"Human dreams... such fertile ground for sowing the seeds of torment. You're so ripe Joey, and it's harvest time." - Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) (Pinhead)

Within the deep trench of night, in the rain-soaked town of Ripley, a lone policeman watched the dim yellow streetlights blink three times and then go out.

He looked up and studied the dead lights with a curious expression, and then a moan crawled out of the alleyway beside him. Snapping on his flashlight, he turned to investigate.

The beam danced crazily across the walls, and then locked upon the face of a young girl leaning against the blackened bricks of Tucker's Café. As her mouth worked up and down like a fish out of water, she desperately tried to hold her guts in with both hands as they spilled out of a gaping hole in her stomach.

When my grandmother died she left me her old two-story house in southern California. A year later, after going through a mangled marriage and a devastating divorce, I decided to move into Gram's old place and write the book I had always dreamed of writing.

The house was odd, not odd because of who lived in it, but odd the way you can sense something's not quite right about a place. It slumped down like a tired old man in an overgrowth of weeds and ferns that wove their spidery webs together into a green embroidery of cascading bougainvillea, laurels, palms, and fragrant eucalyptuses. I had hoped that all it really needed was a bit of repair and a new coat of paint, but the way the house sagged, it appeared as though paint would simply slide off. There had been an earthquake way back when, and looking at the place from the roadside, it seemed to squat upon its foundation like a hungry old ogre patiently hiding in the bushes and waiting to be fed.

In an instant, the computer scanned all of its systems as they began to come back on-line.

"Do you know where you are, Captain?"

Jane Slaton's lips quivered. Her voice made a gurgling sound as if she had lost the ability to speak. As she attempted to focus on her surroundings, she sensed that something was terribly wrong. She recalled fighting to stay alive, and as her adrenaline peaked, she was instantly awake, flailing her limbs in an effort to escape the certain death that had already taken her. Her eyes bulged and strained in their sockets. She attempted to twist her head, struggling to look in every direction at once.

She was in the medical lab-lying on one of the operating tables. The voice continued inside her head. "I know you can hear me, Captain Slaton. I know everything about you--inside and out. We are going to become very close friends-like family."

Joey Jopachian was a clown.

He'd always been a clown: the class clown, the high school clown his girlfriends dumped, the clown at work that always got fired, and the clown of a husband that his wife called 'a damn fool' the day she left him for the lawyer that had written up the divorce papers.

It wasn't like Joey didn't try-he tried. In fact, the harder he tried the worse things got. He even tried to win his wife back, but only ended up crippling and nearly killing her fiancé lawyer. Soon after, he suffered a serious nervous breakdown and that put Joey into the Kramer Mental Institution. The 'wiser-than-thou' doctors there told him he suffered from extreme depression, plus a fervent fear of succeeding, and that with the right medication, he could learn to get over that little hump that swelled at the breast of success. Laughing, Joey agreed with his jailers wholeheartedly, and after they released him, he immediately threw their medicine away and wandered out into the beckoning night.

Joe Hardin rushed through the kitchen heading for the back door. Rebecca, his seven-year-old, chose that moment to ambush his leg, and clutch it tightly with her little arms.

Joe continued to walk unhampered, his long-legged stride carrying him halfway through the room as Rebecca balanced herself on his old brown boots, hitching a free ride.

"I wonder where Reba is?" he asked looking around. "She usually says goodbye to me before I go to work."

Rebecca giggled. "I'm right here, silly!"

In the beginning, it wasn't so bad. In fact, she enjoyed the dream so much, she looked forward to sleep. That was before the horror took over. Chloe had escaped several times, but only because her husband was there to wake her up at each point of terror.

Tonight Chloe slept alone.

I sat looking at the trophy in my hands, the evidence of what I'm truly capable of doing.

For months I had suffered with writer's block. I couldn't write a word; I hadn't a single idea in my head.

Suddenly I was hit with a surge of inspiration. My fingers raced over the keyboard as the story filled my monitor's screen. It was as though the story was being dictated to me, word by glorious word.

"Well," said the woman, "The Crossbones Inn is my baby and I am particular about who I bring in."

"I understand," said Maggie, following the woman to a desk in the corner. "My name is Anita Hawthorne," she said offering her hand, "Have a seat, Maggie."

The whole house was musty and drab with outdated carpet and curtains. A fountain in the lobby was struggling to pump water while vintage music echoed from speakers in high corners. There was a red brick fireplace with a set of crossbones mounted on each side.

Ted wondered dimly when he'd get a bite of the corpse.

"So hard to find good meat these days," Marv sighed and bit into the arm, pinkish chunks bouncing down his cracked grey chin as he chewed. He grabbed a fistful of neck-flesh, twisted, and held the ripped, flapping morsel in front of his companion's eyes.

"Get this down ya," Marv said, the meat from the cadaver's arm already a bulging masticated ball in his left cheek, "before it gets cold."