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as I looked upon them from hidden places. Their mindless
indulgence was painfully offensive, but I did not wish to spill
so much as a drop of my rage upon the unwholesome things,
preferring to conserve my indignation for more deserving
causes.
As I suspected, many of the caverns were not natural at
all, but were the products of carefully placed explosives.
I could see piles of blackened stone distributed liberally
around the mouths of freshly created caves. The new hollows
seemed to travel in directions that would eventually bring
them beneath nearby cities, one almost paralleling the route
taken by the train. It had become clear that not all of Miss
Patience’s victims were killed by her own hand, though they
were almost certainly collected on her behalf. Many times,
as I skulked around and within Lastrygone, I had heard the
creatures refer to their “great and hungry mother under the
earth.” I wondered at how long Miss Patience had been
expanding her industry of cannibalism.
The caverns were every inch a maze, and it took no
small amount of time to navigate to my destination. At one
point, I encountered something that nearly stole the breath
from me—a gigantic stone archway covered with beautiful
reliefs and carvings, all of which depicted what I could
only imagine were some kind of titanic alien beings, all of
them thick with rot and filled with strange worms that wore
crowns. The cavern beyond the archway was large enough
to admit a city, and the darkness rushing from the mouth of
that terrible entrance was of a type that had never known
light. The structure was clearly not the work of cannibals,
as they were neither creative enough nor sufficiently ancient
to have wrought such magnificence. In direct proportion
to the painful beauty of the archway spilled a nauseous
odor, as if all the earth’s dead had been collected within
to fester and rot. If not for my strong constitution, I would
have been most assuredly forced, retching, from the cliff
where I stood. Undoubtedly, this was the passage whereby
124 | Mark Anzalone