Phantom tide Issue 2 An Ovi Publication 2026 Ovi Publications - All material is copyright of the Ovi & Ovi Thematic/History/Dark eMagazines Publications C Ovi Thematic/History/Dark Magazines are available in Ovi/Ovi ThematicMagazines and OviPedia pages in all forms PDF/ePub/mobi/txt, and they are always FREE. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi Thematic, an Ovi Dark or Ovi History eMagazine please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writers or the above publisher of this magazine. There is a specific kind of chill that has nothing to do with winter. It crawls up from the space between your shoulder blades, settles at the base of your skull and whispers... you are not alone. That is the chill we have chased for this second issue of Ovi Dark. We told ourselves, as rational creatures of the modern age, that ghosts are echoes. That the creak in the hallway is just the house settling. That the figure in the peripheral vision is a trick of tired light. But then we read the reports. The real ones. The case files and maritime logs and abandoned diaries that refuse to fit into clean, logical boxes. And we realized ...the horror was never a metaphor. This issue descends, willingly and delightfully, into the Lovecraftian verse, not the tentacled gods of outer space but the older, more intimate dread. The geography of the human soul when it realizes editorial the walls are thin. We bring you stories like ‘A Dangerous Descent’, where the abyss is not a place but a habit. ‘The Rope That Would Not Fall’, where an execution becomes an eternity. And ‘The Weight of Stillness’, a quiet little nightmare about what happens when silence begins to breathe back. But here is where Ovi Dark differs from a simple anthology of frights. Between these fictions, you will find something stranger. Real- world reports. Paranormal incident files from the edges of recorded history. Witness statements that have been gathering dust in archives, presented alongside the speculative tales they inspired. We believe that the most profound horror is the friction point where fact rubs against fiction until both catch fire. A ghost story is a promise. A real report is a wound. When you read them together, you can no longer pretend. In this issue, we ask you to sit with the haunting. Do not turn on another light. Do not check your phone for comfort. Let the rope hang. Let the stillness press against your ears. Let the descent begin. Because the spirits are not interested in your belief. They were never asking for permission. Welcome to the dark. We have saved you a seat by the cold draft. History, Mystery, Fiction & Flair All Under One Roof. One Click! Get every single issue of four iconic magazines: a thematic deep-dive, a history chronicle, a pulp fiction thrill ride, and a short story treasure trove. Complete collections, zero missing editions. Your ultimate library starts here. Grab the complete set today! It’s just one click away! we cover every issue! https://ovithematicmagazines.wordpress.com/ In the back alleys and dimly lit dives where morality goes to die, these stories stake their claim. Here, the world is rendered in stark contrast, the blinding flash of a muzzle, the deep shadow of a fedo- ra’s brim, the crimson stain spreading across a charcoal suit. This is the realm of the fatalistic and the fallen, where the dame is always trouble, the scheme is never clean and the hero is merely the last man standing. Driven by desperation and the promise of one big score, these tales unspool with the relentless rhythm of rain on a windowpane. Welcome. The verdict is already in: nobody walks away clean. The Ovi Dark eMagazine Pulp Fiction Short Stories May 2026 Editor: T. Kalamidas Contact ovimagazine@ yahoo.com Issue 02 Pulp fiction literature re- fers to inexpensive maga- zines and novels, printed on cheap “pulp” paper, popular from the 1890s to the 1950s. These works featured sensational, fast- paced stories, hardboiled crime, sci-fi, horror, and romance, aimed at mass entertainment. Though dismissed as low art, pulp forged enduring arche- types (like the lone detec- tive) and influenced film noir, comics, and writers like Raymond Chandler. contents Phantom Tide Ovi Thematic/Dark/ History eMagazines Publications 2026 Ovi’s unusual pulp eMagazine Editorial 3 A Dangerous Descent a tale gathered out of nightmares By David Sparenberg 9 The rope that would not fall By Regan O’Sullivan 15 Ghost sights reports 23 The 13th figure By Aimee Ingram 29 The log of unkept hours By Thanos 37 The unswung hammer 47 The Rigid Sky 53 The tuning 59 The reverse groove 63 The schist scream 71 The weight of stillness 77 T he moon was cut, the land was cold. The wanderer on the roads came to a place. It was a ruined place with nothing standing but broken stone upon ruined stone and ruined stone upon broken. There was a stairway going down, only no door to cover. And the poor man went in. But there was no light whatsoever underground. The poor man had to foot the cold, black corridor with use of his hands along the walls, his eyes being useless. By and by the traveler came to a room. It was a strange room too. No door was at the doorway, no furnishings were within. There was only a single bed. And the bed was atop a mound of fresh dug earth. Now the wayfarer thought of resting, being weary to his bones. So he laid himself down upon the bed and drew the coverlets up