The curtain-thing staggered, regained its footing, and shoved the wallpaper back.

The two aspects of evil interior design circled each other warily, as the last of the shadows in the wall slipped away. Finally, the two presences began to punch each other. Somewhat ineffectually.

Hellboy shook his head, dropped the little trail of wallpaper he held and turned. He saw the shoving match between monstrous invocations of patterns, pushing each other like thirteen-year-olds in a playground. Still sitting down, scootching along backward on his haunches, Hellboy retreated slowly to the door, as the curtain-spirit kicked the wallpaper-spirit in the crotch.

"Oooh!" Everyone gathered around the monitor winced as the curlicue-thing doubled over, and the hair-creature swaggered closer, only for the enraged yellow manifestation to grab it in an incompetent wrestling hold and trip it up. All without a sound.

Hellboy opened the door, slipped out, and closed it again. A few feet from him, Abe, Liz, Kate, and Manning stared at a screen. He cleared his throat. They looked up, and gestured him over.

"Hey, big guy!"

"You got out!"

"Come check this!"

Hellboy steepled his fingers as best he could given the differences between his two hands.

"I have three questions," he said. "One. What was I doing in Liz's room? Two, why was something that looks like evil wallpaper squabbling with something that looks like evil curtains? And three." He looked slowly down at himself. At the extraordinarily filthy, yellow-smeared, ripped-up dress still hanging off his shoulders. "Three ..." he said, and fingered the material. "Whatever the answer to three," he said, "it never happened. Clear? We never speak of it."

"They're squabbling over you," Kate said. "Well, they were at first. Hellboy, come and watch. We can explain. Which do you thinks stronger: male dominance and social control, or cruel and sadistic vanity? I've got five bucks on misogyny. Abe's backing narcissism. At the moment they're pretty evenly matched a" ouch!" One of the decor-things scored some painful hit.

"Winner can buy me a pizza," Hellboy said. "I'm going back to the oxblood palace. Liz, you want your dress back?"

Contributors.

AMBER BENSON is the author of Death's Daughter, the first novel in an upcoming series from Ace Books. She co-created, co-wrote, and directed the animated supernatural web series Ghosts of Albion with Christopher Golden, followed by a series of novels including Witchery and Accursed, and the novella Astray. Benson and Golden also co-authored the novella The Seven Whistlers. As an actress, she has appeared in dozens of roles in feature films, TV movies, and television series, including the fan-favorite role of Tara Maclay on three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Benson wrote, produced, and directed the feature films Chance and Lovers, Liars, and Lunatics.

GARY A. BRAUNBECK is the creator of the critically praised Cedar Hill series of stories, novellas, and novels set in the fictional town of Cedar Hill, Ohio. His work has been translated into French, German, Russian, Japanese, and Italian. Among his most popular novels are Prodigal Blues, In Silent Graves, Mr. Hands., and the recent Coffin County (all set in Cedar Hill). His collections include the Stoker Award-winning Destinations Unknown, Things Left Behind, two volumes of The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, and the forthcoming Rose of Sharon and Other Dark Detours. He has received numerous awards for his fiction, including the International Horror Guild Award and three Bram Stoker Awards. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, author Lucy A. Snyder, and five cats who will not hesitate to draw blood if he forgets to feed them on time. To learn more about Gary and his work, please visit him online at www.garybraunbeck.com.

KEN BRUEN is the author of twenty-three novels, two-time winner of the Shamus award, and winner of the Macavity Award and the Barry. He holds a PhD in Metaphysics and lives in Galway, Ireland.

A two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award, MARK CHADBOURN is the author of eleven novels and one non-fiction book. His current fantasy sequence, Kingdom of the Serpent, continued with The Burning Man in April 2008. A former journalist, he is now a screenwriter for BBC television drama. His other jobs have included running an independent record company, managing rock bands, working on a production line, and as an engineers "mate." He lives in a forest in the English Midlands.

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the author of dozens of novels for adults, teens, and young readers, most recently The Lost Ones, Poison Ink, and (with Tim Lebbon) Mind the Gap. With Mike Mignola, he co-wrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, which they are currently scripting as a feature film. In the world of Hellboy, he has written three novels (The Lost Army, The Bones of Giants, The Dragon Pool), co-written the first B.P.R.D. miniseries (The Hollow Earth), and edited all three short story collections. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and three children. His original novels have been published in fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

CODY GOODFELLOW is the author of untold human suffering and three novels, Perfect Union, Radiant Dawn, and Ravenous Dusk. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Hot Blood, Horrors Beyond, and Daikaiju. He lives in a benign polyp in best-selling author John Skipp's sigmoid colon. (The view sucks, but it has an awesome hot tub.) *

Born in 1951, BARBARA HAMBLY is a native Californian, though she spent a year of college at the University of Bordeaux, France. She attended the University of California-Riverside, obtaining both a Master's Degree in Medieval History and a black belt in karate, both of which have been equally useful in the writing of fantasy novels. She has taught high school, assisted aerospace engineers with their grammar, modeled, and clerked at an all-night liquor store; she has written horror, fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels, media tie-ins, historical whodunits, and scripts for Saturday morning cartoon shows. She currently teaches one night a week at a community college. She is a widow who lives in Los Angeles.

