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 Read Free Book Online

that exact shade of blue.” She tickles the baby’s fuzzy scalp and smiles.
    I try to turn my head away from her, because the whites of her eyes are almost blinding me, but I can’t hide from the grief clawing up my throat.
    The girl touches my arm, but her skin seems much darker. The world shudders, and I remember where I am.
    “Are you okay?” Kaapi asks. I say nothing, instead choosing to watch her silently from under the shadow of the leaf. She leans in closer to me, and the moonlight reflects off of her eyes so brightly I can hardly see her irises. Instead, I see two reflected images of my own hideous face, mocking me in her bone-white brightness. I force myself still, struggling to control the anger that skitters beneath my skin.
    “I am glad . . . to be dying with you,” she whispers.
    And then, she lifts the leaf.
    In that brief, naked moment I see the shock, the unwilling repulsion in her eyes. Unreasoning anger explodes from beneath my tingling skin. She falls back in the violently rocking canoe, but I lunge at her and grab her throat.
    “I told you not to look!” I yell. “Why did you look?” Hot tears leak from my eyes onto her face.
    “I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t know . . . ”
    “Didn’t know what?” She is going limp beneath my hands, but I cannot seem to stop myself. She has stopped struggling.
    “You have his eyes,” she says, so softly I can barely hear her.
    Abruptly, I let her go. She collapses on the bottom of the boat.
    You have his eyes.
    The dead eyes of a soulless god, whose only joy is death.
    Kaapi awakes briefly, when we are minutes away from the falls. She doesn’t speak—but the roar of the water would make it impossible to hear her, anyway. I hold her head in my lap, rigidly keeping my eyes off of her ruined neck. She can’t seem to move her legs or arms, or even feel when I touch them.
    She smiles. I catch the tears that leak from the corners of her eyes and lick them from my fingers.
    “We’re about to go over,” I say, though I know she can’t hear me.
    Her still-loving stare punishes me, sears my insides until I wish I could vomit my self-revulsion into the churning water.
    “I told you not to look,” I whisper.
    Her smile grows softer.
    Suddenly, I can no longer stand the thought of being on this boat, alone with that smile, those eyes. I toss myself over the edge, and the small boat capsizes. Kaapi cannot even move her arms, but her eyes still somehow indict me just before she sinks below the water that last time.
    I turn away from her and force my way across the current—the effort to reach the far bank exhausts even me, and I sit among the roots and mud, gasping in the damp air. I wonder, if I look over the edge of the falls, will I see Kaapi’s body? I want to look, but when I try to move I discover that my limbs no longer obey me. The sun rises behind the waterfall, but even that spectacular vision grows dimmer with each second. It takes me a long time—too long—to understand.
    I’m stopping.
    At the last moment I close my eyes. I remember Kaapi—not her eyes, or my guilt, but the simple, animalistic pleasure of her pounding into me, the ants skittering across my skin.
    I wish I were an ant. Dull eyes wouldn’t matter to me then. And if I died, I could just be squashed flat—a featureless smear on loamy earth that not even lightning could revive.

Under Cover of Night
Christopher Golden
    Long past midnight, Carl Weston sat in a ditch in the Sonoran Desert with his finger on the trigger of his M-16, waiting for something to happen. Growing up, he’d always played army, dreamed about traveling around the world and taking on the bad guys—the black hats who ran dictatorships, invaded neighboring countries, or tried exterminating whole subsets of the human race. That was what soldiering was all about. Taking care of business. Carrying the big stick and dishing out justice.
    The National Guard might not be