The Beyond #18

In "Curse of the Fire-Bird," ambition turns deadly when Lydia, driven by greed, strikes down her husband with a mace—only to awaken a vengeful transformation as he rises from the ashes as a phoenix. Pursued through flames and shadow by the creature he has become, Lydia faces a fate as relentless as the fire that consumes her.

In a quiet French village, the legend of a hunchback lives on—his ghost said to ring the church bells at midnight, a haunting echo of the night he was killed during a robbery. Though his body fell in silence, his spirit refuses to rest, summoning the town with a sound only the faithful still remember.

In "Wanted: Ghost Writer," newspaper reporter Jerry Vincent takes a late-night job for a mysterious figure known only as Mr. Todt, a man shrouded in shadow who presides over a room lined with unsettling instruments. Tasked with crafting the beginnings of true crime stories, Jerry soon realizes his words summon real horrors—each tale he writes spirals into a deadly fate. As the line between fiction and reality dissolves, Jerry must face the terrifying truth behind the man who writes the endings.

In "The Hand of the Ancient Evil!" from The Beyond #18 (1953), a curious man stumbles upon a mysterious Chinese box holding a withered hand that grants wishes—until a single careless wish unleashes a gruesome fate. As the hand’s power turns deadly, the price of desire becomes horrifyingly clear.

In the shadowed archives of 19th-century London, a chilling record tells of a British explorer whose reckless plunder of an ancient tomb brought a deadly curse upon himself—now, his fate unfolds in a single, haunting page of supernatural dread.

In "The Scourge of the Undead," a condemned man named Jules Scholler rises from the electric chair as a zombie, sustained by a death-like spirit in a fancy hat who feeds on fear. Guided by this malevolent presence, Scholler embarks on a violent spree, his decaying body a grim vessel for vengeance. As his flesh begins to rot, the spirit orders him to end himself—by dumping his corpse in the city’s garbage dump.