“Get out!”

As quickly as they’d come, the images disappeared.

“Fuck!” I slammed my fist into the tunnel wall. I was mad and needed a release. I thought I’d break my hand for sure, but the wall turned out not to be stone and rock at all. The soft red clay fell in a spray of chunks when my fist hit it.

“What now? Mo’Lock!”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

The voice was the ghoul’s, but distinctly different. The hoarse grumble was gone, the imaginary echo no longer there. It was a clear, proper voice. I took a closer look at him. He stood complete and upright, the rigid stance of a gentleman of long ago.

“What is this place? A mine shaft? Where are Caroline and the children?”

I stuttered. I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t my ghoul that stood in the tunnel with me. It wasn’t anybody I’d ever known.

“Oh, do speak up man! Where are my wife and children?”

“What year is it . . . sir?” I asked trying to sound polite.

The man was indignant. “Are you daft? It’s December 15th, 1919,” he spat, looking around the tunnel. “Now answer my question. Where are my wife an . . .”

He cut himself off and banged his head with his big bony hands. “NGGGH! Leave me . . . get out of my mind!”

It was Mo’Lock’s voice, but it didn’t last seven words.

The gentleman came back, but the pompousness was gone. This time his face was dreamy, unaware of his surroundings. His eyes were welling with tears.

“Caroline dear, I promise you the automobile is perfectly safe, perfectly safe.”

I stepped toward the weeping ghoul. “Mo’Lock, are you . . .”

The gentleman became unsettled as I approached. “My . . . my name is Michael Locke. Can’t you see that I’ve killed my family?”

That was all I could take. I hauled off and let the ghoul have it right in the side of the head. He reeled backward and I saw his face change. We stood there silent as Mo’Lock wiped the tears away from his face, studying them before wiping his hands on his pants.

“Thank you, Cal.”

I looked at him a long moment. “Looks like you and I share something.”

The ghoul nodded. “We always have.”

Now I really wanted to kill whatever was at the end of the tunnel. I wanted it to suffer, suffer like it made us suffer. I knew the pain Mo’Lock carried was as great as my own and that was fuel, baby—fuel that would bring this evil down hard.

Just then I noticed the place on the wall where a chunk of clay had fallen after I’d hit it. The naked patch was about the size of a jar lid, a glistening moist whiteness beneath the surface of the clay. It reminded me of the flesh of a floater, a drowning victim that has been in the water for days.