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  * * *

  Tommy climbed the ladder to the tree house, just like he did every morning. When he squeezed through the opening in the floor, he found Bill, sitting against the wall, reading an old issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, with Gill-Man on the cover. It was one of Tommy's favorites.

  "Hey," he said.

  Bill looked up from the magazine. "Hey."

  Tommy finished clambering through the opening. He brushed sawdust from his shirt and plopped down next to his friend. He searched through the pile of old comics and magazines, settling on a Famous Monsters with Wolf Man on the front.

  "Hey," Tommy said. "You think Wolf Man could beat up Gill-Man?"

  Bill sat the magazine in his lap and thought about the question. "Nope," he finally said.

  "Me, neither," Tommy said. "You know what tonight is?"

  Bill smiled. "Trick or Treat."

  "Yeah. It hardly seems like a year, huh?"

  "I know," Bill said. "Remember last year, when I went as Dracula and you went as The Mummy. That was the coolest!"

  "That wasn't last year," Tommy said.

  "Was, too."

  "Uh-uh. That was before."

  "Before?" Bill said, his face scrunched up in concentration.

  "Yeah."

  "Oh," he said. "Anyway, what would you be this year, if you could be anything you want?"

  "I don't know," Tommy said. "Maybe a pirate."

  "How 'bout a biker?"

  Tommy shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. If I could be a teenage werewolf biker."

  Bill laughed. "That would be neat."

  They returned to examining their magazines for a while, even though they had long ago memorized the articles and pictures. Later, Bill said, "So, are we going out tonight?"

  "We always do," Tommy told him. "It's Trick or Treat. We have to go."

  "I guess," Bill said.

  They passed the rest of the day in the tree house in Bill's backyard.

  ****

  That night they walked through the neighborhood, watching the other kids begging for candy.

  "Man, they look so little this year," Bill said through his plastic vampire fangs.

  "No kidding," Tommy said. He had left his mouth uncovered by the gauze wrapping of his mummy costume. As a fairy princess passed by them, Tommy looked into her plastic candy bag. "Boy! They're handing out the good stuff this year. She had a Snickers and a Baby Ruth."

  "Sure beats candy corn," Bill said.

  "Or those marshmallow peanuts," Tommy said, which cracked them both up.

  They followed the throngs of trick-or-treaters through the neighborhood, to the intersection of Main and Harrison. While all of the costumed kids turned left on Harrison, toward another street of lighted porches and smiling Jack O' Lanterns, Tommy and Bill hesitated. They gazed toward the darkened end of Main, as the whoop and din of excited children faded behind them, until all that seemed to remain of the world was the two of them.

  Then, without speaking, they started down Main Street, away from the light. They passed by the empty barbershop, the drugstore (where many of the monster magazines had originally been purchased), the silent courthouse and the vacant lot, where they had both played baseball.

  They walked until they came to the bridge. It spanned a small tributary of the Ohio, little more than a creek, not very deep at all.

  Just deep enough.

  They stepped carefully onto the bridge. Both boys peered over the rail, to the blackened water below.

  "It was really cold, wasn't it?" Bill said.

  "Yeah."

  "I'm sorry I slipped."

  "I know," Tommy said. "It wasn't your fault. It was slick that night."

  "We didn't have to take the shortcut," Bill said. "We could've gone the long way around to Washington Street"

  "We were trying to get done by eight, remember?"

  "Oh, yeah. Well, you didn't have to jump in after me, you know."

  Tommy shrugged. "That's what best friends do. You would've done the same thing for me."

  "Would not."

  Tommy playfully punched Bill in the arm. "Would too."

  "Yeah, I guess so. Thanks for trying to save me."

  They stared silently at the dark water for a few moments.

  "Come on," Tommy said. "Let's go."

  They walked back to Bill's house, where they would climb up to the tree house and wait for another Halloween, best friends forever.

  Forever twelve years old.

