The door swings open the moment that you put your hand on the knob. It pulls you out and you are falling into darkness. You are falling falling falling down a fire escape. Ouch, those iron rails sort of hurt. Your bruises are gonna have stripes. Can't they make these things out of wood and polystyrene foam? A naked lady is coming up the stairs with a whole lot of packages in her arms. You try to open your mouth to offer some help carrying them home and she says "You'll have to ask my Pa about that." Never mind her Pa, you open your arms to embrace her but she ducks to the left and you keep on falling. You feel a 16 oz. can of salt pork hit you on the back of the head and hear a high pitched giggle. You try to stop falling but nothing helps. Eventually, though, the building runs out of steps. You dust yourself off and notice that your head is buzzing. It is that last moment of sunset. You decide to go on a mosquito rampage. You need to stop that buzzing. You run around the street squinting in the dark, jumping and slapping your hands together at the clouds of mosquitoes. You kill so many that your hands are smeared with blood and skeeterwings. You get so good at it that folks come out of the Bucket of Blood to watch you. Strange that they are not cheering but mostly mumbling so low that you cannot quite pick out the compliments. Never mind, you know how good you are. You have skills they can't deny. Thirsty and sweaty as you are, you can't stop killing bugs. You are having too much fun. Suddenly the world's biggest bat swoops over to you and hovers right in front of your eyes. "Hey bat." The thing just looks at you, unblinking. "Nice night." The bat has stopped flapping its wings, yet still hovers in front of you. "Oh gosh," you think, "bats eat bugs." You have been squishing all of their food. And if a giant bat can't eat bugs, what is it going to eat? Don't these things eat only at dusk? For a moment you wonder if a bat could really have an eleven foot wingspan. If it has an eleven foot wingspan, how big is its toothspan? Then you look closer at the thing. It is darker now, but the bat seems to be crumbling into pieces of smaller bat. Aha, there is no such thing as a giant bat, it is only a bunch of bats in formation. Tricky indeed. You weren't scared, though, just interested from a scientific perspective. Any second now you will swat those guys away. As you stare, the stunt bat formation crumbles even further, into smaller pieces. And now it has become white and ghostly. You see that the small bats aren't even bats, they are moths in bat formation. But what do moths eat? Oh sheesh, they could eat just about anything. "Never mind about how nice the night is, man. I'm done talkin' to you anyway." You realize how nice it would be to carve your name into the plywood bar inside the Bucket of Blood. That seems wise. To go back to your half glass of beer, go to page 18. Or you could try your luck across the street at the Black Rock Eel Hotel. They got a bar in there. You wanna do that? Go to page 15.