Climb halfway down the stairs with Bram Stoker Award-Winning author Gary A. Braunbeck, into worlds that occupy the spaces between "here" and "there," where office workers become little more than scrolls of code and an ordinary man discovers that he has to help reassemble the missing face of God; from battle-scarred veterans who have to protect their village from encroaching spirits to a college experiment that may bring about the end of days, all of these stories feature Braunbeck's trademark element: an unblinking eye for emotional detail that elevates the subject matter of each piece into...

It's a quiet night at The Hangman's Tavern just outside Cedar Hill, Ohio -- that is until a disheveled stranger shows up and begins to tell the patrons a story, one that begins: "His full name was Ronald James Williamson, and he killed his first child when he was still a child himself ..."

The stranger's tale includes a little girl named Sarah Thompson, her mother Lucy, and how a tragedy would, in a way, bring all three of them together and result in the birth of a creature of myth, a Golem of vengeance, called Mr. Hands.

Here for the first time is the author's preferred text...