Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dryden Nightmares
    Dryden Nightmares
    Dryden Nightmares
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Dryden Nightmares

    By Eugene Kelly III, Laura Konrad, Katie Papilio and

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Dryden Experiment is expanding its Creative Commons revolution into new genre. Dryden Nightmares gives you nine treasures of the horror genre plus a bonus creepiness from Dryden founder Katie Papillio.

    Welcome to the twisted minds of Kitty Sarkozy, Eugene Kelly, Laura Konrad, Katie Papilio, and Fluffy Sama. They are the things that go bump in the night.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDryden House Publishing
    Release dateApr 28, 2016
    ISBN9780991541737
    Dryden Nightmares

    Related to Dryden Nightmares

    Related ebooks

    Horror Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

      Sep 1, 2019

      The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

      7 min read

    • Article

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Dead Good

      Jul 21, 2022

      “This is a straightup arena banger plowing through a not-so-subtle social commentary about the epic clown-show we are all living in today. Addicted to ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs ups’, people really will do just about anything for that digital dopamine.” “At

      3 min read

    • Article

      Dark Tales

      Dec 2, 2021

      Dark Tales
      6 min read

    • Article

      Joanna Klink

      Mar 3, 2020

      Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-clicking machines, he sleepsin a bed in a room not his own.People enter and pass like ghost-blownfogs. He is a slow walkwith limbs that recently gave way.He is part of the blue snowfall.He is very small,

      1 min read

    • Article

      Sweet Fantasy

      Nov 20, 2021

      Sweet Fantasy
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2023

      1. Wine-makers say it’s the complex flavorcreated by the singular terrain of place: the kinds of minerals in the soilfiltered through the soft pulse and coil of earthworms; the curl of fog that snakesaround blushed grapes like wisps of smoke; the tas

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality

      Jul 1, 2024

      Once a year I give myself permission to indulge in real tenderness. I dip an overripe fig in honey and eat it with yogurt. Then I allow some man to worship me. I make him go down on two knees and pray. “Pray for what?” he’d whisper. “Pray for whateve

      31 min read

    • Article

      A Letter to My Sons

      Sep 25, 2019

      A Letter to My Sons
      7 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2020

      All the animals you knowwill die. You set foodout for them anyway,let the oily seeds fallamong the fiddleheadsto be ground downpermanent as bone.The forest fills and unfills,drops itself down roottubes and turns to dark lace.One undoing: leafto sparr

      1 min read

    • Article

      Torres, On Her New Album And The Power Of Relentless Hope

      Sep 29, 2017

      On her latest album, Three Futures, Torres finds light in life's darkest moments, confronting fear, obsession and even unhinged ecstasy with faith and optimism.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Notes From A Nothing

      Feb 14, 2020

      Notes From A Nothing
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Epic Of Gilgamesh

      Jan 1, 2020

      My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Book of Hours

      Nov 25, 2022

      A Book of Hours
      12 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Final Truth

      Jan 21, 2020

      The Final Truth
      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2022

      If I call myself unlovable, I am, practically; if I say itenough times: unlovable. Then, like practical magic, I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.I’m a long, mean package, a terror-dyke, a nag, a squinting, slut-spun hag—it’s easy, really

      5 min read

    • Article

      Water Believes What We Cannot

      Nov 1, 2020

      I wrote this love letter in the spring, when there was pandemic, which was news, and weather, which was not. Now pandemic has been superseded by police brutality, the American presidential election, and wildfires. The unknowns, the unknowable, accumu

      19 min read

    • Article

      The Healing Power

      Dec 12, 2020

      The Healing Power
      6 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Point?

      Sep 23, 2019

      What’s the Point?
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Paper Wasp

      Jun 3, 2019

      The Paper Wasp
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Sep 1, 2019

      Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sitsan offering from the tree planted thirty years ago after earth softened upcome spring enough to dig a hole roughly twice the size of the burlapball around the root of it. The cone measu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Morbidity & the Miniature

      May 11, 2018

      Morbidity & the Miniature
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Essay On Faith

      May 1, 2022

      exordium While sound and seaworthy, I confess a life of false confessions, false hearts, ample contempt for bench warrants charging me with failures to appear. Let what interest death’s elbow grease won’t erase compound, judgments sealed in my ova, m

      4 min read

    • Article

      TheBattle For Peace

      Nov 1, 2021

      Hi, I am Alice, welcome to my nightmare. Trouble always finds me. I was one of the one hundred people in this world who had magic running through my veins. I was placed in the school of magic. It was sick! You could learn to brew up good potions for

      4 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 4, 2024

      Security confiscated the bracelet I’d slipped into my wallet but not the thin black sweater I wore as I walked out of Macy’s. The sweater still had its price tag and was so soft it soothed whoever was whispering “more, more” in my ears adorned with s

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dryden Nightmares

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Dryden Nightmares - Eugene Kelly III

      Dryden Nightmares

      All stories Copyright 2016 their respective owners

      All settings, characters, and environments CC 4.0 BY-SA

      Published by: Dryden House

      ISBN 13: 978-0-9915417-3-7

      Welcome to the Nightmare

      The Dryden Experiment is a creative commons publishing concept. We build settings and environments under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. What this means is that anyone can come in and build off the materials they find in the Experiment and they don’t have to pay royalties to anyone. All they have to do is credit the original developer and put their materials under the same license as well so that other can carry the task on. Then all of us who participate work hard to cross promote each other. What this does is give us environments the size of Star Wars or Hellraiser that we can use and share without having to sell out to a corporation. It’s a wicked cool idea and lots of fun.

