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labored breathing. Hard heels pounded concrete. The pace quickened.
    Backlit by the streetlight, the silhouette appeared to be Tim's size and weight, six feet and lean. But his outline was unusual. He wore a dark cape that billowed behind him as he ran. A romantic desperado barreling down a back alley.
    With his bad eye, Crowe didn't want to encounter a caped stranger in a narrow passageway at this hour. So he stepped back beside a dumpster and crouched down, smelling the fetid odor of rotting trash, his elbows and back flush against a brick wall. If the runner didn't turn his head as he passed, he wouldn't see Crowe.
    The runner flew by, his cape flapping, shoes slapping pavement. His hard breathing suggested fear. This wasn't a typical jogger, not down a dark alley where you could barely see in front of you and easily stumble on debris. Despite the dark, the man's most salient feature was his bright white face. White and smooth as a shiny moon.
    Crowe kept still. The footsteps faded, as did the runner's outline. Then the runner stopped on the concrete, his shoes sliding and scraping on pebbles or sand. What followed gave Crowe a start. The runner stood by the theater's rear exit, banged on the heavy door with the sides of his fists. A dull, thumping sound of flesh against metal. He beat it like a tympani drum. As Crowe listened, a single word came to mind: desperation.
    The runner cried out to no one, "Back in. Let me back in." From afar, he suggested a deranged moviegoer. Mad for movies.
    The pounding continued. A half minute later, the scene shifted. Crowe sensed that he and the runner were no longer alone. Something else had entered the top of the alley, heading toward the theater. It moved unseen in the darkness, like a wisp of wind, making an almost indiscernible humming sound.
    The runner ceased his barrage on the door. From fifty yards away, Crowe could hear the runner taking gulps of oxygen, until something spooked him. The stranger left the theater and raced toward the other end of the alley. Footsteps faded.
    Crowe listened intently, heard nothing. He stepped out from his hideaway by the dumpster and headed up the alley, past a row of trash cans, toward the streetlamp. The blue bubble bounced inside his eye as he walked. He needed to see Rayne, or just get home. He needed to exit this dark, depressing tunnel.
    He hustled up to the lamp set on a tall post. The gray light illuminated a short cross street that bordered a cemetery dating back to 18th century colonial America. In the daylight, the engravings on some of the weather-beaten headstones were barely legible. A visitor could scarcely read the names and dates, like decades-old coins too long in circulation. Mother Nature could be unkind to the written word. At night the thin stone slabs beyond the iron fence were simply gray disks in the dirt beneath skeletal tree branches. Tim saw macabre surfboards stuck in the sand, imagined a corpse riding a wave on a tombstone, bony arms extended.
    Crowe walked alongside the spiked fence toward the intersecting street. Cars rumbled by, their headlights piercing the night. The sweet scent of moist earth and decaying leaves lingered over the grassy graveyard, but that soon gave way to exhaust fumes punching the air. When he reached the corner, he noticed something in the distance and stopped in his tracks.
    He flashed on the eerie cashier perched inside the theater box office. This—this had to be a Halloween stunt. An elaborate prank.
    The object approached him from down the street. It flew through the air, just above the telephone poles, at the speed of an unhurried boy on a bicycle. At first he mistook it for an enormous black bird, larger than a California condor. It closed the gap from where he stood, reminding him of a dinosaur, a flying reptile with a wingspan of at least twelve feet. It appeared to be gliding on extended wings, sailing directly above traffic.
    Two teenage zombies in torn clothes rocketed off the