Mystic #14

In "The Hex!", a man’s defiance of his wife’s wishes leads to a string of misfortunes after he removes the protective symbols from their barn. As his health fails and despair sets in, a sudden turn of fortune arrives—just as he’s on the mend, he wins the lottery. Rushing to share the good news, he finds his wife finishing the very symbol he once rejected, now painted bright and new on the barn.

In "Hunger," a butcher’s act of sabotage backfires when he’s trapped inside his ex-partner’s meat locker after poisoning it to ruin the business. Left alone with a supply of tainted meat, he endures days of isolation, fighting the growing pull of starvation. As the days pass and no one comes to free him, the question lingers: why didn’t he eat the meat, when it was already declared unfit and the locker replaced with fresh stock?

In "The Man Who Ran Away," a disgruntled scientist constructs a time machine to escape what he sees as a world of intellectual mediocrity, only to find himself utterly out of place in the year 4024—where brilliance is measured in ways he cannot comprehend. The story follows his desperate attempt to prove himself in a future that judges him by standards he never knew existed.

In "The Man in the Morgue," a desperate hoodlum gambles his final coin on a psychic’s promise of better fortune, only to find himself trapped in a brutal twist of fate. After a night of hunger and despair, he attacks an elderly man in a derelict alley—only to be shot dead by police moments later. When the man’s identity is uncovered, the grim truth emerges: the victim was a lawyer sent to deliver a life-changing inheritance, unaware he was walking into a trap.