The beast did not move.
His blow had struck true, caving in the thing’s skull, striking with such force that one of its eyes had popped out of its orbit, dangling alongside a canine snout. It would have been a killing blow, even for a creature of such prodigious size, but for two things.
First, the skull he had cracked open like an almond was only one of three the beast possessed. Three heads — each vaguely resembling one of King Eurystheus’s molossus hounds, albeit on a monumental scale — sprouted from a broad-shouldered torso. His club had smitten only the one on the monster’s left. The other two were completely intact. Yet, before he could swing again, he realized the second thing.
The hellhound was already dead.
Or so it appeared.
Because of its enormous size, he had not realized that it was sprawled out on the tunnel floor. Had it been standing, he probably would have been able to walk beneath its belly. He studied the thing, wondering if he should smite the other heads anyway, just to be sure. There seemed to be the faintest flutter of movement at one of its remaining nostrils, but this too might have been a trick of the light. He lowered the club, then jabbed the torch at the beast’s open but unmoving eyes.
No reaction.
The appearance of the hellhound was not completely unexpected. He had fought creatures such as this before, twisted things, Typhon’s creations. Chimeras. This beast was different only because it was not the product of Typhon’s warped imagination, but rather a natural occurrence — if such an animal could be considered natural — spawned from the Well of Monsters, the very thing he sought.
A closer look revealed the truth. The blow from his club was only the latest in a series of grievous injuries the creature had sustained. There were numerous scars on its two remaining heads, burns and gashes that had healed, leaving ugly masses of scar tissue. Some looked recent, only a few days old and barely begun to heal. They told a tale of life in the lightless depths of the Earth, a story of constant struggle with no respite.
He wondered what manner of creature would have dared challenge a behemoth such as this, and then he wondered if that other monster had survived the encounter. Was it still here, somewhere close? Were there others like it?
Almost certainly.
He edged around the stricken beast, still not certain that it was dead. If his earlier battles with chimera had taught him anything, it was that such creatures were extraordinarily hard to kill. As he passed along its immense flanks, he reached out and laid a cautious hand on its belly.
Still warm. Though given the stifling environment, that counted for little. If it was dead — and surely it must be — then it had expired recently, a day or two at most, but possibly only a few hours.
The low growling noise repeated, and he felt a faint vibration against his palm. He drew back as if scalded and raised his club again, but the creature remained completely still. After recovering from being startled, he ventured closer once more. It was dead. Of that he felt sure. And yet the noise had come from the beast.
Curiosity replaced both his sense of caution and urgency. He leaned his club against the tunnel wall, knelt down and tried lifting one of the massive front paws. It was stiff and heavy, but he managed to raise it as high as his own waist.
The growl came again, and this time he realized that the sound was not from the beast, but from beneath it. He pushed against the forelimb, straining with all his might. The carcass rolled onto its side, revealing a second, much smaller hellhound, with all three of its jaws clamped tight on the exposed breast of the first.
A mother and its pup.
He stared at the thing for several seconds, wondering if it would attack. The noise repeated, much louder now that it was no longer muffled by the bulk of the dead mother, but the little creature had no intention of letting go. Nor did it appear capable of doing much harm. Despite its size — it was as large as a year-old ox — it was wasting away. Any milk the mother might have produced was long since gone.
He felt a pang of sympathy for the strange-looking pup, and then frowned it away. Sentimentality was a weakness, and in a place such as this, a fatal one. Better to crush the creature’s skulls, spare it the misery of a slow death by starvation.
Yet, as he started to reach for his club, intent on delivering a killing blow, something stayed his hand.
Not compassion. He felt none for the hellhound, but something else.
There was an opportunity here.
This creature was a scion of the Well of Monsters. It was a living vessel in which the essence of the Well might be transported back to his home on the far side of the world. A self-sustaining supply of blood and tissue that he might study and experiment with at his leisure, to develop a weapon against Typhon and his creations. Perhaps he would make even greater discoveries.
It was the very thing for which he had come.
He reached out slowly with his free hand. The pup growled again but did not unclench its jaws to snap at him. He stroked the side of its rightmost head, scratching gently beneath the ear.
A low, steady, terrified rumble issued from its throat, and he could feel the creature’s rapid breathing, its heart fiercely pounding. But after a few long minutes, long enough for the torch to burn nearly down to a stub, the growling ceased.
“Well, that’s progress,” he murmured softly. “But what am I going to feed you?”
It occurred to him that the journey home might not be so easy after all.
Thread
1
At the top of the low hill overlooking the narrow trail cutting through the rain forest, Nils Van Der Hausen wondered why anyone would choose to build a village in such a place. He understood why settlements and cities sprang up along coastlines or on the banks of a river, but he could not fathom what madness possessed people to hack out an existence in the middle of the jungle, miles from the nearest road.
‘Village’ was too generous a term for this collection of huts that occupied the small clearing. It was a five mile walk to the nearest road and two miles from St. Paul River. There were dozens more just like it scattered throughout the river valley. Hundreds, even. The government in Monrovia was vaguely aware of their existence but made no effort to regulate them or provide even the most basic of services to their inhabitants. The people who called the place home subsisted on bush meat, which included anything that walked in the rain forest. The exact whereabouts of the villages and the names of the families who lived in them were unknown to the outside world.
It had taken him the better part of a day to reach this place, even with his GPS unit pointing him in the right direction. Finding these villages was like a mad scavenger hunt, a lesson he had learned during his first visit to the West African republic during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
A genetic engineer by trade, Van Der Hausen had been part of the World Health Organization’s response team deployed to Liberia to combat the spread of hemorrhagic fever. Once on the ground, he had discovered that the team had little use for his scientific expertise. Instead, they needed people on the front lines, trekking out to the rural villages, isolating the infected, educating the superstitious villagers about quarantine measures and how to safely dispose of corpses. He had spent weeks tramping around the jungle, in constant fear of the deadly virus, wild animals, bandits and ignorant villagers who were suspicious of everyone.
It had been a life-changing experience.