The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

After lunch, her teacher announced that the school was holding a fire drill. When the alarm sounded, Carmen and the other students filed out of the classroom and assembled in the yard outside. As the teachers read out the roll call, the gang of five girls decided that this was a great opportunity to embarrass Carmen in front of the whole school during the fire drill. They moved over to where Carmen was standing, near a sewer drain, and began crowding the poor girl, getting in her face and nudging her towards the open manhole. They pushed her and she tripped over and fell head-first down the manhole. When they saw her falling, the girls started giggling and when Carmen’s name was called out, they shouted "She’s down in the sewer!" All of the other students began laughing. But when the teachers looked down the manhole and saw Carmen’s body lying at the bottom in the muck and the poop, the laughter abruptly stopped. Her head was twisted around at an odd angle and ...

You don’t know it, but someone has been removed from your life. They haven’t died, they haven’t moved, they have simply ceased to be from present future and history. However you still know they were there, you faintly recall broken memories of someone else there, someone who should have been there but you think you’re crazy. You go to do something, but you can’t remember what … It was them, they wanted to talk to you.

Every family in every town in every country on every continent has one. It’s a cabinet, not particularly odd, not out of place. The paint was peeling a bit on the corners and the knob was a bit loose. The inside smelled like dust and the paint wasn’t the same as the kitchen walls. You hid in there once during a game of hide ‘n’ seek. No one told you it doesn’t open back into your reality. Don’t worry, you can’t tell the difference. But everyone misses you.

My grandfather served in the European Theater of Operations during WWII, an experience he rarely talks much about. I’ve only managed to coax one story out of him. He and a low-ranking officer (granddad was an enlisted man) were travelling by jeep somewhere in Belgium with a cache of much-needed ammunition. Taking a wrong turn on an unpaved road they first became lost, then began to run low on fuel. They sought to ask some locals for help, as the Belgians were highly sympathetic to the Allied effort. They spied a small hamlet, made up of fewer than a dozen thatched huts, and began walking towards it. They were met halfway by a group of three men dressed mostly in animal skins, all of whom spoke angrily in a language neither of them understood (not French, not German, and certainly not English). Negotiations proved futile, and one of the three drew a small rusty knife. The Lieutenant drew his .45 sidearm in return and killed the man when he rushed at them as if to attack. ...

There are exactly 17 people on this earth fated to kill you. If you somehow manage to avoid these 17 people during your lifetime, you are taken to a place of monumental beauty where you are stripped of all clothing and branded on the space just above your navel with a name. When you are sent back to earth, it’s your mission to kill the person branded on you.

In Portland, Oregon in 1981, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs, something of a rarity at the time. This game was called “Polybius”. The game proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and queues formed around the machines, quickly followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side-effects — amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and suicide appearing as having been caused by the game in various versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while it is reported that one became an anti-gaming activist.

This morning I stepped out of the shower and this bathroom was fine: white walls, white tiles, sink and counter with toothpaste crusted all over. Three out of the four lightbulbs over the mirror were still good — 100 watt, clear bulb, blinding bright in the small white room. Like always I was late, so I skipped shaving. She liked it when I didn’t shave, anyway. I was thinking about doing mutton chops. She’d get a kick out of that. I passed the mirror and noticed I was grinning. I didn’t even know I was grinning. I’m in the bathroom tonight before bed and there’s something wrong with the lights. All three are on again but they glow kind of brown and don’t really light up the rest of the room. I should get more bulbs from the kitchen. I should, but I’m busy. The date was shit and she shut her apartment door on me. You’d think that would wipe off the stupid grin from this morning. But I came back in the bathroom and, in the mirror, my face was still doing it. If I touch my ...

The Hum is what people have called a phenomena that occurs in some places in the world. It is a low-frequency humming noise that sounds not unlike a distant running engine. However, the source can never be found. Even with microphones and all sorts of audio technology The source of the Hum has yet to be found. The most popular location to hear the Hum is in Taos, New Mexico. Only some can hear it as well as feel it. They can hear it throughout the day and into the night. The Hum does not stop. It has never stopped. Taken from Wiki: “Many people hear the Hum only, or much more, inside buildings as compared with outdoors. Many Hum sufferers can also perceive vibrations that can be felt through the body. Earplugs are reported as not decreasing the Hum. The Hum is often perceived more intensely during the night. …Common consequences include a lack of sleep, as the Hum can keep some sufferers awake or wake them in the middle of the night. …During the last decade, the Hum phenome...

You might be getting yourself ready for bed, hopping out of the shower at night, or running to grab something before a date when you inadvertently find yourself descending a flight of darkened stairs. About halfway down said flight, the urge to go that much faster jolts into your mind and you immediately obey. What are we running from that dwells in the darkness up the stairs? Is it simply the thought of darkness that causes us to want to leave the situation as soon as possible? Or is there something else? A darker, more sinister force awaiting us to take our time going down the stairs to nab us and take us with them to their hell-hole? Or perhaps is it a force of good, attempting to protect us from the things in the darkness? Could it be that every time we feel that urge to move faster the very hands of an evil force are grabbing our back, and because of our sudden speed we slip out of its grasp? Who knows. Just remember, next time that you’re going down that flight of ...

It’s the summer, and you’re out of your college classes for at least a week or two, before the next semester starts. You’ve spent this time lounging around, and sleeping a lot. But lately, correspondence between your local friends has dropped off. They don’t drop by. Your phone’s been quiet for awhile, and your IM lists are all empty. After five days of this, you’ve gotten bored enough to try chatrooms. They’re all empty; even the big ones. Any e-mails you send get no replies. When you leave your apartment, the whole of the building is unearthly silent. The only noise that comes about at all is the whurr from the automated Rail outside. Nobody answers when you knock. All the buildings are dark and locked up when you look out the window; the only cars are of the parked variety. A search of the entire building, and even further beyond that, yeilds nothing. No life; the only movement is from the wind, or the automated peices of machinary. Defeated, you slink back into the e...

