Adventures into Darkness #10

Mike Kyle's a hired killer with a simple business model—until he takes on the impossible job of murdering a man named Ankar, whose seemingly charmed life thwarts every assassination attempt. As Mike's desperation mounts and inexplicable forces keep intervening, Ankar finally reveals the horrifying truth behind his impossible survival, and the weight of a terrible bargain struck millennia ago. This chilling tale of immortality and its unspeakable cost shows that some prices are too high to pay, no matter how much time you have to regret it.

A professor demonstrates atomic chain reactions to curious students—but it takes a surprising analogy involving bubble gum to make the concept click. The tale then pivots to genuinely bizarre historical oddities: how a midnight murder spread across the entire globe in mere hours, the recorded supernatural wail of a banshee, and the peculiar fate of an 18th-century German poet entombed within an oak tree.

When a bandit's robbery goes wrong at a garden party, John Kadman makes a desperate and shameful choice to save himself—using his companion Joan as a human shield. Haunted by the deed and convinced he's become a phantom doomed to wander unseen, John encounters a ghostly figure who forces him to confront the horrifying truth about what really happened that night. A brutal tale of cowardice and the price one must pay when the darkness catches up.

John Price, England's proud public executioner, finds his fortunes reversed when he's arrested for debt and forced to flee—only to spiral into desperation and violence that lands him on the very gallows he once operated. This 1953 tale from *Adventures into Darkness* traces the dark irony of a man whose profession becomes his undoing.

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Pike Devlin and his two partners strike it rich in the frozen Alaskan wilderness, but greed consumes him—he murders his companions at a treacherous chasm to claim all the gold for himself. Haunted by guilt and pursued by the elements, Pike finds himself lost in an endless blizzard, stalked by wolves and tormented by visions, until he stumbles upon a mysterious cabin and fresh footprints in the snow that promise salvation. What waits for him inside is far worse than any frozen death.

Deep in the Cambodian jungle lies Angkor, the abandoned capital of the once-mighty Khmer Empire—a sprawling complex of towering temples and palaces that rose two hundred feet high, built by thousands of slaves centuries ago. After the empire's catastrophic fourteenth-century collapse, the jungle reclaimed the city, leaving behind enduring mysteries: colossal stone faces of Buddha or Shiva still gaze from the great towers, and local peasants can only speculate whether gods, angels, or the structures themselves created these monuments. French scholars have since reclaimed Angkor from the overgrowth, yet the true story of who built this remarkable civilization remains shrouded in legend and loss.

Derek Mann, a desperate thief, murders a collector to steal a legendary two-thousand-year-old cornucopia—a mythical horn said to grant any wish, though legend warns it carries a curse. When Derek summons the demon Mortheo bound to the horn, his newfound power to conjure wealth seems unstoppable, but the cornucopia's dark reputation may prove all too real as his crimes catch up with him.

Maria's sweetheart John vanishes without warning from their small coastal village, only to reappear at her door two weeks later in "Romance of Death"—but something is terribly wrong with his return. What begins as a joyful reunion turns to horror when Maria realizes the truth about what has come back to her. This 1953 chiller plays the reunion as setup for a twist that hits hard in the final panel.