Italy, 1252. Inquisition. Accusation. Fear. Torture. The guilty and the innocent dying for sins real and imagined, in the flames of the burning stake.... Neilsville, 1978. Peter Balsam has come to this sleepy desert town to teach its youth, and finds a mystery of mounting horror. Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High School - something evil. In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the town...while a dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual.

Lush and deceptively tranquil, with its pristine beaches and blossoming vegetation, the island basks in splendid isolation off the South Carolina coast. Here, where sudden storms unleash the murderous rage of wind and sea, stands the Devereaux mansion, a once-great plantation house now crumbling amid ancient oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Here, Marguerite Devereaux, 50 and childless, has cast off her dreams to care for her aged, demanding mother.

Brilliant summers amid golden fields. Killing winters of razorlike cold. A peaceful, neighborly village, darkened by legends of death? Who is Nathaniel? For 100 years, the people of Prairie Bend have whispered the name in wonder and fear. Some say he is simply a folk tale - a legend created to frighten children on cold winter nights. Some swear he is a terrifying spirit returned to avenge the past. And soon...very soon...some will come to believe that Nathaniel lives still - darkly, horrifyingly real. Nathaniel.

Something is happening to the children of Eastbury, Massachusetts.... Something that causes healthy babies to turn cold in their cribs. Something that strikes at the heart of every parent's darkest fears. Something unexplained that is taking the children, one by one.

The children were waiting. Waiting for centuries. Waiting for someone to hear their cries. Now nine-year-old Christie Lyons has come to live in the house on the hill - the house where no children have lived for 50 years. Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor. Now Christie's terror will begin... When the Wind Blows the children must die!

Amanda: A century ago, a gentle blind girl walked the cliffs of Paradise Point. Then the children came - taunting, teasing - until she lost her footing and fell, shrieking her rage to the drowning sea... . Michelle: Now Michelle has come from Boston to live in the big house on Paradise Point. She is excited about her new life, ready to make new friends...until a hand reaches out of the swirling mists - the hand of a blind child. She is asking for friendship...seeking revenge...whispering her name....

They call it the Academy: a secluded, cliff-top mansion overlooking the rugged Pacific coast. It's a school for children gifted - or cursed - with extraordinary minds, children soon to come under the influence of an intelligence even more brilliant than their own - and unspeakably evil.

Cassie Winslow is 16. She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod. For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift. And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same.

Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth.... His sister is haunted by fearful visions.... And one by one, in violent, mysterious ways, the strangers are dying. Never the townspeople. Only the strangers. Has a dark bargain been struck between the people of Clark's Harbor and some supernatural force? Or is it the sea itself calling out for a human sacrifice?

Just as their troubled marriage is reaching the breaking point, Ted and Janet Conway inherit a home that has been in the family for more than a century. Eager to make a new beginning, the Conways and their three children head for the promise of a better life in the small Louisiana town of St. Albans. But within the long-abandoned, sprawling Victorian manse lies the dark history of the Conway name.

It has waited seven years for someone to come back to the rambling lakeside house called Pinecrest, which has stood empty since its last owner went missing. For upscale Chicago couple Dan and Merrill Brewster, the old midwestern manse is an ideal retreat, and for their kids, Eric and Marci, it's the perfect place to spend a lazy summer exploring.

Every parent's nightmare becomes a reality for Kara Marshall when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night. The police suspect that the girl is just another moody teenage runaway, angry over leaving behind her school and friends because her family is moving. But Lindsay's recent eerie claim - that someone invaded her room when the house was opened to prospective buyers - drives Kara to fear the worst.

Beyond the sparkling Hawaiian beaches, masked by the deceptive beauty of the rainforest, evil awaits 16-year-old Michael Sundquist and his mother, Katharine, an anthropologist who has come to the Islands to study the unusual skeletal remains unearthed on the volcanic flanks of Haleakala, Maui.

After a sudden fire leaves Matt's senile and troubled grandmother homeless, she moves in with the family. Her ceaseless demands cause unrelieved tension - and with her comes a shameful secret about her daughters that traps Matt between a dead aunt who haunts him and his own mother, who seeks redemption for her sister's sins - and her own. Matt transforms from a gregarious teenager to a hostile loner prone to fits of rage - tortured by chilling memories and haunted by nightmares.

Karen Spellman is leaving Los Angeles behind, packing up her life and her daughters, and returning to her hometown to marry her high school sweetheart. In the countryside of her childhood, she is looking forward to a fresh start. But her life quickly turns dark and a malevolent force beyond her control threatens to take her daughters from her and ruin her dreams of a new life. Little does anyone know that an evil thought to be long dead has only been lying in wait, quietly anticipating the day when it will finally be able to satisfy its vengeful desires.

