GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: MIDNIGHT MASS
Once a month, every adult in town would vanish after dark. The children stayed home—locked in, lights out. Told not to peek, that we should be asleep by then anyway, and if we weren’t, all manner of monsters lurked about at night looking for disobedient children to chase.
GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: SEE EMILY PLAY
This is a warning. If you hear kids calling outside your window after 2AM—don’t go. Don’t answer. And whatever you do, don’t say your name.
There’s something wrong with my street, and it starts after midnight. You’ll hear laughter—children playing. Sometimes tag, sometimes jump rope, sometimes just… calling.
But we all know better. You don’t open the window. You don’t peek through the blinds. You never go outside.
I told Emily this, but she didn’t believe me. She thought it was just some dumb story I made up to scare her.
She doesn’t think that anymore.
Because she’s gone.
GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: THE MAN WHO STANDS ACROSS THE STREET
There’s a man who stands across the street from my house every single night at exactly 2:17 AM. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. He just stands there. Watching.
GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: ROOTS
My uncle Jonas was a recluse. I thought he was interesting, but nobody else in my family could stand him—especially my mom, his baby sister. She blamed Vietnam. It wrecked him, stole the big goofy brother she once loved, and replaced him with an imposter dredged from the putrid mud of a battlefield. When the war ended, Uncle Jonas moved in with my grandma and never left. After she died in the late ’90s, when I was just a kid, he and my mom fought bitterly. She wanted to sell the house, but he refused. Being the oldest, he had just as much claim to it as she did, and he dug his heels in.