Every third landing was outfitted with a little park bench, as if they were situated at scenic observation points, instead of just overlooking the lightless void. Gloria paused at each landing and gazed out, exclaiming over how wondrous and remarkable the place was. She was beginning to grate on Ruby’s nerves in a way she never had before. Being perky was one thing. Being delusional was another.

  There were a hundred steps between each landing, and the light from the lamps covered forty or so, leaving a shadowy stretch to cross before the next landing lit up. The warden was leading the way, or rather, one of her hounds was, with the warden close behind. Gloria came after her, walking with a bounce in her step, enjoying this outing as only someone with no concept of supernatural peril could. Ruby came after her, sword cane at the ready, and Altman walked behind her with his gun, grumbling pretty much constantly.

  After several thousand steps, Ruby said, “Are we even getting anywhere? I’m sure we passed that same bench twenty minutes ago.”

  “We are progressing,” the warden said from the front of their parade. “The first test is a simple test of patience.”

  “What’s the second test, then?”

  The warden was just disappearing into the pool of shadow beyond the reach of the light above. “That remains to be–” she began.

  Then a large, lithe shape swooped down out of the darkness above, snatched up the hound, and bore it away. The dog howled, but soon its yips faded away to nothing. Ruby drew her sword and crouched, looking all about her, and the warden dropped, too. Altman cursed behind her, and she dearly hoped he wouldn’t discharge his shotgun so close to her head – she’d be deafened, at best, and caught by a stray shot at worst.

  “Was that one of the… mi-go, are they called?” Gloria was still standing up, looking around, as if watching for rare birds. “Mr Tillinghast told me about them. He has this cunning little canister he says they dropped in one of their flights here–”

  “It was a nightgaunt.” The warden’s voice was strained, and she hissed, as if in pain. Did her connection to the dogs extend to feeling their agony? “Get down, you fool woman! They’ll carry you off, and you’ll never be seen again!”

  Gloria didn’t crouch. “Oh. Mr Tillinghast mentioned those, too. He said they’re vile things, truly abominable. No faces, isn’t that right? Just blank spaces. No faces means no teeth, at least.”

  “Their claws will do just fine,” the warden said. “I said get down!”

  “I don’t think crouching will help,” Gloria said. “There’s no cover here. Perhaps we should keep moving, instead, and more swiftly?”

  “I agree!” Altman shout-whispered and jostled against Ruby’s back.

  “I… there doesn’t seem to be a flock of the things,” the warden said. “I’m still connected to my poor hound, and it’s being carried off. There’s some sort of stone pillar where the thing has a nest… they usually travel in swarms. They aren’t solitary by nature, but this one is alone. It must be from Sanford’s menagerie. He only had one nightgaunt, last I heard. So he has set the beasts free. We must be near the bottom of the stairs, then… but who knows what waits for us?”

  “We won’t find out by huddling here,” Gloria said sensibly. “Listen, Ruby, you should scout ahead. Use your special little trick and see if you can clear us a path.”

  “I…” She swallowed. “I’m a thief, Gloria, not a monster hunter.”

  “You’re the one who picked up the sword, dear,” she said. “Mr Tillinghast will be very grateful, I’m sure.”

  Ruby moaned. She was really going to have to do this, wasn’t she?

  “What are you talking about?” Altman said. “If anyone should go ahead, it’s me. I have a shotgun. What special trick does she mean?”

  “Let a girl have some secrets, Altman.” Ruby considered asking for the shotgun, but how would it even work in null-time? She’d be able to fire it, probably, but once the pellets moved away from her immediate vicinity, they’d likely hang in the air, unmoving, and she could end up blowing her own face off if she was standing in the wrong spot when normal time restarted. Better to proceed with the sword.

  Ruby moved slowly around Gloria, stepping too close to the edge for comfort. The woman patted her on the back, making Ruby flinch. “That sword is made for slicing up monsters,” she said. “You’ll do fine.”

