“I know.” Before Octavio can continue down this topic, Mookie asks again: “You sure you haven’t heard nothing about the Purple? No Death’s Head anywhere?”

“Nah. But I know I guy who knows a guy who got a hold of some of the Red.”

“Bullshit.” Always a friend of a friend story.

“For real! Said that shit’s like bath salts had a baby with steroids or something, man. Makes you go crazy. He went nuts. Tore up his mother’s house. Ate her dog.”

“Ate her dog.”

“Scout’s fuckin’ honor, yo.”

“You were a Scout?”

“Do I look like a damn Boy Scout to you?”

“I dunno, Octavio. Go back to work. You hear anything about Death’s Head–”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll call you.”

It’s all a myth. The Five Occulted Pigments. Sacred blah blah blah. Way Mookie sees it isn’t much different than talking about Jesus or Buddha or any of that other stuff: yeah, maybe there’s a grain of truth in that bag of rice, but for the most part, it’s all stuff people make up to feel better about all the other stuff they don’t understand. The stories folks tell about the Great Below – ancient gods in at the heart of the Labyrinth, mystical mineral pigments nobody’s ever seen but everybody’s got a story about, monsters that folks have only ever seen once – they’re all just that. Stories.

And Mookie doesn’t have time for stories. But Casimir Zoladski, he’s got his brain wrapped around one such story the way a car wraps around a telephone pole – it’s inextricable. He’s gonna be the Boss one day. So Mookie’s doing the deed. He won’t find anything, but hopefully Casimir will one day say, “Good job”, and maybe give him another couple crews, or maybe make him a proper lieutenant instead of a soldier, or best of all, just let him retire with one last suitcase full of money.

Mookie asks everybody he can ask. He knows a couple rock-flesh Trogbodies that hang out at a boxing gym in Brooklyn: Morg has a clumpy basalt body and he’s strong, but slow. His mate, Gannog, is taller, a little leaner, a body of all iron-blue limestone. Gannog’s quick on his feet, Morg is slow. Better at wrestling than boxing. Mookie shows up and the two of them are training – all the humans of the gym know them as Morgan and Gary, don’t know that they’re monsters, don’t know that they go down into the dark when night falls and sleep together by merging with the rock.

When he asks about Death’s Head, Morg says it’s all a lie. Gannog’s on the other end of the spectrum: he’s a believer. He says he sometimes hears the whispers of the Hungry Ones echoing up through the tunnels of the Tangle like someone talking through a cardboard paper towel tube. Says that the old gods make Caput Mortuum – sometimes they call it the Violet Void. Says that some folks claim it’s not even a proper Pigment in the rock. Then the two of them go on to talk about the other colors, too: Red’s real bad news, they heard tell of a quartzite Trogbody who got hold of some Golden Gate, but it didn’t do anything when he ate it, whatever, all crap, none of it useful.