Hands Out

When a woman walks into a South Shields newspaper office to complain about her own obituary, the compositor who set it has to reckon with six years of notices he never questioned. Crossing out her name may not be enough.

As a Baltimore department store prepares to close on Christmas Eve, a longtime layaway clerk pays off an elderly customer's last six dollars as a parting kindness. But something behind the stockroom gate has been waiting for that balance to reach zero.

Sixteen-year-old Toby needs his paper-route collections to help keep the electricity on, but six customers on Linden come with instructions he can't afford to follow: pay their bills himself and stay off their porches after four.

A disgraced taxidermist working out of a subterranean Boston workshop receives an unclassified, fleshy specimen sealed in cold preservation brine. As he prepares his tools, a burning sensation in his childhood spinal scar exposes an uncanny biological pull toward the vat. Some missing pieces were never meant to stay lost.

A Midnight Transmission original. Working deep beneath the North Sea, a diver hears his missing father's familiar summons against the steel of a diving bell, but the man vanished from this oilfield twenty-three years ago.

For twenty-four years, a tired highway worker believed his job painting the stripes on Route 99 was just mundane labor. But when his supply of a strange, government-mandated paint begins to run dry, he discovers the glowing yellow line is the only thing binding an ancient, planetary terror beneath the asphalt. If the line breaks, the world unravels.

A disgraced marine biologist comes home to a dying Maine harbor to count the catch and finds the boats landing fish that have been extinct for three hundred million years. The town is eating them. So is he.

Two hunters take shelter from a mountain storm in a cabin nobody seems to own, with a lamp lit and two cups set out. By morning one of them has made a promise he did not understand, and it follows him home.

A dying man refuses every comfort: the doctor, the prayer, the hymn book his mother keeps pressing into his hand. But something in the room has started paying attention, and it is waiting for the moment his back is turned.

Facing eviction in a brutal Boston winter, Maeve Miller accepts a bizarre, high-paying job to sit in pitch darkness and comfort an unseen companion. The rules are simple: never turn on the light, and never try to look at the entity in her lap. But as a suffocating sickness begins to hollow her out, Maeve realizes she has signed away much more than her time.