Just as Skelly cleaves its head open with Santa Muerte, her Bowie. It slumps backward, the box landing on its soft, oily belly.

The other two squeal in surprise–

Skelly uses that surprise. She smashes the butt of her knife into what passes for the one’s nose, sticks the blade into the eye – and brain – of the second. As the nose-smashed gobbo reels, leathery lids blinking over bulbous eyes–

Slice.

She cuts its throat.

It tumbles into a puddle of its own black blood.

They came for the box, she thinks.

She picks it up. Wipes blood off it. Skelly steps back outside as a few of the Daisypusher dead gather around. The pink-robed hausfrau hurries up, points toward the rock wall – “I saw some of them go that way!”

Skelly thrusts the box into the dead lady’s hands. “Here, Pinky. I need you to hold onto this. Give it to Lister– er, Burnsy, OK?”

A quick nod. “Sure thing, miss.”

Skelly hands off the box and hurries away – she reaches the end of the carved out cavern in which Daisypusher sits, the rock wall that forms the end of the line for the far end of town. No gobbos–

But then she spies something at her feet – a pile of earthen dust sitting there like pencil shavings.

It’s funny how the brain sometimes misses a beat. Or takes too long to connect ideas. It’s only a half-second when Skelly walks up, sees the pile, and then answers her own mystery. They must’ve bored a hole in the rock above our heads.

Except that last thought suddenly becomes: the rock above my head.

She looks up. Another wrong move. She should have sidestepped, backed away, any movement but standing there and craning her head heavenward.

A ring of goblin faces greet her from within the rock.

A ratty noose drops down–

It catches around her neck. She screams.

Suddenly it’s pulled taut. She can’t breathe.

They begin to haul her up.

Head pulsing. Legs kicking.

Her knife clatters to the ground.

She tries to scream again, but now it’s just a squeaky hoarse whisper.

They pull her up through the hole. Body scoured by scabrous rock.

They laugh as they drag her through the darkness.

Chapter 18

18

The greatest trick the monsters have is that they can look like us. Maybe soon they’ll learn to act like us. Maybe one day they will even become us. Am I mad?

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

It’s been a long fucking day down there.

Davey Morgan takes the train back out to Staten Island. Battered and bruised. Put through the wringer. Same way he feels every day on the job.

He loves it anyway. It’s who he is.