Let it be known my intentions were good, the first two horror tales meant to build terror calluses, but step 3 isn't of that nature, nothing to prepare you for something that isn't there.

Please allow me to offer for your inspection three fables of the horror kind, a graduated climb, each tale with a different theme and level of foreboding. Simple tales of simple people in banal situations but with small packets surgically installed, their contents meant to slip into your consciousness creeping on twisted limbs, or slamming into it with a sucker punch, the weight of our imaginations exacerbating its might and impact.

Join me on a journey into a small cosmos of my making where we start down a familiar road, familiarity breeding content, our content contested at a crossroad somewhere down that highway where reality and the supernatural intersect.

HICCUP IN THE BOX, Step 1, chilling. We start with a box, a fairly mundane object if not examined too closely. A tale where magic and a man's religious beliefs collide when he finds a thought-provoking mystical one with a problem. A hiccup. A sporadic glitch in its magical mechanism that sometimes giveth, but of greater consequence-sometimes taketh away.

THE GYPSY'S CLAW, Step 2, macabre. This horror is more straightforward, in your face. Something you can picture, and it ain't pretty. Gypsy curses are the stuff of horror. Gypsies aren't doppelgangers, they exist and have history, a reality string that threads through time connecting them to us in a very credible way. It's their foot in the door to our horror and pragmatism, people not to be crossed lightly.

There are repercussions when we commit negative acts on an ongoing basis, a buildup of bad mojo that generates a cosmic balance sheet of sorts. If your sheet is one-sided, things can shift to compensate, coming back on you with a vengeance. Many bad people go their whole lives without that balance coming due, skating through life and getting away with murder, so to speak. Regardless, if the time comes, it blindsides them, unable to fathom the worm turning, even when they are staring it in the face, or the claw as the case may be.

THE PAINT LOCKER, Step 3, blood-curdling. We start with a box, and we end with a box, different designs, different horrors. Terror is at its best when we are blindsided by it when it sneaks up on us; the boogeyman in the closet you never see coming. How can you come to terms with something, reason it away, when it isn't even there? The height of horror without going monster.

Horror, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, except horror is in their eyes, ears, nose, throat, mouth, and mind. Fear of the unknown grants horror an opening into our psyche, a foothold to be exploited, its potency an intensity and absorption dynamism that can be driven well beyond simply scared under the right conditions, its force gauged by the duration it takes to steep down to our guts.

It's a dark mass pushing down on us, a sinking feeling as it transpires that doesn't stop until we are plummeting with it and spiraling into depths of despair. Signals are cut when inputs reach a critical point, our minds unwilling to deal with it, rendering us powerless as its cold hand reaches down into our souls and grasps us by the short hairs seizing our mobility and freezing us with fear. Part and parcel, we sink blindly into a dismal morass and are folded into its malignant influence, a quagmire of inescapable, psychotic quicksand.

Join me for a drive during the darkness of night down a steep, winding mountain road without a guardrail during a torrential rain, headlights showing its surface to be a rainbow of oil and gasoline while traveling on threadbare tires with worn brake pads. Somewhere down that road is that intersection we spoke of, something disturbing, frightening is going to happen, and it's going to be bad, very, very bad, or I can hope.

Joe Paul