Search Worlds Without End

This House has a Name...

Rachel Adair thought Draper House in Washington, D.C, would be the perfect place for her and her husband, Hugh, to try and start a family. But as soon they moved into the century-old townhouse, the nightmares began: horrific images of the child Rachel lost; the unforgivable sins of Hugh's father; scenes of blood-curdling rituals... and the scraping sounds of an even greater terror that lives within the walls...

A tragic accident left eleven-year-old Hope Steward with an extraordinary power that is both blessing and curse. Her touch alone can heal those suffering from horrifying afflictions... or subject them to an unspeakable fate.

Now, a once-innocent child has become the prey in a monstrous hunt. Her scientist father is determined to exploit her frightening gift, a relentless government agent is out to kill her -- and a damaged soul called Monkey vows to deliver her to the mercies of the fiendish forces he serves....

What secrets lie within the ancient place known as the Goat Dance?

A Haunted Lake...

Seven-year-old Teddy Amory should have died that winter's day on Clear Lake, when she fell through the ice while skating with her older brother, Jake. But something got inside her that day-something terrifying...

A Haunted Town...

Nightmarish forces lurk in the mountains of Virginia, and a shadowy darkness has begun to spread like a shroud over the living. Now a town must face its terrifying past as a possessed child threatens to unleash an unspeakable horror...

Stoker Award-winning novelist Douglas Clegg (Afterlife, The Hour Before Dark, and over a dozen other best-selling novels of contemporary horror) sets his rich imagination to the task of reinventing Arthurian legend, and the results are spectacular. A young monk becomes enthralled by the story a mysterious prisoner begins to tell as he tends to his wounds. The prisoner is Mordred, bastard son of King Arthur Pendragon and his half sister Morgan Le Fay, who has been arrested for murder and treason. His story is one of ambition, power, and betrayal, and it will change the monk's life forever.

In Clegg's ambitious reimagining of Camelot, Mordred, the traditional villain of Arthurian legend, emerges as a heroic and romantic figure, torn between his powerful mother's desire for revenge against Arthur, his own conflicted feelings toward the father who betrayed him, and his passionate love affair with a knight in King Arthur's court: Lancelot. The first of a trilogy, Mordred, Bastard Son sets the stage for an epic adventure of love, friendship, magic, war, and betrayal, a fresh, dazzling chapter in the Arthurian canon.

For years, the Jackson family has vacationed at Rowena Wandigaux Lee's old Victorian house on Gull Island, a place of superstition and legend off the southern coast of the U.S. One particular summer, young Beau follows his cousin Sumter into a hidden shack in the woods--and christens this new clubhouse "Neverland."

Neverland has a secret history, unknown to the children...

The rundown shack in the woods is the key to an age-old mystery, a place forbidden to all. But Sumter and his cousins gather in its dusty shadows to escape the tensions at their grandmother's house. Neverland becomes the place where children begin to worship a creature of shadows, which Sumter calls "Lucy."

All gods demand sacrifice...

It begins with small sacrifices, little games, strange imaginings. While Sumter's games spiral out of control, twisting from the mysterious to the macabre, a nightmarish presence rises among the straggly trees beyond the bluffs overlooking the sea.

And when Neverland itself is threatened with destruction, the children's games take on a horrifying reality--and Gull Island becomes a place of unrelenting terror.

A mysterious New England village. A stolen child. An ancient ritual. A legend of shadows. A terrifying birthright. Who holds the key to the chilling mystery of Stonehaven and its desolate woods -- and what unspeakable creature remains trapped within its summer mansion?

Tabe of Contents

• 23 - Underworld - short story
• 48 - White Chapel - novelette
• 89 - O, Rare and Most Exquisite - short story
• 111 - Only Connect - short story
• 137 - The Fruit of Her Womb - short story
• 163 - The Rendering Man - short story
• 190 - The Night Before Alec Got Married - short story
• 212 - The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon - short story
• 232 - Chosen - novelette
• 262 - "The Little Mermaid" - short story
• 271 - Damned If You Do - short story
• 289 - The Hurting Season - short story
• 311 - I Am Infinite; I Contain Multitudes - short story
• 348 - Afterword (The Nightmare Chronicles) - essay

The high desert town of Palmetto, California, has turned toxic after twenty years of nightmares. In Los Angeles, a woman is tormented by visions from a chilling past, and a man steps into a house of torture. On the steps of a church, a young woman has been sacrificed in a ritual of darkness. In New York, a cab driver dreams of demons while awake.

And a man who calls himself the Desolation Angel has returned to draw his old friends back to their hometown -- a town where, two decades earlier, three boys committed the most brutal of rituals, an act of such intense savagery that it has ripped apart their minds. And where, in a cavern in a place called No Man's Land, something has been waiting a long time for those who stole something more precious than life itself.

An epic tale of horror, spanning twenty years in the lives of four friends -- witnesses to unearthly terror.

As children, they played the Dark Game.

When Nemo Raglan's father is murdered in one of the most vicious killings of recent years, Nemo must return to the New England island he thought he had escaped for good, Burnley Island...and the shadowy farmhouse called Hawthorn. But this murder was no crime of human ferocity. What butchered Nemo's father may in fact be something far more terrifying...Something Nemo and his younger brother, Bruno, and sister, Brooke, have known since childhood.

There are secrets buried on Burnley Island.

Within the rooms of Hawthorn, beautiful Brooke Raglan has begun to go mad. She sees faces at the windows and wanders the night, trying to find what she believes is a monster.

Bruno Raglan has wiped the memory of a terrible event from his mind. Now he compulsively picks apart Hawthorn and discovers that within its walls lies a forbidden secret.

As he unravels the mysteries of his past and a terrible night of his childhood, Nemo witnesses something unimaginable, and sees the true face of evil while Burnley Island comes to know the unspeakable horror that grows in the darkness.

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

"I'm coming for you. You will never escape me."

She's the most dangerous inmate in the hospital for the criminally insane... and she just broke out. When Trey Campbell takes his family to Catalina Island, his escaped patient leaves a trail of bodies behind as she hunts for her one true love - from a previous life.

You see him every day. But you don't know who he is... on the inside.

Among the neighborhoods full of lovely palm trees and clear blue swimming pools of California, a new killer is hunting. Pursued by rookie cop Jane Laymon and psychologist Trey Campbell, this murderer's pathology may be linked to inmate Michael Scoleri -- AKA Abraxas -- at the Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice.

Do they communicate with their minds?

The young man in the straitjacket doesn't want the Red Angel to be caught. But his skin holds the name of an upcoming victim. And up on Moon Lake, in the San Bernardino mountains, a terrifying killer plans to descend into the valley to find his next victim.

He feels safe in his cage. But if he escapes, you'll never be safe again.

They are the most dangerous mother-son serial killer team in history. "Bloody Mary" Chilmark is certifiable -- just ask her doctor. The Darden State Hospital is home to the most dangerous psychopathic killers in the country. But Bloody Mary got out, and raised her baby away from that bad environment.

But her son Doc's been arrested, processed, and held at Darden State -- and is considered one of the most dangerous of the hospital's inmates. As wildfires burn out of control in Southern California, authorities face the overwhelming task of relocating hundreds of Darden's patients to other prison hospitals before the raging inferno descend

In the frenzy, "Bloody Mary" finds her opportunity to free her son.

It's up to Trey Campbell and officer Jane Laymon to hunt for the mother-son duo in the dark underworld maze of the old asylum beneath the hospital.