For a moment I had an urge to hide. I looked around wildly, but there were only a few sparse trees near this part of the road. There were some deeper woods further back, but there was no way I could get to them before whoever was coming arrived. And on top of that Chaucer chose that moment to start squawking about the Witch of the Misty Woods again, which made the idea of ducking into a thicket of trees seem not so appealing.

A moment later a bright red sports car came tearing around the curve in the road and nearly clipped me. It came to a screeching halt a short way down the road as smoke wafted up from underneath the tires.

"Whoa, sorry dude, I didn't see you there," Antony Lebon Lacey said as he hopped out of the vehicle. He was dressed in the same zebra-striped spandex suit he'd been wearing the night before.

"Why don't you pay attention to where you're going?" I shouted. "And for God's sake, slow down!"

"Are you crazy?" Antony said. "This baby can go from zero to one twenty in five seconds. It would be an actual crime to drive it slowly." He took a drink from a beer can he was holding and let out a loud belch.

"You are truly a heathen, do you know that?"

"Thanks, man. My high school principal said the same thing. In fact, I got a Heathen tattoo on my stomach. You want to see it?" He yanked down the front of his already extremely low-cut suit to show off a truly hideous display.

"That says 'Heethan.' You've spelled it wrong."

"Oh, that's a bummer. I wasn't sure how to spell it. I told my artist Rat to just take his best guess."

"Lord help me," I palmed my face and shook my head.

"Anyway, I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad to see you, dude. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's something really weird going on."

"Yeah, I've gathered that. Everybody seems to have vanished into thin air overnight."

"Uh, yeah. Except it wasn't overnight."

"What do you mean it wasn't overnight?" I asked. "I was talking to you about your loud music last night, which you rudely refused to turn down, and then I went home, had a couple of glasses of wine, and went to bed. When I woke up this morning everyone was gone."

"Yeah, I thought the same thing at first. After you left the rest of the band came by my house. We had a jam sesh and then the party really started. But I guess I kind of pre-partied a little too hard because the last thing I remember is laying down for a minute in my bed with Tiffani and Traci and the next thing I knew I totally passed out. When I woke up the girls were gone and the house was completely empty. Plus all the cars were gone from the driveway except for mine."

"So your bandmates must have taken off and given your girlfriends a ride home," I said. "So what?"

"That's the thing. Everybody had been partying almost as hard as me. They wouldn't just leave. Trust me, I've known these dudes for a long time. They party until they drop. They would have just crashed wherever they could find a spare bed in my house. Or maybe just on the floor. And they wouldn't wake up until well into the afternoon."

"So they vanished into thin air like everyone else has. I agree with you that something odd is going on, but I still don't understand why you think it wasn't overnight."

"Look, the first clue I got was when I went to pour myself a bowl of cereal and noticed the milk had gone bad. I just had it delivered yesterday. It had an expiration date of September 14th."

"Okay, so you bought some not-so-fresh milk."

"Then on top of that, I had a bunch of fresh flowers that had just been sent to me by a fan. They were all dried up and dead."

"It doesn't surprise me that you can't take care of flowers," I said.

"But the real kicker is my watch. I paid top dollar for a Platinum edition Rolex watch with a rare perpetual calendar. It's the most accurate date keeper on the planet. And according to my watch today is October 31st."

I blinked my eyes a few times. This completely audacious claim had left me momentarily speechless. I finally mustered up a weak "That can't be right."

"It is right. Happy Halloween, bro. Hope you're stocked up on candy, although between you and me I don't think we're going to get a lot of trick or treaters this year."

"You're trying to tell me that we both slept for two months?"

"It looks that way, man."

I looked around at the trees. There was an unmistakable autumn color to their foliage that I somehow hadn't totally registered before. A breeze stirred up with a distinct chill to it. It rustled through the leaves and I watched a few of them fall from the trees. I didn't want to believe it, but something told me that Antony was telling the truth.

"Well I'll be a monkey's uncle," I said.

"Awk, monkey's uncle," Chaucer squawked.

"Whoa, that's a righteous bird you got there, man," Antony said, noticing Chaucer for the first time.

"Yes, he's a dear friend to me," I said. "Haven't seen him in a while, but for some reason he just decided to make an appearance.

"Where'd you get him from?"

"Just now? He showed up in a tree in town. But originally he was a gift from a voodoo priest I met while on a research expedition in Haiti."

"That's totally bitchin'," Antony said. "I used to own a collection of exotic snakes. We featured some of them in the video for Party Valhalla."

"Party what?" I asked.

"Come on, bro. You're joking, right? Party Valhalla? Our smash hit from our second album Bodacious Cannonballs? It was #1 on the Billboard hot 100 for five weeks in 1987?"

"Can't say I'm familiar with it," I sniffed.

"Were you living under a rock during the 80's? They were required by law to play it on the radio at least twenty times a day when it came out. You couldn't go to a high school dance or sporting event for months without hearing that song."

"Yes, well I eschewed activities such as those. They do not interest me in the slightest."

"Well eschews me then," Antony laughed. "You're a trip, bro."

"So what happened to your collection of exotic snakes?" I asked not knowing what else to converse with this cretin about.

"Oh yeah, they got confiscated by the county after my burmese python got loose and tried to strangle some kid in a wheelchair."

"That's horrific," I said.

"Yeah, but it's okay, man. They found my snakes a home in a reptile sanctuary and the kid was all right. I mean, aside from being wheelchair bound."

"Indeed. Well, all's well that ends well, I suppose."

"Yeah, man," Antony said.

We stood in an awkward silence for a moment before Chaucer squawked out "Happy Halloween!"

"So it seems like we've got ourselves in a bit of a predicament here, bro," Antony said.

"Yes, it does. It's really Halloween, isn't it?"

"Afraid so, man."

"How did we sleep for two months?"

"I don't know, bro. Maybe we're, like, Rumpelstiltskin or something. Aw, man, that just reminded me of my high school band, Rumpelforeskin."

"More distressingly, that's two months with nothing to show for it. I could have been working on my novel this whole time. Assuming I could have averaged five pages a day, I could have been around 300 pages into it! The ice cream could have been in the early stages of melting by now! What a colossal waste!"

"Ice cream melting?" Antony looked confused. "What the heck are you talking about, man? Wait, have you been smoking something? Are you holding out on me, dude?"

"It's just, uh, never mind. You wouldn't understand."

"You're right. I don't understand. I don't understand anything about what's going on right now. I don't know about you, but I'd like to get to the bottom of it. What happened on the night of August 31st to make us fall asleep for two months? And then what happened after that to make everyone disappear? Where did they go? What happened in September?"

"Awk," Chaucer squawked. "Beware the Witch of the Misty Woods."

Antony's face turned suddenly pale. "Oh no. Oh God, no."