to his chin. There was a smell of must and mold and the odor bothered the sleeper. Whether he slept or not cannot be said. By and by there was a light, but only a gleam of light. It was a strange light, too, all gray and ghoulish green. A Dangerous Descent a tale gathered out of nightmares By David Sparenberg And the light showed pale as twilight and poverty down the corridor beyond the doorway without a door. There in the paleness was a dense shadow. And the shadow was that of a woman it seemed, tall of statue and menacing. There was an ee- riness to her that sent a shiver. And the dreamer could tell the specter bode nothing good, as the figure came on toward him, petrified there like one buried alive in those rank sheets of that moldering bed. For the waif moved with a stalking motion but a will not its own. And she walked like a body bereft of her soul. There and then when the man needed to cry out most desper- ately and challenge the menace, the shadow stopped and van- ished. Whether that came from being seen too soon or not can- not be said. But it was a good thing. Because the traveler’s voice was frozen inside. His tongue had the weight of lead. His chest was tighter with fear than the lid of a tightly sealed coffin. But lo and behold, there was a new terror at hand! Scarce had the phantom disappeared from before the threshold when the turned dirt around the bed be- gan to quake and give way. Up out from the trembling ground a haunting climbed, naked, ghast- ly, and breathless, with a green reek on her rotting skin. She pushed straight up with eyes rolled back and open maw, and toppled down, falling stiff as a plank and heavy as stone, hard onto the bed and the poor man prisoner upon it. Then horror seized the dreamer to the depth of survival. With a strength that was all he could muster and desperate too, he struggled to be free from the crush of his corpselike assail- ant. He sat up in the unholy bed with his eyes bugging out, wet with a sweat from the scream he was screaming. The fallen stiff was gone. And the wanderer on the roads was alone in the un- derground room, with darkness only to behold before him. After a heartbeat or a second at most, the poor man again began footing his way down a cold, black corridor. His hands were his eyes while his eyes were strained to blindness against the impenetrable pitch. The black of the hallway was as dense as a tight wound shroud. By and by the traveler saw a light in the distance. The light was a pale light too. It lead the sleepwalker down into yet an- other room. It was a strange room. Here there was noth- ing but a narrow bed set up inside the doorless doorway and the covers of the bed were turned back. More than this in the chamber, there was not a thing but only two. And the two women were disputing, al- though over what could not be said. But at a stroke the two broke it off. One of the two was a genteel lady, tall of stature but as pale as a wasting sickness. The lady crossed over and laid herself out on the narrow cot, drawing the coverlets up to her chin. She lay flat on her back, with hands crossed atop her chest. Her eyes were fixed and motionless, star- ing at the ceiling above without even blinking. The second of the two was of a different sort. Heavy boned and hard on the eyes, she was short and stout, with swart skin and a mole or two and a wiry whisker. She muttered viciously as she hastened from the room and disappeared. The traveler went up beside the pale lady alone in her bed. Being weary himself with wea- riness close to death, the man wondered should he climb into the sheets as well, to give his flesh a bit of reviving rest. But first he asked the pale damsel, “What ails you lady, and why are you here in a state close to death?” Then it seemed the woman an- swered without a word spoken. Somehow the man knew there was a curse upon her and the one who had fled was the one casting the curse. The ire of the visitor rose at understanding this injustice. And he vowed in his heart and soul to deal with the witch and set the lady free. Along and along, and he was again, eyeless and hand with foot, down a cold, black cor- ridor. Then by and by there shown a light. And it was a weak light too, flickering ahead, like the light of a starving fire. The traveler followed the light to its source. There he came to a place where one side of the stone of the hallway wall was hollowed into a cavern. In the shallow was a floor of sand like the waste of a desert. On the sand burned a ring of fire. Be- side the fire sat an impish idol, as ugly as ugly could be. And there the fetish fed the fire, but poorly, with bits of twigs and the dry, brittle skeletons of broken and desiccated leaves. To one side of her familiar, but turned away, sat a squat hag, the Baleful Gob, performing her foul work by muttering curses and spells of malediction. Her clumpy hands kept busy too and heavy breathing mixed with the sounds of bones being rubbed against bones and stones being pounded on stones. When the idol at the fire spied the intruder looking in, that impish lump of evil scowled its worst scowl and howled its loudest howl. But the wander- er on the roads had a power and charm of his own. With a word he silenced the jabbering little demon. And there and then the fiend was frozen as quick as a chunk of ice in the grip of win- ter. There followed next a bat- tle the likes of which is seldom