they check the CCTV tapes the story's the same: no stranger pushes past her. The whole time she was by herself on the floor, completely and utterly alone.

The Pile Of Leaves

An office worker is driving home one day in autumn. Thick piles of leaves cover the ground and the sun is bright and crisp. It's a good day to be alive. The man is looking forward to seeing his family when he gets home. He pulls into his drive, climbs out and goes inside.

After greeting his wife he checks the rest of the house, but his two little kids are nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, he asks his wife where they are and she tells him that, last she saw them, they were playing out in the front garden.

The office worker checks the garden. No kids. He's starting to worry now, and his search becomes frantic. He runs back inside and tells his wife that he can't find them anywhere. She comes out to help him search.

"I don't understand," she says. "They were just out here a moment ago. They were playing the leaves."

At her words, a horrifying idea occurs to the office worker. He runs to his car, crouches down and checks underneath . . . then recoils in horror. His worst suspicions have been proved true. It seems that his kids must have been waiting to surprise him, hidden in a pile of leaves in the driveway. Hidden there even as he arrived home in his car . . .

He gropes under the chassis for their little broken bodies, but it's already far too late.

The Corpse Worms

A young student meets a man at a nightclub and, one thing leading to another, ends up going home with him. The two spend the night together, drunkenly enjoying each other's company. In the morning they wake up with twin headaches, and quickly part company. The girl's embarrassed more than anything, so she doesn't mention the encounter to any of her friends. It was a stupid, alcohol-fuelled decision. Worst of all, she fears she might have caught something. She's itching horribly down there.

A week passes and, despite her hopes, the itching doesn't go away on its own. The girl makes an appointment at her local clinic and submits herself to her inspection. The diagnosis comes back: she has a colony of "corpse worms" living inside of her. It's treatable but, since the only place you can get corpse worms if off a dead body, the police will be wanting to speak to her.

She's taken down to the station and interviewed. There in the featureless interrogation room the whole humiliating story comes out. She tells them about the guy, and gives them his address. The police head off to investigate.

A week or so later, after she's been in and out of hospital a couple of times to be treated, she receives a follow-up call from the police. A young officer, barely hiding his disgust, explains that the guy she slept with was a hospital worker. It turned out that he'd been abusing the bodies entrusted to his care. At the time of their liaison he was, it seemed, a practicing necrophiliac.

The Solid Cement Car

A cement-truck driver is making his rounds one morning with a "wet" load. It just so happens that his second job of the day is in the same neighbourhood as his house. He decides to stop off and surprise his wife with a visit.

He pulls onto his street, and to his surprise sees that there is a car parked in his driveway. He stops up on the other side of the road, and looks  across to his home. There, through the living room window he can see his wife . . . and another man, a stranger. They're sitting awfully close. All at once, a dozen possible explanations rise up in the driver's head, but they're weak. Jealous rage floods through him.

He's never had the best temper, and so the cement-truck driver pulls up his truck alongside the stranger's car, climbs out and levers open the sunroof. He directs the chute towards the sunroof and pulls the lever. Wet cement torrents out into the car, filling it in seconds. His revenge complete, the man climbs back into his cement truck and drives away.

Later that day, the police arrive at the depot with a warrant for his arrest. He knows what he's done, and so he doesn't resist. But it's not until they get back to the station that the police fully explain what has happened. It turns out that the car he wrecked was a surprise present from his wife. The man he saw inside his house was the agent who delivered the car. He and the cement-truck driver's wife had taken it for a test drive, before returning to her house. He'd come inside to finalise the paperwork.

Bad enough, but the worse is still to come. When she took the car out for a test drive, the man's wife took their baby child with her. The poor thing was still inside the car, strapped into its child seat, when the cement-truck driver took his ill-planned revenge. He's not being arrested for destruction of property, but for murder.

The Tanning Salon

A woman is preparing to be married next month. She's excited about the big day, and the one thing she wants more than anything else it to have a nice, deep tan. To this end, she heads down to a local tanning salon. It's one of those self-service places; basically a small shop with a bunch of coin operated machines. She strips off, inserts her money and climbs inside. Twenty minutes later she emerges a little bit more brown.

But it's not enough. She wants more. A few days later she heads back for another session, and another the day after that. She's getting close to the tan she wants, but it's still not enough . . . and the wedding's getting ever closer.

The night before the rehearsal, she heads down to the salon once more. This time, when her time on the bed expires, she just puts more money in. Not once, or twice, but five times. By the time the salon's finally closing up for the night she's dizzy and dehydrated, but she finally has the deep-gold tan she wants. She heads home and falls into bed.

And there she stays, forever. Her family find her the next day, dead and shrivelled, organs cooked to perfection from the inside out.

The Itchy Head

One afternoon, an old man comes wandering into hospital, wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown. He looks confused, squinting about short-sightedly. When one of the nurses approach him and asks what is wrong, he tells her his head itches terribly. As a matter of fact, it has for quite some time.

