The thought nags at him: what if it’s something else?

As the pig grumbles forward, Mookie fumbles with the tin in his pocket, a tin sized well for normal hands, but in his hand it looks the size of a button popped off a shirt. With a thumb he lifts the rust-rimmed top (it’s an old lip balm tin, same tin he’s been using for coming up on ten years now) and reveals the peacock-blue powder inside. Just the sight of it makes his temples tingle, his knees go weak, his brow flush with sweat.

He looks down at his cakey blue thumb, a “Smurf thumb” in Blazehead parlance, a classic tell for those looking for Cerulean addicts – and then he thinks, here it is, here’s where I rip open my third eye and see what’s following me.

Mookie pops a callused thumb into the powder–

He presses one thumb to one temple–

Then the other–

The Blue Blazes washes over him.

It’s like being in a ship that’s just starting to capsize. Listing on an unforgiving ocean. Then: a wind of wet heat on his forehead – a hot breath – and at the edges of his vision the ripple of blue flame like a puddle of vodka lit with a Zippo, a ripple that fades fast, taking with it the scales that cover the eyes, that protect the mind, that hide the happy dumb people from the truth of what lies beneath.

It’s then that he sees.

Not roach-rats. Or cankerpedes.

It’s gobbos. Gray snot-slick heads. Yellow fangs. Some loping like dogs, others hurrying along on bent and rubbery legs. A dozen of them. Many with weapons.

Fifty feet in and closing. Forty. Thirty.

A few of the gobbos are naked – bulbous genitals like tumors slapping against hairless thighs – while others are robed in tattered rags, rags once the clothing of humans but stolen and torn to ribbons and knotted together in motley patchwork clothing.

Twenty feet.

The pig won’t go faster. Mookie’s going to have to fight. Last thing he wants to do is bring some mob of the Underworld’s finest to the Sandhogs’ door. They’ll never help him if he does something like that.

Ten feet.

It’s then he sees something else–

Behind the Gobbos, something else. Shiny eyes. Long, flashing fingers. A black shape, blacker than night, black like a hole in the Devil’s heart.

Like a Grim Reaper’s cloak.

Through the walls, the lub-dub oonch-oonch of pounding bass.

Nora steps on the gobbo’s arm. Bones crackle like bubble wrap popping. Anybody poking their head past the door of this strip club back room would see Nora standing on a skinny, greasy man – a divot-cheeked, sallow-faced weasel with thinning black hair matted to his bulbous scalp – with a .38 snubnose pointed at his face.

But she’s Blazing. One of her last doses.

And it shows her that this is a goblin. Little fucker’s been hiding out here at Double Delilah’s, hired as the janitor – which translates to “jizz-mopper” – of this back alley strip joint. While on the side, he’s been slinging bits of Blue to top-shelf customers and well-paid dancers. And, worse, once in a while he kidnaps one of the girls and takes her down into the dark where…