  PRAWN

  James R.Cain has had stories and poems published in over 90 publications, including the anthologies COLD FLESH, LURKING FEAR, COLD GLASS PAIN and CLOAKED IN SHADOW. His novel EK CHUAH is due to be published in the USA in 2006. Visit him online at: www.darkanimus.com/cain.html.

  * * *

  Eva spun into a million nightmares and each of them the same: falling down an endless passage, a dervish spinning out of control, hitting walls, striking bottom to drown in a sea of mucus. Then she was free and falling again, repeating the journey, ever into darkness, and her one thought was this: Why did I eat that friggin' prawn?

  Eva twisted in a fugue with her senses made dull from fear's inexorable blows. Her skin became a chitinous shell and adhered to her bones, and the organs became twisted, writhing things, bloated slugs that stirred awake within her being. Eva's eyes-God her eyes!-twitched animate, and slowly rotated in their sockets, bulged outward like inflated balloons.

  Eva hit bottom, ploughed into a tar sea, and there she floundered. Her strength dissipated like windblown steam. She gyrated in spasm through the mire. Slowly, slowly waded to the shallows where shock dry-humped her limp.

  There she slept. In time, she dreamt again.

  Eva dreamt of a land of acid-scarred forests, and a million axe-wielding manikins came towards the trees. They began copping in frenzied abandon, expressionless, stripping the trunks in a gale of sticks and leaves. The manikins continued their work until the landscape became a wasteland of mud and kindling pyres. They set fire to the stacks with laser vision - red threads that ignited the wood, and the land became a semblance of hell with fires belching smoke. This continued for an age, and the pyres crumbled to heaps of steaming embers. The ash blew away leaving a world that was as crisped and parched as the Martian desert. A world of contaminated earth where once a forest had been, a place where starving children choked on the air.

  Eva wept to see that awful place, knowing how things should be, could be . . .

  She lay there for God knows how long-a day, a year, a millennium?- and in her inertia, Eva's body crystallised into amber. She became a driftwood log with dead flies petrified into her face-she could feel the lumps. A roach crowned her shoulder like a 3D tattoo.

  Why?

  Why?

  Why?

  Time festered. Eva didn't understand how she'd come to be in this cave of wetness and damp. Her last, nay, her only memory was of dinner with a preacher man in an ash-black suit. The preacher had worn a wide-brimmed hat and clutched a tattered bible in his sunbaked fist. He'd thrown it onto the white cotton tablecloth and opened to a passage, stabbing at the text while ordering lentil soup.

  "Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgement upon all, and to convict all the ungodly among them of all the deeds they've ungodly committed."

  The preacher had a harelip. Pigeon eyes lay in a hollow beneath his brow, and his eyebrows were wire clouds. He berated Eva for sin while he sipped and dribbled soup from his spoon-sin Eva had never known nor committed.

  "Sin's inherited you see," the preacher man said in a Southern accent, watching with a birdie gaze. "Each man or woman's condemned by God before they're ever born. Justice, ya see? You Missee, are in dire need of salvation this night."

  "Salvation from what?" Eva asked. "God?"

  The preacher snapped off a reply with a flick of his wrist. Eva couldn't quite remember what he'd said, only that she'd remembered thinking it was strange that God should design u
s for destruction.

  "Perhaps the religions have misunderstood?" she'd said. "Perhaps man cast the Creator in his own hateful reflection?"

  The preacher snatched up his bible, said Eva would burn and that hell had a particularly nasty spot for blaspheming women.

  Then there was the prawn, a lonely red prawn with its spiky head watching Eva from off her fork. The prawn had sat there in an orange-beige seafood sauce, and looked up at Eva with its peppercorn eyes. "Tonight, he'll come for you," it whispered. "Tonight, you'll know your dreams and sweep up the world." The prawn wriggled on the utensil and winked a rounded eye.

  "Do prawns have eyelids?" Eva asked aloud.

  The prawn squirmed while the preacher searched his bible. "To do this, you'll most certainly have to die. Bite me and be done!"

  Eva bit down in annoyance as the preacher man recited from Revelations-bit and wished all religion away.

  Now, here she was. Floundering in a bog of filth.

  "I'm altering," she said.