  “Warden, how many beasts, monsters, whatever, are in this menagerie?” Ruby paused alongside Van Shaw.

  The warden sniffed. “I haven’t been down there in a long time. Locking things up that way, it’s not to my liking, but Sanford said it was important for his studies. But as I recall, besides the nightgaunt, there’s a byakhee – those fly, too – and a child of Abhoth, and one dhole, though it’s only about the size of a footstool. There’s definitely a crawling one… there was a hunting horror, but it died in captivity, two researchers were poisoned during the autopsy… oh, and the gug, of course, that was one of his first live acquisitions. There’s definitely a Leng spider, and a moon-beast. I think that’s all. And your old friend the shoggoth is down there somewhere, too.”

  “I don’t know why I asked,” Ruby said. “Apart from the shoggoth, I don’t know what any of those things you mentioned even are.”

  “If you see a monster, it’s more important for you to kill it than to identify it,” Gloria said from behind. “And do it soon. The clock is ticking. My master wants this place under his control by morning, and the night is progressing swiftly.”

  “Yes, fine, I’m going.” Ruby took a breath and stepped past the warden but didn’t immediately leave the shadowy stretch of steps. Being in the darkness felt a little safer, somehow, though if the nightgaunt didn’t have a face, it probably didn’t hunt with senses as mundane as sight anyway. With luck, it would be occupied for a while, eating the hound.

  Ruby looked at her wrist, the radium dial glowing in the dark, and began to twist the knobs.

  “I still don’t understand what she’s doing,” Altman complained.

  “Your understanding is not–” Gloria began, but then Ruby finished turning the clock back, and null-time took hold. There were few sounds in the void, but that only meant the breathing of her compatriots was easily audible, and its absence made the place into a tomb.

  She only had an hour, to find and kill whatever beasts down there wanted to find and kill her. She drew the sword and left the wooden sheath on the steps, moving swiftly toward the next landing.

  Which wasn’t illuminated, of course, because she was outside the regular flow of time, and the gas lamp stayed dim. She should have thought of that. But… there was light, wasn’t there, up ahead? When she peered down the next flight of steps, an end to the descent finally appeared. There was a real hallway down there, the edges of the walls and floor and ceiling sheared-off and visible against the darkness, like a stage set of a room seen from the theater audience. It looked like the other half of the hallway they’d departed from in the world above, and there was a light bulb shining on the ceiling.

  Ruby briefly wondered what would happen if she climbed on top of that ceiling, and walked across the roof of the corridor, into the dark… but she wasn’t curious enough to try it. She hurried down the dark steps instead, and when her feet touched the floorboards, and she finally had walls on either side instead of void, she wanted to drop to her knees and kiss the ground. The hallway turned sharply to the right just a few yards ahead, and she hoped there wouldn’t be another maze down here, since she had no hound to help her traverse it.

  Ruby walked around the corner, sword held before her – and screamed, dropping the blade and stumbling backward a few steps. There was a huge beast in the hallway, a purple crab the size of a Shetland pony – no, it was a spider. Look at its fangs, look at its glittering profusion of eyes! Ruby wasn’t one of those people with a paralyzing fear of spiders. She’d had a roommate once who couldn’t even smash the things with a shoe, but could only hyperventilate and beg someone else to deal with the menace. But it didn’t take an arachnophobe to feel terror at the sight of this thing: it was malevolent death on eight legs.

  The thing was frozen mid-scuttle, its four front limbs lifted off the ground, their pointed ends aimed at Ruby like spears. The spider filled the hallway entirely, impossible for her to get around… but she wasn’t supposed to get around it, was she? She was supposed to kill it.

  Ruby bent and picked up the sword. She imagined this spider, moving in real time, scuttling around the corner, up the stairs, launching itself toward them with terrifying speed… it would have killed them all, and easily. Ruby thought she probably would have leapt off the side of the stairs rather than face its clashing mandibles and horrible limbs.

