by Amy Cross
"If he's underground," Darla says, "you won't be able to sense him from up here."
"Then I'll find some other way to follow him down there."
Darla seems lost in thought for a moment. "There's a story," she says slowly. "A legend. A nightmare. Something I was told about when I was younger. I never considered it could be real, but... It was said that beneath London there was a ruined werewolf city, with -"
"With a throne," I say, interrupting. "I've seen the throne. It's at the bottom of a pit."
"You've seen it?" Darla says. She seems lost in thought. "If that's real, then maybe the rest of the werewolf city is real. Maybe that's where Duncan is headed. It'd be the perfect place to wait to recover, if he needed to hide from someone."
"He needs to hide from everyone," I say.
"That's where he is, then," Darla says. "He's in the Underworld. But... We'll never find him. It's huge down there. And there are things living down there. Dangerous things. I've heard stories about it. There's no way we can just blunder in."
"Then we won't," I say. "We'll get some help."
We climb out of the grave. I take the head of the architect and place it in the hole, and then we cover it with soil. We stand there for a moment, two werewolves in the night. It seems only right that we should pay our respects to the head, even if we were the ones who ripped it out of the building. It feels proper to give the head a final resting place. After all, it deserves peace after a life filled with pain.
"Rest in peace," I say.
"The world," says Darla eventually. "It's a crazy place. Filled with fucked-up stuff that most people don't notice or don't want to notice."
I nod. "Come on," I say. "We've got a different type of grave to dig up."
Jess
Darla lifts a brick away from the pile and throws it to one side.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asks. "I mean, not to doubt you or anything, but are you really really really really really sure? Are you really really really -"
"I'm sure," I say, pulling bricks away as well. Part of me is desperate to find Matt, to pull him out alive, but part of me is worried about the consequences of setting him free. The last time he was free, after all, he tried to kill me, and he's not exactly in control of his werewolf side. He's crazed and chaotic, but right now he's the only one who can possibly help me to find Duncan.
Darla seems cautious, almost nervous. "Whatever you say," she replies. "I just remember you saying that this guy is crazy."
"He is," I say. "But sometimes crazy is good. And if he -"
"There!" Darla says. I look down and see a face looking back up at us from under the remaining bricks. It's a face I never thought I'd see again, a face I thought would remain buried forever.
"You came back," he says, sounding weak.
"Yeah," I say. "Of course I did."
"You..." He pauses. "You took your time."
"Darla," I say, "meet Matt DiMera. The wolf in the pit." Matt stares up at us. It's hard to tell whether he's alive or dead, but then I see his eyes narrow slightly. "I promised I'd help you out of here," I say. "I just... didn't say when."
Darla and I pull more bricks away, and then we help Matt out of the pit.
"I thought this was a legend," Darla says. "I heard stories but... I never thought there was an actual wolf in an actual pit."
There's silence as Matt stands up and looks around. He's covered in small scratches. "I never thought I'd get out again," he says slowly. "I thought you were going to leave me down there forever."
"I would have," I say. "But I need your help."
"I helped you already," he says, almost sneering. "We're done."
"I need your help again," I say.
He smiles. "And why would I want to help you again?"
"Because you're crazy," I say.
"Thanks."
"And because we're going somewhere totally crazy." I take a deep breath. "What do you know about the Underworld?"
Matt stares at me. It's immediately clear that I've got his attention, but there's a look of fear in his face. "I know enough," he says eventually, "to know that there's no way I'd ever tell you how to get down there. Been there, done that. Not many people go to the Underworld and live to tell the tale. The odds of doing it twice? Not a risk I'm willing to take. I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can tell you about it."
"I don't want you to tell me," I say. "I want you to take me. I want you to come with me."
He laughs. "I'm crazy," he says, "but I'm not that crazy."
"I have to rescue Duncan."
"Not if he's in the Underworld," Matt says. "Not if he's down there. If he's down there, the only thing you can do is wait for him to come back up. If he ever makes it out alive." He pauses. "If he's really down there, the best thing you can do is try to think of something nice to say at his funeral."
"He'll make it out," I say. "Because I'm going to go and get him."
"You don't even know what the Underworld is," Matt says. He turns to Darla. "Neither of you do."
"I've heard stories," Darla says. "When -"
"All the stories are true," Matt says. "Every one of them. Think about that before you decide whether or not you want to go down into the Underworld."
"It's not a case of wanting to go down," I say. "It's a case of having to go down."
Matt sighs. "I've been down there," he says. "It's a ruined city. I've seen the kind of creatures that are living in those ruins. Things you never dreamed could be real. Bog Babies. Harpies. Loom People. Some even say Black Annis herself has been seen down there. Do you really want to bump into any of those things in the dark?"
"No," I say, my heart feeling heavy. "But I also don't want to leave Duncan down there alone. He needs my help." I wait for him to tell me it's okay, for him to tell me that he'll help us. But he just stares at me. "If you won't come with me, at least tell me what I'm up against. At least prepare me." I turn to Darla. "You too. You don't have to come with me. I understand if -"
"Oh I'm coming, darling," she says. "I've always wanted to see a Bob Baby or a Harpy. I met one of those Loom People once and damn near had to crack his skull open to get his jaws off my leg. And as for Black Annis, I wouldn't mind running into her at all: she still owes me a cow."
