When I left a labyrinth full of unsettling creatures, I went out through the wrong exit. Ahead, a simple wooden gate, twice my height with a neat pitched roof, blocked my way forward, more wooden fencing stretching to either side.

Almost as if to keep those strange cave creatures from getting out this way. Although what good a wooden fence would do, I didn’t see.

I consulted my fabric map of the labyrinth. As I suspected, this had not been my intended exit, but I wanted to leave all the same. Even walking all the way around the mountains instead of through, as I’d meant, would be preferable to going back.

The green scent of moss and water wafted on the breeze, tall bamboo trees swaying on the other side of the fence. Inviting. As I approached, I noted carvings on the outside walls of the cave. Images of sages and community leaders entering the cave to consult the otherworldly creatures. For wisdom? For trade?

When I reached for the gate latch, an electric snap sounded. A force punched me in the stomach, throwing me to my back. From there, when my vision cleared, I saw painted sigils on the under side of the roof. Marks for repelling the unearthly, for the most part. Defined as things not-of-this-world. Anyone else could pass through unharmed.

Wheezing, I sat up. So the rules applied to me too, it seemed. Clearly, something had changed since these people had communed with the others. I could call out, persuade someone to let me through. But my inability to open the gate myself was all the evidence anyone would need that they should not let me in. Out.

Oh, I wanted out of that labyrinth.

I turned around and headed back the way I had come.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe for new stories, sneak peeks, book reviews, and updates delivered to your inbox and social feeds.

Links

Summer’s Latest

Beneath the Bluebonnets: Tales of Terror by Texas Women

Read my eco-horror short “Well Being” in this fabulous new anthology, in which a mother follows strange impulses from tainted water to find her daughter.

From Mary Shelley to Tananarive Due and Mariana Enríquez, women have long shaped horror—often without equal recognition. Living closest to the genre’s edge, women know these fears firsthand: lost autonomy, violence, childbirth, survival.

Set in Texas, a land of haunted histories and increasingly restrictive laws, Beneath the Bluebonnets emerges from the raw intersection of terror and endurance. Written by twelve Texas women writers: R. J. Joseph, Lauren Oertel, L.H. Phillips, Kathleen Kent, Madison Estes, Jess Hagemann, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacklyn Baker, S.G. Baker and edited by Carmen Gray, this collection is urgent, unflinching, and deeply haunting—stories that refuse to look away.