  She was aware of her body metamorphosing beneath the part of her body she'd once called a neck. It was ironic to Eva, that God was commanding this farce, and enjoying her pain.

  Time became a dull monologue. Eva found she could move, slightly at first, and then she gained some momentum. In a moment of shocked incredulity, Eva saw she'd adopted a squid-like form. She was an amorphous entity with a mouth slithering around a lake of mucus-tar. She came to experience pleasure in the simple act of movement and left ripples in her wake. A myriad of eyes awakened all around Eva's skull, blinking alive to take in her world.

  The cave had two arched vaults. The ceiling and walls periodically contracted and billowed out, raining gel from the roof. As Eva swum, the world awakened into life.

  Bone-white orbs emerged from the walls, peeling away as oysters with snapping maws. Their mouths were filled with pinprick teeth and they had dull impressions for eyes. They swept upon Eva as a swarm, slapping, biting, gnashing her shell and limbs. They gnawed Eva's suckers in a desperate frenzy . . .

  Eva tried to beg God for mercy, but found her mouth had dissolved. Her tongue fumbled against a flat plate of skin where a mouth and lips had been. That worm of muscle probed against an inner surface of iron, tried to force release, but none came. Eva couldn't breathe, couldn't gasp, had no outlet for terror. A keening roar began in her brain . . . a vibration that threatened to explode.

  Eva's body arched. She arose and separated from the sea-Venus risingpropelled by the torment of her chewed nerves. Bony orbs gnashed all over as Eva levitated upwards. Her survival instinct revived and pulsated as a jet heart within her chest.

  Blobs adhered to every inch of Eva's skin, an ulcerous cloak of parasites . . . and as they chewed, they adopted Eva's image. Little faces formed on Eva's tentacles and slippery torso, mocking reflections that resembled a woman Eva had once known and recognised as herself: Eva in her younger years.

  Eva pivoted. She began to spin quickly, quickly, rising towards the ceiling, gyrating. Her tentacles were pulled outwards by the centrifugal force of her motion, and the Eva faces were flung away. Light speared outwards and erupted from the centre of Eva's being-a magnesium flower destroying the cave's shadows-and Eva transmuted into a furious star.

  She detonated from within.

  An event horizon evaporated the orbs from Eva's body. Sparks and fire lanced her skin.

  Eva split.

  A shrunken twin separated from Eva's side, gaining form and substance as it split away and spun also. Eva knew glorious release as she watched her sister born, and as the pair spun in harmony. Then twin split and the children spun and split, spun and split, and each generation was slightly different than the rest.

  Eva was both amazed and satisfied as her progeny were born around her. The noise of birthing becoming a song, a high-pitched squeal of life that called to the universe, and Eva was the centre of it all. The chasm became crowded with the birthing sisterhood, and each child looked towards its mother, the goddess of their kind. Each called towards Eva with semi-translucent eyes radiating happiness.

  Eva saw each bore a semblance to her-an eye here, a chin there, an ear perhaps? Each slightly different but yet she felt, the same. Parts of a greater whole perhaps? A jigsaw, the pieces of which were being thrown to the wind. Parts somehow more and yet less than the whole.

  The sisterhood formed a whirlpool and began to howl around in a gale, each child alight, multiplying within the storm. Some collided into the walls and were thus absorbed-flashes of incandescent light marked their passing. The white-teeth orbs were slaughtered-images of Eva's face lay in charnel mounds in the bog.

  Eva came to think of her progeny as angels, and the angels plunged into the walls of the chasm, assaulting it with flaying limbs and tentacles, detonating in bursts of light until the cave began to quake and shudder. The walls contracted in jerks, then quivered and the ceiling yawned upwards to form a sphincter that sucked and billowed fresh atmosphere into the cave. A great many of Eva's children were drawn away this way, born up and into the world beyond the stars, multiplying as they rose. They cramped the passage above in a rush-the way Eva had originally fallen. The angels destroyed the gates of their imprisonment and left them a gaping ruin through which freedom beckoned.

  Eva was content.