"A cow?" I ask.
"An actual cow," Darla says, seemingly annoyed.
"Who is she, anyway?" I ask.
Darla shakes her head. "Never mind. Let's hope she's not down there. The point is, I'm coming with you."
"Not all the way," Matt says. He fixes Darla with a dark stare. "You know why."
"Whatever," Darla says, but I can see in her eyes that she knows what he's talking about. "But we can do this. We can go down there and we can get Duncan. We'll find him, and we'll haul him back to the surface." She turns to Matt. "With or without your help."
Matt smiles. "I'll tell you what you have to do. But I won't come down there with you. I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy. I'd rather go back in that pit than go down to the Underworld." I can tell from the look on his face that he's serious. Still, he knows things that could be useful. If I'm going down there to find Duncan, I might as well know as much as possible about what I'm going to face.
"I'm definitely coming with you," Darla says. "We've come this far, we might as well go all the way. I'm definitely in. If it was Eddie down there..." Her voice trails off. "You know, right?"
I nod. "If there was any way we could have saved Eddie," I start to say, but the truth is that there's nothing more than I can say that could make her feel better. At least we still have a chance to find Duncan, even if he has been cut in half. Eddie's dead. I still don't quite know what Eddie was to Darla, but I can tell that he meant a lot to her.
I take a deep breath. This Underworld place sounds like fun. But Duncan's down there somewhere, and he needs my help. Once we get down there, I'll be able to find him, I know I will. He's saved me in the past, and now I'm going to save him. Even if he's still cut in half, ev
en if he doesn't want to be saved and he can't be healed, I'm going down there. And this time I won't come back to the real world until I've got Duncan with me. I owe him that much, and so much more.
I close my eyes and try to sense him. It's been so long since I could sense his presence in the city. At first, once again, there's nothing. But then, gradually, I sense something. A faint presence. A faint voice. And then I feel it wash over me. Duncan. He's out there. He's alive. I have no idea where. I have no idea what he's doing, or where he's going, or whether he's in even more danger than I can possibly imagine. But for the first time in a long time, I can sense him. He's alive. And I'm going to rescue him from the Underworld.
Epilogue
General Chaucer held the slide up to the light. All he could see were a series of black squares and a few numbers. It made no sense at all to him. Then again, his mind had never been very good when it came to science. He was a fighting man. He understood war and combat, not DNA sequences and RNA transmitters.
"What am I looking at?" he asked. He hated being down in the government lab, and he wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. The whole damn place made his skin crawl.
"It's all we could salvage from the Blaum Building," said Dr. Mendler, the chief scientist at the lab. "Most of the target materials were gone. The head, for instance -"
"The head was gone?"
"The head was gone, sir."
Chaucer sighed. Violence. Death. This was the sort of thing he was used to, the sort of thing he felt comfortable talking about. "So did we get anything of use?"
"Potentially, sir, yes." Mendler took the slide and held it up again, pointing to several of the black squares. "This is DNA from the metastasized cancer that had spread throughout the building. Obviously this was based on Franklin Blaum's original cancer, but the nature of the building meant that it grew much faster."
"So it's cancer?" Chaucer said wearily. He had no interest in cancer. Cancer was not a weapon, so cancer was not something that he thought about.
"Yes, sir, most of it." Mendler pointed at another part of the slide. "But there was something else mixed in with part of the sample. It took me a long time to identify the intruder, but eventually I did. It's blood. Specifically, sir, it's lycanthrope blood."
Chaucer stared at him. "Werewolf blood?"
"Yes sir," Mendler said. "My best guess is that at some point shortly before Blaum died, the cancer attacked a werewolf and was contaminated with some of the creature's blood. Now, the cancer died shortly after this occurred, but this was a very fast-acting, fast-evolving cancer. So even in the few minutes it had, it was able to absorb the werewolf DNA and use it as its own. In effect, it mutated."
Chaucer took the slide back and squinted at it. The whole thing seemed ridiculous, but he'd learned to trust Dr. Mendler over the years, he'd learned to grudgingly respect scientists in general. Sometimes they could be useful. And Mendler knew his stuff. It was Mendler who had created the Gene Baby, and it was Mendler who had reverse-engineered a Sentinel husk. "Mutated into what?" Chaucer asked cautiously.
"It never got time to find out," Mendler said. "But we have time."
"This," said Chaucer, staring at the slider, "is a mutation of hyper-aggressive cancer and werewolf genes. Is that right?"
Mendler nodded. "That's a simplistic way of looking at it, yes, but it's essentially accurate."
"So," Chaucer continued. "What do we do with it?"
Mendler took the slide back, held it up to the light and gazed at it with almost paternalistic pride. He looked like a man whose son had just scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final or the winning score in the Superbowl. His eyes almost sparkled as he marveled at the slide, as he thought of the possibilities. His voice was filled with excitement and anticipation. "We grow it."
