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A pop-up Halloween mask-maker whose one unsold mask never fit anyone finally puts it on at closing time, locks the shop from the outside, and walks into the night wearing second skin.

Something under the porch narrates Halloween night while kids leave candy and parents kill the light, patient longer than both, winning by waiting instead of chasing.

A real music only gatekeeper salts his door, hangs a cross, and calls in the purists to cast the song out like a haunting, until his own 3 a.m. replays give him away, because if it ain't real, why is he so scared of it and why does he know every word.

The lone survivor of a lake house massacre hid in the crawlspace and listened to him walk, then buys the house twenty years later, learns every board by heart, and on Halloween night she is the one who walks slow.

A deadpan narrator walks through a crime boss's funeral naming all six pallbearers and what each one stole, the letters handed out at the grave expose every one of them, and the casket turns out to be full of river sand because the man in the gray hat telling the story is Ray himself.

The city itself narrates 3:15 a.m., the manhole steam, the bodega cat, the names on the bridge rail, then turns its streetlights, dogs, sparks and sirens on a man stalking a woman on the fourth floor, and by sunrise everyone thinks the night was calm.

Two Pittsburgh goths call in for concert tickets and win second prize, four August nights at a Miami Beach resort, where they suffer through foam parties, fishnet sunburns, and a waiter who keeps telling them to smile, until a thunderstorm clears the beach and they finally dance in the rain with eyeliner down to their elbows.

Six minutes in the Shroud and one more chest too many, so a looter dies with a full bag at zero, wakes at the Flame Altar in rags, crafts a wand from two Bones, and sprints back through the fog for his tombstone, only to spot another chest on the way out.

Deep in the Kindlewastes Hollow Halls, a survivor finds a page from an undead child remembering a mother's candles, a saffron-dyed orange blanket, and sweetened chamomile, and having woken alone too, reads it out loud, lights every corner, and promises to come back for the child.

A $2 tape with a 1994 ghost on it. He does the taxes now.