He cuts the quad left, then right again–

Tires bounce up onto those collapsed salt columns.

Columns that, fallen, form a ramp.

Skelly screams.

The quad races up – and is suddenly airborne.

Gobbos watch from beneath. The slingshot lets loose, but whatever creature serves as ammunition rebounds off the four-wheeler’s undercarriage with a metal plunk.

The quad in flight, Skelly experiences an odd moment of bliss – an absurd sensation that all her life has led to this strange and singular moment. Ramping a jacked-up hell-quad over a dirge-singing pack of goblins with a burned-to-death stuntman at the wheel.

I’m flying, she thinks, half-giddy.

The tires hit ground. The flight is over. Her pelvis almost shoots up through her ribcage.

Chapter 23

23

I asked Danny – Cerberus – how he does it, exactly. How does one navigate the Tangle as a living dead man? What is his secret? He explained it to me thusly: he can feel all the ghosts of the Great Below. Always. Together they form a sensation that exists at his margins, a psychic awareness that is hazy, non-specific, and ever-present. He can, with some concentration, explore this formless mass of spirit psyches like a man reaching into a murky pond to feel around in the mud for a snail, or a coin, or a lost key. He can see who they are, can even see through their eyes, and in this way can begin to put together a picture of the spectral movements through the Shallows and into the Tangle – and so, a map, an imperfect map, is formed. Of course, that ends once the ghosts reach the nadir of this place. Once they approach the Ravenous Expanse, he says, they disappear – like a candle flame snuffed beneath an overturned cup.

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

Mookie lies caught in the grip of a terrible dream, the kind that keeps shifting, worsening – a dream shot through with betrayals from him and against him, a nightmare thick with the feeling of being lost in the dark and without a friend. All the world and what’s beneath it is his foe. Werth cutting his throat. The Boss laughing. Davey, dead in the water tunnels beneath the city, goblins planting eggs in the sockets of his torn-out eyes, his mouth still forming the breathless words necessary to condemn Mookie for his inaction. Grampop, cursing Mookie from the dark, calling him names. Skelly, belly swollen with some half-and-half baby about to be born. Faces of death. A mounting tide of ghostly faces, bulging and spilling on the beach that is Mookie’s mind.

Now he stands at a pig farm. Black-bristled, white-bellied Mangalitsa hogs sniff, snort, and grouse in the green-gray mud. Above his head, a steel sky threatens rain. He smells wild animal musk. Pig piss. Hog shit. Footsteps slapping mud behind him.

Jess. His ex-wife.

“You made a mess of things,” she says.

“I know.”