Part Three
Underworld
Prologue
I don't know why they call London a city. It's not. Never has been. It's always been two cities, one on top of the other. The main London, and the other London.
Listen.
There's a story. I don't know how true it is but I believe it. Apparently there was this guy a couple of hundred years ago, his name was Harrington Edwards and he was working construction on the first big sewers being built beneath the city of London. One day he got lost. Very lost. Probably more lost than any person in the history of humanity has ever got lost. He wandered around for days down there, trying to find his way back up to the surface, back up to his friends and family.
He never made it.
I don't know if he was disorientated, or confused, or just plain stupid, but as Harrington Edwards tried to find a route back to the surface, he ended up going further and further down. Deeper and deeper and deeper. He ended up in tunnels that no-one knew existed, tunnels that were supposed to have been filled in many decades earlier. He must have realized, after a few days, that he was never going to get out alive.
But then he found himself in the other London. The one beneath the one we all know today. The one that was erased, the one that was deliberately destroyed and crushed. The one that was supposed to be empty and abandoned.
This other London was lit by the phosphorescent light of ancient moss. Huge buildings filled the caverns, reaching several storeys up to the roofs. It must have been an astonishing sight for poor Harrington Edwards as he first wandered through those ruins. Having longed to see his home, the surface world, again, he now found himself face to face with a nightmare ghost of his home, an ashen, doomed metropolis deep beneath his London. He was looking for his home, and instead he found someone else's home. It must have seemed so empty, so lonely.
And then the creatures came. Antipedes, huge worms with a million legs that double as teeth. Loom People, whose only goal is to strip the human body into threads for their legendary looms, which they then pass on to their masters, the Flesh Weavers. Golvs, hideous creatures with teeth in their eyes. Even a few stray werewolves remained down there, or so I'm told. Such things that would drive any many insane. Poor Harrington Edwards must have run screaming to try to get away from this menagerie of horrors.
But of course they caught him. He ran into the Bog Babies. And that's how Harrington Edwards died. He drowned, and was sliced up, and was eaten, and was skinned alive, and suffered a massive heart attack, all at the same time. The only consolation is that there must have been so much pain, so much agony, that his body shut down and was unable to feel anything. But still he would have seen all those creatures watching him die. Loom People. Bog Babies. Loop Bandits. Criads. Tenderlings. Golvs. Why, some people say that even Black Annis herself came to watch.
And they all laughed.
That was it. That was the world you asked me about. That was the Underworld.
Jess
"And," he continues, fixing me with a dark stare, "the legend says that one day this other city, Lycanth, will rise up and break through the surface once again, destroying London as we know it. But..." He smiles. "Like I said, I don't know how true this is."
I take a deep, deep, deep breath. It sounds... intense. And scary. And also wildly, wildly overblown. Okay, I can understand how a bunch of werewolves could sneak about in London for centuries without anybody noticing. No problem with that at all. But an entire second city, beneath the first London, crawling with strange creatures? That's kind of a hard secret for anyone to keep.
"So," says Darla, sitting next to me, eyes fixed on Matt. "This Underworld is where Duncan crawled to when he dug himself out of his grave?"
Matt nods slowly. "I imagine he decided it was too dangerous to return to the surface, so he dug down and tunneled to the Underworld. He's probably down there right now, resting, regrowing the part of his body that was sliced off. What part did you say that was again?"
"His legs," I say. "And his lower torso. He was pretty much sliced in half."
Matt winces. "Werewolves might be able to heal, but shit like that still hurts."
I swallow hard. "So wha
t do we do? We just go down there, find him, and bring him back up, right?"
"In theory," Matt says. "Yeah, that would work."
"In practice?" Darla asks. Unlike me, she seems to be actually enjoying all of this. She loves the idea of an adventure down into some ruined, monster-infested underground city. Either she's never been in real danger before, or she's been in so much real danger that it doesn't mean anything to her anymore; whatever, she's psyched up for this. Is that a good thing? Or should I be worried?
"Any journey to the Underworld is dangerous," Matt says. "Obviously it's a risk. There are creatures down there. Things that should never have even existed. To see them is enough to drive most men mad. Even Black Annis stays clear of certain parts of the Underworld, in case of... complications."
"You keep mentioning Black Annis," I say. I turn to Darla. "You've mentioned her too. Who the fuck is she?"
Darla looks at Matt, waiting for him to tell me.
"Black Annis is someone you will never, ever meet," Matt says. "You will go out of your way to avoid ever having to encounter her, because to meet Black Annis is to look into the diseased, nightmarish eyes of the greatest evil ever born in this land. Everyone is scared of her. Even the Flesh Weavers... and by the way, if you run into them, you have to run. Same with the Loom People. Same with anyone or anything you encounter down there. But don't worry. Black Annis will keep away from you, she's a busy lady and a couple of young werewolves won't interest her in the slightest."
"Okay," I say, sighing. It seems like every question I ask is answered with more things that I don't understand. I just have to focus on the real job at hand, which is getting into the Underworld, finding Duncan, and getting him out of there. After that, we'll worry about the rest of our lives. But right now, there's only one job: I have to find Duncan.