Children of the Indigai — E.S. Wynn

People think that California is a state built upon beaches, a place all pavement and movie stars, gangs, porn and sunshine. They forget that this is where the gold rush happened, that there are dark places and thick, unchartable woods in California where men like Leonard Lake lick the charred remains of human bodies tainted by pain and leather. They forget about Charles Manson, The Zodiac Killer and the vampire of Sacramento. When they hear the name, California, their minds never cross into the rural pockets where time has gone still and left the patterns of the past relatively unchanged, but even these tiny, forgotten vestiges of a colonial past that lurk on the edges of civilization pale in comparison to the horrors that shiver and spawn in the deeper hills, the dark places between the slopes and canyons where black, viscous, twisted things shift and surge, where the trees and the night are so thick that whole families are taken sometimes in the darkness without a word, a sound, a scream.

This E-short is also featured in the collection titled Shores of the Nameless Gods