known. On one side pious prayers were intoned. On the opposing side countering curs- es were spewed. The battle went from fierce to fiercer then from fiercer to fiercest. Yet not once did the evil intention budge or flinch, turn away and scurry off. At last, the dreamer sum- moned all the strength he could and desperate too. In a voice he might have borrowed from tempest, for it had the power of thunder to it, the man com- manded the Gob be silent. He ordered her straight off to quit the place and lift her curse from the pale lady now and forever. Then just when a body might think that goodness had victo- ry in hand, a terrible reversal happened. The hair of the Bale- ful Gob was clumpy strands as thick as a hangman’s rope. Here, in the work of perdition, several of the coils reared up and shot from her gorgon’s massive head. With fearsome speed the thick coils flew too. In their flight the strands changed from hair into snakes. The braided serpent’s jaws were open wide, and poi- son dripped from their exposed fangs. On they flew at the gleeman’s head and the reek of their hiss- ing was licking his face. In fear of this nightmare death, he stum- bled backward and fell away to save dear life. And falling away, the sleeper awoke. Now here he was when his eyes opened, huddled beside a wintery bush, beneath a fruit- less apple tree. Dew was on the roadman’s skin and a chill was in his bones. The sky was like the shell of an egg, with sun barely breaking through. It was but the crack of dawn. From yellow-gray twilight the shadow of a raven passed over the land. The flapping of the raven’s wings was a dread sound. In the near distance the traveler heard the pounding of hoof beats. The galloping was eerie and seemed to be that of a six-legged horse. Then it was the traveler knew he had gone down into the NetherRealm. It was a danger- ous descent too; death stalked him there. So, the wanderer with his restless, questing soul rose to his feet. He clutched the amulet at his throat, spoke a prayer-chant for protection, and turned his face westward. For there is one matter known by all initiates, and that truth is this: The shortest way through night is to walk east and the longest way through day is to walk west. Either way, there is dreaming. Only some dreams come from the haunting contortions of darkness and other dreams are gifts from the givers of light. The rope that would not fall By Regan O’Sullivan T he valley of St. Verena is a green cleft in the world, a place the maps have forgotten and the roads refuse to find. The modern village, if one can call a scatter of stone cottages and a single pub a village, huddles beside a stream that runs black with peat. Above it, on a knoll choked with elder and thorn, stands the church of St. Verena herself. Its tower is a square finger of grey limestone, pitted by six centuries of weather. The bell-frame is visible through the emp- ty louvres... two great bells, their clappers frozen in a permanent yawn of rust. So the guidebooks say. So the hikers believe. I came to St. Verena in the October of last year, chas- ing a footnote in a monastic cartulary. The villagers were polite but distant, the sort of politeness that watches you from behind a lace curtain. Only old Mr. Thorne, the sexton, a retired schoolmaster with a face like a walnut—offered more than a nod. “You’ll hear them,” he said, as we sat in the church porch. Rain ticked on the yew trees. “The bells. Not with your ears, perhaps. But you’ll know.” “I understood they were rusted solid,” I said. Mr. Thorne smiled thinly. “Oh, they don’t move. Not the metal. But the sound, the sound comes. Always the same sequence. Slow. Measured. The old coup de la mort for the Requiem Mass. One stroke for each year of the dead, then nine for the soul’s release.” He paused. A drip fell from the porch roof onto the stone. “Last month, Mrs. Penrith heard it at three in the morning. She sat up in bed and told her husband, ‘That’s for me.’ She was dead by noon. Not a mark on her. Heart, the doctor said.” He tapped his own chest. “The bell knows, you see. It knows who is next.” I asked, less sceptically than I wished, whether anyone had seen the ringer. “Seen?” Mr. Thorne’s eyes moved to the tower door, iron-studded and immovable. “No. But on the night of a death, if you stand be- low the louvres, you can hear, not a rope. Something else. A breathing. A man’s breath, drawn in pain and let out as if each ex- halation cost him the world.” I should have left then. I did not. * * * * * * * * * * The call came three days later. I had been transcribing a four- teenth-century charter in the vicarage attic, a document that mentioned one “Hugo, son of Ranulf, bell-ringer of this par- ish.” The margin bore a later hand, tremulous and cramped: Hic iacet qui fugit. Miserere. Here lies he who fled. Have mer- cy. That night, I woke to a silence so complete it had texture. The rain had stopped. The stream had stopped. Even the air seemed to hold its breath. Then the bell spoke. It was not a vibration in the ear. It was a vibration in the room, in the marrow of my long bones. Low. Profound. A single note that faded into a second, then a third. The rhythm was funereal, deliberate, as if measured by a heart that had forgotten how to beat fast. I dressed in darkness and went out. The churchyard lay under a moon like a paring of bone. The tower rose black against the stars. And from the