Haversham.

Werth answers, starts to say, “You wouldn’t believe–”

“Things have changed,” Haversham says.

Werth listens, and it feels like the floor is dropping out from under him again – falling, falling, his guts, his heart, his head.

“OK,” Werth says. Voice raw.

“We need you back. Come to the house.”

“The house. Yeah.”

Haversham ends the call.

Werth sits for a few minutes. Staring at the center of his steering wheel. Like it’s an eye staring back, or a mouth trying to draw him close in order to eat him.

Finally he breaks the spell, starts the car, and gets the fuck out of there.

12

Some say that the Underworld is the Hell of all the myths: that it is a prison. Some say that God built it, though then others ask, why would God build such a thing? How mad must God be? The easy reply is, of course: quite mad, indeed. God’s actions throughout history, if you believe in him and the purity of the Good Book, have been the actions of a psychopath. Just the same, it’s difficult to reconcile the images of Hell and the ways of a Christian God with the existence and function of the Great Below – the Great Below has very few dead, after all. Some shufflers, some ghosts. But most of what lurks in the dark are not creatures of spirit; these are no spectral entities. They are flesh and blood. Gray flesh and black blood in the case of the goblins. Stone and sap in the troglodytes, slick scale and toxic slurry in the Nagas. I have heard one theory that works toward bridging the gap, suggesting that the gobbos – and perhaps the other denizens of the deep – are reincarnated sinners. Die as a sinner, be reborn as a grub in the subterrestrial prison below our feet. If that’s true, if the Underworld really is a kind of jail, then it further explains why so many of the creatures just want to be free of it – at any cost.

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

Werth sits. At a kitchen table at the Boss’s house – one of two kitchens, it turns out. This one has lots of white tile and dark wood, big stainless steel appliances. Two ovens. Pots hanging from a pot rack, occasionally drifting into one another – clunk, clank, clink. Doesn’t look like anybody ever uses this kitchen – though the central butcher block has square-shaped stains on it. Maybe that’s where they put the takeout containers.

He wants to lie down. Take a long nap. A long nap in a deep grave, with roots and worms and cold earth to keep him comfortable for the rest of eternity.

It’s not just the pain – which by now has fought past the Vicodin like a distemper-sick dog chewing through a door.

But that’s not what’s really bothering him.

Haversham said, “The Boss is sick.”