  She touched the end of the blade to its abdomen, closed her eyes, and pressed. Despite the thing’s chitinous armor, the sword point penetrated with ease – she might have been cutting butter. When she made herself look, the sword had pierced the spider’s body fully, point emerging from the back. Was that enough to kill the thing? She wasn’t sure, and the idea of the spider scurrying around, wounded and maddened by pain, was even more terrifying than the thought of it healthy.

  So Ruby started cuttings its legs off. The result was deeply surreal. She severed the legs as close to the body as she could with swipes of the sword, but the detached limbs still hung in the air beneath the spider, as if attached by invisible threads, until she pushed the dismembered parts aside with the flat of the blade. Ruby couldn’t bear the thought of touching the legs with her hands, so she pushed them to both sides of the hallway as best she could. Chopping the legs off was tiring, too, like splitting a cord of firewood with an old axe.

  The sword blade was covered with purplish black ichor by the time she was finished, and she swung the blade back and forth to fling off the droplets, which then hung in the air all around her in hideous globules. Ugh. She was clearly still getting the hang of navigating null-time.

  The body of the spider hung in the air, now unsupported by its legs, like something one of those surrealists in Paris might have painted. Ruby slashed down with the sword, right through the center of the body, intending to bisect it cleanly, but the thing was just too big. The sword only cleaved about two-thirds of the way through its body, but surely that was a mortal wound?

  How to proceed, though? The thing was still in the way! Ruby finally got down on her hands and knees and crawled awkwardly underneath the spider, pushing the sword along the floor ahead of her. The back of her brain screamed that she was in danger, there was a predator right above her, there were hideous fluids dripping on her, a great weight was going to crush her – but she pushed on with gritted teeth until she’d reached the far side and regained her feet.

  A glance at her watch told her that the whole affair had only taken about five minutes, much less time than she’d believed. The watch was distorting time in one way, and her fear was distorting it in another.

  She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and set off down the hall, toward the next turning. Whatever waited for her on the other side would meet the same fate as that hideous spider. It felt a little unsporting to carve up these monsters while they were frozen in null-time… but it wasn’t like the beasts would have given up their advantages in size, speed, strength, and hideous mandibles if their positions were reversed.

  “You must be the gug,” she said when she found a multi-limbed, multi-jointed thing, with mouths shaped like scythe blades, looming in the doorway of a side passage. “You look like a gug.”

  She set about her grim work, and wondered how long this night was going to last.

  •••

  Altman was tense, watching for monsters, and still bitter that Ruby had been sent on ahead instead of him, when he was clearly the stronger choice… and then Ruby returned, scarcely minutes after she’d left, trudging up the stairs toward them, dragging the point of her sword on the ground. Her clothes were smeared with green and black stains, her hair disheveled, her sword coated in slime. How could anyone possibly get so dirty so quickly? “You’re back already?” Altman said.

  “I cleared the way.” She sounded incredibly weary, and the sword was covered in foul, dripping slime.

  “What, you killed everything?”

  “I didn’t see the shoggoth. But I saw a lot of other things and killed them all. There might be more… but all the ones I found were headed toward us, hunting us, so with luck they’re all gone.”

  “How did you defeat the entire menagerie so quickly?” Altman demanded.

  “Mr Tillinghast is a powerful friend to have,” Gloria said. “He gave her the tools she needed. Is it much farther to the bottom, Ruby?”

  Ruby mutely shook her head and started back down the stairs, limping.

  Altman heard a flapping sound, and something swooped out of the darkness toward Ruby. Not the nightgaunt again – this was winged, too, but less humanoid. It put Altman in mind of an immense beetle, but with a carapaced head and black teeth. “Down!” he bellowed, and raised his shotgun. Gloria and the warden ducked, and Ruby actually flung herself down full-length on the stairs.

  Altman pulled both triggers, and the shotgun kicked hard against him. The sound of the gunshot was swallowed up by the void, without echoes, and the monster – a byakhee, Altman thought it was called – tumbled to land on the steps below Ruby. It thrashed and mewled, a winged monster the size of a Great Dane, until Ruby got up and thrust the sword into its head in a single decisive motion. She looked back up the stairs at him. “Good shooting, Altman.”