lou- vres, from the empty, rust-clot- ted louvres, came not only the sound of the bell but something else. A rope. It had not been there before. A thick, hemp rope, grey with age, dangling from the bell-cham- ber opening, its end frayed as if someone had sawed it with a blunt knife. Worse: it was mov- ing. Not swinging in the wind, there was no wind but twitch- ing. Jerking. As if an invisible hand were climbing it, hand over hand, from above. I am not a man given to flights of fancy. I walked to the tower door. It should have been locked. It swung open on a darkness that exhaled cold air like a crypt. Inside, the stair was a spiral of worn stone, each step slick with something that was not water. I climbed. The rope passed me, a serpent of old fibres, descending from the upper dark. I did not touch it. I did not dare. The bell-chamber was a square of moonlit dust. The two bells hung like great iron fruits, their surfaces a scab of orange rust. The rope vanished upward, through a hole in the ceiling, into the bell-frame itself, where no rope should have been at- tached. And there was a man. He knelt on the wooden plat- form beneath the larger bell. He wore a tunic of rough brown wool, rotted at the shoulders, and his feet were bare. His hair was long and matted, and his hands, his hands were wrapped in the rope, which passed through his palms as if they were made of smoke and mem- ory. He was pulling. Heaving. Each pull produced no sound from the rusted bell above, yet the note filled the air, rich and mournful. “Hugo,” I said. My voice was a croak. He turned. His face was young, perhaps twenty but worn smooth by a grief that had lasted centuries. His eyes were the colour of the bell-metal, and they held no surprise. Only a terrible, famil- iar exhaustion. “You hear it,” he said. His lips moved, but the voice seemed to come from the walls. “You hear the knell. Who is it for this time? The baker’s wife? The child with the cough?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I came because ...because the rope.” He looked down at his hands. The rope passed through them, white and whole on one side, ghostly and translucent on the other. “I cannot let go,” he whis- pered. “I tried once. In 1623. In 1798. In 1904. I take my hands away, and the rope is still there. It grows out of me.” “The cartulary said you fled.” His jaw tightened. “The plague came in the au- tumn of 1348. I was eighteen. The priest was dead. The villag- ers looked to me, the bell-ringer, the one who could summon help, who could ring the passing bell for the dy- ing. I rang it for the first three. Then my mother took the fever. Her face turned the colour of the bells’ clappers. I rang for her. And when she died, I ran.” The knell continued, stroke by stroke, as if another bell were count- ing. “I ran down the valley,” he said. “I thought: I will bring a physician from the next town. I will re- turn with medicines. But I knew. I knew there was no physician. I knew the road was guarded by men with pikes who would thrust me back into the plague. So I hid. For three days, I hid in a ditch, eating wild garlic, listening to the death knell I had abandoned. When I came back, the village was silent. Every door stood open. And the tower ...I climbed to the bells and I rang the Mass for the Dead for every soul I had left behind.” “Including yourself,” I said. He looked up. The moon through the louvre caught the tears that ran down his face but did not fall. “I was not dead. Not then. I stayed in this chamber. I re- fused to eat. I refused to drink. I pulled the rope until my hands bled. And when my body finally died, the rope did not. Because the bell had not finished.” “The bell has been ringing for six hundred years,” I said slow- ly. “The villagers hear it before a death. They think it is a warn- ing.” Hugo shook his head. “No. No warning. The bell is not for them.” He pulled again, and the note that came was higher, a cry of unbearable longing. “It is for me. One stroke for each year I lived after I fled. Eighteen years of cowardice. Eighteen thou- sand six hundred and eighty- four strokes. And I have been counting. I have been pulling. But every time a villager dies, the bell adds another.” “Adds another?” “Because I am still fleeing,” he said. His voice cracked. “Every death in this valley that I could have prevented, every mother, every child, every old man alone in his bed, they are my plague. My punishment. I ring their knell, and the knell becomes mine. I cannot finish. I cannot atone. Because as long as one person in St. Verena fears death, I am still the boy who ran.” The rope jerked in his hands. The bell tolled again, louder, nearer, as if the sound were a physical thing pressing against my chest. “You can stop,” I said. I stepped forward. The dust on the floor did not move under my feet. “The atonement was never the bell. The atonement was staying. And you have stayed. Six hun- dred years. You never left again.” Hugo stared at me. For the first time, something like hope flick- ered in his rust-coloured eyes. “Let go,” I said. “The rope will fall. It must.” He looked down at his ghost- ly hands, at the rope that passed through them like a river through reeds. He closed his eyes. And with a sob that echoed through the centuries, he opened his fingers. The rope dropped. It did not fall slowly. It plum- meted through the hole in the floor, through the stairwell,