  Her children continued to pour away as she gave herself to the maelstrom-the birthing process was painless now. Eva knew fulfilment with each birth.

  An understanding crept up from the innermost recesses of Eva's being: This is how it was always intended to be.

  Titillation like treacle engorged each cell in Eva's body as the children commenced a harmonious symphony within her mind. Her children throbbed light-a universe of birthing stars-and each hesitated momentarily before rushing upwards to fill the world-that place of past essence.

  "It's how things should be," Eva said and knew the truth of her statement.

  A thread of knowledge came to mind, words from the preacher man: "Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgement upon all, and to convict all the ungodly among them of all the deeds they've ungodly committed."

  "The Lord or me," said Eva and in wondering knew.

  A cold speck formed in one limb. The speck travelled up Eva's extremities leaving stone in its path, and a dire chill caused Eva to tremble. Uncontrollably she shuddered, and grew numb, then slowly, slowly . . . she returned to the tar in which she'd formed.

  Eva rested in that corpulent bed. Faces-her own-leered around her with filmed-grey eyes. The slime was warm as it embraced her. Eva submitted to its touch . . . breathed in the pall that clung on the dead.

  Threads of night scrawled across her sight.

  The last of her children were spawned and flying away.

  Continents of ash formed in Eva's body and clogged her heart. Regions of life quaked and began to blink away.

  Into nothing.

  "The prawn was right," Eva said with a gasp.

  She'd realise her dreams just never in her life understood them.

  Tomorrow would be a better day.

  Her children would not leave the world unchanged.

  AFTERLIFE

  Novelist Karen Sandler's romance fiction has been published internationally in countries as diverse as the UK, Denmark, The Netherlands, Australia and Estonia. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists and always garner favorable reviews from critics and fans. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in the horror anthology THE BLACK SPIRAL and the Canadian science fiction and fantasy magazine, NEO-OPSIS.

  * * *

  Syd "the Kid" Denton smirked as he prodded the inert form of Joey Fratantonio lying at his feet. The tang of gunpowder hung in the air, and smoke drifted from Syd's still warm gun barrel.

  Syd hitched worn black denims up on his skinny hips and scanned Joey's cruddy little apartment. Everything was jake; no witnesses, no evidence whatsoever that Syd had done the deed.

  A clean hit. Surely this t
ime, Mr. Russo would see that Syd was ready for bigger and better things.

  Then Joey's ghost slithered out of his body.

  "Holy shit!" Syd squeaked, nearly dropping the gun.

  The ghost bumbled around the shabby living room, jumping back each time its insubstantial form passed through a piece of tacky furniture. It took Joey's spirit a full minute to realize the croaked body on the floor was his.

  Joey's incorporeal hands flew to his ethereal face, his mouth a quivering "O." Then he looked up from his useless carcass to Syd standing there with the gun.

  Joey aimed a misty finger at Syd. "You!"

  Syd stared at the spirit, then at the corpse on the floor. He shrieked in frustration, swiping at Joey's ghostly form.

  Joey stumbled away and passed through a table lamp with a sizzle. He shook off the electricity, then staggered toward Syd again. Four steps away, Joey flickered, scattered, and disappeared.

  "Oh shit, oh shit," Syd whined as he tucked away his gun and ran from the apartment. He paused in the basement just long enough to unload the gun and dump it in the incinerator. Back behind Joey's building, he tossed the gun's magazine into the dumpster.

  "Why me," Syd moaned as he raced across the street, dodging taxis. "Why now?"

  Seven years ago, it had started a near-riot when the ghost of a murdered preacher appeared at his killer's trial. The brouhaha went clear to the Supreme Court before the judge agreed to accept the returner's ghostly testimony. Since then, hundreds of returners had popped up to accuse the guilty, but randomly enough to make even the coldest killer's finger waver on the trigger.

  But Syd had been so damn sure it would never happen to him. He'd aced hit after hit without a single ghost. Until now. Until Joey Fratantonio.

  And if Joey followed the returner pattern, he'd be on Syd like a leech until Syd gasped his last.