"Change is coming," began the preacher with a whisper, yet somehow every word rang loud to me. "A variation from the normal and accepted, a night of impossibility to challenge what most believe is right and probable. The Now and Today is in a state of disrepair, unworthy for those who know and believe..."

The preacher spread his arms apart atop the pulpit, a bird ready to take flight. It seemed to me a worthless gesture, yet I found I could not move as he continued his sermon. My wife, daughter and child now sat cross legged around his feet, gazing up smiling and blank as drool ran down their chins.

"Halloween is a time unlike others my dear children. Souls, like birds, become lost. As an old song goes, "Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air..."

His hands worked hypnotically, tracing strange shapes in the emptiness. The blackness of his clothing seemed to grow high around him, a halo from the pit.

"All borders shall be crossed on All Hallow's Eve. The lost shall return to the seekers, and men like these-" he motioned, pointing at me, "-will find new purpose in their lives that before lay dead and vacant."

He lept from the pulpit then, suddenly standing before me. Eyes like charcoal disected me as he lay a single, corpse-cold hand upon my shoulder. I stepped back, shuddering and writhing from that touch; it felt unclean, rotten, as if my life were being marked and twisted into something meant for the most terrible of ends.

He smiled. "The world you know will be nothing but a memory Peter. When I merge the worlds under the moon in scant days, you and your family will once again be whole. Dead...living....all will be together!" he rasped, throwing me a grin of teeth which had long ago gone to seed; each was black, withered down to something less than their roots.

He stepped toward me, his face melting away to something hellish as he once again reached out-

I saw my family, still gathered at the pulpit. Their eyes were gone, their flesh hanging off in yellow, sour ribbons. They were dead. Dead as the preacher. Seeing me. Wanting me.

They rose up then, sudden and without sound, shambling down the steps-

I ran from that place of ghosts screaming, fleing those eyes, trying to preserve my sanity and not die of a heart attack, the smell of old, decaying bodies and the sound of strange, watery laughter nipping at my heels....