The Nightmare Collector

About the Collection

In this collection of four haunting tales, reality unravels, and the human spirit is tested against the unknown. These surreal stories explore fear, obsession, and the mysteries of the human psyche. Each story brings an unsettling atmosphere and asks how far we’ll go to face our deepest fears.

Tale of the Eternal Sea: Stranded in a boundless, silent ocean, six shipwreck survivors struggle against hunger, madness, and the whispers of unseen entities beneath the waves. Drawn to a mist-shrouded island, they must confront the darkness within and the ancient forces that await them.

The Labyrinth of the Sleeping Wraith: Rafe is a writer haunted by relentless dreams of a wraith that has pursued him since childhood. The wraith has robbed him of his creativity, leaving him desperate. When a mysterious woman appears in his dreams to offer a solution, Rafe begins a perilous journey into the depths of his mind. But the cost of escaping the wraith’s grip may be more than he is prepared to pay.

Shelter: A mother and her two daughters survive society’s collapse in a remote cabin deep in the hills. When five dangerous-looking men appear on the horizon, they retreat to a hidden room, waiting for the intruders to take what they want and leave. As silence stretches into hours, disturbing truths will be revealed.

Deathbed Revelations: Tormented by grief and pursued by a relentless demon, a dying man journeys through the fragments of his fading memories. Magical symbols carved into his flesh are his last line of defense, but the answers he seeks lie buried in a moment long forgotten. In his final moments, he struggles to uncover the source of his torment before his mind slips away forever.

Excerpt: “Deathbed Revelations”

The scene opens with an old man lying on his deathbed.

Wild eyes dart around a drab and lonesome room. Scattered bits of oily hair fail to cover a jaundiced scalp dappled with scabs and spots. His sagging face contorts in grief and terror. His body, stripped to the waist, shudders violently in pain. Horrible wounds in the shapes of strange symbols—some still crusted with dried blood, some wet with fresh blood—adorn his bare chest and stomach.

Arthritic, age-spotted fingers fumble around in his pockets but find them empty. His head tilts back, his mouth opens, and stretched cheeks sink between toothless gums, emitting a tearless sob. He looks around the room with wide, desperate eyes, searching, it seems, for someone, but he is alone. Whatever path this man’s life took, it brings wretched and horrifying solitude as his life comes to its end.

I’m terrified by this man, and I don’t know why.

His eyes shine with a fleeting moment of clarity and his hand slides beneath his pillow, searching, then emerges, bleeding, holding a broken piece of razor blade. A joyless smile bends his lips.

I look again at the cuts and scars, then back at the jagged bit of razor, and come to a grisly understanding that his wounds and scars are self-inflicted, and he has one left to carve—a final act of symbolism—the last exclamation point to punctuate the story of his life. He brings the blade to his face, and with a shaking hand, he slices a symbol into his tongue—two overlapping Xs followed by lines and curves that quickly become obscured by blood. His final curving line cuts too deep, and his tongue drops to his chin, dangling, held only by a slim strand of flesh.

I scream in terror, but there is no sound.

Is this a dream? It’s too real. Where am I? Why am I so terrified of this old man?

Tears and blood seep onto the pillow as he turns onto his side, and his stomach tenses and spasms with sobs. I feel his emotion as if it’s my own. His grief and his fear. The unbearable loneliness. I want to cry but cannot. Emotion has no release in this formless place from which I watch.

I can hear his thoughts as he reflects on what brought him here. How did he come to this? At what point in his life did the road fork, and how did he choose his path so wrong—a path that led to such despair and loneliness?

But he’s not alone. I freeze as the shadows move, coalescing into a horrifying creature of darkness. The serpentine shadow wraps around his leg, finding greater purchase as it ascends his body, attempting to drag him down…

Author’s Note

The Nightmare Collector was compiled from several short stories I’d written over the years, and three of them were interesting projects.

Some years back, I was asked to contributes music to a Halloween song comilation called Frightful Refrains. I already write dark, cinematic music, so this seemed right up my alley. And yet, I got stuck. I had some ideas, but no direction.

So I decided to pretend I’d been asked to score a movie. That, I figured, would give me some structure. So I came up with a very rough outline of a story that I could imagine as I worked on the music, and I called it The Tale of the Eternal Sea—a maritime folk horror with mythical undertones.

Using that story as my guide, I wrote two songs for Frightful Refrains, but it felt incomplete. Now that I had a piece of a score, I had to write the story, and if I wrote the story, I’d need to finish the full Tale of the Eternal Sea score.

Two years later, Frightul Refrains II was released, and I was again asked to contribute, and from that project was born another short story titled The Labyrinth of the Sleeping Wraith, and again, it came with an entire The Labyrinth of the Sleeping Wraith score.

Long before either of those, I’d written my most personal story, Deathbed Revelations—a dark memoir told in mythical form that details psychedelic experiences I’d spent years trying to figure out, and with that came a score of its final chapter, The Transient.

—Dane Clark Collins

Who Will Enjoy This?

For readers who enjoy authors like Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and China Miéville.