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The dungeon kept on going. I would have been impressed by its sheer size, had that not been the thing now trying to kill me.

“Where are we going?” Heather whispered.

I wasn’t sure. All I could think of, apart from how stupid it was to come back for Heather, was Oana’s slick. The tunnel from her kitchen to her hidden garage, the one thing that kept her alive. I couldn’t get the image out of my head. Any smart conspiracy would have something like that in their headquarters. Of course, the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist weren’t exactly smart.

Still, this was a freaking gothic castle in LA. It wasn’t authentic; it was more about what a bunch of Ren Faire people thought looked cool. Secret doors would be practically required. In the corner of the dungeon, I found a cell. It appeared to be a real cell, someplace to lock someone away as opposed to something dedicated to carnal bliss. It was locked, but I picked the door with a small needle-like thing I really hoped hadn’t previously been inserted into anyone.

“Wow. You sure know how to pick a place, Nicky,” Vassily called. “I should bring girls here.”

“Why is he calling you Nicky?” Heather whispered.

“Do you really want to have this conversation now?” I hissed back.

I went into the cell and touched the walls. Cool stone. They had carved some things into the walls, mostly Satanic prayers and Metallica lyrics, but someone had put a little—well, I hesitate to call it a poem, but:

I was here

Here I was

Was I here

Yes I was.

I stared at it. It was right at the foot of the little cot. In the sea of self-conscious evil of the late teenage years, it was out of place. It was almost cute in its way, and Satanists were many things, but cute wasn’t one of them. I traced the words with my finger.

“Oh, Nicky…?”

“We need to go! That monster is almost here and I don’t have my gun!” Heather whispered.

Crouching by the words, I poked the brick. With a masticating grind, the brick moved. “Huh,” I said.

And fell through the floor.

IT WAS A PIPE, WET AND SLIMY
, canted at about a 45-degree angle. I couldn’t be sure exactly: I had left my level in my other pants, and I was screaming. Later, if I ever spoke about this again, I would have to amend that to bellowing, yawping, or some other, more manly vocalization. But let’s face it, I was screaming. That’s what happens when you’re suddenly zooming through the wet, throatlike darkness, hurtling toward an unknown that’s practically guaranteed to be unpleasant.

The nice part was this chute was way too small for Vassily, and I couldn’t even hear his voice over the sound of my screaming and the rapidly increasing distance between us. The pipe slowly leveled out and I lost a little bit of speed, and then it opened up and I went sliding across a slick concrete surface, coming to a stop... somewhere in the pitch dark. All I know was my ass made little echoing sounds when it zoomed across the wet floor.

A hiss followed me, getting louder and louder. I tried not to have a heart attack as I went for my phone. I hit a couple buttons and a light shone from one end. I pointed it in the direction of the hiss in time to see Heather shoot out from the pipe about thirty feet away and slide across the floor on her butt. She bumped into me, most of her momentum gone by that time. Only then did she open her eyes.

“Jim?”

“Yep.”

“Where are we?”

I shined the light around the room. The phone’s glow was brighter than might be expected, but a real flashlight would beat the pants off it any day of the week. We were in a large concrete room. The fishy aroma of algae permeated pretty much everything, and I knew I would have to air myself out afterwards to be remotely presentable. An open doorway led out, though not to anywhere I’d want to go on a normal day. Things skittered away from the beam of the flashlight. For the time being, I planned to ignore them. I got to my feet and helped Heather to hers.

“Storm sewers, by the looks of things.”

“What was that?” she asked, nodding into the dark in the vague direction of the waterslide.

“Escape hatch. Means there’s probably a way out of here that won’t kill us.”

“Probably?”

“Satanists, remember?”

Dimly, I heard the echo of crashes and pops above. The geologic sounds of Vassily having a tantrum in the sex dungeon, filtering down through the slick to our ears. I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for anyone topside. I moved gingerly across the floor, trying not to slide my feet at all. Heather slipped on a patch of algae, windmilled her arms, and I caught her without thinking.

“Thank you,” she said, holding onto my arm.

