Shelled

Some games should never be finished.

Twelve-year-old Callum Fairchild thinks he knows the rules of Hangman.

Choose a word. Guess the letters. Complete the drawing.

Simple.

Until one afternoon in the quiet town of Ashbury, Callum and his best friend Elijah begin a game that neither of them remembers starting. Six blank spaces wait on the page. Elijah refuses to reveal the word. Then Callum guesses the letters.

S. H. E. L. L. E. D.

The final letter writes itself.

And something beneath the floorboards answers.

That night, Callum dreams of a battlefield buried beneath Ashbury-a vast, impossible trench filled with dead soldiers and a creature wearing an ancient military helmet fused to its skull. It has elongated limbs, a shell-covered body, and three long toes.

It calls itself Drícada.

By morning, Elijah has disappeared.

Worse, everyone insists he never existed.

Photographs change. School records vanish. Callum's parents disappear without a trace. Strange three-toed footprints begin appearing inside the house. And somewhere in the darkness, something whispers Callum's name.

Desperate for answers, Callum discovers an ancient occult book hidden in the abandoned Ashbury Parish archive. Its pages reveal a terrifying secret: certain Hangman words are not words at all.

They are names.

Names belonging to entities trapped between life and death.

For centuries, the Hangman game has been used as a crude method of summoning and binding them. But Callum has made one fatal mistake.

He drew the gallows.

Now Drícada-the Soldier Between Earths-has found a doorway into the living world.

And it is learning.

As reality begins to fracture and Callum can no longer trust his own memories, he must confront a horrifying question: Are the people he remembers truly gone-or were they ever real at all?

There may be only one way to stop Drícada.

Play Hangman again.

But this time, Callum cannot afford to guess wrong.

SHELLED is a fast-paced supernatural horror novella filled with childhood nightmares, ancient evil, impossible memories, buried guilt, terrifying creatures, and a game that was never as innocent as it seemed.

Because sometimes a word is more than a word.

Sometimes it is a door.

And once the door is opened, something may come through.