Moonlight Over a Ruined Village

For tonight’s episode, we find ourselves standing at the crossroads with one of the village’s disaffected youths. As we stand beneath the moon in need of direction and purpose, we await the birdman and his legion of doomed souls. The hour is late, and nothing good is likely to come of any of this. Nevertheless, we stand waiting, mulling over the past crimes and sins that brought us to this lonely street corner. Our guid...

Though it is not my intent to allow this work to descend into the realm of self promotion, I fear it is necessary as it is relevant to tonight’s tale. I wrote a novelette entitled Escaping the Old Charleston Jail, and it is available on Amazon. It’s a dark tale about man at odds with the world around him. He turns to alcohol to dull the pain of fitting in, but the alcohol becomes a prison to him. Our doomed hero eventua...

For tonight’s tale, we find Tomisaburo, the mysterious Kitsune who acts as the demon lord of the ruined village, curled up in a hole he dug in the ground. He is lying there so he does not have to show his face to the moonlight. As he contemplates his place in the world of the living, a world in which he received that savage ass whoopin from them boys, he hears a strange voice. Intrigued by the level of venomous pride and arro...

For tonight’s tale, we meet a man embarking on a quest. Our pilgrim, a young man who is being relentlessly haunted by an unquiet spirit, has decided he can no longer endure the ice cold touch of the restless dead that pokes him in the eye every Thursday night. He seeks aid from one who is learned in the ways of the dead. Yet our hero finds that the learned make claims to knowledge they can never possess, and they are in no po...

For tonight’s tale, we follow our solitary thug as he makes his way through the tunnels that run beneath our ruined village. He was sent there by a mysterious figure. Some call him the bird man, others call him the dirt spider. Our hapless thug is being pursued by an unimaginable horror that has just received a name, and that name is the Rook. The birdman informs our solitary thug that the Rook is coming for him and he will s...

Tonight’s tale will be told in two parts. For the first part, we follow a young woman as she ventures into the village. The fires of her curiosity were undoubtedly stoked by the villages growing reputation for being infested with thugs, drunks, assholes, and the pedantic creeps who broke them. Her curiosity leads her to the infamous doll museum, and her better judgment leads her to leave it almost immediately. This leads her ...

For tonight’s tale, we follow our hapless wanderer as the reaches the conclusion of her journey through the darkness at the center of the ruined village. She is pulled from the battle between the two raving jackasses by a strange creature in the form of a ventriloquist dummy. From that point on, it gets a lot weirder.

 For this haunted dummy serves as her only guide through her encounters with an increasingly bizarre suc...

For tonight’s tale, we meet our hapless drunk. He is standing on the street at dusk. He is alone and without his crew, but he is not aimless. For he is there to execute the duties of his office. The hapless drunk has moved up in the world, and he somehow managed to assume the role of liaison to the board of education for the ruined village. At least, that’s the way he remembers it. He is there to confront the teacher wh...

For tonight’s tale, we follow another traveler along the river road.  Though he has no definite destination, he has an aim, he has a purpose, and he has the means and will to obtain them. This is a man who was haunted by denizens from beyond the veil. Lost and desperate, he sought help in the ruined village. While there he found them boys and their crew. They helped him to find his strength. Emboldened, he returned to th...

For tonight’s tale, we meet Tomisaburo. Some of you may think you are familiar with that name, but you are mistaken. You have yet to meet Tomisaburo, but tonight you will be cured of that. For this is the night that Tomisaburo gets revenge on them boys for attacking him. That never happened, but the rumor is that he tried to tempt them with a haunted shamisen and they beat him for it. Since them boys did nothing to dispel the...

Tonight is the night we look back over the first five episodes of the series. We start with a hapless traveler on his way home that is pursued by a faceless phantom, and we end with a mysterious vigilante assaulting a gang of creeps in a graveyard. In between, we have two sisters learning a new way of life, two brothers preserving their old way of life, a ventriloquist dummy given unholy life by a ruined man, and a doomed soul robb...

For tonight’s tale, we follow the newly initiated member of the crew that haunts the village with them boys. They have taken to calling him the professor, as he has a unique talent for looking into the supernatural with his feet planted firmly on the ground. Often when dealing with the unknown, people become so bewitched and bewildered that they lose sight of the ground they were standing on before everything changed. For tha...

For tonight’s tale, we find ourselves with a lone woman standing beneath a streetlight in front of a desolate field. There is nothing around her but the gravel street in front of her and the torn-up earth and abandoned construction equipment behind her. As she stands there, she is watched from a hole in the ground by a pair of auburn eyes. This particular shade of auburn does not naturally occur in humans, and the owner of th...

For tonight’s tale, we return to the very spot where the solitary thug waited beneath the moonlight for his doom. This was the spot where the hapless thug encountered the ruined beings that removed the very bones from his body while he was still alive. They then left the empty husk of all that was left of him to drown in water not even deep enough to cover the discarded cans and garbage that always seems to accumulate along t...

For tonight’s tale, we find ourselves back on the river road. Yet we are not alone. Far from it. We are members of a gang of likeminded malcontents who have finally decided to do something about the strange occurrences that have plagued the river road. They are going to go straight to source all of these occurrences. The entrance to the drainage tunnels. This is near the area where six of the village youths were found after t...

            For tonight’s tale, we rejoin the young woman who dared to venture into the ruined village where she lost her way on the river road. Having learned little from her last ordeal, she decides to set out to explore a different village, this one at the foot of a haunted mountain. This mountain is said to be the home of not only a coven of witches, but also a murder...

            For tonight’s tale, we finally address the issue of the weasel, for he has been lurking in the background of these tales for far too long. While his story is as tragic as you probably think it is, there are supernatural elements woven throughout the weasel’s misspent life that may shock you. The weasel possesses supernatural powers that enabled it to sur...

            Tonight is the night we look back over the second seven episodes of the series. First, we meet the mysterious Sachiko as she rides the bus into the ruined village. She has come to investigate the bizarre incidents the area has become known for. Then we meet the solitary thug on his way to meet someone about a job, which does not go well for him at all. Next, we meet...

            For tonight’s tale, we meet the cult of the spider. Their leader has been lurking in the shadows of all of these tales. He watched the wolves move into the mountain village, and he did nothing. He watched the river village fall into a state of ruin, and he did nothing. He watched the demented followers of the wolf of the mountain perpetrate their sick bone rem...