  “Praise from the master monster-killer?” Altman said. “I appreciate it, and I mean that sincerely.”

  She gave him a little salute, then kicked the byakhee’s body until it tumbled off the side and resumed her descent.

  After the next landing, the end of the stairway appeared suddenly, like a magician’s conjuring trick. Ruby reached the bottom first, and then the warden descended with stately calm, and Gloria with unhurried ease, all preventing Altman from doing what he wanted to do – leap down in great bounds to something that at least looked like a normal corridor.

  When Altman’s foot finally touched the floor of the deep basement, there was a gurgling, wrenching sound above him. He turned to look back, sure they were going to be cut off and sealed below that darkness forever, in Sanford’s final trap.

  Instead, the staircase extending so far above him into the dark distorted, first seeming to stretch out and attenuate, becoming a long thread attaching them to the world above. A moment later, the stairs seemed to compress down instead, like an accordion, the landings overlapping, stairs piling atop stairs… until, after a confused moment, there was only a single flight of a hundred steps, leading up to the hallway where they’d started this journey. The darkness was gone, or at least held back by walls of wood and plaster.

  “Sanford’s spells are unpicking themselves as we progress,” the warden said. “Restoring the original topology of the Lodge. We won’t have such a long walk back up, at least.”

  “Excellent,” Gloria said. “If we’ve reattached the basements to the upper floors, then we’ve made major progress. We’ll take a look around, unravel any other spatial knots Sanford has left for us, make sure none of the beasts of the menagerie are still loose, and then… we’re going to find where the magus hid his relics. We need them, especially the Ruby of R’lyeh. Mr Tillinghast mentioned that in particular. Once that’s done, I can give a positive report to Mr Tillinghast.” She clapped her hands like a camp counselor about to start a singalong. “Shall we proceed?”

  “There are ugly things up ahead,” Ruby said, voice still drained of energy. “Consider yourself warned.”

  She led the way through the basements, and Altman’s astonishment only grew. They passed the chopped-up remnants of an oozing spider bigger than himself, and then a heap of slime and limbs that had come from some creature he couldn’t possibly identify. Next came a great shell, and the creature that lived inside, like a cone snail but writ large, was sliced to pieces.

  Ruby pointed out one of the libraries to Gloria, and said, “Sorry about the mess.”

  The mess was considerable – the floor was covered in a sort of ankle-deep gray suet, from which emerged fragments of bone and tentacle. It stank like a midden. That had been something alive? Altman was aghast, and after all he’d seen, he’d believed himself beyond disgust.

  “I’m sure we can have it cleaned,” Gloria said.

  The operating theater where Sanford and Altman had examined the sodden gift was covered in thousands of dead worms, and a few that still slithered and wriggled. “What happened here?” Altman said.

  “A crawling one,” the warden said. There was a dog at her heels again – where had it come from? The hound stalked around the room, snapping up the living worms in its teeth. “It’s a great horrible lot of worms all working together as one. Looks like Ruby cut it up well enough to break its coherence, but my hound will finish the job. Otherwise, it might re-form, in time.”

  “You doled out this much slaughter in mere minutes?” Altman said to Ruby.

  “Time isn’t what it used to be,” she said. Why did everyone have to be so maddeningly vague? When Altman possessed all the Lodge’s occult secrets – well, yes, he’d probably keep them to himself, too, actually.

  They walked for what felt like days, and was at least hours. Gloria produced a little notebook at some point, and seemed to be drawing a map, stopping to consult with the warden from time to time. The basements had been restored to their original form, at least as far as Altman could recognize. There was the ritual chamber, with the stone where he’d said his oaths. The vault, now entirely empty, which made Gloria cluck her tongue, even though Ruby had told them to expect it. The archives, the storage rooms, the research labs, the theaters. The only things they couldn’t find were the doors to other places.