“If you lack the appetite for the macabre, gruesome, and strange then I don’t know what else to tell you, it’s just going to get worse.” - C. B. Pockets

Picture a razor-sharp boline moon in a starless sky, and over the whispering howls of the autumn night’s breeze you detect the faintest a-sharp of a bloodcurdling scream. Beneath the moon’s lustrous horns is a dirt road sandwiched between forests of cacodaemoniacal flora. A woman runs on it. Pale, waiflike, and barefoot. Partially covered by a tattered, ivory taffeta. Partially soaked in freshly drawn blood. She’s the one screaming, in case you couldn’t tell.

She moves like a drunken angel. She doesn’t seem to feel the rocks scraping the soles of her feet. Her father calls her Cathy. Her sister calls her Cat. Her face’s a twisted mask of loathsome, iridescent rosacea. A dilapidated pickup coasting around 15-mph blares its raucous horn, flickers its high-beams. A tempest of blinding jaundice-light floods across her backside, casting her in a celestial strobe-light effect. Her scream gains an octave and both legs lock in place as if by some vampiric spell.

Sobbing now, she turns and sees through the vehicle’s shattered windshield and is reminded of the man now seated in the driver’s seat; his blood-soaked dungarees, that decaying eye, stumps of old, mossy teeth. His head is bald as a stone with a tattoo across his brow that reads: KILLROY WAS HERE.

Gripping the wheel is the cold steel of his triple-tip hook hand, sharpened for murder—

-Nora Foster grimaces at her notepad. She doesn’t like what she's writing. Erasing now. Her go-to response for underwhelming fantasy. Twirling her lime-green mechanical pencil 180-degrees in her hand like a drummer, she reunites its graphite-tip to the college rule pulp. Nora has the tendency to mutter to whilst scribbling.

“Hands,” Nora whispers.

Hook-hands Nora inscribes.