Haunted Thrills #9

Jeffrey Waring poisoned his paralyzed sister Cynthia to claim their father's fortune, but after her burial, he becomes tormented by compulsive visits to the family tomb—only to find her coffin repeatedly opened and her corpse wearing an unsettling smile. As fear gnaws at his sanity and a mysterious voice calls from the grave, Waring spirals toward a reckoning he never anticipated in "Madness of Terror."

A free-lance art critic stumbles upon a mysterious ancient silver vase in an abandoned mansion, and after accidentally breaking its seal, Mike Kent finds himself plagued by an invisible, malevolent force that compels him toward violence and murder. As Kent descends into chaos, desperately seeking answers about the vase's dark history and the entity controlling him, he turns to a sorceress in a final, desperate gambit to reclaim his humanity. "Devil on His Shoulder" is a creeping psychological horror tale that explores what happens when a decent man loses control of his own actions.

A desperate stranger arrives at a remote inn near Capetown with a fortune in diamonds, but his sudden illness becomes the undoing of everyone it touches—when the innkeeper Matthew DeJong murders him for the gems and flees into the African wilderness with a mysterious map, he discovers that some debts cannot be paid in gold. "Directions to Your Tomb" spirals into a fever dream of guilt and retribution as DeJong's greed draws him deeper into cursed territory, where the line between madness and supernatural vengeance grows impossibly thin.

Tom Lanfry, a book critic frustrated by his own inability to write, makes a desperate bargain with a supernatural stranger who promises him the gift of genius for the Selden Publishing contest—but the price he agrees to pay may be far steeper than he realizes. As weeks of fevered writing lead to what Tom believes is his masterpiece, the line between creative brilliance and mental unraveling begins to blur in ways that suggest his mysterious benefactor has kept his end of the deal in the most sinister way possible.