Fat Larry looked down the dark road and shook his head. “I don’t know, Tommy. Looks like a pretty good distance.”

“What’s a matter,” Doug laughed, “afraid you’ll walk off a few pounds?”

Tommy shot the heavy boy a withering glare. “You could always stay with the car. Is that what you want?”

“Hell no,” he ruffled. “I was just thinkin’. . . .” but he trailed off and finally let the notion die. “Screw it,” he shrugged, dismissing the chill at the back of his neck. “Let’s go get those bastards. Nobody calls me Lard-ass.”

Each of them stuffed a few Halloween goodies into their jackets; then they shut the trunk and fished the last few beers from the cooler in the backseat and started down Sykes Road on foot. Within fifty yards the T-Bird was gone, swallowed by the darkness behind them.

Larry walked a few steps behind the others, unable to keep up with them or keep his eyes off the overgrowth all around them. The moon was a spotlight in the sky, so bright and clear he could almost see Jackie Gleason’s face in it, but a bank of clouds kept upstaging it and limiting their visibility to just the road before them. The fog seemed denser as well, and glowing.

He buttoned his jacket up around his neck and kept walking.

Tommy and Doug seemed caught up in their own worlds. Tommy was talking incessantly about a big-titted checkout girl at the IGA who’d had an eye on him earlier, while Doug matched him word for word with talk of carbs and headers and how it wouldn’t be long before his Ramblin’ Rambler was “street lethal.” Neither one of them seemed to notice the silence. But Larry did. There was not a cricket chirping anywhere. Not a frog, not a buzzing insect. Nothing. It’s just too late in the year, he tried to rationalize, too cold already for insects and reptiles. But he’d heard such sounds just hours before, when they dropped the Millers at the Danner gate.

“Hey, you guys? Maybe I really should wait at the car. My stomach . . .”

They both stopped and looked back at him. In the limited light Larry couldn’t tell whether Tommy was smiling or sneering. Tommy reached into his jacket, pulled out his mask, and slipped it over his head. It was a rubber face of Tor Johnson, the star of vintage grade-B horror movies; squat, bald as a bullfrog, the mouth agape, and the eyes rolled back as in his most memorable film roles. There, in the middle of a country road, at night, the dead actor’s blank countenance with a Daiwa cap perched atop it was curiously more unsettling than any of the other ghoulish masks from Tommy’s box. “Too late to back out, Larry,” Tommy said in a muffled voice. “We’re all in this.”