Dark Harbor Magazine Becomes Macabre Magazine For nearly a year, Dark Harbor Magazine has been a home for horror. We published stories that lingered, work that carried weight, and voices that shaped the character of the magazine. In that short span, readers returned issue after issue, and writers trusted us with their best work. The result was…
Month: September 2025
The Stranger on the Train
Something is wrong. There is a stranger in the back of the train. Someone I have never seen before. Sitting alone, among all the daily commuters I see every day. Perhaps I never noticed him before. Though he has a distinct look I would have noticed. His face is smooth and there is not a…
Beast
At dusk, he carried a small backpack into the park, unfurled a one-man pop-up tent near the ablutions of the main camping ground. The tent screamed vivid yellows and blues—jarringly incongruent with his craggy face and deadpan expression. Until recently, it had been his son’s. From the many times they’d come here together. Way back…
The Bedbug
It starts like this: a pinprick of blood on a white sheet. Caroline nearly misses it. She would’ve missed it if it weren’t for the snow-blind blankness of her new bed set. The spot is perfectly round and rust red, the planet Mars in miniature. “The god of war,” she thinks, a bad omen. Her…
No One Ever Sees Me
Halloween was the best family event of the year. Every Halloween, The Cousins played Ninjas. Our grandmother had ten children. Ten children all got married except Uncle Steve. He died in Vietnam, and my dad always poured a beer into the grass for Uncle Steve when all the siblings got together. All these children having children is…
My Little Desert Oasis
Ten years ago, it came and unleashed hell upon my little desert oasis. When I finally confronted it—striking a deal that would end its reign of terror—the missing had reached twenty-two. It may not seem like a lot, but for us that was nearly a quarter of our population which meant everyone either knew someone…
The Pole Barn
You don’t remember how you got here, just that you woke up on a dusty futon in a large empty garage with a slick concrete floor that you place your bare feet on as you jolt awake. Light is coming through the high windows on the one wall but you can only see tree tops…
Phantasm
Now that he has passed from this life, I can reveal the remarkable tale he entrusted to me. With respect to this narrative, my name is unimportant. Know only that I was a close friend of Ian Bellairs for many years. Moreover, I was an admirer of his work as a crusading journalist of long…
Shrieks and Giggles
Prologue: The Tree That Feeds on Silence “When a child cries at midnight and the dog does not bark, the ancestors are the ones rocking the cradle.”– Old Tiv saying In the far stretches of Taraba State, where the savannah breathes in long sighs and the earth blushes red beneath bare feet, there lies a land shaped more by…
Old Sea Right
It hadn’t been a conscious thing, the way he lost his mind. It slipped away slowly, like water draining through a crack in the hull. Somewhere along the way, he knew it was gone. Hunger consumed it. Hunger could do that, especially when you hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe it began when he couldn’t tell…