After Midnight

18 stories. 18 narrators. Every one of them wishes they'd never looked.

A woman moves into a suspiciously cheap apartment and finds a handwritten list of rules taped inside the kitchen cabinet. By night three, she understands why someone wrote them. A night security guard discovers that one storage unit is always warm to the touch - and that someone visits it every Tuesday at 2 AM. A deep-sea welder sees his own face watching him from the dark water. It looks sorry for him.

A grad student signs up for a paid sleep study. The researchers show her footage of herself at 3:03 AM - awake, speaking a language no one can identify. A rideshare driver picks up a passenger who knows his name, his address, and the thing he did last summer that he's never told anyone. A wildlife photographer finds trail cameras repositioned to photograph their own boots - timestamped yesterday, when they were forty miles away.

A ham radio operator picks up a transmission in her own voice, broadcasting coordinates to a door in her basement that wasn't there yesterday. A real estate agent buys a house that's been on the market for ten years. Every previous buyer withdrew within a week. Now she knows why - the reflection in the hallway mirror isn't hers. A quality inspector at a toy factory opens a doll addressed to a specific child by name. Inside its hollow torso is something organic.

Every story is told by the person it happened to. Some escaped. Some adapted. Some are still inside whatever they found.

Voices in the Static is Volume 1 of the After Midnight series - standalone horror anthologies connected by a shared universe of recurring places, timestamps, and things that shouldn't exist.

From Cleverhound Press. For readers who grew up on campfire horror and graduated to reading scary stories at 2 AM.