“While we wait here, the city’s going to die,” he says. A morose thought. He suddenly doesn’t hate the city so bad. He can’t imagine its streets dark. Some will stay behind, won’t they? Criminals. Lunatics. Mole Men. And the monsters will rise. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe they want a playground. A place for gobbos and snake-men, for rock-bodied golems. For all the monsters and the starving worm-gods that birthed them.

As though on cue, one of the gods launches up out of the rift – the size of the ancient worm dwarfs anything Mookie’s ever seen on land or at sea. It’s a giant worm of black segmented flesh, with one mouth containing a hundred smaller mouths, a thousand dead eyes at the fore of its shunted head.

When it rises, a deafening whisper fills Mookie’s mind:

HYOR-KA.

Nora makes a small, afraid sound.

The world shakes.

Another worm-god rises, this one lacking the segmented body and featuring a ragged line of rock-like spikes along its dorsal ridge.

Another screamed psychic whisper:

UTHUTHMA.

The first worm-god ascends, squirming in mid-air like a mosquito larva in pondwater. It slides toward the crackling golden gate left in the air high above, and it’s fits perfectly – like the worm-god and the impossible hole were made for one another. A vacuum hiss, a booming echo. The beast wriggles into it and is gone.

The next worm-god heads for the same hole.

Mookie stands up. Helps Nora stand, too.

“Come on,” he says. “I know how we get home.”

Chapter 29

29

Their voices awaken me. Lith-lyru. The Bleak Hymn. The Song of Despair. It sings me to awake. One last moment of consciousness before I die, or so I thought. There greeting me in the dark: a tiny skull-shape clinging to a rock. The face of a small button-cap mushroom. It’s then I realize: I have found it. The prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box – Caput Mortuum. The Death’s Head pigment. Rumored to cure all ills but rumored also to confer… other effects, permanent ones, upon its eater. I do not care what they are. The song is loud now, its watery echo and discordant notes vibrating in my heart, urging me to eat, eat, eat. So I do. I eat the mushroom. I feel it. I feel the change. It is time now to join the gods.

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