I smiled to myself. I remembered meeting Mina a year ago; I had been convinced that there was no way someone that hot wasn’t out to get me. I had been braced for the inevitable betrayal the whole time, ignoring the fact that Mina took a little while to warm up to me, if I want to put it mildly. Had she actually been out to get me, she’d have thrown “do me” vibes at me the whole time. Like Heather was doing right at that moment, holding on even though she had long since gotten her balance back. Heather was a killer, probably her cult’s favorite one, and she had done that Satanist back at the courthouse with her bare hands. Or possibly the sink, or the paper towel dispenser, or the handle of the flush toilet. I hate my imagination sometimes, but it was doing a good job reminding me that I wasn’t holding some ingénue with a few crow’s feet.

 I let go of her and shined the light at the doorway. In the darkness ahead, something crawled over an uneven surface and flopped into water. I cursed.

“What?” Heather asked.

“I hate the undercity.”

“Why?”

“Seriously? Look around.”

“Oh, I thought there was more to it than that.”

“There is. The best parts smell like dead fish and the worst parts, well... let’s move fast.”

I was worried about a persistent legend in Los Angeles known as the Lost City of the Lizard People. No, seriously. It’s a real thing and you can google it if you don’t believe me. Like most things in California, it had all started with gold. Specifically, a deposit said to be located under Fort Moore Hill, downtown. In 1934, local lunatic G. Warren Shufelt (The G was for “God, are you kidding?”) claimed a wise old Indian had told him about the underground city of the lizard people, and because he didn’t seem to understand that such a thing, if real, should be avoided at all costs, promptly sunk mineshafts to find it. He
did
find it, stretching from Broadway downtown all the way to the Southwest Museum (which, for conspiracy buffs, is less than a mile from the former headquarters of V.E.N.U.S.). Shufelt went into the city and was either crowned prince of the lizard people or eaten (accounts vary), and the
LA Times
claimed the whole thing was a hoax.

It isn’t.

Oh, God, I wish it were.

When I said I worked for every conspiracy, cult, or secret society, that’s not entirely true. I never worked for the lizard people.

Because they are fucking
crazy
.

And here I was, in their domain. Granted, we were west of their city, but in getting away from our present predicament, we’d be going toward it. I was going into Moria knowing exactly what was waiting for me in the dark. No reason to panic Heather, though. I was panicking enough for the both of us.

I went to the doorway, a rushing sound growing louder and louder as I approached. I shined the light down, revealing a single slick step leading to a larger pipe. Concrete borders gave us a place to walk. In the middle was a sluggish six-foot river of black water turgidly plowing its way through the dark.

“That way,” Heather said, pointing in the direction of the flow. “That will lead us out.”

“Not necessarily. I mean, yeah, if we were aboveground. Down here, sometimes those dump into flood chambers, reroute into pipes. It’s a goddamn maze.”

“I hate the undercity,” she said.

“Damn right.” I led her downstream anyway. My sense of direction has never been stellar, and down here, whatever I had was completely scrambled. I kept my eyes peeled for markings on the wet concrete walls, either conspiracy symbols or something mundane added by a municipal employee. I didn’t see anything, and that worried me. We were
theoretically
west of their city. Nothing said they hadn’t branched out. Or separated into warring clans.

The water didn’t look deep, but that was deceptive. It was completely opaque, with angry eddies periodically swirling up from the depths. It was either the slide down or the ambient filth, but all the little scratches I had received during my first escape from Vassily had started itching as my subconscious mind provided the feel of infection. I kept my back to the wall, inching along the side. Heather imitated me, probably thinking I had some secret way to move around down here. Ahead, the pipe opened up into a pool, which boasted two more pipes, going in opposite directions.

Jutting from the side of the pool was a short pier. A skiff was secured to the side with some greasy rope. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I said.

“Whose boat is that?”

“I really hope it’s not Zed’s.”

“Who’s Zed?”

“We’re not doing this.”

“Doing what? Jim? Are you stealing that boat?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t... it’s Mis... you need permiss...”