Lush and deceptively tranquil, with its pristine beaches and blossoming vegetation, the island basks in splendid isolation off the South Carolina coast. Here, where sudden storms unleash the murderous rage of wind and sea, stands the Devereaux mansion, a once-great plantation house now crumbling amid ancient oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Here, Marguerite Devereaux, 50 and childless, has cast off her dreams to care for her aged, demanding mother.

Brilliant summers amid golden fields. Killing winters of razorlike cold. A peaceful, neighborly village, darkened by legends of death? Who is Nathaniel? For 100 years, the people of Prairie Bend have whispered the name in wonder and fear. Some say he is simply a folk tale - a legend created to frighten children on cold winter nights. Some swear he is a terrifying spirit returned to avenge the past. And soon...very soon...some will come to believe that Nathaniel lives still - darkly, horrifyingly real. Nathaniel.

Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth.... His sister is haunted by fearful visions.... And one by one, in violent, mysterious ways, the strangers are dying. Never the townspeople. Only the strangers. Has a dark bargain been struck between the people of Clark's Harbor and some supernatural force? Or is it the sea itself calling out for a human sacrifice?

Italy, 1252. Inquisition. Accusation. Fear. Torture. The guilty and the innocent dying for sins real and imagined, in the flames of the burning stake.... Neilsville, 1978. Peter Balsam has come to this sleepy desert town to teach its youth, and finds a mystery of mounting horror. Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High School - something evil. In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the town...while a dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual.

Cassie Winslow is 16. She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod. For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift. And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same.

The children were waiting. Waiting for centuries. Waiting for someone to hear their cries. Now nine-year-old Christie Lyons has come to live in the house on the hill - the house where no children have lived for 50 years. Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor. Now Christie's terror will begin... When the Wind Blows the children must die!

The small town of Villejeune, Florida, lies far enough from the inquisitive eyes of strangers and even the reaches of the law that a community with its own customs, rituals, and deadly rites has grown there. In order to start fresh after a failed job prospect and unexpected emotional trauma for their teenage daughter, Ted and Mary Anderson have returned home to Villejeune, unaware of the growing malevolence there. Soon, they are thrust into a nightmare as their sweet but troubled daughter, Kelly, is pulled into the darkness that seems to have consumed the town.

Amanda: A century ago, a gentle blind girl walked the cliffs of Paradise Point. Then the children came - taunting, teasing - until she lost her footing and fell, shrieking her rage to the drowning sea... . Michelle: Now Michelle has come from Boston to live in the big house on Paradise Point. She is excited about her new life, ready to make new friends...until a hand reaches out of the swirling mists - the hand of a blind child. She is asking for friendship...seeking revenge...whispering her name....

They call it the Academy: a secluded, cliff-top mansion overlooking the rugged Pacific coast. It's a school for children gifted - or cursed - with extraordinary minds, children soon to come under the influence of an intelligence even more brilliant than their own - and unspeakably evil.

Every parent's nightmare becomes a reality for Kara Marshall when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night. The police suspect that the girl is just another moody teenage runaway, angry over leaving behind her school and friends because her family is moving. But Lindsay's recent eerie claim - that someone invaded her room when the house was opened to prospective buyers - drives Kara to fear the worst.

Suffer the Children presents a terrifying tale of apocalyptic fiction, as listeners are introduced to Herod's Syndrome, a devastating illness that suddenly and swiftly kills all young children across the globe. Soon, they return from the grave, and ask for blood. And with blood, they stop being dead. They continue to remain the children they once were, but only for a short time, as they need more blood to live. The average human body holds 10 pints of blood, so the inevitable question for parents everywhere becomes: How far would you go to bring your child back?

A telephone ringing in the dead of night signals the beginning of a journey into fear as MaryAnne Carpenter hears the shocking news: her friends the Wilkensons are suddenly, inexplicably dead, their only child, MaryAnne's godchild, abruptly orphaned and dependent on her.

It has waited seven years for someone to come back to the rambling lakeside house called Pinecrest, which has stood empty since its last owner went missing. For upscale Chicago couple Dan and Merrill Brewster, the old midwestern manse is an ideal retreat, and for their kids, Eric and Marci, it's the perfect place to spend a lazy summer exploring.

After a sudden fire leaves Matt's senile and troubled grandmother homeless, she moves in with the family. Her ceaseless demands cause unrelieved tension - and with her comes a shameful secret about her daughters that traps Matt between a dead aunt who haunts him and his own mother, who seeks redemption for her sister's sins - and her own. Matt transforms from a gregarious teenager to a hostile loner prone to fits of rage - tortured by chilling memories and haunted by nightmares.

Villejeune, Florida. A secluded little town at the edge of a vast, eerie swamp. Far from prying eyes. Far from the laws of civilization. Here, folks live by their own rules - dark rites of altars and infants, candles and blood. Years ago, the Andersons left town with a dream. Now, they are back. To live out a nightmare. Something has been waiting for them. Something unspeakably evil. It feeds on the young and the innocent. Soon, it will draw their teenage daughter into its unholy embrace....