Four Souls of Eve

By Christa Carmen

It’s All Hallows’ Eve, a night when the door between the physical and spiritual worlds dissolves. It’s also the night before Eve’s wedding to Jack, and she is surprised to find herself visited by four spirits, the ghosts of ex-boyfriends past. The spirits’ souls require propitiation, which Eve can provide at the expense of a portion of her own soul, payable on the first Halloween after her death. Banking on her sentimentality, the spirits appeal to Eve’s more positive memories of each relationship, and Eve has to grapple with her destructive habit of putting others before herself.

Frank Quattrochi was Eve’s first love, until the cigarettes he smoked with a mad compulsion became a series of nails in his coffin. Paul Abello had seemed like the perfect man before Eve discovered that the smooth talking and the clever backstory were covers for a raging heroin addiction. She liked to think Jared Dewar had tricked her into making the same mistake twice, but in hindsight, Eve wasn’t sure how she’d missed all the same signs of drug addiction in a man she loved. And Adam Barclay – well, the last Eve had checked, Adam Barclay was still alive, but Adam had apparently been serious when he said he couldn’t live without her.

The spirits rattle their chains in what they hope are performances worthy of Eve’s acquiescence, and midnight is fast approaching. In the course of making her decision, Eve realizes that her most disagreeable relationship may not be dead and buried after all. Can she slip past the four souls that have gathered on her balcony before they can talk her into something she regrets?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frith Books
• Release date: Oct 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781907623615

Christa Carmen

Christa Carmen lives in Westerly, Rhode Island with her fiancé and a beagle who rivals her in stubbornness. Her short stories have appeared in Devolution Z Horror Magazine, Jitter Press, Corner Bar Magazine, Literally Stories, Fiction on the Web, The J.J. Outré Review, pennyshorts, the DreamFusion Press anthology, The Book of the Macabre, and WolfSinger Publications' Just Desserts. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in English and psychology, and a master's degree from Boston College in counseling psychology. Christa works for Pfizer in Clinical Trial Packaging, and at a local hospital as a mental health clinician.

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Four Souls of Eve by Christa Carmen 

Published by Frith Books © 2016 Christa Carmen. All rights reserved. 

www.christacarmen.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-907623-61-5

Cover design by Anna Reith © Frith Books 2016

Original art by Tithi Luadthong tithi-luadthong.pixels.com

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Four Souls of Eve

Christa Carmen

Dedicated to John, whom no supernatural being in the world could keep me from marrying.

EVELYN JACOBS KNEW HOW THAT OVERDONE, overblown Ebenezer story went. The Muppets, other holiday specials and parodies aside, last December she’d found herself in the third row for a local theater group’s take on the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future and, while the acting had sucked—the arrogant, morbidly obese kid she’d gone to high school with now owned the company and had cast himself as Ebenezer—it had gotten the story across well enough.

Eve was not only skeptical of the existence of ghosts; she found the prospect of an apparition visiting you with the intention of saving your soul while you were in your nightgown unlikely. Hell, her grandfather was a real-life Scrooge and Eve would have bet the equivalent of the man’s fortune that, if a ghost proposed he share his wealth and promote good cheer or be cast into an early grave, the old man would have knocked the spirit right back out of whatever window it had gained admittance through.

So Eve thought that Dickens’ old penny-pincher was a fine morality tale to tell the kiddies, but