Within five seconds Mateo was as alone in the alley as he’d ever been, with no other sound but a can skittering along the pavement in the nighttime breeze. The harsh glare of the streetlamp nearby cast its usual stark shadows. He hadn’t thought to check whether the horned thing had a shadow or not.

Mateo went back inside La Catrina, shut the back door, and leaned against it.

I’m not insane. I’m not. Easy to say. Hard to believe, given that he had just seen a monster, which had then vanished in a way he associated more with science-fiction movies than real life.

But whatever he’d just seen—it didn’t feel like one of his dreams. He was awake. Aware. That hadn’t been a vision of the future, or even a nightmare. It had been very solid. Very near.

Except for the part where it vanished, he told himself. Come on. That couldn’t have been real.

Quickly he turned back to his final tasks at La Catrina for the night. If he concentrated on his chores, then he wouldn’t have to think about what he’d seen. Or not seen. Maybe he could even forget about it.

Side work finally done, Mateo folded his black apron and hurried back out to his motorcycle. Right now all he wanted to do was get home. He didn’t see the horned thing again; at first he thought whatever weird thing had happened to his brain had ended.

But things weren’t back to normal.

Something about Captive’s Sound had … changed.

When he looked upward, it was as if there were a film between him and the stars overhead—like a grimy window between the town and the sky. And it was as if there were a deep, dark line in the ground, curving along the street as far as he could see in either direction. A fault line, he wanted to call it, except that it was visible and invisible at the same time. Mateo stretched one foot toward it, a kind of experiment, but the road felt perfectly smooth underneath. Yet there was this odd sensation, almost like vibration, that came up from it.

A stray cat nearby hissed at him and darted away. Mateo often put milk or leftover scraps of the fish tacos out at the end of the day; the strays knew him, sometimes curling about his legs so fondly that he had to shoo them off before he could straddle his motorcycle. Did even the cats see that something was wrong with him?

Is this what it’s like? Going insane?

Mateo put on his helmet, got on the bike, and revved the motor. He needed to get home. Once he was home, he’d feel better. He had to.

The ride was even weirder, though. The farther he drove through Captive’s Sound, the worse it seemed. Those strange lines in the roads—they were everywhere, and he had to remind himself to focus on traffic instead of the ground to keep himself from having a wreck. And some of the houses had a strange, watery light around them, as if they were melting. It was like being in a Van Gogh painting: colors too bright, perspective skewed, and the sense that everything was being broken down into pieces.