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The ground kept shaking, almost rhythmically.

“Maybe it’s just another...accident spot.” Jarret didn’t sound convinced.

“Something smells down there,” Ally whispered back.

They fell silent, staring at each other. Ally wondered if she was as pale and scared-looking as Jarret and Peter.

“So, what’s the plan again?” Peter asked, his doubts clear.

“We go down there and look around,” Ally said, realizing how dangerous it sounded even as she spoke. “If we see people, we save them. If we see snakes, we burn them.”

“And if we see both?” Peter pressed her.

“We do whatever we can.”

Jarret shrugged off his backpack and laid it on the ground.

“One of us should cover the others,” he said. “Take all the gas and matches and burn any snakes that come too close.”

“Playing with gasoline.” Peter shook his head. “Man, we are
all
gonna all be crispy critters.”

“I think I can do it.” Jarret held out his hand. “Give me your pack.”

Peter gave him a hard look.

“Sure you’re not just volunteering to stay in the back?”

“I’m volunteering to cover
your
back.” Jarret’s voice grew hard. “That means I’m the last one up the stairs if you two have to get out fast.”

“Pete.” Ally laid a hand on his arm. “That sounds great, Jarret. Just be careful, okay? Peter’s right—you could really burn yourself if you get careless.”

“I know.” His anger vanished in a smile. “God will protect me.”

Ally couldn’t muster a smile back. She envied his unshakeable faith. She believed in God, too, but she didn’t see why God would keep her safe when He’d let so many other people die.

No use thinking about it. She slid off her backpack and handed it to him. Looking sullen, Peter did the same. Jarret slung one on his back and one over each arm. They handed him their lighters and matches, which he shoved into his front pockets.

“If there are people down there, and they’re alive, we have to try to get them out. If we can’t, be really careful about the fire,” she said, as Jarret organized himself. “I don’t want to burn anyone by accident.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t, either.”

“Maybe they won’t be down there.”

“Let’s hope not.” He smiled at her again, and Ally wondered if maybe she wasn’t dating the wrong guy. Peter was nice enough, and he’d given her his socks, but he’d done nothing but complain ever since she’d decided to go after the monsters.  Jarret had been dubious at first, but he’d always kept a positive outlook.

Something to think about later, she told herself, looking back up at the silhouetted girders of the building. A gust of wind blew dry leaves along the cracked and broken walkway, and she shivered. The sirens from the car alarms were on their last gasp, moaning deeply as they died. In a few places across campus she saw glimmers of light from stalled or parked cars, but that was all. Nobody else seemed to be alive.

She hoped the freshman had managed to get to the chapel safely.

“You know,” Peter said, eyeing the twisted steel support beams, “with all the quakes, the cellar might collapse.”

Ally shrugged.  She was more worried about the monsters than the roof.

“Okay.” Jarret had one of the squeeze bottles in his hand. His flashlight was jammed awkwardly into one of the backpacks’ outer pockets. “Are we ready?”

Ally nodded. Peter groaned.

“I’ll go first,” she said, steeling herself. This was it. This was the moment in the movie where the blonde either became a hero or lunch.

She needed to pee in the worst possible way.

Instead, she took a step forward, and then another.

XXXIV

Everything was made of human bone, reminding Jack of the bones that had tumbled loosely in the dirt caught within the bulldozer’s bucket. But those had been brown and rough, whereas the bones of the walls and floor they stood upon were an elegantly polished ivory, smooth and gleaming. Large femurs and tibias made up the central structure, chinked with phalanges and tarsals. Skulls grinned at the tops and bottoms of the walls. A pale, sickly, ambient glow lit the tunnel.

“I take it this is not a heavenward passage,” Andy said tartly, looking at Todd.

“The corridor of mortal remains goes hellward
and
heavenward,” the theologian said. Amon was crouched next to one of the baseboard skulls like a mouser at a hole, one twiglike forearm digging into a socket. “Which way did your staircase lead?”

“Down.” Jack leaned against a wall, still feeling a little weak. “Hellward, I imagine.”

“That’s usually how our senses interpret the direction,” Todd agreed. “We’ll walk. Tell me when you recognize something.”

“And don’t even think about singing ‘Dem Bones,’ ” Andy said, giving Jack a mock-stern look. Jack smiled faintly for him, knowing that his friend was trying to hide his concern with weak jests.

“Now that song’s going to run through my mind all night.”

“How about something cheerful, for a change?”

Jack wasn’t sure he’d be able to sing anything for very long, but he gamely nodded.

“Any requests, Ed?” he asked, looking at the theologian.

“I enjoy contemporary jazz.”

“Afraid I can’t help you.” Jack pushed himself off the wall. “How about you, Amon?”

The devil had hooked something out of the eye socket and was gnawing on it, its head tilted. It looked up at him, its mirror-eyes glinting in the weak light.

