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she'd left it, turned away from the door, beyond the hanged man.

    "Fine," he said. His hand touched hers—
touched hers
—as he picked up the wire and stretched it out. "Fine," he repeated. Then, moving quicker than she'd have thought possible, he wrapped the wire around her neck and began to squeeze.
    Ashley clawed at his face, but that just made him tighten the wire even more brutally.
    "Stupid girl," he hissed into her ear. "I hate stupid, treacherous girls."
    He jerked the wire with each word until the room was spinning. She clawed at her own neck, trying to get her fingers beneath the wire, away from her throat, but it was cutting into her, cutting off her breath, cutting off her ability to think—except for the one thought over and over,
How can this be? How can this be?
—until there were no thoughts anymore, no breath, no...

    Morgan Roehmar let the girl's dead body slump against his and felt the excitement that killing always brought. She
was
stupid. Why in the world did she assume a ghost would choose to look the way its body had looked at the moment of death—all bloody or diseased? Or old? He much preferred to take on the form of the way he had looked at seventeen—the age of the boys he'd killed. But that had been a mistake, killing boys, he now knew, thinking of the woman who had betrayed him to the police, thinking of this one.

    He was stronger, now that he'd killed her, and he'd get stronger with each additional death. Already he was no longer limited to the area where the porch had been, where he'd died. Though he had no access to a chain saw, or to plastic bags, he did have time, before people would come with their damn lights that would scatter him in the air. He laid her out on that bale of hay beneath the mannequin with the knife, with her peasant dress arranged artfully about her, her hands folded just below her bosom, the earpiece over her head, the battery-pack wire entwined around her fingers the way a funeral home placed rosary beads.
    Nice and neat.
    Ready for her friends to find her.
    For there was nothing, Morgan Roehmar thought, worse than a messy dead body.

Only on All Hallows' Eve
    As far as Martin could tell, the village of Farnham was too small to have anything interesting ever happen. Sixteen years of living in Farnham was enough to make anyone's brain begin to slumber, but Martin was determined not to let this happen to him, as it had so obviously happened to all the elders of the village, and to so many of his kinsfolk, and was now beginning to happen to his age-mates.

    Even his cousin Raleigh, who had always been good for thinking up schemes and pranks and ways to get out of working any more than was absolutely necessary, even Raleigh was no longer fun. Lately he was taken with Lissa, the blacksmith's daughter, and all of a sudden he was concerned about not looking foolish, or lazy, and he was absorbed with searching out opportunities to talk with her, and—failing that—to talking
about
her.
    It was enough to make Martin a bit desperate.
    The last almost-exciting thing to happen in Farnham was during the summer when old man Tomlin had run away from home to join the army—or, depending on who was telling the story, to get away from his old scold of a wife, Elfirda.

    Yet when Martin expressed the thought that maybe army life would be more appealing than farming, Raleigh—who seemed intent on turning into someone's grandmother—countered that no one ever thought to see old Tomlin alive again. Soldiering, he said, was sure to get a body killed much faster than boredom ever did.
    Then, in the fall, as the season of harvesting was drawing to a close, and a long, hard winter of cold days and dark nights was all there was to look forward to, a holy man named Brother Wade came to the village.
    Farnham was too small to have a church or a priest, but occasionally preachers would visit and use Martin's father's tavern as a gathering place to give their sermons. The fact that Brother