I shook my head. “And that’s how you got dirty?”

“Let me finish.”

“Sorry.”

“After walking through the pipe for an hour, we came to an intersection. I believe it was somewhere below Dupont Circle.” The ghoul spoke slowly and carefully, rolling out each word for maximum effect. Sometimes his speech patterns reminded me of a drunk trying to sound sober, but with an air of elegance that belonged only to the undead.

“Dupont? That’s like five miles from the drainage pipe!”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. Anyway, that was where we found the hole.”

I sat forward. “Hole?”

“Yes, and it was not city work, I can tell you. The pipe had been cut with a blow-torch and was very uneven, like the cutter started out trying for a circle, but settled for a square.”

“Where’d it go?”

“For the first several yards it went east, maybe north-east.”

I nodded. “Toward Whitney Green.” I took another drink. My gums were numb and my scalp felt like it was swarming with ants.

“Possibly, but after those several feet the tunnel turned into an incline, and after that there was an unexpected drop . . . straight down.”

I was getting a little impatient. At times he could be too efficient. “Did you go down?”

Mo’Lock looked away. “We had no choice . . . we slid.”

I laughed. “And you got dumped into the pit!” I was feeling good.

I offered the bottle to the ghoul as a peace offering. He waved it off. “No, thank you.”

“Come on, it won’t kill you,” I urged.

He looked back toward me. “No, it won’t kill me. It tastes bad.”

The drink and drugs were making my thoughts wander. “When was the last time you ate or drank anything?”

He thought about it for a second. “Just a little over a hundred and ten years. Not counting the occasional mouthful of rainwater.”

“Or a chunk of that guy’s neck! Remember that?!” I was having fun. It was the best I felt all week. You gotta love painkillers.

Mo’Lock stuck out his tongue. “How could I forget? That tasted very bad.”

We fell silent for a moment as Mo’Lock worked the memory of biting that guy through his mind. I lit a smoke. “So, you and your buddies fell in the pit . . .”

Mo’Lock looked up slowly. “It was a short fall into another tunnel. We found that it went in two directions, so we split up. I went east by myself. The other two went west.”

“What was the tunnel like?”

“Big, wide. I’d say twice the size of the drainage pipe,” he answered, then continued. “I walked for a while. Didn’t see much of anything. The tunnel was clean and quiet, like a spotless mining shaft. Very odd.”

I laid my head on the desk.

“Then I started coming across exits. They were above me, and near as I could see they were normal manhole covers with these strange clamp locks welded to them. You know, like on preserve jars. There was one about every five hundred yards.”