The Book of Doom (14 page)

Zac watched and found himself admiring the Valkyrie’s work. The dancers who weren’t yet fighting were now rushing to get involved. Revellers knocked one another over, then trampled across the fallen in their hurry to get stuck into someone. The club had been chaotic before Herya had done anything, but now it was a very specific type of chaos. One that was taking place well away from the guarded door.

“Oi! What’s going on?” the bouncer’s upper mouth demanded, as the bottom one bit down on another stick of gum. He pushed into the crowd, ducking something short and hairy and vaguely troll-like as it flailed by above his head. “Cut it out, the lot of you!”

Zac sidled along the wall to the now unprotected door. He didn’t hear the faint sloppy
schlurp
the eyeball on the ceiling made, or see it slowly swivel to look at him as he knelt down beside the door handle.

After a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure the bouncer wasn’t coming, Zac slid the pick into the waiting lock. Before he could find the first pin, the door opened with a faint
click
.

Zac gave it a cautious push. It swung inward, revealing a long dark corridor. A stale breeze breathed at him from deep within the darkness.

“Come, Zac Corgan,” it said. “I have been expecting you.”

NGELO STOOD OUTSIDE
Eyedol with his back pushed firmly against it. The flickering neon glow of the sign washed the surrounding area in shades of red, but he’d discovered that if he pressed right up against the wall he could tuck himself up in a pocket of shadow, out of sight of the rest of the underworld.

His breathing was steady now and he was no longer sweating. He thought he could probably do with going to the toilet again, but it wasn’t a pressing emergency quite yet.

He felt stupid. That was the worst part. He’d been scared by the sights and the sounds in the nightclub and he’d made a fool of himself in front of Zac and Herya. In front of his friends.

He thought about praying, but he didn’t know if anyone would hear him from way down there in the underworld. Then again, with God gone, he’d never been really sure if anyone was even listening any more.

He prayed anyway.

“Hello, it’s me, Angelo,” he said into his pressed-together palms. “I’m in Hades, so this might be a bad line, but if you can hear me, please look after my friends. They’re the only ones I’ve got. So, um, yeah. Love to everyone. Amen.”

There was a sound of breaking glass from over by the front entrance. Someone big and heavy came crashing through the doors before they had a chance to swish all the way open. The monstrous figure landed heavily on its misshapen torso, dragged itself back up on to all four feet, then plunged once more into the club.

Angelo squashed himself further into the shadows as the sounds of battle rang out through the broken doors of Eyedol. He tried to think about Batman, lurking in the dark just like he was. Batman wouldn’t be scared. Batman wasn’t scared of anything.

But he wasn’t Batman. And he was terrified.

“An. Gel. Lo.”

His name came as a whisper, broken into three syllables by a voice that sounded parchment dry. Angelo froze exactly like Batman wouldn’t.

“An. Gel. Lo.”

The voice seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It was just there, loitering around his ears, up to no good.

“An. Gel. Lo.”

“Um, h-hello?” he whimpered. “Who... who’s there?”

“An. Gel. Lo.
An. Gel. Lo.
”

“Stop it. I’m w-warning you. I know karate.”

There was a soft giggle from the darkness. “No,
An. Gel. Lo
,” said the whispers. “You don’t.”

And with a rustle, the night snapped shut around him.

Zac stepped into the corridor and the door blew closed, cutting off what little light there had been. He heard the lock slide into place, and knew that there was no going back.

He took a moment to replace his lock-picking tools, before he went for another pocket and pulled out a short plastic tube about the size of a marker pen. It gave a
krik
as he bent it, and a weak green glow spread along the tube’s length.

The walls on both sides of him blinked in the emerald light. Literally blinked. Hundreds of eyes, each the size of a marble, were embedded into the plaster. They stared at Zac, and Zac stared back. He brought the glow-stick closer to one wall and watched the pupils dilate in response.

“I can see you, Zac Corgan,” said the voice from along the corridor. “Can you see me?”

