Trembling With Fear 01-12-25

Greetings, children of the dark. Before we get into it, let us wish our Californian friends much luck and safety as those fires continue to grip. Be well; seek refuge.
It’s all systems go here at TWF Towers, almost like we never took a break, so we have a few parish notices. First up, our new editorial assistant Annette Livingstone has officially taken over managing the Horror Tree inbox, so you’ll see a new name popping up to acknowledge your submissions. Please don’t worry – she’s won’t bite (much).
Also, you may have seen on social media that we’re looking for a new assistant editor to take over the special editions. That call-out has morphed a little: the boss man liked my suggestion of widening our team even further, and so we’re actually seeking an editor take on each of the special editions – four in total! That will not only give us more back-up in the world of TWF Towers, but it’ll also help YOU specialise in whichever holiday grabs you most. We think we’ve got a new Valentine’s editor, fingers crossed, so if you have a love of summer horror, of festive darkness, or you consider yourself Halloween royalty, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you: [email protected].
(Remember, these are volunteer positions; as much as we’d love to pay our team, any earnings the site makes need to go into keeping the lights on and paying for submissions. We don’t do this for the glory!)
And so onto this week’s edition, where Sarah Cline brings us a main course dripping with blood and regret. This one is truly haunting, but does come with content warnings for animal harm. That’s followed by the short, sharp (and coincidentally ghostly and somewhat vehicular) speculations of:
- F.M. Scott’s accidental hitchhiker,
- Crystal N. Ramos’s anniversary grief, and
- Shiloh Kuhlman’s lingering soul.
Before we leave you to it, though, permit me a final plug? Writing the Occult: The Uncanny happens this Saturday 18 January,. Want to learn more about the uncanny valley, doppelgangers, creepy dolls, and how the uncanny goes beyond horror and into all of speculative fiction? Details are at writingtheoccult.carrd.co.
Over to you, Stuart.
Hi all.
It has been a busy week! We’ve been reaching out recently to find our new specials editor, and we’ve also been working on getting last year’s anthology, which is very overdue at this point out into the wild. We have a draft that I am taking a break from proofing to write my section in the newsletter!
I’ve also worked a little on our new site layout. Fingers crossed, it is coming sooner than later.
Now, for the standards:
- Thank you so much to everyone who has become a Patreon for Horror Tree. We honestly couldn’t make it without you all!
- Be sure to order a copy of Shadowed Realms on Amazon, we’d love for you to check it out and leave a review!
Offhand, if you’ve ordered Trembling With Fear Volume 6, we’d appreciate a review!
For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree as we’re not really active on Twitter anymore, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.

Sarah Cline
Sarah Cline lives in San Diego, California. Her writing has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Grim & Gilded, The Maine Review, and The Chilling Pen, among other publications.
Not Like The Others, by Sarah Cline
He looked like a man who had gambled and lost. Lanky. Black hair twisted by grease. Crouching to grasp a run-over rabbit from the road. Standing with its sad body in his hands, a wall of pines behind him.
Cheyenne stared from across the road as he caught her gaze, and continued to lift the dead rabbit to his mouth. Sank his teeth into the rabbit’s plump belly. Whipped his head back and forth. Ripped back. Fur slipped away in the wind, tickling the white spine of the road. Blood drew a red line across his mouth. He grinned at her, teeth crimson. Cheyenne felt herself flutter; a flag in the breeze.
He paced across the road, pines roaring. “You should not have seen that.” He was younger, up close. Older than her, though; taller.
“Why?” Cheyenne whispered.
“My hungers are not like yours.”
Her heart thumped like a fist at the door. “What are you?”
His eyes ran her up and down. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Forget what you saw.”
He started up the road, toward town.
“Wait!” Cheyenne called after him. He paused, but did not look back. “I too want to taste blood.”
He turned slowly; gazed down at her from the advantage of his height.
Cheyenne swallowed. Whispered, “Who are you?”
He grinned like a wolf. “Call me by my true name. Call me Shadow.”
~
“If I take you into my confidence, you must swear upon your life that no word spoken between us in secret will ever leave your lips.”
No one had ever invited Cheyenne to speak in secret.