RHYS HUGHES is a prolific writer of fantasy fiction. Born in Wales in 1966, he now lives in Spain. His intention is to write exactly 1,000 "items" of fiction and link them into one gigantic story cycle. His books include Worming the Harpy, The Smell of Telescopes, The Percolated Stars, The Less Lonely Planet, and The Postmodern Mariner. His most recent novel is Engelbrecht Again, a sequel to The Exploits of Engelbrecht, Maurice Richardson's classic series of stories about a "dwarf surrealist boxer" who fights clocks, zombies, witches, robots, and Martians.

BRIAN KEENE is the best-selling author of Ghost Walk Dark Hollow, The Rising, Ghoul Kill Whitey, City of the Dead, Terminal, and many more. Several of his short stories have been adapted into graphic novels and several of his novels are slated for film and video-game adaptations. The winner of two Bram Stoker awards, Keene's work has been praised in such diverse places as the New York Times, The History Channel, CNN.com, Publishers Weekly, Fangoria magazine, and Rue Morgue magazine. You can communicate with him online at www.briankeene.com or on MySpace at www.myspace.com/brian_keene.

JOE R. LANSDALE is the multi-award-winning author of over thirty novels and two hundred short stories, articles, essays, columns, and reviews. Many of his works have been optioned for film and television. His novella Bubba Ho-tep became a cult film by the same name, directed by Don Coscarelli, starring Ossie Davis and Bruce Campbell. Among his awards are two New York Times Notable Books, the Edgar, six Bram Stokers, the British Fantasy Award, and the Grinzani Prize for Literature.

CHINA MIEVILLE's novels include Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council, and Un Lun Dun (for younger readers). He has won the Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy Awards twice each. He lives in London and Providence.

MIKE MIGNOLA is best known as the award-winning creator/writer/artist of Hellboy, although he began working as a professional cartoonist in the early 1980s, drawing "a little bit of everything for just about everybody." He was also a production designer on the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire and visual consultant to Guillermo del Toro on both Blade II and the film version of Hellboy. He and del Toro co-wrote the story for the sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Mignola lives in southern California with his wife, daughter, and cat.

GARTH NIX was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia. A full-time writer since 2001, he has previously worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. Garth's books include the award-winning fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen; and the cult favorite young-adult science fiction novel Shades Children. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch, the six books of the Seventh Tower sequence, and the Keys to the Kingdom series. More than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world; his books have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, and The Australian; and his work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in a Sydney beach suburb with his wife and two children.

JOHN SKIPP remains one of America's most cheerfully perplexing Renaissance mutants: New York Times best-selling author turned filmmaker, satirist, cultural crusader, musical pornographer, splatterpunk poster child, purveyor of cuddly metaphysics, interpretive dancer, and all-around bon vivant. Although praised in recent years for his solo work (Conscience, The Long Last Call, and Mondo Zombie), Skipp is perhaps best known for his collaborative efforts with Craig Spector (The Light at the End, The Cleanup, The Scream, Dead Lines, The Bridge, Animals) and Marc Levinthal (The Emerald Burrito of Oz). "Second Honeymoon" kicks off a new phase of full-tilt collaboration with Cody Goodfellow. Upcoming work includes Jake's Wake, The Day Before, a diabolical secret graphic novel, and the long-awaited epic horror Freek.

STEPHEN VOLK was born in Pontypridd, South Wales. His first produced screenplay was Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, after which he went on to write scripts for US studios such as Universal, Columbia/Sony, TriStar, and MGM, including The Guardian for William Friedkin. He shocked the British nation in 1992 with the notorious "live" BBC TV Halloween-night drama Ghostwatch, and won a BAFTA for the magical short film The Deadness of Dad. His most recent feature credit is the psycho-horror road movie Octane starring Madeleine Stowe and Mischa Barton, while for television he created and was lead writer on two seasons of ITV1's multi-award-winning hit series Afterlife, about a troubled medium and an even more troubled psychologist. In 2006, his first short-story collection Dark Corners was published, from which '31/10' was nominated for both a British Fantasy and a Bram Stoker Award. He lives in Bradford-on-Avon, England, with his wife Patricia, a sculptor.

TAD WILLIAMS is a best-selling novelist whose work is published in more than two dozen languages and occasionally on cocktail napkins and matchbook covers. He has also written film, television, and comic books, all in much less exciting ways than you'd suppose. He believes strongly that Might Should not Make Right and that A Persons A Person, No Matter How Small. He also fervently supports changing Americas monetary standard to one based on cheese. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Deborah Beale, their two adorable, attack-trained children, three dogs who are all college graduates but live at home because they're having trouble finding work, and two cats that can't solve Sudoku puzzles worth a damn but keep on trying, which is probably admirable.

DON WINSLOW is the author often published novels, including A Cool Breeze on the Underground, The Power of the Dog, and The Winter of Frankie Machine. He lives on an old ranch in southern California with his wife and son.