The nurse takes him in to be inspected. It doesn't take long to work out what the problem is. His hair is crusty with dried blood. When she tries to clean it, his scalp peels away along with the hair and the blood. There beneath is a bloody hole, delving deep into his head. In the depths she sees the grey matter of brain. Not only that, but it's moving. Little white shapes wriggling madly away.

"Oh, God," says the nurse. The little white things, she realises, are maggots.

It's not long before the doctor's have worked out what's happened. The old man lived alone, and he's not in the best of minds. A cut on his head became infected, and the infection spread. Flies came along, landing and laying their eggs. Slowly, day by day, the infection ate away, worming down through flesh, through bone, deep into the soft stuff of his brain, until his whole head was open to the sky. The man was so frail that he never even knew; all he ever felt was that steady, stinging itch.

The Body In The Bag

A cat belonging to a young woman living in the city dies one day, of natural causes. The woman loved the cat very much, and wants it to be buried somewhere nice. Unfortunately she lives in an apartment with no garden, not even a communal one. As an alternative, the woman calls one of her friends--an artist who lives in the countryside. They arrange to meet at an out-of-town shopping centre, where the woman will hand over the body of her pet so that it can be buried out in the forest.

The woman wraps the body of her cat in paper and loads it into a boutique bag. She heads out to the shopping centre and goes to the food court, where she grabs a coffee while she waits for her friend. The artist eventually arrives, having been delayed by traffic. They chat for a few minutes, and then the woman goes to hand over the bag with the cat in it . . . only to find that it's missing.

They contact mall security and start a search, mostly to no avail. Someone must have taken their chance and stolen the bag while the woman went to the bathroom. The shopping centre manager apologises profusely to the woman, but there's nothing they can do.

Sadly, the woman and her artist friend head out to the car park. On the way they notice that there's some kind of commotion going on at the far end of the lot. They wander over to look. Lying there unconscious on the concrete, surrounded by a crowd of horrified onlookers is a large, middle-aged tramp. Lying there beside him is a familiar-looking boutique bag, the straggly head of the woman's cat poking out of the top.

The Deep-Fried Rat

A trucker pulls into a service station on the motorway. He's been driving all night and hasn't eaten since the night before. He needs some food, and so he heads for the fast-food bar and orders some fried chicken and chips. While he waits he glances around the place: it's not exactly sparkly clean--but then again he's been in some bad places in his travels. He takes his food and heads for a table.

He's about to bite into his chicken when something makes him stop. He pokes it with his fork,  inspecting the meat. For a moment all he knows is that it looks kind of weird . . . and then he flips it over and he sees the shape of it. He hurls it away from himself, almost vomiting.

The deep fried thing is not chicken at all. It's a rat, curled into a ball and slathered with batter. The poor thing must have fallen into the fryer, cooking itself whole in the remnants of a hundred meals-worth of grease.

The Sewer Workers

A group of sewer workers are down in the tunnels. They've been sent to clear out a blockage in one of the more far-flung pipelines under the city. The trouble is, they're working from plans that are way out of date. The further they go down, the harder it gets to be sure of where they are. At last, they come to a hatch in the floor of a junction.

"This is it, I think," says the foreman. "Let's head down."

They prepare their gear and open up the hatch, only to find that the tunnel beyond is narrower than they thought, and the ladder is long-since rusted. They can only send down one man to clear the blockage. A young workman volunteers for the job and is roped up and lowered down into the dark. A few minutes pass.

Then the man starts screaming.

Panicking, the others haul back on the rope. The guy down the hole sounds like he's screaming his lungs out. Eventually he comes back into sight, kicking and yelling, and they manage to get him over the lip of the hatch. He's shuddering violently, clutching at his clothes. His hair has turned a deathly white.

"What happened?" cry the other workmen. "What's down there?"

But the guy won't answer. He can't even speak. They shut up the hatch and manage to drag him back up to the surface, where he's carted off to hospital. But whatever the doctors do to him, he will not speak, will not say a word about what it was down there he saw.

The Carpet Store

A woman is out shopping for a new rug for her bedroom. She's wandering around a warehouse store, searching. She's looking for something exotic, something imported perhaps. She inspects some carpet samples and brushes her hand across a stack of rolled up rugs at the end of an aisle. Just then she feels a sharp pain in her finger, as though a pin or something was embedded in one of the rugs . . . but when she looks she can't see a thing. Sucking her finger, she leaves the store and heads back home.

A few hours later her neighbour discovers the woman lying dead in her kitchen. The police are called and the body taken down to the morgue. A pathologist examines her thoroughly, and eventually determines the cause of death. The woman was killed by the bite of an exotic spider.

It's a week before they track the woman's movements back to the carpet store she visited that day. And it's a week more before they discover the offending carpet. Imported from the Middle East, the thing is riddled with the husks of venomous spider eggs. The spiders themselves, however, are nowhere to be found.