“I swear it,” she whispered.
He leaned toward her. Seated on the floor of the shotgun bedroom she shared with Whitney in the foster house, there was hardly any room between them. Stains crusted the carpet, cigarette smoke and chatter filling the air from the older kids’ rooms down the hall. But when he spoke, it was just the two of them, alone together in a castle of gothic splendor.
“You will be my disciple. In time, I will bring you fully into the fold.” Brown eyes darted across her face, savoring the anticipation. “When I give you the bite, you will be like me.”
“When?”
Shadow shook his head. “Obey me until I am satisfied that you’ve proven yourself.”
The roof of her mouth went dry.
He smirked. Took one of the old hand-me-down dolls from her bed. Dorothy.
Cheyenne tensed. Almost reached for the doll.
Shadow placed it on the carpet between them, and reached into his jeans pocket. She winced when the blade snapped out of the pocketknife. He held out the palm of his hand – pocked neon with molting scales and puddles of bruising – and wheedled the tip into a scabbed cut, pressed. Blood sprouted. He turned his palm over. Blood speckled the doll’s dirty face.
“I can bring inanimate objects to life with my blood,” he murmured. Cheyenne knew her eyes were saucers. He always smirked like that when he’d impressed her. “You must wait for the blood to sink in.”
“How long does it take?”
He pressed his thumb against the cut. “A few hours, a few days. Until the next turn of the moon.” He shrugged. “As soon as the blood takes root.”
The door swung open behind her. Cheyenne twisted, but it was only Whitney, shrugging off her backpack as she climbed over Cheyenne to make it to her bed.
“Hello.” She considered Shadow.
His gaze fastened on her, Cheyenne forgotten. “Hello.”
Shadow stared at her the way Cheyenne had been taught seventeen year old boys should not look at fourteen year old girls. Then Cheyenne remembered that whatever he looked like, Shadow’s true form was 278 years old, and his ways were his own.
~
The light of the harvest moon rusted the roof of the trailer as Shadow boosted Cheyenne over the back fence before climbing the drain pipe.
“TVs on.” Cheyenne shivered like a hare beneath the hawk.
“The Fucking Bitch always leaves it on when she’s asleep.” Shadow knelt beneath the dimly-lit window from which the tinny voices muttered. “Can’t believe I used to live in this tin can,” he sneered.
Cheyenne knelt beside him. They scooped handfuls of moist dirt from the base of the trailer, and hid the talismans beneath the house. The moon glared off the glossy paint of malignant runes before they vanished into darkness, and Shadow and Cheyenne shoved the dirt back into place. Burying the talismans. Shadow slit the belly of a frog and left it sprawled over the black mass of disturbed earth before the children scrambled back over the fence, laughing and cursing breathlessly; running home drunk on moonlight.
~
“I’ll give you the bite,” Shadow said, sliding crusted blood from beneath his fingernails with the tip of his pocket knife. “You’ve proven yourself worthy.”
“Thank you, Master!”
“But after, there is something I’d like you to do.”
“Yes, Master?”
He tossed the pocketknife up into the air. It spun across the face of the waning moon before he caught the handle. “Let me into your room at night, after your foster parents have gone out.”
“Why?”
“I need to be alone with Whitney.” He stared at the blade. Turned it back and forth in the moonlight. “Recruit her to the coven.”
Cheyenne bristled. “Do we need to?” Only she belonged to him.
He glanced at her, amused. “Are you jealous, Cheyenne?” A rare instance of him using her name. “Don’t worry, you will always be my first disciple. We’re not like all the others. You know that. What we have, what we are, is something special.”
“And the bite?”
He flicked the pocket knife. It sank into the earth, handle quivering, as Shadow came towards her. Head eclipsing the moon, its crescent framed his dark hair like slanted horns.
~
Cheyenne lay on her side, staring at Whitney’s back in the bed across from her, until their foster mother stepped between them, glaring down at Cheyenne’s bite.
“You don’t need to go to the hospital,” Martha spat, tugging the sheets over Cheyenne. “You got a roof over your head? You got food to eat?”
Cheyenne murmured something.
“Then you got everything you need.”
