“You don’t have room for that kind of bullshit here. The house, Mookie. Be here in the hour or else.”

“I don’t know she’s alive. Nora. It was just a pic. She might be–” He can’t even say the last word. It catches in his throat, a frog in a net. “I don’t know she’s alive.”

“Here.” A fumble of the phone. Skin or fabric rasping against the receiver.

Then: “Mookie.”

Nora. It’s her.

“It’s me, honey. It’s Daddy.”

All she says is, “You reap what you sow.”

Then Nora’s gone and Werth is back on the line.

“Satisfied?”

“Go to hell.”

“The house. One hour. Or she eats a bullet.”

Click.

Part Three

PART THREE

MEAT & MONSTERS

Chapter 20

20

I seek to push deeper into the Great Below. Deeper than any human has pushed. I want to see the Ravenous Expanse. All I have are stories carved into walls or overheard from a roving pack of gobbos. I want to see the deepest gods, Those Who Eat. I want to stand at the edge of the Maw-Womb. I think I hear them, those gods. It’s just a tickle at the back of my mind, like a little earwig burrowing into my ear. It’s like tuning a radio past the static and listening for the snippets of voices in the chaos, and what I hear, what I’ve put together, is that if I go deeper, if I go to the heart of the Underworld, I will find the secrets of this place. I will learn why the goblins exist. I will learn what the worm-gods want. I will know where to find the Occulted Pigments and what they do. By forging downward I will learn the fate and future of the world above and how our two worlds need one another, because I believe that they do. When I go down into the Expanse, I will have the truth of this place hewn into my heart.

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

Gasp. Twitch. Thrash.

Skelly lurches awake on a pile of bones.

Animal bones, by the look of them. The delicate skeletons of mice and rats, of squirrels and pigeons. Larger bones, too: cat bones, a dog skull, the antlers of a deer, the horns and half-a-skull of a big bull. A mound. Tall as Mookie. Big as a Jersey sand dune. And this one is not the only one – the room is a wide-open cavern, heaped with piles of bones and bodies.

All of it bathed in the eerie green fire-glow from trash barrels, oil drums, and torches stuck atop crooked poles. Light and smoke like waltzing wraiths.