I wasn’t getting permission from whatever lizard person or mutant owned this thing. Instead, I could hope they had some kind of subterranean ride-share program, and if they ever asked me to kick in a couple bucks or maybe some roadkill, I’d happily do it. I gingerly stepped out onto the dock, putting my weight carefully on one foot. The wood was waterlogged and filthy, but it looked mostly solid. I pressed down. It creaked a little, but held. I took another step, now completely on this odd little structure. The skiff was small, but it would fit two people as long as one was standing. It was entirely empty, except for a bit of dirty water collecting at the bottom.

“If I fall in, you’ll save me, right?” I asked.

“You want me to jump in there?”

“It’s not my first choice, no. But if this thing sinks, yes.”

“Of course!” Heather said, the happy smile audible in her voice.

I had no idea how sincere she was. I put one foot in the skiff. It wobbled, but didn’t seem like it was going to sink. I winced as I slowly transferred my weight into it. I took my foot off the dock, and now I was officially standing in a stinking skiff I found in the LA storm sewers. A long pole with grimy tape around one end was on hooks on the side of the dock. I picked it up.

“I think we’re okay. Can you untie the boat?”

“You see, Jim? Positive thinking. You believed you could stand on that boat, and you did it.”

“Is that what happened?”

She nodded, untying the ropes. She hopped in, and though she barely weighed over a hundred pounds, I winced again, sure the vessel would tip over, sink, or maybe even explode, because it had been that kind of day. When nothing of the sort happened, I handed her the phone flashlight. She lit what little of the gloom she could as I pushed off from the dock. The pole found purchase at the bottom of the pipe; judging from that, we were in about six feet of water. There were currents at the bottom moving a good deal faster than the stuff on top. Someone falling in would likely be sucked to the bottom, then get shunted along on a very drowny trip through the undercity to be spat out into the Pacific as fish food.

I moved us out into the center of the underground river. Then, remembering something Mothman had told me one time, picked the left tunnel and pushed us over there.

“Jim?”

“Yeah?”

“Why did that monster call you Nicky?”

“I owe him some money. He came in shooting.”

“How did he know you were there?”

“That’s a really good question.” I thought about it, and short of Vassily tracking my phone, which seemed unlikely, it meant he was either watching the place or someone tipped him. Who? I had no idea. Vassily’s full net of contacts was a mystery, and it’s likely that through Neil he could have met any number of Satanists, both low- and high-ranking.

“Any ideas?”

“He was probably watching the place,” I decided. Then, spinning it up with some lies, I said, “He probably has any number of debtors in there. Gambling evokes greed, envy, probably gluttony, so they’re big fans. When I was there, they were always trying to get me into high-stakes poker.”

“Is that how you built up your debt?”

“Yep.”

“And you used a fake name? Why?”

“Would you tell a loan shark your real name?”

“I wouldn’t deal with a loan shark.”

“Well, yeah, that would obviously have been the better decision for me.”

She was quiet. I could feel her staring at me, even though she kept the dim beam of light barely clearing the path ahead. When she spoke, it was resigned. “You’re a complicated man.”

“You could say that.”

I pushed down the tunnels for hours. We were making good time, especially when I was able to make the current work with us. Of course, “making good time” was on a trip to God-knew-where, so maybe speed didn’t matter much. Along one of the tunnels, the light picked out a shape about the size of a terrier loping along one of the concrete walkways. It was moving towards us, eyes glowing red in the beam, totally fearless in its domain. And it should have been. It was a gray rat, huge and mangy. I almost muttered something about Rodents of Unusual Size, but I didn’t want to annoy it.

I pushed us over to the far size of the stream. It paused, watching us float by. Soon, the darkness swallowed it back up, but the sound of its claws on wet concrete dogged us for several hundred feet.

“What was that?”

“Tijuana pet,” I said. I knew that wasn’t enough, so I elaborated. “It’s an urban legend. Old lady goes down to TJ and she loses her glasses or something while she’s down there. I don’t know what an old lady would be doing in TJ, but that’s the story. Anyway, she meets a street dog and it’s starving, so she feeds the poor thing. It’s one of those heartwarming tales about someone rescuing a stray, and they become best friends. She brings the dog back to the States, where she takes it to the vet. That’s when the vet breaks the news to her: it’s not a dog. It’s a giant rat.”