"You don't know that!" Ajax contested. "She could be dead in the woods somewhere! She could be lying dead behind the mansion for all you know!"
"She's down there," Dean corrected, staring at the entry with his new-found psychic vision. "I'm not leaving here till I get her back."
"Well that's your gig, man! You want to stick your neck out so your head'll be lopped off, that's your business! Me—no way!"
"Fine... " Dean walked into the mine's wide egress; Ajax, without much faith, followed. Their flashlights beamed dead ahead: dirt walls propped up by heavy wooden stulls like railroad ties. Railroad tracks led them down further, until...
"Damn," Dean muttered.
The entry ramp stopped at a four-tined fork which led further down into multitudinous branches and off-shoots: tunnels within tunnels.
"It's a fuckin' maze!" Ajax complained. "We'll never find our way through this shit!"
"Yes we will," Dean croaked back in assurance. "Follow me... back to the entry."
They both stomped back to the entrance of the mine. "You got a knife?" Dean asked.
"Well, yeah," Ajax replied. "You wanna butter some bread?"
"Start cutting," Dean ordered. He whipped out his own knife and began... cutting open the abdominal vaults of the dead police officers. From the rents, he yanked out long tubes of the small intestine. Like yanking yarn from the belly of a stuffed doll.
"Yank! Yank!" he shouted.
Confused, Ajax thought what the hell, and he cut open another dead cop's belly and began yanking out intestines. Got nothin' much else to do right now, he considered.
Soon six piles of pink-gray intestinal whirls lay at their feet. "Cut each loop off at the end," Dean instructed. "Then tie each end together."
"Say what?" Ajax inquired.
"Just do it!" Dean yelled. "You saw the mine! It's a labyrinth! If I'm going down there, I need to be able to find my way out."
Ajax seethed in his distaste, but he did it just the same. The human small intestine was twenty-four to thirty-two feet long. Ajax snipped of each end with his knife, then tied the ends together by way of a sheet-bend knot, connecting each end as effectively as possible. Shit squeezed out of each end, which set Ajax' face long. I'm handling police officer excrement, he thought. He flapped each wad off his hand like slabs of warm brown clay. But by then, at least, he was beginning to get it... when Dean tied the last end to his back belt loop.
A guideline, Ajax thought.
"Come on," Dean said, shotgun in one hand, flashlight in the other. "I'm going down there... to get Arianne out."
Ajax didn't argue. He followed Dean deep into the front mine stope, to the area which branched out into four different corridors. Ajax dropped the 150-foot reel of intestines to the dirt floor and kept his end tied about his wrist.
"I'll try one at a time," Dean said. "If I shout... pull me back."
"Got'cha," Ajax understood.
Dean took a deep breath. Then he began to lower himself into the first egress.
««—»»
This eats dick, Dean thought, plodding forward. The earth-formed corridor wound ever downward. The deeper Dean descended, the harder the stench wafted up.
The foulest stench to ever assail his nose, which stood to reason: it was into the main shaft of this very mine that they'd dumped hundreds of dead cattle and probably enough rendering bilge to fill a community swimming pool.
Some of the corridors were manways—barely wide enough to squeeze through—while others were haulage passages. Some, he knew, would lead to the main shaft, others to dead ends. Eventually, the corridor he now occupied ended at a great pile of rubble. Damn... Frustrated, Dean followed the life-line of intestines back to entry.
"No luck," he told Ajax. "A dead end."
"Maybe they're all dead ends," Ajax pointed out. "Maybe she's not even here."
"I know she's here," Dean felt assured. He couldn't explain how he knew, he just knew. This place was full of archaic evil, and it was some equally archaic benevolence that whispered its secrets to him, emboldened him with its supereal wisdom. "Arianne's in there somewhere, and so is the hellish mother and son who've been tearing this town a new asshole."
"How do you know?" Ajax countered.
"I just do. And I know why they're here, I know what summoned them— vengeance."
"Vengeance? For what?"
"It's me they want. They've brought their horror here as vengeance against what I've done."
Ajax smirked as though the words were ridiculous. "And what's that?"
Dean's voice grated out as if confessing to murder. "I've cranked more horns out of more cattle heads than anyone in history."
Dean checked the second set of passages, then the third. Both were clueless dead ends. "This one," he said of the fourth, "has got to be it."
He stepped in as if entering the esophagus of an immense dead beast, then began moving toward its belly.
««—»»
When Arianne awoke she thought she must be drowning in filth; she didn't breathe as much as gulp great mouthfuls of air. She hung naked, suspended by her wrists, in some low cavern of beslimed wet rock. The old mine, she realized. I'm at the bottom of the mine. No source of light could be detected yet she could see the entails of her surroundings as if through some sort of filter, as if evil had a light of its own. Arianne knew at least that much: it was evil that had brought her to this foul place.
Before her lay piles of dead cattle, some corpses mummified to twisted sacks of leather, others bloated by rot and putrefactive gas, while still more seemed to have melted down to puddles of nameless slop in which maggots churned voraciously. But what stretched beyond was even more vile: a veritable lake of befoulment, as though all the waste of hell had been dumped here. Indeed, this was the place where the Devil emptied his bowels.
And it was from this lake that the woman emerged. Arianne had seen her before, on the night she was nearly killed by Sergeant Lass: a woman who existed not as a being of flesh but a being of darkness, a woman made solid by every evil thought and loathsome desire generated by humankind. She was the lust behind every rape, child-molestation, and act of incest. She was the erection at the groin of every Serbian torturer. She was the synapse which triggered every finger to ever drop napalm on women and children, and the blood that pumped in the hearts of every SS death-camp guard. She was Pasiphae.
She traipsed knee-deep through the liquid filth, bringing her black smile ever closer. Arianne just hung there, watching.
"Not quite the Harlot of Sodom, hmm?" The spectral queen's voice echoed like words cast out in a mountain range. "All the power you could have over men, and look what you've done with it. You've given it away, and now you are ruled by them."
"Got any crank? Got any cokesmoke?" Arianne asked. "I'm stringing out."
"Not a real woman at all but just a silly little piece of meat for men to drain their loins in."
"Guess not," Arianne muttered in dejection. "So fuck you."