Some stories don't need room to grow. They just need the right door.

Dark Descent is a monthly micro-horror magazine. Short, sharp, unsettling fiction that gets under the skin fast. Best stories go into the yearly Dark Descent anthology too.

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DeadHead

The seat beside him was supposed to be empty.

The man in the pilot’s uniform took the empty seat beside me just as they closed the cabin door, and for one impossible second I thought he was the person I had killed.

Not because of his face.

His face was wrong. Too narrow. Too pale. Clean-shaven where Gordon had worn a short beard to hide the scar under his chin. The man beside me had no scar, no beard, no blood on his shirt, no look of surprise frozen forever in the dark pupils of his eyes.

But he had Gordon’s stillness.

That was what made my hands tighten on the armrests. The same awful quiet. The same way of occupying space as if the world had already happened and he was merely waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

He placed a black leather flight bag under the seat in front of him, buckled his belt, and turned to me with a small, tired smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “Almost missed it.”

I nodded because nodding was easier than speaking. My mouth had gone dry the moment he sat down.

Outside the oval window, rain slipped in bright threads down the glass. Blue runway lights blurred and trembled in the dark. Somewhere beneath my feet, engines groaned awake, deep and animal, and the plane gave a little shudder.

The man looked past me toward the window.

“Bad night to fly,” he said.

I forced myself to breathe.

“Are you flying the plane?”

He smiled again, but this time it seemed to arrive a second too late.

“Not this one.”

His uniform was dark navy, almost black in the cabin light. Four silver stripes on the sleeves. Wings pinned above the breast pocket. He looked like every pilot I had ever seen coming through terminals with coffee in one hand and the secret knowledge of weather in the other.

And still, for half a second, some ugly little part of me wondered how he had gotten there.

Not into the seat.

Into the uniform.

The thought came and went so quickly I almost missed it. But he didn’t. I knew he didn’t. His eyes shifted toward me, calm and dark and unreadable, and I felt suddenly exposed, as if the cabin lights had brightened just over my row.

I looked away first.

There was something wrong with him.

Maybe it was the rain.

Maybe it was the fact that no one had checked his ticket.

Maybe it was because the seat beside me had been empty all through boarding. I had watched it, prayed over it, guarded it like a miracle. No one beside me meant no questions. No accidental touches. No one noticing the mud on my cuffs or the bandage wrapped too tightly around my left hand.

No one leaning close enough to smell the smoke in my coat.

“I’m deadheading,” he said.

Read the rest of the story on Medium

I Never Planned to Be a Writer. I Just Kept Coming Back to It

Some people find their path early and walk it in a straight line.

Yeah, that was how I thought my life would be, but that’s not my story! I Zsolt Zsemba was born in Hungary, moved to Canada at nine, and spent decades crossing between industries, countries, and versions of myself. Through all of it, one thing kept showing up: writing.

Not because I planned it that way. Because I could not leave it alone.

It Started With Poems Nobody Ever Read

I was twelve when I started writing seriously. Poetry, short stories, ideas that went nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Growing up between cultures gave me an unusual lens on people, and I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of what I observed.

Nobody told me to write. I just did it.

That habit went quiet for years while life got loud. But it never disappeared. It just waited.

Indonesia Changed Everything

In 1999, I moved to Jakarta for two years and started working in the entertainment industry with my now ex-wife (Zara Zettira ZR.) for 17 years. I wrote scripts, worked on television productions, and got a real education in storytelling under pressure. That chapter eventually ended, and I returned to Canada and the family business. The family business was ingrained in me since I was 10. I have lived and breathed furniture all my life. Yet even there, design, production and quality control are what I specialized in.

Years later, in 2018, I came back to Indonesia as COO of MD Pictures. The entertainment industry pulled me in again, and this time, something shifted. The ideas I had been sitting on started turning into actual books.

The stories I had been collecting for decades finally had somewhere to go.

Someone Told Me I Was Not a Writer

At some point along the way, someone looked me dead in the face and said it. You are not a writer.

I did not argue. I just kept going.

Today, that moment feels less like an insult and more like fuel. The books exist. The blog exists. The audience exists. Sometimes the people who doubt you end up being part of the reason you push harder than you otherwise would have.

Gerobak 777 and Writing for Indonesian Readers

In 2024, I released Gerobak 777 in Indonesia. The launch took place at Gramedia Matraman in Jakarta, and it marked a real milestone for me as an author. The book explores themes of friendship, identity, and personal growth, and the response from Indonesian readers made the whole project feel worth it.

Writing and publishing in the Indonesian market as a Canadian author is not the obvious move. But bridging those two worlds has been a recurring theme in my life, so in a way, it made complete sense.

Horror, Human Nature, and Everything In Between

I do not write inside a single genre because I do not think inside a single genre. My books move between horror, suspense, psychological drama, and social commentary. My blog covers expat life, relationships, Bali, and the kind of observations that most people think but nobody says out loud.

One day, I am writing about a haunted cemetery. The next thing I am writing about is modern masculinity or the absurdity of influencer culture. That range is not an accident. It reflects how I actually think.

The readers who follow me across platforms tend to be people who are also navigating multiple worlds at once. That is the connection point.

Bali Without the Filter

Now, having a decent social media presence and living in Bali means I see both versions of this island. The glossy one that fills Instagram feeds, and the real one underneath it.

My writing tries to show the second version. Local culture, environmental realities, what tourism actually does to a place, and what expat life looks like when you stop performing for the highlight reel. Readers get perspective, not just recommendations.

Why I Keep Writing

I am not chasing a single outcome. The goal has never been to become one type of creator or fit inside one category.

I write because it is the clearest way I have ever found to think. Horror fiction, travel observations, personal essays, and social commentary, none of it feels like work in the way other things do. It feels like the thing I was always going to end up doing.

If you are following this blog for the first time, welcome. If you have been here a while, you already know what to expect: honesty, range, and no guarantee of what comes next. Oh yeah, also I guess I do a lot of TikTokking as well 🙂

That is exactly how I like it.

https://www.tiktok.com/@zsoltzsemba

https://www.instagram.com/zsoltzsemba

💀 Sleep can wait.
Every horror reader remembers that one story.
The one they still think about years later.

That's the kind of experience we love celebrating in Dark Descent.
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