“Nancy Whiskey,” it spat. Jack’s eyes widened, and then he gave the devil a crooked grin.

“Why, the devil has a sense of humor.”

It glowered at him, and for a fleeting moment Jack thought he could taste the malt, and the craving he’d joked about earlier hit him in the pit of the stomach. He licked his lips and reached inside his coat to touch the pack of cigarettes as though it were a talisman. But that was dangerous, too.

Hell was not having any way to avoid temptation.

“Are we going?” Todd asked. His eyes were unfocused again, his head weaving slightly as though he were reading something behind their comprehension.

“How about giving the devil a hymn?” Andy suggested. Amon hissed, lifting the dry, dark-looking thing it was chewing on between its teeth and scuttling next to Todd.

Jack ran a hand over his face.

“I don’t know any cheerful hymns.” He took a deep breath. Maybe Andy was right. Maybe he did need to sing. At least it would keep his mind off drinking and smoking. “Do you know ‘The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife,’ Amon?”

The devil ignored him. Todd began to walk, and Jack took up the rear again. After a moment he felt ready, and he started the tune, another he’d first heard in Kentucky.

“
One day the old devil come to my house, da da da dee da da, one day the old devil come to my house, ‘One of your family I may turn out,’ wack to fie doodle all day....”

“Oh, heaven help us, it’s one of
those
,” Andy groaned.

Jack’s voice echoed strangely through the bone tunnels, sounding weaker than usual as he sang the next verse. The farmer’s fear of losing a son didn’t seem cheerful at all to him, even with the “da da” refrain, and he hurried to the next verse:

“‘Hit’s not your oldest son I crave,’ da da da dee da da, ‘Hit’s not your oldest son I crave, but your old scoldin’ wife I’m taking today,’ wack to fie doodle all day.’”

The words tasted like ash, and despite himself, he thought of Rose, lost in Anchorage, back in the days when he thought he was going to be a singer instead of an occultist.

Memories of Rose made the next verse die on his lips. He fell silent, unable to sing about a woman being kidnapped by the devil, even though the old lady prevailed in the end.

So many hadn’t. Including the one he’d loved.

Dry, insectile laughter whispered through the hall. It took him a moment to realize that the noise came from Amon. The devil was looking over its shoulders at him, and Jack was certain it could read his mind. His wards tingled, and he decided its true form was probably much closer to the looming shadow he’d seen during his attack than the slinking beast before him now.

Andy looked back at him, too. Jack pulled up the collar of his leather jacket, unable to meet his friend’s eyes.

“Stupid song,” he muttered.

“I’ve never liked diddly-dees,” the former priest agreed, although his gaze was a silent query.

“Do you only sing folk music?” Todd asked from the front of their small procession.

“Mostly,” Jack said. “I can get by on some country-and-western classics, if I have to, and I know a fair amount of gospel and blues.”

“Have you ever written your own music?”

“N—not for a long time.” Not since Anchorage and Rose. He rallied himself to drive off the memories. “How about you? Do you play jazz?”

“No. I appreciate its precision and spontaneity, but I don’t have any musical talent.”

Jack nodded. He wasn’t surprised that Todd liked modern jazz; it had the same kind of mathematical underpinnings the theologian seemed to call upon in his philosophy of life. By the same token, Jack had never been able to warm to the style. He could appreciate early jazz, the kind still rooted in the blues, but all in all he preferred music that relied on the human voice.

“This?”

He looked up and saw Todd gesturing to a staircase that spiraled upward. Both he and Andy shook their heads at the same time.

“Down,” Andy said firmly. “And with more… vertebrae.”

“All right.” Todd sounded amused.

“Will you be able to sense the dragons, if they come close?” Andy asked.

“Indirectly.” Todd began walking again. “They play havoc with the probabilities. I expect they’re adding variables beyond my comprehension, which makes the equations look like nonsense.”

“You see equations?”

Todd was silent so long that Jack didn’t think he was going to reply. Then, at last, he spoke.

“My perceptions of the material world are no longer as acute as yours, Andrew, but in exchange I see at a...a different level. My mind interprets the input as statistical equations. I’ve come to suspect that others sense the same information as auras, or visions, or even hunches, but that we are all receiving the same data at the most fundamental level.”

“What do you mean by perceptions that aren’t as acute?” Jack asked.

“I’ve become colorblind. And I don’t hear or smell or taste things as well as most people. My sense of touch isn’t very sensitive anymore, and I don’t feel pain as acutely as you do.”

“I never knew any of that,” Andy said, sounding intrigued. “You hide it well.”

“My perceptual impairments are seldom a problem for me. Being black has been much more of a challenge, and I was born that way.”

“When Amon gives you his flesh to eat,” Jack said, interrupting Andy’s response, “do your equations clear up?”

“Yes.”

“And, Amon—when you bite Todd, what do you see?”