Kinder

Kinder: Nightmares and Plaintive Hauntings from Beneath the Veil

By Martin Kearns

"They say children are our future-but what if that future is damned?"

From the shadowy realms first glimpsed in Beneath the Veil, Martin Kearns returns with a chilling collection of stories that explore the darkest echoes of youth. In Kinder, innocence is an illusion, and the monsters don't always live under the bed-sometimes, they're the ones tucking you in.

A high school girl follows invisible tendrils cast by a soul-hunting demon. A centaur delivers brutal justice to a father who's failed his child. A man's buried memories awaken-and they remember him in return. Each story peels back the fragile skin of adolescence to reveal something ancient, hungry, and unrelentingly cruel.

These are the children of Lilith. These are the lessons she's loosed upon the world.

Terrifying, lyrical, and deeply unsettling, Kinder is a descent into the nightmare playground where broken families, forgotten sins, and the horrors of growing up collide.

• Terminal Link": A retired veteran in assisted living starts receiving haunting messages on a new smartphone... and something begins crawling from the past into the present.
• "Tick": A detective investigating the neglect of a child discovers there's something darker hiding in the walls-and the child may not be what he seems.
• "Creeps": An after-school suspension becomes a descent into a reality-bending nightmare for a teen girl who sees... too much.
• "Wind Driven Rain": A lonely boy in a collapsing house meets something older than the storm, and possibly hungrier.
• "The Angler": A grieving brother is drawn to a lakeside legend and the monstrous truth about his sibling's fate.
• "Echoes of Flesh": A woman haunted by guilt returns to a childhood home that remembers every cruel word-and answers back.
• "Chiron's Jaunt": A domineering father learns the price of perfectionism when an ancient being steps from the woods to teach a lesson he won't forget.
• "Tock": A clock repair shop harbors a secret that unspools time itself-along with the lives bound to it.
• "Kinder": In the sterile hum of a daycare center, a mother glimpses something watching her child. Not a man. Not a ghost. Not gone.

These stories are unsettling, mythic, and emotionally resonant. They're not just horror-they're hauntings of the heart. If The Ocean at the End of the Lane had a monstrous twin raised by Lilith, it might look something like this.

Warm regards from the dark,

Kearns