The sun soaked the room with warmth and light, burning away the cold darkness that fed on the couple's nightmares.

The city, once the jewel of the region, had by then become little more than a moldering corpse.

A cold chill slowly crawled up my spine as my eyes began to adjust in the half-light of the old building and the outlines of something vaguely human came into focus.

"Halloween is half as scary as this year's election," Irene said, turning off the television.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I couldn't look away from the door as the strange scraping noise continued just outside my room amid a growing smell of putrescence and freshly dug earth.

Suddenly, her absence hit him like a sharp, deep physical pain even though she'd been dead for years.

There were so many problems in the world, but none of them were hers.