The back of her blouse was stuck to her skin; a trickle of blood tickled the small of her back. The interior of the elevator dimmed to the point of disappearing entirely. The Walther weighed a thousand pounds. Her legs wobbled madly. Vasquez lowered the gun, reached her left hand out to steady herself. When it touched not metal, but cool stone, she was not as surprised as she should have been. As her vision returned, she saw that she was in a wide, circular area, the roof flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. The space was lit by a symbol incised on the rock at her feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock, whose perimeter was shining with cold light. Behind and to her left, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone turned her around. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. Deep in the darkness, she could detect movement, but was not yet able to distinguish it.

As she raised the pistol one more time, Vasquez was not amazed to find herself here, under the ground with things whose idiot hunger eclipsed the span of the oldest human civilizations, things she had helped summon. She was astounded to have thought she’d ever left.

—

For Fiona.

——

John Langan is the author of the novel House of Windows and the collection of stories Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. His stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction and Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.

——

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over twenty-five years. She was fiction editor of Omni and Sci Fiction and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the horror half of the long-running The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the current The Best Horror of the Year, Inferno, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft Unbound, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Tails of Wonder and Imagination, Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People, Teeth: Vampire Tales (the latter two with Terri Windling), and Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas).

Forthcoming is Blood and Other Cravings and After (the last with Windling).

She has won multiple Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and Shirley Jackson Awards for her editing. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”

She lives in New York. More information can be found at Datlow.com or at her blog: Ellen-Datlow.LiveJournal.com.