Dust and Echoes

In the isolated settlement of Terth, life is defined by the Burn Line...a shimmering, humming barrier that encircles the town, protecting the last of humanity from the radioactive wasteland outside.

To touch the Line is to burn.

To question it is heresy.

Caleb is a tower mechanic, dedicated to keeping the ancient machines running and the barrier strong. But lately, the silence speaks louder than the hum. He’s noticed gauges that ne...

The Grand Banks, 1755.

The fog does not roll; it exhales. And hidden within the stifling gray of the Atlantic, something waits for Lieutenant Thomas Halloway.

Halloway is a man of the Royal Navy, a scholar of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the rational world. He trusts charts, sextants, and the sturdy timber of the HMS Acheron. But when the fog clears, it reveals a vessel that defies all reason: a blindingly white craft, smoo...

Darius Enlo is five thousand days into a lonely mission to harvest a comet that will exponentialize Earth's AI models. Onboard are the scientists who will execute the plan on arrival, frozen in ice for the long haul. Watching over them alone is Darius, a transit caretaker.  But when an impossible message arrives from deep space claiming the mission is a death sentence for "his people", Darius must make a choice.

Does he trust the A...

Stewart believes he is just waiting out the clock. Retired, invisible, and adrift in a life that feels increasingly gray, he drives into the high Utah wilderness not to find something new, but to escape the quiet nothingness of home. He tells himself he is ready for the end.

But the mountain has a way of calling a bluff.

When a sudden winter storm buries the remote road and traps him in a freezing whiteout, the silence of the deser...

Sent to the dreary, isolated Oregon coast to stay with a grandmother they barely know, two city teenagers find themselves trapped in a war that is older than they are, and far more terrible.

Their family's history is the town's curse, and the only path to survival demands that they sail directly into the heart of the darkness. This is a story about the agonizing choice between running from your past, and the moment you decide to bu...

Thomas Reid is a literary star, his bestselling novel The Factory Grave, a golden ticket out of his blue-collar past. But the life he built withing a remote mountain fortress, the perfect family, the critical acclaim....it all feels like a fraud. He is haunted by a suffocating "survivor's guilt", a feeling that drives him back to the Utah wilderness for a reunion with Rudy, the best friend he left behind.  

He went for penance. He...

What if you found a VHS tape... that showed you the future?

It's 1992, and Clint Mercer is a lonely man living a quiet, predictable life. His only solace is the local video rental store, a relic of a bygone analog era. But when the clerk hands him a mysterious, unlabeled cassette with one word on it ...REWIND! his world is shattered.

It's not a movie. It's a prophecy.

Clint watches, horrified, as the grainy, handheld footage shows ...

Jack's a long haul trucker that's not just hauling freight.

He's cursed with a psychic radar for evil...a 'Thump' in his skull that screams for blood, freezes the cab with spectral dread, or heralds true, ancient darkness.

Blackmailed by a demonic 'Dispatcher' holding his sister's life as leverage, Jack is now on a cross-country run with an impossible cargo: a sealed, freezing trailer that's a beacon for every monster on the map.

F...

A collection of some of my favorite original short scary stories, volume 1.  What if the things you trust most...the deep silence of the woods, the familiar voice of a loved one, a desperate cry for help in the dark...were all just bait?

For this special episode, Dust and Echoes presents a triptych of terror. Three Original Tales of Terror from author James Cawley that explore the unsettling truth that we are never truly alone, an...

Seeking total solitude in the vast, silent corners of the Utah desert, a traveler believes he's finally alone. But the darkness is listening...and waiting. 

When a relentless siege begins against the thin fabric of his small tent, he is forced to remember the ancient, whispered rules of the night:

Don't speak,

don't whistle,

and never, ever tell the darkness your name.

This is a terrifying psychological battle against a patient ...

REDEMPTION An Original Dust and Echoes Cinematic Western by James Cawley

Under the searing Utah sun, where the San Juan River cuts through stone and silence, a quiet frontier life is set ablaze. When a brutal betrayal rips her world apart, Emma Hawthorne rises from the ashes...scarred, armored, and guided by something far older than the church bells that once tried to tame her.

Redemption is not your typical western. It’s a vengean...

After the funeral and the estate sale Thomas stays behind to spend one final night alone in his childhood home.  To say goodbye before it's sold. 

The rooms are now empty. But something still moves in the silence.

As he clings to fading memories, something within the house begins to respond.

A slow-burning tale of guilt, loss, and the dark things that wait in places we think are safe.

Written and performed by the Author, James Cawl...

Some roads lead to what people would rather forget.

In the backroads of Indiana, the corn grows high enough to swallow the horizon. Mile after mile of silent rows, where sound dies and even daylight feels heavy. Farmers tell their children to stay clear of the fields after dark. Hunters avoid them altogether. And still, the missing persons reports grow.

This is the story of what Jenson and Susan McBride stumbled into one late summe...

Three hundred years after the fall of the old world, the survivors live not in cities… but inside their skeletons.

High above the vine-choked ruins of what once was Manhattan, the Stone Tree Clan endures among the rooftops guided by firelight, memory, and the stories passed down since the first flames were lit. Stories that remind them of the sins that burned the world… and of the one law that has kept them alive:

Stay close to the...

Some places will never let you go.

Jeff Bauer thought he escaped his hometown of Burley, Idaho. He traded wheat fields for Hollywood lights, childhood ghosts for film scores and awards. But a phone call from an old childhood friend drags him back into the nightmare that he thought he'd escaped. 

Developers are unearthing the farmland where two kids once hid things that they hoped would always stay buried. Now, Jeff must confront th...

Long before covered wagons creaked across endless sagebrush and steam locomotives chased the horizon...something ancient arrived from the cold stillness between distant galaxies, and it buried itself deep into the red clay of Shoshone land.  And there, it waited for the old man and the girl. 

Generations later, Dzoon awakens it. The visions it brings are unlike anything he’s ever known...not memories, but omens. Fire. Ruin. A ghost...

Dust & Echoes is a fiction podcast blending horror, mystery, adventure and suspense in original short story form. Each episode is a cinematic, immersive experience drawing you into tales of the strange, the forgotten, and the haunted parts of being human.

Written and performed by author James Cawley, Dust & Echoes delivers a modern campfire experience, one story at a time.

Unheard. Unpublished. Until now. 

New episodes ever...

When neurosurgeon Garrett Goodwin boards the Celestia Maris with his family, he’s looking for quiet. But in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, the ocean gives him something else: silence. The kind that feels… alive and watching. As strange orbs appear on the horizon and a boy in the ship’s medical wing whispers in someone else’s voice, Garrett is drawn into a nightmare of reality that science can't explain.

The Bermuda Meridian is ...

He took the deckhand job with no experience and no questions asked. Just a one-way ticket to somewhere quiet. A chance to disappear.

After years of bad choices and time served, Joey’s ready to leave everything he broke behind. But the further the small fishing boat he gets from land, the more dread builds inside Joey's mind.  

What begins as a quiet escape drifts, in thick fog, into darker waters. And as the isolation deepens, Joey...