The carpet is hauled away for further inspection, but the detectives know it's already too late. The spiders have spread already, and it's only a matter of time before the hatchlings start laying eggs of their own.

The Dead Grandmother

An American family are off on holiday; they're driving across the country: the mother, the father, the kids and the grandma. However, not long after they set off, the grandma succumbs to a heart attack and dies. She was pretty old, and they've been expecting it for a long time, so none of them are particularly shocked. It is inconvenient, however, as they're away from home, and don't know how to go about getting her buried in the state where they are. Instead, they decide to take her back home in the car, and bury her there.

The problem is, rigor mortis has already set in, and as such they can't fit her inside the vehicle with the rest of them. To get around this, they wrap her in a sheet and tie her to the top of the vehicle. Stuck up there, she looks like just another bundle, and they're satisfied that she won't be a problem. They all pile into the car and set off home.

A few hours later they stop at a service station and go inside to get some food. When they emerge, their car is gone. They search the car park, but it's nowhere to be found. They contact the service station security guard, and he lets them review the CCTV footage. They gather around and watch as a couple of guys in hooded tops saunter up to their car, slip the lock, clamber inside and drive off, without even realising that the corpse of the dead grandma is strapped to the roof.

The Abandoned Hospital

A small group of workmen have been assigned to clear out an empty hospital in the bad part of town. They're working in small groups, one in each part of the building. The men in the ward building are breaking down old pieces of furniture and carting out piles of trash. The hospital's been shut down for years, and the inside's pretty disgusting. There's dirt and dust and needles everywhere, not to mention rats the size of dogs.

About midday, the men break for lunch--all but one of them. His co-workers can't find him; he must have wandered off. They break for lunch anyway, call his mobile a couple of times (with no success), and decide to wait for him to turn up.

Towards the end of the lunch break, he does. He's behaving strangely though. His hard hat is pulled down over his face, his coat collar turned up. He doesn't stop to talk to his colleagues, but keeps his head down and heads quickly for the gate. His friends try to stop, to find out what might have happened inside the hospital, but he pushes past them and is gone.

It's puzzling, but they have a job to do. The workmen head back into the building and carry on with the clearing out. A few hours go by, and they've almost forgotten about their workmates strange behaviour. Then it happens. The foreman is checking ahead through the empty wards. Shining his torch into a dusty corner, he comes across a dead body. It's the man who they all saw leave the site earlier that day. Or the man who they all THOUGHT they saw leave.

The body is lying there on the floor. He's been stabbed, and his clothes have been taken. Whoever it was who went running away from the hospital earlier that day, it clearly wasn't him. 

The Halloween Hangman

It's Halloween, and some teenagers are out trick-or-treating. All in costume, they're hitting a couple of neighbourhoods, driving in between in a borrowed car. As they're heading down the highway, they pass by a lonely-looking farm. Strung up from the sign at the intersection leading to the farmhouse there's something that looks like a scarecrow. It's some kind of Halloween decoration: a hanged man. The teenagers stop in the road to take a few pictures with their mobile phones, then speed on towards their next target neighbourhood.

But a few weeks later, as they happen to be passing the junction again on a night out, they notice that the hangman decoration is still there. There're even a couple of crows perched on its shoulders, picking away. They stop and climb out of the car. One of the boys goes to take a closer look. He doesn't have to get too close to see that it's no decoration, but instead a real, rotting corpse, stung up from the sign like the victim of a lynch mob. The stench is terrible.

It turns out that the man had killed himself on the week of Halloween. He'd lived alone in the farmhouse, and so nobody had missed him when he went. Just like the kids in their car, everybody who passed him by thought that he was a Halloween decoration, and so he hung there, quietly decomposing for weeks and weeks and weeks.

The Roommate

A couple of girls are rooming together in the dorms at university. One night the quieter of the two girls decides to stay in and study, while the other heads out clubbing with her friends. They part ways, and the louder girl heads off with her friends into the town.

A long night later, after a good few drinks and a lot of dancing, the girl stumbles back to the dorms. It's long past bedtime, and the window of their shared room is dark. Her roommate must be sleeping. The girl's hand hovers over the light switch, but she decides she's not so drunk she can't find her way across the room in the dark. Doing her best to stay quiet the girl picks her way over to her bed. She falls into bed and in a few moments is sound asleep.

She doesn't regain consciousness until late next morning. She's got a rough hangover, and it takes her a while to pry herself out of bed. She sits there for a while, clutching her aching head, then grits her teeth and throws open the curtains. She looks over to her friend's side of the room, and sobers up cold.

Her roommate lies tangled in bloody sheets, clearly dead. Blood smears the walls, and written there on the wall are the words: "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?" The killer, it seems, was there in the room when the girl returned from her night out on the town. It was only her drunken state and the darkness of the room that saved her from her friend's untimely fate.