Ada returns to sell her mother's house in a village that seals its secrets in clay jars. Three knocks and a child's mitten lead her back to a door she once kept shut.
✳ AN INDEPENDENT HORROR LIBRARY
Some stories
never leave you.
Step inside a world of fractured memories,
quiet dread, and things left unspoken.
Free to read. Hard to forget.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR / GRAPHIC NOVELS
The complete stories. Always free.English · Italiano · 简体中文 · 日本語Written by Atanas Ibba Mantchorov
01 / THE COLLECTION
Choose your unease.
Every cover is a door.
Open one, and take your time.
I returned to close the building. Thirty years of complaints. All marked resolved.
A flood-barrier technician discovers who pays for the city's perfect silence.
A hotel operator follows a disconnected telephone into the memories she was paid to erase.
Two brothers enter their late father’s tailoring shop, where old judgments alter bodies and rooms.
During a final inspection of a condemned tram, an operator's old lie turns an empty carriage into a journey that refuses to end.
An investigator follows three missing people into an archive that removes painful emotions, and discovers the price of relief.
A woman records reassuring announcements in a decaying broadcast building, where her voice begins to fear the promises it makes.
A mother preserves a childhood summer inside a sealed greenhouse until it begins stealing warmth from her adult daughter.
An interviewer trapped in an apartment must listen to a childhood story she has spent her life interrupting.
Snow isolates two workers in a mountain flood-warning station. A suppressed alarm returns through the walls, and the engineer who silenced it must decide what a clean report is worth.
A widow guarding a forest flood shelter keeps one bed empty for her missing husband. At night, something beneath the floor begins accepting her offerings.
A housing inspector visits a celebrated new residential tower after a tenant vanishes. His camera reveals what the perfect view has been hiding—and what it expects its residents to become.
A sound archivist enters an abandoned municipal bath to recover a missing recording. Beneath its drained pools, a machine is teaching the town to speak with one voice.
A lost-property officer follows a child's glove into a shuttered tram depot. Its courteous custodian offers to return everything—provided someone accepts responsibility.
On an abandoned tidal island, a conservator strips paint from a shelter wall. Beneath each coat waits a person she remembers—and a door she would rather forget.
Sheltering from a storm, a bridge inspector gives his hostess a small promise. In a town where every road returns to the same warm room, he discovers what she has been keeping on tape.
A municipal cartographer follows a missing street into the blank edge of her own map, where an old administrative choice has become a place to live.
A heating engineer discovers why an apartment building is so eager to make her feel at home.
An acoustic consultant discovers that a hearing room trades silenced testimony for a flawless face.
Alone in a flooded boarding house, a retired tailor feeds a mannequin that grows more presentable as he disappears.
Filming a condemned cliffside stair tower, Mara discovers her supposedly dead mother carrying the town’s worst memories. To free her, she must take hold of the family inheritance.
A lonely engineer returns to a submerged power station when her former crew calls for help. The repairs offer her something she wants more than rescue: a reason to be needed.
A repairman enters a shuttered museum of domestic life. Its mechanical family has kept one seat empty—and remembers the rules of his childhood.
A wedding photographer discovers that the people she cut from her pictures have gathered in a locked ballroom. Every attempt to repair the image changes the room around her.
A sound engineer preserves her husband's last voice in an abandoned acoustic laboratory. When her neighbors lose their sounds, she descends into the rooms where each replay has been left alone.
An archivist corrects a hospital's final transcript and discovers that its erased voices still inhabit the walls.
At a snowbound mountain station, a technician follows a moving red boundary in search of nine missing villagers. The storm outside is old. The hour inside refuses to end.
A father follows his missing adult daughter into a deserted weaving town. To escape the wish that binds them, they must surrender the memories that make them family.
A beloved broadcaster returns to her school recording booth to recover a childhood tape. The version that made her famous has learned to defend itself.
A courier accepts a room in a welcoming district, then discovers that its peaceful residents have made her the receiver of their unwanted fears.
A ventilation technician opens a sealed device in a vacant apartment. Something in the ducts begins copying the residents, always one breath behind.
An illustrator restores the paper orchard she made for her son. Inside it, he is still a child—and has never been hurt.
After an avalanche seals a mountain hotel, a night porter discovers whom its promise of perfect quiet was meant to silence.
Three salvage workers shelter in a flooded dock archive. A pair of recovered boots refuses to leave the scales, and their supervisor's account of the accident begins to change.
A translator enters a private clinic to find a missing colleague. Every question offers two answers, and neither permits her to leave.
A surveyor returns to her childhood apartment block. Each correction to its plan erases a room, until the only way out is to leave something unmeasured.
A museum guide enters the model town of her childhood and confronts the perfect version of herself that keeps an inconvenient memory silent.
A mother and daughter shelter in a forest cabin that demands a keepsake for every quiet night. Safety begins to cost them the person they loved.
At midnight, the island station would fall silent. Nao had spent twenty years teaching strangers to listen.
Ren returned to sell the boardinghouse. Every room had a tenant once. One had never stopped waiting.
The commission promised one week's work: restore the town's damaged portraits.
On his final night in a dead-letter office, Ken meets a woman whose apology never reached her daughter. Every unopened envelope leads to another room—and one belongs to him.
A former singer investigates a recording institute where imperfect breaths are edited away—and people vanish into the pauses.
A reopened port. Six windows. One witness who cannot trust what he saw. Some lights should have stayed off.
A winter caretaker arrives at an empty hotel with her sister. One key. One set of footprints. A room that knows them both.
A photograph draws Nao back to her childhood home. Her missing sister is in the window. Their mother has been dead for seventeen years.
Iris vanished during filming. Now Mara returns to the forest, searching for the truth the camera failed to capture.
A house. A return. And the unsettling feeling that something has been waiting. Step inside the story that started the collection.
49 stories · 50 editionsMore shadows to come.
02 / BEHIND THE STORIES
The horror is
in the human.
A∴A memory you can't place.
A room that feels familiar.
A silence that knows your name.
AFTERIMAGE is a reading room for the psychological horror graphic novels of Atanas Ibba Mantchorov. Illustrated stories that linger in the space between what we remember and what we choose to believe.
The complete collection is free to read here, in English, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. For those who prefer the weight of a book, physical editions can be found through the purchase links as they become available.
BEFORE YOU TURN THE PAGE
How do I read a novel?
Click any cover to open the full-screen reading room. Use the arrows or swipe to turn pages. You can zoom in, switch between one and two pages, and return later to your saved place on this device.
Are the complete stories free?
Yes. Every published edition is available to read in full, with no purchase required. Choose English, Italian, Chinese or Japanese above the collection, or select an edition under each cover.
Can I buy a physical copy?
When a print edition is available, an ‘Own a copy’ link appears with the novel and inside the reader. It takes you directly to the seller's website. Each book's purchase link is managed separately.