The voice sounded like it was close to laughter. There was an accent to it too. Greek, probably, considering which underworld they’d ended up in.

Zac stepped away from the wall and peered along the corridor. The green light only extended a metre or two along it, leaving the rest behind a curtain of impenetrable black.

Watched from both sides by countless tiny eyes, Zac pushed on into the darkness until he came to a smooth metal door set into the back wall of the corridor. It opened with a
ding
, revealing a windowless metal box. There was a light mounted in the ceiling and a rectangular LCD display built into one of the walls.

“Going up,” said the voice.

Zac took a look back along the corridor and found it still in darkness. He could hear the faint clicking sound of ten thousand blinking eyelids, and the distant din of fighting from beyond the door.

“Hurry, Zac Corgan. I do not have all day.”

“All right, all right. Keep your hair on,” Zac muttered, then he stepped into the elevator, turned round, and watched the doors slide closed. The number
666
flashed up in red on the display and the lift began to climb, slowly at first, but quickly picking up speed until Zac felt the G-force pressing down on him.

Just a minute or so later, he experienced a tiny moment of near-weightlessness as the lift came to an abrupt stop. He waited for the doors to open and, after what felt like a very long time, they did.

He stepped out of the lift and gazed around at the room he had arrived in.

It took up roughly the same amount of space as the dance floor downstairs had done, but it couldn’t have looked more different. A luxurious red carpet covered the floor. Vast chandeliers hung from the high, domed ceiling, casting a twinkling glow across the antique furniture. Something classical and dreary was being played on a vintage gramophone over in the corner, and the thudding of the dance music downstairs felt like a dim and distant memory.

“Greetings, Zac Corgan. Welcome to the home of Argus.”

“Where are you?” Zac asked. He looked over the room. “Show yourself.”

“I am here, Zac Corgan,” the voice said. Greek. It was definitely Greek. “I am behind you.”

Zac spun round and saw the lift doors close. There were pillars on either side of the lift, each several times wider than he was. Something about them drew his eye, and it took him just a moment to realise that they weren’t pillars at all. They were legs.

Slowly – ever so slowly – Zac looked up.

Angelo’s heart was playing the bongos in his chest. His arms were pinned by his sides and he could now say with absolute certainty that he
definitely
needed the toilet.

He was wrapped in a tight cocoon, unable to move, barely able to breathe. He felt as if he were dangling from a great height, being buffeted back and forth on the breeze, and occasionally bumped against something solid and flat. He was absolutely correct in every one of these assumptions.

It was warm in the cocoon, and as panic tightened round Angelo like a noose, it began to get considerably warmer.

Zac didn’t believe in giants. Or rather, he
hadn’t
believed in giants, until now.

The giant sitting in front of him had changed his mind. He was perched on an enormous throne, into the base of which the elevator doors had been built. He sat forward in the chair, his metre-long fingers gripping the armrests, his shed-sized head lolling down almost to his chest.

The clothes he wore were musty and thick with dust, giving him the look of a long-neglected museum exhibit. His skin was blotchy and held together with stitches. They criss-crossed his face like a city-centre road map, and Zac would’ve sworn that the thing in the chair was long dead, had it not been for the eyes.

The eyes were open. And they were staring down at him.

“Hi,” Zac said. “Almost didn’t see you there.”

“Hello, Zac Corgan,” said that voice again. The giant on the throne made no movement. “Will you bow before the all-seeing Argus?”

Zac gave the question all the consideration it deserved. “Doubt it,” he said.

The voice suddenly brightened. “Good. I cannot stand a kiss-ass!” it cried, and Zac realised it was coming from elsewhere in the room.

He turned to find a man grinning at him from behind dark-tinted glasses. The man was a little shorter than Zac, but considerably wider. He was bare from the waist up, his bulging belly sagging down over a baggy pair of white shorts that were tied with red bows round his knees.

His head was bald, but partially covered by a small red fez that he wore at a jaunty angle. The centre of the man’s chest was matted with thick black hair, and his top lip was weighed down by an equally thick, equally black moustache.

All these things registered just barely at the back of Zac’s mind. The front of his mind, meanwhile, was fully occupied with just one thought: nipples.

Where the man’s nipples should have been, there were eyes. Zac stared at them. He couldn’t help himself. How could he not stare? After a moment, one of the nipples gave him a cheeky wink.

“
Yiassas!”
cried the man. He caught Zac by the upper arms, then leaned in and kissed him on both cheeks before he could pull away. The man smelled of death and olives. “I am Argus Panoptes. You have been looking for me, yes?”

Zac stepped back. “
You’re
Argus?” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the seated giant. “Then who’s that?”

Argus laughed, making his bare belly jiggle like half-set jelly. “This? This is just a statue.”

“It doesn’t look like a statue.”

“It is woven from the skin of my enemies’ children,” Argus said. He smiled again, and in that moment Zac was reminded that he was dealing with a demon. There were too many teeth in that mouth, all crammed in together, jostling for space. “Feel it, yes? Touch it.”

“No, thanks.”

“Please. Please, I insist,” Argus said. “Touch my giant leg. It bring you luck.”

“Right, well, if it’ll make you happy,” Zac sighed. He touched the nearest leg. The skin was disturbingly smooth.

Argus beamed. “Is nice, yes?”

“Not really my cup of tea,” Zac said. “What about the eyes? I’m guessing they didn’t come from your enemies’ children. Unless, you know, your enemies’ children are huge.”

“Ah, no, no. The eyes, they belong to me.”

With a quick flick of his wrist, Argus removed his sunglasses, revealing two dark holes. Zac gazed into the empty sockets, then up at the beach-ball-sized eyeballs in the statue’s face.

“Those must’ve been a tight fit,” he said.

Argus laughed again. “Haha! Yes. They are not my actual eyes, of course. Would you care to sit?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Please, I insist. Please.”

“I’d prefer to stand,” said Zac.

Argus’s shoulders slumped, then a wry grin crept across his face. He placed his hands on his stomach and folded two rolls of flab together, giving the impression of a mouth.

“Pwease, Zac,” Argus said, moving the rolls so it looked as if they were talking. “Pwease sit down on our lovely couch.”

To their credit, even Argus’s nipples got in on the act. They looked imploringly at Zac.

“Yeah... OK,” Zac said. He pointed at Argus’s belly. “If you promise to stop that.”

Argus laughed again, then he jigged over to a cream leather sofa that stood off to one side of the room. Zac noticed his shoes for the first time. They were bright red with gold trim, curled up at the toes like a genie in a pantomime.

The shoes danced on to a leopard-skin rug that was spread on the floor between the couch and a roaring coal fire. The demon jabbed at the coals with a poker while he waited for Zac to sit.

“I know why you have come to see me, Zac,” he said once Zac had positioned himself on the couch. “I have been following you closely for some time.”

Zac raised an eyebrow. “You have, have you?”

“Please, please, do not take it personally,” said Argus, giving the coals a final stab. “I follow everyone closely.”

He set the poker back on its hook, then turned to face his guest. Zac wished the demon would put the glasses back on, but they were nowhere to be seen, and so he forced himself to stare into the hollow sockets and did his best not to flinch.

Argus slapped his belly several times. It jiggled hypnotically. “You are seeking the
Book of Everything
and you have come to ask for my help, yes?”

Zac didn’t reply.

“You believe I can provide you with – how you say? –
information
as to its exact whereabouts.”

“They’ve built a tenth circle on to Hell. I’ve been told you might know what’s down there.”

“I bet you have,” Argus exclaimed. He gave a twirl, and Zac saw there was another eye poking out from the demon’s hairy back. “I am the all-seeing Argus, after all.”

Zac leaned forward slowly, making the leather couch creak. “So what
is
down there?”

Argus tapped the side of his nose. “Aha! All in good time, yes? Right now, I see we are about to have company.”