“I don’t kn-uuuurrrh,” gurgled Percy.

“Is it—is that—dearrrgh,” Joe tried.

“Not dead,” uttered Percy, bracing himself against the wall and heaving great breaths into his lungs. “Notjustdead. Whatever that is, that’s worse.”

“Okay.” Hands on hips, gaining control of his stomach spasms, “Are we going in?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Deep breath.”

As though it would help at all, each took in a lungful of comparatively fresh air, and strode full speed back towards the hole in the wall. They attacked it, kicking it through with arms over their mouths and noses. Once the gaping hole was big enough for an easy escape, Percy took out a torch to illuminate the gloom.

It was a black staircase, glistening wet with slime, all enshrouded in curious, unexplainable white mists that made it impossible to see beyond the distance of a metre.

“I feel like this is a very bad idea,” said Joe.

“I agree.” And Percy stepped through.

The air was the sort of humid one expects in an area of mass decomposition. Like a dumpster. Or a body bag, occupied and left in the sun for three weeks. Immediately their hair was wet against their faces, and the warm mist mingled with the sweat that broke out on contact with heat and fear.

The stairs were wide, short, and uneven. They were old, clearly, crumbling here and there, but not worn. This staircase, it occurred to Percy, had always been kept out of the way. By design, it, and by association, this entire space, was meant to be seen by very few people.

The further they descended, the more the mist thinned, and they found themselves in a sort of antechamber. The stairs covering the full width, wall to wall, came to the ground about three feet from a narrow, arched stone doorway. Inside, a long, low-ceilinged, granite-walled room presented itself. The floor,when their boots finally touched it, was slate, wet and trickling with the inexplicable, malodorous heat of the chamber. There was no light—no fire to warm the atmosphere—but the ground, the walls, the very air, all thrummed with a sweltering and unpleasant energy.

On approach to the doorway, Percy lowered the light of his torch towards the ground, and found there the enormous pentagram Althea had spoken of, carved into the floor. The edges glistened black and green under his illumination, which traced the unmistakable lines, coming to rest on metal restraints at the top, then the bottom, held fast to the slate with screws driven deep into the rock.

Percy looked to Joe, who had pressed the backs of his fingers to his pale lips, and whose eyes stared at the horrifying evidence of immense suffering with a slightly disparate vacancy to them. Percy could virtually see him attempting to compartmentalise the day’s atrocities. Trying to shove this into the ‘movies I wish I’d never seen’ category, and out of the ‘images that will haunt me every waking hour for the rest of my life’ category.

Percy wondered at his instinct to keep silent in the obviously empty space, but Joe responded to a wordless nod from him with his own equally noiseless gesture. Each took an opposite side of the room, which was perhaps thirty feet long, maybe twenty wide, so neither was ever so far from the other that it wouldn’t be a simple matter to dash to the other’s assistance should it be needed. Even if it meant dashing over that dismal, deeply cut pentagram.

Joe’s search along the left wall discovered chains and handcuffs, grim and stiff, but all-too-usable. Percy’s wall was bare and blank, from the top, all the way to the bottom, except where a thin slit, maybe two inches tall, six wide, sat at the base of the stone. It lay there in such a way as made it apparent the slit was no accident. The ancient wall was built around it,the stones beneath and above of the same uniform size and age, designed with the clear intention of keeping that slit open. Strange, but lent an especially unsettling air when coupled with the fact that this slit was the final destination of the sharp ridges of the pentagram, slashed here, slashed there into the slate, and leading down the slightest of inclines, straight to this hole.

Percy heard Joe’s footstep by the back wall, and turned to see him supporting himself against a table, taking in a long, shaky breath. Percy’s raised torchlight revealed a flicker of reflection from the items he had found there. Items which came into harrowing recognition on approach, rusted as they were. It was sparse, what was left, but the two short, sharp paring knives, a cluster of rusty razor blades spilling out of their little box, and a cleaver, told a story neither was quite prepared for.

Percy took an arm around Joe, who attempted a stoic silence, but Percy felt his watering eyes against his neck when he pulled him in, felt the trembling in his chest, and held him closer still.

He thought only of the stone and the structure, of the age of the buildings, of topics and ideas as bland as his mind could manage to think of, because otherwise it would break all apart.

Joe whispered, low and barely audible, “I can’t stand the thought…”

He couldn’t finish, and he needn’t have. It was Althea who had told them about the place. Althea, who was seventeen years old, who was kept a prisoner in this house for months, since she was only sixteen. Althea, who had shown Joe the scars she received when she was strapped to the rusty restraints on the floor, when Cleo had cut her all over and let her blood drip and drain into the pentagram, to be funnelled into that slit in the wall. To whatever was in there.

A good, healthy flush of anger propelled Percy’s quick steps away from Joe, across the wet brown-red dust at the bottom of the carved floor, and onto his knees by the wall. He aimedhis torch through, evoking an immediate screeching howl—ear piercing, abrupt, and unearthly. Percy reeled back at the shock, and straight into Joe’s arms.

Joe’s only response was a meeting of the eyes, then an eager nod.

Percy repositioned himself, and, a little more gingerly this time, aimed his torch into the black.

A growl, a fierce growl right at the wall, and deep huffs of ferocious hot breath snuffled at the light.

Percy lowered his head, down and down, and almost against the putrid floor, then leapt up, pulling Joe with him at the flicker of pink. A flicker at first, then a long, encroaching, thick slit tongue poking and lapping at the carved stone.

“What the fuck is that?” Joe took a few steps closer, then was arrested by Percy’s hand on his arm.

“It’s got a long, forked tongue, and it drinks blood. We don’t need to know what it is. We just need to burn it.”

“Agreed.” Joe wrenched his gaze away from the slithering tongue and back to Percy. “Where can we get a whole lot of gasoline?”