Daniel Bradbury
Bio
Big fan of long walks in the woods, rye Manhattans, Spanish literature, jazz, and vinyl records.
Lover of all things creepy and crawly.
Stories (23)
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The Swimming Pool. Top Story - June 2024.
Clementine watched the sun swaying like a drunken dancer from the bottom of her parents' swimming pool. It was July: the slow, gold-colored time when the heat felt mean spirited, and the air felt thick with possibility. If she focused, she could hear the neighbor mowing his lawn. She could hear the drone of the cicadas and cars passing her parent's house on Magnolia Avenue, lent an almost otherworldly quality by the chlorinated water filling her ears. Clementine checked her watch. Seven minutes. She should have lost consciousness by now.
By Daniel Bradbury2 years ago in Horror
Home Video
BUCK TANK CANYON The television screen flickered into life for what would be the last time, casting a pale glow across the carpet in the half-light of Reggie's motel room. The shot framed the feet of the remaining counselors facing inward in a tight circle. Reggie could hear snatches of agitated conversation but wasn't able to pick out anything specific over the fizzing and warbling of the old celluloid. The shot began to pan upward, but there was a loud smack as something hit the top of the camera and it pointed back down towards the red earth. "Turn that fucking thing off! What's wrong with you?" Fox hissed.
By Daniel Bradbury2 years ago in Horror
Home Video
Reggie was a man who was driven to collect. Vinyl records, purchased indiscriminately, occupied uneasy towers of shelving leaning against his living room walls. The guest bedroom had never hosted company, unless you counted the endless piles of books that rested there. Thirteen separate editions of Don Quixote lay in various states of disrepair on the old queen-sized mattress. His bedroom was made accessible only by a narrow desire path through towers of vintage toys (still in the boxes), cookware, and celebrity memorabilia. A bobblehead figure of Jimi Hendrix watched over the eclectic hoard from the top of a tower of old cookbooks in the corner opposite Reggie's bedroom door.
By Daniel Bradbury2 years ago in Horror
Living Shadow. Top Story - January 2024.
There's a kind of darkness that belongs to Illinois. If you ever find yourself a little east of the Mississippi river on a night in late autumn, you might see it then. If you're on a road that's outside one of those fragile halos of electric light and civilization (and let's be frank, that accounts for most roads in Illinois) you'll probably get to watch it close in around your car: a cool, viscous absence of light that's not so much black as it is gray. Like the color has been sucked out of everything.
By Daniel Bradbury2 years ago in Horror
The Octopus
Traditionally, we humans have placed ourselves at the far right of the intelligence bell curve. Not just that, but we tend to claim we're the only ones there. Pigs, elephants, a couple breeds of dogs might fall somewhere near the middle, but when it comes to smarts, we've just gone and declared ourselves the cream of the crop. I've always thought that was a bit self-important.
By Daniel Bradbury3 years ago in Horror
Top of the Charts. Runner-Up in The Mystery Box Challenge.
Have you ever looked at the liner notes on a CD? Maybe you were on a road trip, bored of watching endless stretches of farmland roll by your window and you needed something to distract you. Maybe you're one of those rare people who gets curious about who and what goes into making a record and you decided to find out. If either of those apply to you, there's a chance you might have seen my name. You wouldn't remember it, of course. Just a handful of tiny black letters populating one of those overcrowded blocks of text, tucked away in the liner notes of an album. "Blake Mickens: bass guitar on tracks 2, 7, and 12." "Martin Aubuchon: drums and percussion on tracks 3 and 11." "Special thanks to Chloe Hall, Calvin Hawkins, Jorge Dominguez and Sylvia Adzoh." If you pick up the right record, I'm somewhere in there.
By Daniel Bradbury3 years ago in Horror
Stryggid
The light of an early November sun drifted lazily through the trees of the grotto, casting it in shades of ochre, yellow and umber. Its crisp, cold light seemed to dance as the trees swayed in a wind that smelled of ozone and overripe apples, heralding the arrival of a storm in the next hour or so. Styrggid sighed to himself, unwinding his body from the aspen he had been resting in. The rain wasn't dangerous to him, not like it would have been if he were a few centuries younger, but that didn't mean he enjoyed being caught in it. It was time to return home.
By Daniel Bradbury3 years ago in Fiction
