“It’s the mother lode, baby,” he murmured, not feeling much better, speaking with more bravado than he actually felt. “You better believe it.”

With the uneasy, rubbery sensation that he was not entirely in control of his legs, he walked down the hall to the pipes. For the first time since he’d broken in, he was aware of the largeness of the place around him, the vast silence of all this emptiness holding its breath. Squatting down, he aimed the flashlight into the pipe and looked inside. There was something glittering deep inside the pipe. It might have been liquid or solid, he wasn’t sure, but from here it looked like—

“Holy shit!” he squeaked, jerking backward. The thing inside the pipe was moving toward him. He tried to step backward and his shoulder slammed into the wall. One foot angled crookedly across something behind him, twisting his leg, sending him spilling sideways toward that filthy floor. Dave’s hands flew out to break his fall, and he had time to think that it must’ve been the biggest rat he’d ever seen in his life coming out of that pipe.

That did it.

“Screw you, buddy,” he said to the pipe, standing up again and brushing off his pants. “I’ll be back later or maybe I won’t. But for tonight I’m out of here. This kid is gone.”

His flashlight went out.

The blackness fell over him in a thick, impenetrable cloak. Dave’s legs did a fast one-eighty and charged blindly in the direction of the stairs. He wasn’t thinking about silver anymore, or what it could buy him. In the brilliant lucidity of his fright, the only thing he was thinking about was what had killed all the rats he’d found down here.

It was down here in the basement with him, whatever it was, closing in on him in the dark. His foot hooked over something sharp and he fell to the floor.

A thick slithery shape, terribly quick and muscular, squirmed past his bare forearm, moving up toward his head. Terror gripped him utterly then, and there was a faint, warm wetness as his bladder let go. Dave screamed, and even as he screamed, he could hear the slithering thing settling in next to him with a questing, insinuating presence that seemed intelligent somehow, knowing. It slid past his cheek and encircled his head, groping for the blood vessels in his neck. His veins and arteries, he realized, were what it wanted, a means of getting inside him.

At last he understood.

The thing in the dark did not want to kill him.

The thing in the dark did not want to hurt him.

The thing in the dark promised him all the silver he wanted.

Dave Kellogg opened his veins to receive the mother lode.

DEDICATION

For Jack and Veda,

“Let me tell you a story…”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS