The Big Dam Hole only spits out a couple humans a year and they die right away; Marauders  get em first and aint enough of em left to sprinkle on a teacake after.  Most times Marauders got to make do with tumbleweeds although they are a tough chew, specially the fangs.
     They got other sources.  Only last week they kidnapt a mess of Red Suckers and trusses em by their wings over a blackwood fire and boils em til their eyes pop out their heads like billiard balls caromin off the table, and they rips and chews the mortal remainders like jerky.  Maraunders is vicious even to their own kind.
     Cemetery has all kinds.  We got Red Suckers and Hirsute Ones and some cannot make up their minds what they wanna be, plus we got yours truly.  I take pride in the happy circumstance that I run this place despite not bein alive anymore, cause a guy can be anythin he wants to if he sets his mind to it.  I was a ball of fire when I was lively and dam well aim to stay that way.
     I aint no Prometheus and cant bring light everywhere.  The Big Outside is devoid, aint nothin bringin them savages enlightenment.
     And the Kid, nobody enlightens him.  I like the Kid.  Good card player, though he dont have no advantage over me cause I got the extra arms and them sleeves has a lot of hidin places if you know what I mean.
     Dont know what Id do without my superfluous appendages, which come in dam handy in the Mines.  You want to stay out of the Mines unless youre me cause the workers down theres persnickety on occasion, specially if they chews their chains off which on occasion they have.
     Sometimes I feel sorry for the people that come outa the Big Dam Hole havin just wandered into her from gosh only knows where, and no more sense than they give a jackass with the staggers.  Lately Maraunders is takin to campin right by the Hole so they get first crack at the newcomers, and they howl like a horny farmhand on a Saturday night when they snap one of em open like you break yourself a peapod.
     The Kid found hisself a pile of bones outside a Marauder mudhole recent-like and he comes back into the saloon all shook up and says to me he says, they was baby bones in that pile.  That aint right doc, says he.  Well hell, aint nothin right in this cockeyed world but I says, well why not do somethin about it.  And he says all calm and quiet, I aim to.
     Not much shakes up the Kid but them baby bones done it.  And we all of us got shook up when that little gal come through the Hole.

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* * * * *

     I turned one street and then another, left and right and left, and there was fog everywhere.  I cursed myself for a fool, as I ran and walked and then ran again.  No idea of my bearings and no way to sound for them, having no nautical experience to speak of.
     Or should that be of 'which to speak'?   I can never remember.   Inattention during a grammar lesson is unforgivable, Miss Gibbons said, so I do not expect to be forgiven.
     I should have taken the other seat in the hansom cab that the elderly gentleman offered.  I would have, except there was something about him that did not inspire confidence.  Perhaps it was the way he patted the seat next to his, caressing it as one would a lover's cheek, as he invited me in.  No need to ask upon whom his next touch, gentle or not, would be bestowed.
     "No, thank you, sir," I replied, "I have a carriage waiting just kitty-corner. " And I slammed the door upon his disappointed face.  Little Miss Hanging High, for I actually had no transportation of any kind and felt as if I were hanging myself higher than Haman with my folly.  But I reasoned there must be some other conveyance available.  I was in the most civilized city in the world; such a utopia would never suffer harm to come to a citizen in need of movement and safety.
     My problem was of my own making, for I should not have lingered at the Darwinists lecture, but the man was fascinating.  I had many questions, and I must admit as well that he was not entirely unattractive.  Wedding-ringed, curse the luck.  And he spoke in the backroom of a Soho pub, since, as he explained, no scientific arena of repute would house such heretical theories.
     The upshot was that I overstayed myself, despite Miss Gibbons's admonition that I return to the school's boarding house no later than ten of the clock.  It was now 11:45 post meridian; I wondered if she should open the door to me at all at this hour.  All of sixteen and I had no business abroad on a night like this, or so she had said.   All alone in this world without a relation to call my own, such a pitiable soul should not desport herself about the streets at ungodly hours like a common drab, or so she had said.  She would have fainted dead away had she known what area of the city I was frequenting.
     I hated the woman; I hated her school and her sense of propriety and her condescension.  I hated that I had nothing to my name except a few pounds as a parental legacy, and could afford nothing better than that place.
     I hated that my mother and father were dead and I was alone.  I hated being alone.
     I shall desport to my heart's consent, thought I.   Mummy would have been proud.   
     Darker, foggier if such a thing should be possible.  Hell is murky, says Mrs. Macbeth, and so is London, and the flares of the lamps are no better than candles lit in the great vaulted hall of an all-encompassing blackness.  I felt like Beowulf at Hrothgar waiting for Grendel, comforted only by a single wan flame.  What an inadequate method of illumination gaslight is, to be sure.
     "May I be of some assistance, miss?"
     A shadow moved, a single black wave tumbling forth from an ocean as dark as Acheron, and I am afraid I screamed.
     He put his hand to his heart as if I had offended him, which I suppose I had.  "Oh, come now," he replied, "surely I am not as bad as all that."
     No, indeed he was not.  Tall fellow, and all the girls at the school--the older ones, to be sure--liked them tall.   Very thin, a muffled face.  Silken cloak, top hat.  A dandy, but why should a toff be larking about in this muck?   For what could he be in search?
     "Are you quite all right?"
     I found my voice like a fool.
     "Yes, I am sorry, I am quite all right.  You startled me, that is all."
     "A thousand pardons, miss, I do apologize if you took fright.
     As he spoke, he unmuffled his face.  Handsome fellow, very!  Clean-shaven, firm skin, solid jaw, cobalt blue eyes, most attractive and calming.
     "How do you come to be here, my dear?"
     "The Darwinist's symposium.  I fear I am behind my time, or perhaps ahead of it."
     "Ah, the fellow said.  Darwin.  The philosopher of the humanist, he who ignores mankind's filthiness and links it to beasts.  And seeks to supplant God with his foolery."
     "I beg your pardon, I am sure," I said, attempting to rise on tiptoe to meet his eyes, "I happen to find the subject most interesting."  I tried to look affronted, although it was difficult to do so, gazing into those darling sharp eyes of his.
     "Do you?  You believe we are all animals under the covering of our skins?  The savage lurks inside, below the beating heart?"
     "I hardly think it is as bad as all that.  We are none of us monsters.  Darwinism is simply a theory as to the origin . . ."
     "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," the fellow intoned.
     I shook my head with impatience.  "No doubt He did," I returned, but can we not assert the possibility of other creations, without reckoning with the beast below the skin?"
     He smiled, showing a row of even white teeth.  "Let us agree to disagree then.  You have very nice skin, are you aware of that?"
     I blushed and shuddered at the same time.  Blushed because I receive so few compliments, none at all from the male sex; shuddered because it was an unspeakably personal remark to make in such an off-handed conversation, in so bleak a place.
     "Thank you,"I said.  "You are very kind, if a trifle indelicate."
     "Again, I crave pardon if I offend."
     "That is quite all right.  Do you know how I might find my way . . . ?"
     "Skin is a remarkable thing," he went on imperturbably.  "The thinnest covering imaginable; cut it and what oozes forth?   Blood, pus, mucus and filth, the abominable interior humors, the red sins that flow ever so freely . . ."
    He rolled his eyes up into his head, like one who is quite mad, or unusually near-sighted.
    Well, I am in a predicament, I thought to myself.  I need to get away from this man at once.   Cobalt eyes be d______d, I must run and that right early.
     His eyes showed white.  "Pare the skin from the body bit by bit and every slice will disclose new horrors.  We are horror inside, poppet, we are blood and bile and bone . . ."
     I could feel the blood and bile slamming in my skullbone, like the racketing steampipes in the boarding house; I could hear my own gasps, and I thought to myself that if I heard a woman gasp like that, I would conclude that she was not at all well.
     Then his cobalt eyes rolled back into view and he drew out the long daggar; I saw its gleam like a shine of silver in a mineshaft (not that I have ever visited a mineshaft), and I knew I had crafted my own death.  I had lingered too long in the land of shadows and now the King of Shadows was going to punish me for my impertinence.
     He held the blade up to my eyes, I suppose for his own gratification--it certainly did not gratify me--and gave it a twist in the air.  My courage gave way, although it was the best possible moment for it to do so, for it forced me to turn and run the alleyway's length as fast as ever my legs would carry me.  I had sojourned with apes and the beast was after me.  And, as if to shield me from the primate, the fog surrounding me grew thicker still, a wave of it washing over me, a great whitish intake of breath that propelled me to the extremity of the wall.
     There was a wall.  I had run down a dead end, down to my own life's end.  I continued to run toward the wall, intending to slam my hands against it and then turn and face what was running towards me on black gentleman's boots that resounded like the metal cleats on a pale horse.  I do not know what my purpose was in making such a stand--perhaps dying against a wall is not so humiliating as dying in the street--but as I ran I experienced a lightness, a levitation, as if my feet were no longer making contact with the ground.
     Rushing waves of mist engulfed me, and there was a smell of dust and earth as I reached the wall and went through it.
​
                                                           * * * * *​

     We heared the roar which always sounds to me like a belch from a bad tumbleweed stew, that gulpy sound the Big Dam Hole makes when it blasts some poor fool into Serpent Canyon, and the Kid he stood up and adjusted his gunbelt and I knew our little game was over.  Folds my cards, which was a dam shame cause they was Aces and Eights, dead mans hand.
     Dead mans hand.  Hee, thats comical.
    The Kid heads out the door, and before he exits stage left, he twirls his 48 shooter.  That man is a sight to see when he practices turnin adobe walls into lace.  Then after practice he usually comes into the Elbowbend and drinks hisself into a state of putrefaction, but today he slams it home like Jesus Christmas come to claim.  I was pretty sure he was not about to rescue no humans, be dammed to the lot of em says I, and the Kid he agrees, but he did wanna take them Marauders down a peg.
     Nothin to do but wait, so I took me the opportunity to oil and maintain the bartenders, one of which had a loose pneumatic tube and the liquor was not flowin at all, and what dam good is a bartender with no booze to give you say I.   That was Jack, the bigger of the two, and Jack is nothin but trouble.  I get a lot of grief from that machine.  Sledge now, he runs like a dream.
     Meanwhile I waited for the screams and the roars, which meant them Maraunders had kilt and split open another one.  I admired the Kid for tryin to stand up to them, but what earthly good that will do I do not know.  Why fight death an dyin?  Live and let live, says I. 
     Live and let live.  Hee, thats comical.
    Waited and waited but them screams never come.
​
                                                             * * * * *

     It is difficult to describe the tumult in which I found myself as I passed through the wall.  It was a furious rushing sensation, as if I were standing atop a carriage out of control upon a mountain road, and the slightest deviation from the path would send me hurtling to my doom.  The rush of wind and purple wave and crimson sparkle that made up the maelstrom tumbled me forward, with no way of stopping or even slowing myself.
     I thought that I must be insane, the night's fogged events being no more than the delusions of a girl turned lunatic.  Then I wondered if perhaps this was what death was like, to pass through the Wall, and Death's Coach, which kindly stopped for me, hurtling me toward the Last Judgment.
     I landed with a most painful thud, as if I had been dropped from a great height.  I was face down in the dirt, my chemise torn (I heard the rip and it struck me to the heart, 4 p. wasted on the thing), my dress rumpled and doubtless in sore need of pressing.  I shook my head, raised it.
     Now for a scene, for surely no prophet in a strange land had ever seen desert waste such as this! 
     The sky was a deep roiling purple, with black clouds skittering across its tumultuous surface.  Lightning flashed as green as jade; a deep crimson shade from the red-limned twin moons covered the ground with a bloody tinge that was horrifying to look upon, a coloring that seemed to turn the desert sands into crimson waves.
     I lay at the entrance to an enormous serpentine canyon.  Its walls twisted every which way, like the circular mazes in the Crystal Palace's gardens, but turned in mad directions, as if a warlock gardener had utterly disarrayed them with foul magic.  This stone Eden was itself a serpent.  Its rocks were fissured throughout, and there was a massive chasm in its center with numerous pinkish crusts like aureoles surrounding it.  This abyss erupted white clouds that grew red in the brackish atmosphere.  Red dust whirled around me, stinging my skin, watering my eyes.  I flung up my hands to cover my face and looked down, only to behold what monstrosities grew from the scarlet dirt.
     The foliage!   I saw great stalks of yellow, purple, red, with spikes of dark brown and jet dripping a greenish ichor.  There were massive black cacti, with stingers that looked like pink mouths with ruddy serrated fangs.  It was indeed Beelzebub's botanical garden, rooted in Gehenna.
     There was one creeper, a bilious orange vine with pendulous black pouches depending from it like drooping mouths.  A great white slug-like thing propelled by diaphanous wings wandered near one of the pouches, which snared it.  The winged creature screeched and whinnied in the most piteous way, and I covered my ears at the noise, my eyes tight shut again.  I was trapped like that insect was trapped, enveloped in a dark place that would devour me.
     I opened eyes and uncovered ears when the screeches faded.  The plant's maw was sealed over and the now-glowing shaft was plump and vibrating with the struggles of the victim inside.  I gagged and turned aside and was violently sick upon the red ground.
     I do not know how long I lingered there, clinging to the earth, dazed at the horrors of the place.  How to escape?  How to return?   Return to what?
     The knife-wielding fanatic in the alley on the other side of the void?   If I were to escape him, what then?  Where then?  Miss Gibbons and her sterile house of the over-mannered indigent?
     I wondered if it would not be better to die where I found myself.  I was obviously in some Purgatorial netherworld, condemned there by a cold and unsympathetic Lord, who had for some reason forgotten to take the life from my body.
     Then I heard the snuffling sound.  It was so near me that I felt, smelled the fetid breath of the thing before I saw it.  I closed my eyes, hoping I should never see it; it could devour me, blind and terrified as I was, before I managed a glimpse.  Its snout nuzzled me on the cheek.  I felt a rush of weakness as a gelid bitterness trickled down my face.
     Any death but this, I thought, any hell but this.
     I opened my eyes.
     The snout was that of a massive black pig, but all resemblance to an earthly animal ended there.  It had seven nostrils, each dripping a greenish viscosity that bubbled as the beast breathed in and out.  As I watched, my eyes forced open in perpetual shock, the seven holes moved and disgorged tiny worm-like feelers that terminated in single eyes, and then, in a curling movement, the eyes rolled back and became mouths, fanged with steelish shards, jagged and blood-rusted.
     The thing's neck and back were spiked and reptilian; its belly was covered with black fur, and its bristly legs terminated in cloven black hooves.  It was eyeless except for the orbs in its snout, mouthless except for the apertures that displaced the eyes.
     If it watches, I thought, it cannot eat; if it eats, it cannot watch.   Perhaps it does not want to.
    As I looked up at the saddle of the beast--a curved leathern cup that sat strapped on the creature's back--I thought (for thought is marvelous in its speed at times) that whatever was riding this monstrosity was giving me time to fully appreciate its physiognomy before feeding me to it.  That argued that the rider had an aesthetic sense of the fitness of things.
     The rider!  A great black presence, cadaverously thin and bent and apelike, the skull possessed of a cavernous jaw filled with ghastly teeth.  It sat slouching in the saddle and snuffling, without cloak or covering other than the briefest loincloth.
     It resembled nothing so much as a simian corpse, a gorilla's black bones with flesh and hair still spottily intact and skin stretched taut over the bones, yet the corpse lived and moved back and forth in the saddle as if entranced.  It swayed and gurgled as it stared at me, and its red-lit eyes glowed in the violet light.
     Upon its breast hung a grisly trophy: a human skull raked with claw marks.
     I had no sooner comprehended this horror than the beast began repeating a single word:
     "Nooenn, nooenn, nooenn . . ." (I never saw the word written; I spell it here phonetically).
     The brush all around echoed it; perhaps this was some deity, and I was its sacrifice.
     "NOOENN, NOOENN, NOOEEN . . ."
     I prayed, thought of Mummy and Daddy, willed my eyes to shut. 
     But just as quickly I opened them.  The darkness behind my lids was too much to bear.  I would meet my death face to face.
     The instant I opened my eyes, the rider upon the beast began to bounce frantically, keening and squealing in his unknowable tongue and brandishing his right forearm.  He twirled his own armbone, as if it were on a pivot, independent of the rest of the skeleton, exactly as a Wild West trick-shooter would spin and aim a rifle, then leveled his black skeletal hand directly at me.  
     A single bone-shard shot from the end of one finger and lodged in my left shoulder.  It was horribly painful, and I screamed at its sudden sharpness and the intense hurt, while at the same time I could feel a great numbness settle over my left side.  I reached and clawed the bone away, but it was too late, my body was slumping to the left as if I had lost all control of it.
     A second bone flew and lodged in my right shoulder, and my right side collapsed as well.  I fell to the desert floor, shivering in the reddish dust, staring up at the apparition.  The boar-like mount began to nuzzle me with its hideous tentacles; the rider opened his mouth to howl out his triumph to the desert air.
     My eyes were glazing over with paralysis, and the black skeleton became in my melting sight a dark man, like the fellow in the alleyway who had wanted to pare my skin bit by bit.  I had escaped one form of death, which might have been mercifully swift, to fall prey to what would surely be a slow devouring.  In my fading sight I saw the steel mouths hovering over me, dripping a brackish saliva.
     Then one dived for my face.
​