Prologue
When true horror knocks on our door, some of us are pulled back and some of us are pulled towards it. What is the strange impulse to go towards something that most people would run away from in terror? The characters in these stories could perhaps tell if they were still around to describe the contents of their demented minds. Perhaps it is simply an either conscious or unconscious wish for self-destruction. This could be the case but when I think about the story of Esko and Tymppis in particular, there must have been something more to it, perhaps some kind of metaphysical desire to experience magnificent and inconceivable things so far removed from the banality of everyday life – even if that means being destructed in the process.
I have heard these stories from a trusted friend who never lies and is always completely honest. He told them to me so that I may share them with the world and let people know what sort of things are lurking out there in the dark and perhaps most frighteningly, in our own minds. In these stories nothing is as it seems and horrors are waiting just around the corner in the usual habitat of the unfortunate souls who encounter them. It would be a mistake to assume that the places we are most familiar with and where we feel most safe and comfortable will always remain that way. These stories, if nothing else, certainly demonstrate that beyond any reasonable doubt.
With these words I invite the reader to open his mind to the terrible possibilities existing all around us. Not only in haunted houses and dark castles at night but everywhere and not the least in our own minds.