      After the successful introduction of our Science Fiction Universe, which now boasts seven books and two games, we are turning our attentions to other genre. Next up, horror. Come with some of the Dryden Experiments very best authors as we open up a new cosmos, one guided by dark and malevolent powers. In some of these stories you can see the twists in the universe. In others, the characters have no idea that they are instruments of the madness that haunts the center of our very being.

      Enjoy.

      -Katie Papilio, Owner, Dryden House Publishing

      Introduction to Nightmares – Eugene Kelly III

      And know this, Solassa, that evil comes in all forms, from the maddening screaming of the roaring core of the hottest star to the subtle spite of the faintest of whispers in the night. Hold fast to the Truth that you have been given, or there will be nothing to save you from the pit of everlasting darkness. - Genhowesha to King Solassa, Book of Crowns 5:17

      In the sarcophagal heart of the forest, the black flame burns. For ten thousand eons it has burned, without smoke or sound, both nurturing and destroying the roots of Creation. High above this eternal fire stands tall one half of the Tree of Life and Death, whose roots run through the smoldering soul of the Earth, emerging forth to feed its twin. Under a bleeding sky of onyx and crimson, it encases the world in the grip of its engorged tentacles of expanding venomous wood, cracking the universe asunder. Its branches extend limitlessly into the void, rivers of shadowy poison flowing through its hollow veins of perpetual night.

      The Tree’s toxin, liquid reflections of pure pain and malice, travels freely through the veins that unite the Realms. For there is not one universe that it touches, but a hundred million, each of them infected from the black bile of the Tree. Some of these worlds drip with the poison and are hell realms of madness and death. Still others are only lightly touched, and it is here where the horrors of the dark manifest themselves as dreams, thoughts, and momentary visions of terror that creep just at the edge of our vision and slink silently through the overgrown gardens of forgotten wisdom that fester in the wilting corners of our consciousness. Yet even in the smallest of ways, every living being is touched by the polluting pestilence that grows from the heart of this cosmic cancer.

      In its very being, nature abhors itself, as cycles of life and rebirth are always fed by the two remorseless viceroys of the void; death and dissolution. Yet even more so, it abhors a vacuum. Within the midnight veils of the shrouded abyss, in which the swirling spheres beat and pulse to the pounding music of the Cosmos, there lurk incomprehensible beings of power; Olden Things which seethe in the darkness, looming in the hidden corners of man’s fears. They writhe perpetually in the depths of eternity, devouring the poison of the Tree in a feast of grotesque gluttony. They hunger, they feed, they wail in agony from a gnawing which they can never satisfy.

      Among these is Xzodzoa, the Emperor of the Land of the Dead and guardian of the City of Tombs. Then there is Vinrunum, the mysterious face of pulsating fungus who lurks in the diseased palisades of the Land of Dying Flames, and Skullflower, the Mistress of Agonizing Intimacy, who lies amongst dying flowers dripping with her repellent, lecherous stench.

      Ruling over all worlds is the dread Ahmarjanin, the Genie of Creation, who sits upon a throne of liquid diamond, wrapped in a million robes of scarlet and sapphire. God Emperor of the celestial seas, its astronomic abode is a molten citadel of a Thousand Palaces, in which lie riches unthinkable to mortals in their splendor and majesty. It is the only being with the power to rip open the barriers between the Realms, baring those within naked to all the glory and horror of the Olden Things. It is only the veins and the Tree itself that Ahmarjanin cannot enter, for that is the abode of Xzodzoa alone. Together, the two wretched beasts rule over all time and space; Ahmarjanin traveling amongst the blazing stars, dominating all under its crimson gaze, while Xzodzoa is the master of the dark, stalking the hidden caverns of time and space where shadows float amongst seas of black poison through caverns of echoing ebony. It is an eternal dance of blinding light and smothering dark, with neither titan ever able to fully consume the other.

      The poisoned, retching body of the Cosmos is never static, for veins open and contract, closing off some worlds to vistas beyond while opening up others to realities enveloped in the purple perfumes and cerulean spices of the Gods. Sometimes it is a blasphemous ritual that shifts the Tides of Creation, tearing open portals to the tyrannical tempests beyond and almost certainly dooming all those involved in the horrid sacrament. Other times it is subtler; a gesture, a word, a thought. Pen put to paper, concepts made words made reality. A book of vague remembrances cracking the wall between our world and that of the Gods. For when the firmament falters and the thin veil that protects man’s sanity from the inconceivable profanities from beyond is ripped away, the locusts of rot and ruin shall rise from the abyss to claim what is theirs, and woe to all who stand in their way.

      Dream Girl – Kitty Sarkozy

      I saw you for the first time in my favorite coffee

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1