"See what I found?" said the fat woman. She held up a man's leg. It was artificial. "I found a hand, Thursday," said another. The women drew back along the tunnel, towards the urn of tea.

Down here they had always found things. Wine cellars and pits of plague. Skeletons. Once, a great dinosaur, removed in portions, stealthily, not to halt the work of excavation. And there had been banquets to prove the safety of the vaulted tunnels, candelabra gleaming and the chink of thin crystal goblets spangled with champagne.

And now, the chink of a goblet, up ahead, and the glow of new light.

The money had been the payment of passaging, coins for the ferryman.

And crossing over the bone-dry Styx, hell within Hell.

A reddish glare lit the closed station beyond the second tunnel, unveiling oddly the placards and the posters, half-transparent with age. Hovis, Ovaltine, Pears Soap, girls on bicycles and girls who swung from the moon. But they were phantoms now, forced to look on at changing times.

A ring of red workmens' warning lanterns, and flung up on the walls, sparking, searing oxyacetylene torches, blasting in a primitive fever.

On the platform they had formed the arena.

Men in tailored garments with elegant hand-set sleeves, Italian shoes. Eight men. One with his hair held back in a ponytail by a clip of ivory. One with a coat of fur. The glint of a couple of gold-banded cigarettes. Champagne bottles in vacuum coolers, and shallow glasses. Over the ozone, chimney scent, the perfumes of rich men. Cologne and aftershave and hair oil. And over that again, already, a meaty throbbing smell.

The two black dogs, barrel-shaped like the tunnels, spade-formed faces, all jaws, the muzzles off, tugging and growling. The men laughed at their eagerness.

As they let them go, the man in the fur gave the nearer dog a sharp kick. It did not seem to notice as it belted forward.

The first blood came in three seconds.

Its odor went up like hot oil.

The men shouted. They had laid their bets.

"G'on!"

Another man, with greenish frogskin shoes, kicked the slower dog back into the center.

The dogs rammed each other, the spade jaws trying to fasten into throats, shoulders. They rolled snarling and choking against the tilework and blood blotched the poster of the Ovaltine maiden.

The man in fur slipped his hand inside his opened coat, into a pocket which parted obligingly. He was already hard as a rock. He breathed the gladiator stink of sweat and blood, the acidic peppery exudations of human adrenaline under Faberge.

The last man at the platform's edge, standing away a little with his champagne, not liking to be splashed, saw something white below him on the line. He turned, and there was a newcomer there, standing under the platform, looking up, smiling.