We Live Inside Your Eyes Read online

  “The Monster Under the Bed”

  Sometimes, just for kicks, I write small dialogue-only stories and post them on social media. There’s not much to them. No depth, character development, or scene setting. Thus, there’s not much to say about them, here or anywhere else. But who among you doesn’t love a good comeuppance piece?

  “The House on Abigail Lane”

  There are over a million words of unfinished stories in my files. Over a million. Most of it will never be seen by human eyes, but every now and again I’ll go in and have a peek at what’s there. Among the corpses are a handful of aborted novels, including over fifty pages of a Kin sequel. There’s a kaiju novella, abandoned twenty pages from the end because of its similarity to a popular horror novel that was released while I was writing it, and a novel about paintings that come to life that I ditched after watching Velvet Buzzsaw. Stories can die for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes you lose steam, sometimes you get stuck, sometimes someone else gets to the idea first, and sometimes the excitement for a project wanes and you jump to a horse with sturdier legs.

  During one of these expeditions into The Crypt, I chanced upon a single page of a story I’d started three or four years ago about a house in which people vanish when they go upstairs. There was enough on the page to intrigue me, and I really liked the tone of it. It had a true-crime-y feel, and when I reached the end of that page, I found myself eager to know what happened next. So, I took it out, dusted it off, rewrote that first page and the story caught fire. I hope its reanimated corpse entertained you.

  We Live Inside Your Eyes (I & II)

  When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom looking out the window. Eleanor, the girl in the house across the street, used to do the same, and we would signal to each other for hours. This graduated to walking to school together, and later, she was my first kiss. This story is my affectionate nod to those simple, exciting, confusing times, and an expression of my gratitude that she resisted the urge to sacrifice me to The Bone Mother.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KEALAN PATRICK BURKE is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of six novels, numerous collections, and over two hundred short stories. He has no spare time, but if he did, he’d probably use it to do a bunch of things he wouldn’t want to talk about. Or play videogames and junk, whichever required the least amount of effort. Visit him on the web at www.kealanpatrickburke.com or on Twitter @kealanburke, where he (thinks he) is hilarious.