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“Connor!” I shouted, pointing down in front. “Look!”

“I see it, kid,” he said, keeping his calm. “Don’t get all freaked-out marveling at it. Just be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” I asked, but I was already pulling out my bat. I had a pretty good idea forming in my head. If the fog from the movie could pour out into our world, I wondered what else could come through.

All three of us stood transfixed by what was happening on the screen. There was little we could do but watch as the movie flashed through several scenes in rapid sequence. Clips from a whole host of B-grade zombie flicks came up one after another. With each new one, creatures from each remained on the screen, pressing against it. Like swimmers coming to the surface, the figures pushed through the two-dimensional world and into ours.

“Did they—?” Jane started, but I cut her off.

“Yep,” I said and started off down our row to the aisle.

As the floor in front of the screen filled with cinematically manifested undead that kept pouring off the screen, the film changed images once again, this time coming to one steady setting. This time the film had more of an amateur home-video quality.

A field of green grass stretched along a horizon against a backdrop of cloudless blue sky. A lone figure came into the frame—young, dashing, and one that I had seen before thanks to my psychometry. Mason Redfield looked a lot better this way than when I had originally met him—old, dead, and filled with water.

He turned to the screen as if noticing it, and walked toward us in the type of tweed suit he had fancied in his youth. Like all the rest of the creatures manifesting in the theater, he pushed at the screen, but met more resistance from it than the others had. Mason reeled back from it, shocked, but I could tell from the expression of determination on his face that he wasn’t even close to giving up. He ran forward, slamming between film and reality like that old video for “Take on Me.” Sparks flew from the screen, raining down onto the assembled zombie army below. Several agents in the theater snapped into action and charged the horde down by the screen, but Connor, Jane, and I kept watching Mason Redfield up above.

Movement off to my left caught my eye and I looked over. Inspectre Quimbley had joined us, out of breath from running down from the projection booth. His eyes were also transfixed on the screen.

“Is that the Mason Redfield?” I asked him.

“Back from the grave, I believe,” the Inspectre said. “Trying to return to his youth, from the looks of it.”

The Inspectre’s old friend leapt at the screen, the screen erupting in sound and fury with a prismatic spray of color. The rejuvenated professor passed through it and landed along the tops of the front row of seats, very much alive and looking even younger than me. “Protect me, my beautiful monsters,” he shouted. “At all costs.” At his command, the aggression among the zombies rose, especially those who fell into a close, protective ring around the reborn professor.

The Inspectre continued down the aisle toward him. “Mason!”

Redfield was too busy staring at his own limbs to notice the Inspectre. He stood there balanced on top of the seats, flexing his arms and fingers around like they were unfamiliar to him. Eventually, he took notice of the Inspectre advancing on him and did a double take.

“Argyle?” he said with an astonished smile. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Mason.”

The Inspectre’s old partner’s eyes widened. “You’re so. . . old. . .”

“I think the salient point,” the Inspectre said, “is the fact that you’re so young.”

Mason Redfield looked around. “Where are we? Where are my students? This isn’t where I was supposed to be.”

“We beat them to it, I guess,” I said.

“They were supposed to retrieve the film,” he said, angry, but then he gave a dark laugh. “Students can be so unreliable.”

“What have you done, Mason?” the Inspectre asked. “What dark bargain have you struck . . . and why?”

Mason turned his attention back to