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Nature is calling?but they shouldn't have answered.

Travel journalist and mountaineer Nick Grevers awakes from a coma to find that his climbing buddy, Augustin, is missing and presumed dead. Nick's own injuries are as extensive as they are horrifying. His face wrapped in bandages and unable to speak, Nick claims amnesia?but he remembers everything.

He remembers how he and Augustin were mysteriously drawn to the Maudit, a remote and scarcely documented peak in the Swiss Alps.

He remembers how the slopes of Maudit were eerily quiet, and how, when they entered its valley, they got the ominous sense that they were not alone.

He remembers: something was waiting for them...

But it isn't just the memory of the accident that haunts Nick. Something has awakened inside of him, something that endangers the lives of everyone around him...

It's one thing to lose your life. It's another to lose your soul.

Note: the English edition is a substantially rewritten version of the Dutch original.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she's there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

On a foggy winter morning two children discover the impossible: the wreck of an eighteenth-century ship stranded in a field.

One enters the hatch on the deck and is never seen again. And she isn't the last to disappear...

Soon a government agency begins to investigate, determined to uncover the ship's secrets before a media storm erupts. They enlist Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult, to unravel the mystery, who soon realises the ship could be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened under the sea.

In a maelstrom of international intrigue and pure terror, Grim must race against time as he comes face to face with an open doorway to the apocalypse.

This story appeared in the Postscripts anthology Unfit For Eden.

The Boy Who Cast No Shadow won the prestigious Paul Harland Award for best Dutch story of the Fantastic in 2010. Mr. Olde Heuvelt tells us he wrote it in a four-day rush in between two chapters of a novel which was giving him uncontrollable screaming fits at the time. "To me," he adds, "it's a story about being different and coming to terms with the fact that that ain't such a bad thing. With this story I humbly paid homage to Joe Hill's Pop Art, which I think is the best short story of the 21st Century."

This story was anthologized in The Apex Book of Wold SF 4, edited by Mahvesh Murad.

Read this story for free from PS Publishing (epub or mobi).

That day, the world turned upside down. We didn't know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. But it wasn't like that--the world simply turned upside down.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed Magazine.

People send their dreams and wishes floating down the Mae Ping River with the hope that those dreams will be captured, read and come true. It is a surprise what some wish for and why. One can never know what's inside someone's heart - what they really truly want, and those dreams sometimes reveal our true selves.

Read the full story for free on Tor.com.

It's the same old story. Take a chance and pick up a hitchhiker. But only after midnight and only when you need some company. Of course, the hitchhiker will disappear. That's the way the story goes, right? But this time you are the hitchhiker. And there's a tunnel up ahead.

This short story originally appeared in Dutch in 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 11 (2019), edited by Ellen Datlow.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.