He’ll put off the call. Just for tonight. Time to murder some food. Not literally. Not this time. To do that – to go select a hog (a real hog, not a Sandhog), he’s gotta take a trip out of the city to one of the farms. Maybe Butter Moon, where Charlie Predwick raises beautiful Berkshire hogs, or maybe Red Bridge Farm, where Maeby and Mark Cunningham have a pen of wild Mangalitsa – close enough to boar that the pork is wild, gamy, musky. For now, that’s not an option. He’s in the city and he’s got work to do, so he figures it’s off to see Karyn.

Karyn McClaskey – little hipster chick inked from wrists to neck to ankles. Butcher. The girl loves all parts of the pork, especially the strange parts. Ears and face-meats, guts and gonads. She’ll even cook the tail. Braise it in beer. Then bread it. Then fry it.

His stomach does happy somersaults just thinking about it.

Last time Mookie checked, she’s dating one of the Get-Em-Girls, too. Not his place to judge. (Though Karyn’s always picked the crazy girls.)

A trip to Karyn’s will be good. He needs something to distract him. He’s still riding the tail-end of the Blazes. Makes him feel buzzy and bee-stung. An antenna drawing in too much noise, not enough signal. When that dark shadow-thing attacked him, it poked holes inside him, holes he can’t seem to plug up, holes through which gush visions of Nora and Jess, images of cancer and shadow.

Mookie comes up out of a metal cellar door in a West side alley, and his phone suddenly goes full tilt like a juggled pinball machine. It buzzes and lights up once, twice, again and again.

He’s got ten new messages.

They’re all from Werth. The old goat has the patience of a coked-up mosquito.

Mookie sighs, then thumbs redial without listening to the messages.

“Fuck, Mook, where you been?” That’s how Werth answers.

“Downstairs. I got something. We thought it wasn’t real, but I got–”

“No time for that. Later. Something bad has happened.”

“What?”

“Someone murdered Casimir Zoladski.”

PART TWO

BLOOD & BRINE

8

The Underworld in myth has long been associated with the dead – it is in the low places that the souls and spirits of the departed go in many of the old stories, sometimes to be castigated for their earthly ways, sometimes because that’s where the dead must go. It has long been believed that this Underworld, our own Great Below, was not like that: it was a physical place, not a spiritual one. Its walls were granite and quartz, basalt and schist – they were neither slick with spectral ectoplasm nor formed of the non-corporeal dreams of the freshly demised. The monsters of the deep were real, it seemed, and ghosts – if they were real at all – were not part of that place. We were, of course, wrong.

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