The walls shimmered like the dunes of a desert. Cheyenne’s fingertips found the rough tears where Shadow’s teeth had pierced her skin. The wound throbbed beneath her touch, and when it was her turn to use the bathroom, she tugged down the collar of her shirt, watching her skin change color with each passing hour. Red and angry, then a sulking spilled-wine. Putrid yellows and greens. Finally, black.
Three days since the bite, and Cheyenne didn’t feel any stronger. Didn’t feel magic tingling in her veins.
Felt, if anything, weaker as the transformation wracked her body. She slept most of the day. Feverish, then shivering cold.
Whitney sat up silently. Her face blank. A thousand-yard stare. Cheyenne watched her leave the room. She hadn’t asked Whitney if she’d joined the circle. Maybe Shadow would reveal more to both of them, after the transformation. If she survived, but it didn’t matter.
He’d promised her their souls were bound. Even in death’s kingdom, they would rule side by side.
He’d promised.
Martha scrunched her nose. “How’d you get that bite again? A dog?”
“A black wolf,” Cheyenne murmured. “With golden, glowing eyes.”
Martha scoffed. “You’re infected.” She tugged the door shut behind her, leaving Cheyenne alone.
On the end table beside the bed sat Dorothy, gazing down at Cheyenne with button-black eyes. Shadow’s blood, now faded and chipped, spackled her face.
Burning softly, Cheyenne drifted towards sleep. Her eyelids sank.
As dreams smeared her slitted gaze, Cheyenne’s eyes lingered on Dorothy. Was that a soft smile spreading her lips? Lowering her lids? A look of pity, maybe.
No, Cheyenne thought, drifting off.
Commiseration.

Sensitive
Long day. Lots of bullshit at the office—some with technology but mostly with people. Hypertypical, as you’ve come to label it. Just the same, it all seems to get under your skin. Like so much.
As cops motion you through the accident and emergency vehicles on the freeway, a chill hits you. It subsides, leaving a thick presence behind.
That night you awaken in bed. In the hall, the plug-in nightlight you bought is on. You freeze, recalling that the thing is motion-activated. A shadow spreads across the wall. Something deformed, broken. It stops outside your door. And waits.
F.M. Scott
F.M. Scott is from Tulsa, Oklahoma. His stories have appeared in Skink Beat Review, Apple in the Dark, The Horror Tree, The Killer Collection Anthology (Nick Botic Horror), Sirius Science Fiction, and more. He has a novella ready to submit, and he’s building a collection of short stories.
Mommy, I’m Cold
Lily woke at 3am to the sound of her son whispering her name – a year after she’d found him frozen on her front porch. Shivering, half-drunk, half-hungover, she stumbled through her house, following the sound of his “Mommy” floating on the air.
She reached the front door. With trembling hands, she wrenched it open – but no one stood on the porch, so she turned away.
“Don’t leave me, mommy. I’m cold.”
How could she leave him?
“Mommy is here,” she said, and stepped outside.
In the morning, her husband found her frozen body on the porch in the dew-soaked dawn.
Crystal N. Ramos
Crystal N. Ramos lives with her husband and two children in Georgia, USA. She has won the Maggie Award for Excellence in Prepublished Romantic Fiction twice and has an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State University. Some of her shorter work has appeared in Rescued Hearts: A Hidden Acres Anthology, Stygian Lepus Issue 5, and The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review. In her imaginary spare time, she likes to knit, cross-stitch, and play Minecraft. You can find her on Facebook.
Rescue
Flung from her car, through the windshield, and impaled on a tree. Her blood drips endlessly, and she screams for help. Too much time is taken, and she can scream no more. Desperately, she begs for death to come, and it does. But death still leaves her behind. The woman stands in front of her own corpse; the soul looking at the shell. It is raining hard, and she turns and sees red and blue flashing lights heading her way. She can do nothing as she watches everyone scramble around her body. “I’m still here.” She whimpers. “Help me, please.”
Shiloh Kuhlman
Shiloh Kuhlman is an author from the state of Michigan, USA. He has independently written a novella, titled “Funny Pages”, and an anthology titled “Peripheral Landscapes”. Both can be found on schulerbooks.com. He currently lives comfortably with his many pets.