Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters by Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, China Miéville, Joe R. Lansdale, Cherie Priest, Christopher Golden, Al Sarrantonio, David Schow, John Langan, Paul Tremblay Page A

tiny stage, pounding out some vaguely familiar speed thrash.
    Kenny was in a corner. He waved, a long arm beckoning. I sauntered over, took a seat. He couldn’t have picked a darker corner of the bar. I couldn’t see Kenny at all, he was a hazy shape, shifting. Then he leaned forward and I saw his eyes, only his eyes, those same sad doe eyes.
    I flagged down a server, ordered some pitchers of beer. It was too damn loud to talk, so I drank and listened to the band. Kenny didn’t touch his beer. I drank enough for the two of us. Eventually, the band took a break, and I turned to Kenny, raised my glass. “Cheers,” I said. An arm snaked out, and we clinked glasses.
    I gulped down half a beer, wiped an arm across my mouth like a thirsty pirate. “Man, I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I really thought you were dead.”
    Kenny’s dark shadow stirred. I could smell seaweed. He spoke, and his voice vacillated between a watery tremble and a sonorous rumble. A voice of deep seas and even deeper night skies.
    “I’ve never been so alive,” he said. “Before, I never quite fit in. I was different. I don’t think I ever really belonged here. And I was right. There was something else out there. Something for me.” He gestured, and through the smoky darkness I caught a faint glimmer of an arm waving upward. “But it wasn’t up there,” he said. “It was the sea.” I imagined I heard a watery chuckle. “I’m a pirate, of sorts.”
    Then Kenny leaned in, across the table, and I saw him for what he’d become, for what he really was. “But even pirates get lonely,” he said.
    And I thought about what it means to be a friend, to be there for someone. Thought about what I was, what I’d become. Kenny was proof that people change. That I could change.
    So I took Kenny home.
    Kenny the Kraken smiled, wide. His mouth was large and deep and black. Dead things swam in its depths. His eyes were bulbous fish eyes, and they regarded me with sad, alien innocence.
    I reached over, plugged the sink, turned on the tap. Kenny lolled in the water. I plucked a can of sardines from the refrigerator and began to feed them to Kenny. It was the least I could do for my friend.

Underneath Me, Steady Air
Carrie Laben
    Rosemary’s is always this dark, but it’s a good dark. If you come here at night to drink with the hipsters and hipster-watchers, it’s illuminated by strings of year-round Christmas lights and the dull glow of the jukebox. If you come in the afternoon to drink with the old men with tracheotomies and slumped backs, the sun never reaches the third bar stool. Squint a little and you can believe you’re in a bunker underground. I still feel safe here, after everything.
    I drank at Rosemary’s with Ginger and Carol and Steve the night before. I started around five with the vague plan that I’d cut it off and leave myself plenty of time to sleep, since I had to work the next day. Then I started drinking to forget that I had to work the next day. Then I did forget that I had to work the next day.
    This is a long way of explaining why my story might sound unfocused, spotty. And, let’s be honest, self-centered. There’s nothing that inspires more self-centeredness than a hangover, and I was shitty hung over that day.
    I made it out of the house on autopilot, it hit me in the subway: tightness in the skin over my skull, feet irritable in my cheap-cute rubber rain boots, and most of all the blue pain of hunger in a slightly nauseated stomach. But I was two trains into the commute by then, which made it harder to turn back than to go on.
    The rain had mostly stopped by the time I got there. As I emerged from the subway station, I caught a flash of movement and looked up. I would have split my skull on the sun if it hadn’t been for a little cloud—a scrap of fog, really—just above the building that turned the light all pinkish-gray.
    As it was, I winced and blinked and, seeing nothing important, turned my focus back to the