At the tunnel’s mouth, zombies blocked the path. Their empty eye sockets panned back and forth, waiting for us to come at them.

The ghoul and I slowed, but we didn’t stop. When the zombies saw that we weren’t going to turn back, they scattered, clearing a path for us. They were all bluff and wouldn’t risk a fight, since we were aware of their vulnerability.

We entered a massive room the size of an aircraft hangar, but more square than rectangle. The walls were parts of many things; red clay, hard rock, and stone. Protruding everywhere, ceiling to floor, was bone-white skin, throbbing and moist. We moved into the center of the room, surrounded by fires tended by zombies. They kept their distance, cowering and shielding the talismans around their necks with bony hands.

Behind me, Mo’Lock was staring in awe at the fleshy room. There was a tangible energy in here I was sure he felt. It made every tiny hair on my body stand on end.

Familiar symbols covered every exposed surface, while altars occupied the lower halves of three walls. One I recognized as a classic voodoo altar, covered with dried blood and melted candles, copper pots overflowing with chicken feet. Another appeared more satanic, with a Hand of Glory—the severed hand of a suicide victim—placed in front of a goat’s head. The third was a clean white table combining the symbols of the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim religions.

But the fourth wall was where I found what we’d been chasing all along, the source of perhaps a thousand deaths. A thing that had once been a nothing, a nobody. A little man who decided to take whatever he needed to invent his own world. He created a reality by pickpocketing the beliefs of the world and using them to recreate himself as a monster that fed on brains, the very source of the soul. By doing so, he’d made his own world.

It was an unbelievable testament to the power of belief and the ugliness of egotism and hatred. Why is it when humans tap into tremendous power, the first instinct for most is to take, to destroy? Before me was just another example of someone who could have been special, the greatest intellect on earth, but instead used his power to shed blood and sow terror.

I stared at the face in the wall—the face was the wall. It was gnarled by rock and stone, stretched by its own voracious appetite. It looked stupefied by the heroin flowing through its massive system.

It was a face I knew and suspected, but one I still couldn’t quite believe I was seeing again.

This was the reason I did what I did. This was a monster.

“Hello, Cain. It’s been a long time.”

24

Staring at the abomination, my mind raced back to the aftermath of our last confrontation. I’d stood watching them hose off the street, the gooey pink gripping the asphalt, desperately fighting to hold its ground. But the hoses won in the end, and bit by splattered slimy bit, the last remains of Edgar Cain were washed into the sewers.