In some television markets, people get two different versions of the same channel. This is usually caused by affiliates being nearby–for example, while living in New Jersey receiving the ABC affiliate from both New York City and Philadelphia, or living in Southern California and getting both the Los Angeles and San Diego stations. For the most part, these appear to be the same channel in all except local news and some daytime programming, with the exception that one is actually closer and more clear than the other. These channels, in reality, should not occur. Television markets are set up to focus around ONE city, and offering two different versions of the same channel in one market can split viewer-ship in the ever-competitive ratings race. If you are to watch the channel with worse reception, from the city that is further away, you’ll start to notice that the news reports major events that never occurred, on people that aren’t real, on technology that shouldn’t exist,...

There was this woman whose husband was acting very strange one day, very paranoid, she asked him why and this is what he told her: “Twelve years ago to this day a whole bunch of my friends and I went to an old haunted house downtown to stay the night because we thought it would be fun. We were all settled on the bottom floor of the house and we were fine for the first few hours. We began to hear things that sounded like foot steps pacing on the floor above, and scratching on the walls.” “We sent Jimmy, who was the oldest of us, up to have a look so he grabbed his flashlight and we watched him head up the steps. His foot steps seemed to stop towards the last few steps where he was no longer visible to us and slowly his light faded from view, we called after him but there was no reply.” “Afterwards we sent Matt, the second oldest up to find him, he walked up the steps and the same thing happened. At this point we thought they were joking, and out third eldest, Jason went u...

David Lang’s two children, George, 8, and Sarah, 11, were playing in the yard when Lang and his wife came out of the vine-covered brick house. He spoke to the children and then started walking out across the pasture. At this time, Judge August Peck, and Lang’s brother-in-law came driving up the lane in a buggy. The judge saw Lang in the field and was about to call out to him when it happened. Lang vanished from the face of the earth. One minute he was standing in an open field with no trees, stones, or fences. The next, he was simply gone. Lang’s wife and the two men immediately ran to the spot to check that he might have fallen through a hole in the ground. There was no such hole. Mrs. Lang went hysterical and was taken into the house. Neighbors were called out to help, scores of people searched the field, but to no avail. A surveyor and geologist examined the field and found limestone bedrock a few feet underground without a single fracture in it. For a month the searc...

Since before I could remember, I’ve wanted to be a mother. It seemed my whole childhood and teenager years were spent yearning for a child of my own. By the time I was nine, I had names–and color schemes for the nursery–picked out. All I needed was someone to make them with. But college was disappointing. I went through a whole string of bad boyfriends and bad father material. Getting on with my career didn’t seem to help much. I realized, though–when I was twenty-seven, and there were no suitable prospects on the line–that, technically, I did not need a man to have a child with. Just a very particular product of his. I found a sperm donor bank, chose the best prospect they had, got out my turkey baster and… well… hoped for the best. I was overjoyed when my first pregnancy test came out positive. My doctor was surprised to see me coming in sooner than he’d expected. Before I was four weeks along, I had the nursery painted, and the furniture set up. Toys and diapers, bott...

Every individual will make 16 choices in their lifetime that will forever alter the course of humanity. No more than 16, no less than 16. These choices will be small, and at the time of decision, will mean nothing. They won’t have to be choices which result in action, they could be choices that result in inaction. But months, years along the way, when the full impact of your decisions and the chain reaction of events they have caused are felt… you may have been the one who caused the end of the world. And you will never know.

I was six, maybe seven years old when this happened. My family had just gotten back from visiting my aunt’s house. My cousins were watching a scary movie in the basement, and even though my parents said I would get scared, I snuck downstairs and watched some of it. I don’t remember what part I saw, but there were little monsters with teeth that would eat people in their sleep. When we left for home it was dark outside and my parents scolded me for watching that movie. I secretly hoped they would keep scolding me, because I was feeling sleepy and didn’t want those things to eat me. We got home fine and my parents even managed to calm me down enough to the point where when my bedtime came around I could go to sleep. I fell asleep almost immediately and slept pretty well. I woke up sometime during the night. Knowing where everything is in my house I didn’t turn the lights on, but instead used the street light coming in the windows. I went to the bathroom and then got a glas...

A strange ringtone plays on your cell phone, you reach for it but whoever it was must have hung up, a wrong number maybe. You look at the phone anyway. You’ve missed a call. You listen to it. When you put the phone to your ear. Suddenly you hear a scream of pain, you toss the cell across the room, but you can still hear it. When you finally pick the phone up you see who the call was from, you realize who’s voice it was. Yours.

In 1938, over 6,000 patients were checked into mental hospitals all across America within one week of each other. Reports of similar instances supposedly came from Europe and Asia as well. The circumstances of each patient were, eerily, identical. Every patient completely shut down, shivering in the corner until their family, unable to calm or care for the individuals, committed them. The only thing the patients would say was: “There is not, and never has been, such a thing in this world as a meaningless coincidence.”

You’d fallen asleep to late-night television, but curiously woke up to the sounds of the static playing on the T.V. As you sit up, rubbing your eyes, you read the scrawling words of the Emergency Broadcast System “This is just a test – This is just a test – This is just a test…” You glance at the clock. 3:33. Yawning, the television catches your eye, and as you watch, the EBS say something different, “This is just a test – This is just a test – You are being watched – This is just a test…”