"Look, Mommy!" A laughing child in a wizard's costume pointed up between the walls of the concrete
canyons. "The Man in the Moon has come to our party!"
His mother gazed up at the almost-full moon that hung over the city, its pale light given a faint orange
tinge by the pollutants in the air. A huge face had appeared on its surface—a gigantic head of a manbull, complete with horns.
The mother smiled. "It must be an advertising stunt, dear."
A ragged cheer went up as more people noticed the impressive face. A group of students
masquerading as zombies performed an impromptu dance in the middle of Main Street. Children out
to trick-or-treat clapped their hands in delight.
Several concession holders, camped out in their booths along the procession route, made a mental
note to complain to City Hall about their lack of advance information. What a great mask that face
would have made!
In his office high in Police Headquarters, Jim Gordon stood at his window, looking down on the city
below. His men were out in force tonight, but so far, so good. There had been virtually no arrests.
The disasters throughout the world had dampened everyone's spirits. Gordon found himself
comparing the partygoers to ostriches burying their heads in the sand rather than facing up to danger.
But maybe that was unfair. When people were afraid, they needed something out of the ordinary to
help them forget their worries.
Gordon's mind, however, kept straying to Cassandra's vision. She said the city would be destroyed at
midnight on Halloween, and Batman seemed to have taken her very seriously indeed. Gordon hadn't
heard from Batman since, but that wasn't unusual. They had no regular contact. When one of them
needed the other, he was always found.
The commissioner took a last look at the moon, wondering how on earth the sponsors had managed to
project a hologram onto the lunar surface, then turned away from the window.
He glanced at his pipe, which lay on his paper-strewn desk beside a pouch of tobacco and a box of
matches. The evening had been largely stress-free, and Jim had been able to comply with his decision
not to smoke again.
I'll give it till midnight, he thought. Gordon pulled out the old pocket watch that had belonged to his
father, and his father's father, from his waistcoat pocket. Twenty minutes to go. All quiet so far. Has
to be a good omen.
Then the face in the moon spoke.
Every man, woman, and child in the city heard it, yet no microphone would have picked it up, no tape
recorder could have translated it to audio. The voice spoke directly inside their heads, coming from a
location that seemed to be at the heart of their being, their very center of existence.
And the voice prophesied doom.
"Your foulness will be cleansed, as the foulness of the world is cleansed. The cycle is ending. Make
peace with your gods. Tonight, every last one of you will die."
Jim Gordon's stomach lurched. With sinking heart and shaking hand, he reached for his pipe.

Most of the Western Hemisphere was in darkness. Almost midnight in Gotham meant almost nine P.M.
on the West Coast. In Europe, it was five in the morning, with dawn still more than an hour away.
Across the globe, more than a billion people were sleeping.
And every one of them had heard the Stone King's warning. It came to them in their dreams, or they
wakened with a start... to his physical manifestation.
A Navajo medicine wheel laid out in the New Mexico desert started spinning like a top, spitting out
cobalt-blue sparks. The Ohio Serpent Mound began to undulate as if it were a living thing. In
California's Death Valley, a thick, sulfurous smoke began to spew forth from the old bauxite mines,
suffocating everything it came in contact with.
A British army patrol on night maneuvers reported thirteen giant figures dancing around the sacred
stones of Avebury in a slow shuffle. Each one wore a bull's-head mask.
An ominous plume of smoke spewed out of volcanic Mount Etna in the Mediterranean. Grimacing in
its swirls and roils were the faces of a thousand demons.
After a silence that had lasted two thousand years, the cave-dwelling Oracle at Delphi in Greece
began to speak again. But where once the air was perfumed with burning laurel leaves, now it was
dank, and heavy toxic fumes spewed up from the cavern's depths.
The voice the Oracle spoke in was the voice of the Stone King. And the message it delivered never
changed.
Your time has come. Prepare to die.