“I want to buy this,” Mookie says. Could be fake. But what if it’s not? What if it’s really one of the Five Occulted Pigments? He’s already got a little tin of what might be Vermilion – the Red Rage. To have a phial of Ochre? Golden Gate? Be a damn fine bargaining chip. He ever finds himself swinging on the end of someone’s rope it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have these in his pocket to save his ass.

Or to save Nora.

“I can’t do that,” Burnsy says, a fast hand darting out and pulling the phial away. “You got what you came here for. I’ll do the gig. You’ll take care of my family.”

“I can help you. I can…” Here Mookie’s reaching, but it’s worth a shot. “I can get you back on the payroll. With the Organization. Lister, c’mon.”

“Mookie, go home, go get some sleep. You look like batter-dipped shit–”

Just then, outside, a hard bell clangs. Like an old iron dinner bell. Another bell joins in. And a third. A murmur of voices rise up amongst the alarm.

Burnsy bares his teeth. Grabs for the tire iron.

“What’s going on?” Skelly asks.

Chapter 17

17

Few can say what the gobbos actually want. Certainly by examination their wants and needs are crass, even evil: they enjoy the pain of others. They take great pleasure from the torment of human beings – they enjoy it the way a dog enjoys rolling around in roadkill, or the way a cat takes pleasure in torturing a rat. Gobbos hunt. They hurt. They eat. They breed. They steal. They kill. And yet that’s just what we see of them: and until the Sandhogs broke into the Great Below years before, the gobbos had little exposure to mankind. So what did they do before they met us?

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

The bells are ringing.

Someone screams.

A sick, sinking feeling hits Skelly’s stomach, like her guts have no bottom, like it’s just a hole that pulls her into herself.

Some of the dead run toward the danger. They hold swords. Claw-hammers. Old-timey double-barrel shotguns, barrels rimmed with rust. Most run away. Faces frozen in mortified panic. Wretched limbs dragging them along.

A corpse in a moth-eaten tuxedo, a crumpled top hat held tight to his sunken chest, cries out as he hurries past. “Gobbos. Gobbos.”

Goblins.