Hybris2

It was getting late, the rain was picking up and we were completely and utterly lost. My partner Shawn and I were on a business trip to complete a transaction in some backwater town, but we hadn’t been able to find it. This far out in the countryside neither cell phones nor GPS were working properly and to make things worse, not even all of the tiny villages we’d come through had had road signs. It felt as if we had driven right back into the dark ages. Now, with the sun going down and the rain coming in torrents we abandoned every last shred of hope of finding our destination and instead decided to stay the night at the next poss

I'm sorry, but I won't be coming to your Halloween party this year either. It has nothing to do with your parties, it's just... costume parties in general. I don't enjoy them anymore like I used to. Not since that last one a couple of years ago. Yeah you know the one I mean. But you weren't there, so you don't know everything that went on. I suppose it's for the best if I just tell you. Since it was the last year of college for most of us, it was a pretty big event. We weren't likely to see most of the people again by the same time next year, after all. Lena, who hosted it, put a lot of effort into the decoration and the catering. There wer

I was lying in a dizzy half-awake state and listened to the unnerving tic-toc sound of an old grandfather clock. How would I ever be able to sleep with that noise? But hadn't I been asleep just moments ago? Was it even morning or evening? Time felt foggy and undefined and my only half-functional mind struggled to make sense of it.  I looked at the clock on my nightstand. Almost 3AM. Full consciousness arrived at last, and with that a startling realization: I had a digital clock. I didn't own any device that would produce the kind of sound I was hearing. Yet the sound remained,  if anything it was even clearer than before. A low, regular tic-