In the moments before the lock tumblers released Hell, Laszlo hesitated, fingers gripping the ancient key. Her mind was in that Neverland suspended between blank idiocy and genius. Had she been the type to believe in devils and demons, she might have listened; heard the inner voices that screamed warnings from every karmic cell and strand of DNA from every life she'd ever lived. But she was a stoic. She'd lost touch with her reptile brain and ancestral knowledge; she didn't believe in God or ghosts or what walked the earth before humans lost touch with what they really were. For Laszlo, monsters were her own kind – the dregs of society. Soulless meant psychopaths, paedophiles' and rapists.

And yet...as she stared down at the rusted key and her own trembling hands, something started to fizz and burn in her solar plexus. Something's wrong here, she thought inanely. Something wrong and broken...

Her head lolled back, sweat trickling beneath her armpits. Using all her training, she gritted her teeth, pushing fear to the back burner. Her breath rasped as her heart started to thump. Again, she glanced down at her fingers, shaking now as though palsied. Her body worked against her mind and she fought to beat it into abeyance to do her bidding. Above, the sprinkler system began to fail as the water pressure died. The miasma from the prematurely decayed bodies of the crones and Silas filled her nostrils.

"Get a grip!" She said out loud. Then turned the key.

The lid of the chest lifted smooth and silent. In the dim light of the room, the inside was black as pitch. So black it appeared bottomless. Laszlo stared into this void with a mix of terror and confusion. She knew she should reach in to explore each corner, but a childhood fear surfaced; her lying in bed in the dark afraid to put a foot over the edge of the bed in case something lurked there, something squat and gibbering, just waiting to grab her ankle.

It's empty, she told herself. Just an empty old chest.

Something in the inky depths gleamed momentarily, then winked out. It startled Laszlo so badly, she cried out, covering her mouth with one hand. She grabbed her weapon but knew it was useless. What I need is silver bullets, she thought insanely, and almost laughed out loud.

The chest sighed, a deep resonance so low she barely heard it. There was something at the bottom of the chest. A shape. A symbol?

"Verity..."

Laszlo peered into the chest, both hands clutching the gnarled leather rim. Her stomach lurched, as tears sprang treacherously, sparkling on her lashes.

"Hannah?"

This was impossible and yet it was a friend's voice; her dead colleague; whispering from long rotted vocal chords.

"She needs..."

"You're not Hannah!"

"....you..."

"This isn't happening!"

"...to open the doorway."

Laszlo scrambled to her feet, glancing desperately at the other chests, then at the pile of bloodied rags and body parts. Her eyes fell to Silas's old leather-bound book discarded at her feet, reaching down to grab it. She flicked through the pages, recognised Latin text. There were symbols and glyphs, pentagrams and ouroboros. "Sigils?" She breathed.

Flicking back to the frontispiece, she gazed at a line illustration depicting a vast labyrinth with many chambers buried deep within the earth. Each chamber held a twisted horror, clearly from the imaginings of some sick medieval mind; many limbed things that writhed; creatures with their insides outside; rugose bipedal monsters with huge eyes; slithering torsos with no limbs. The largest chamber held a throne and on that throne something thin and withered held court. On the surface of the earth, the sun shone and people harvested corn and tended livestock, seemingly unaware of what lay below. To one side of the sun were Roman numerals 3000MMM. To the other side the legend, 'Tria Milia Saecula'

"Three thousand years," Laszlo murmured, staring at the illustration again. What looked like a ray of energy or light wormed its way through each demonic chamber, permeating the soil until it was inches from the surface.

Frantically, she tried other keys in other locks, until one by one each chest lay open. For the first time she noticed that the lids held similar sigils to those in the book. Instinct told her the book might hold the means to stop whatever was happening here. But how, she had no idea. Outside, a police siren echoed, then faded away. She thought of the teeming humanity of the city, oblivious and unaware, easy meat for this eldritch horror. Another voice reached her, wrenching a sob from her guts.

"Villy?"

Only one person had used that endearment; her grandmother. But that love had been taken from her years ago. This was mind games. Cruel and horrifically potent. Laszlo covered her ears with both hands but couldn't shut it out.

"Villy...we need you."

The empty chests gaped. Dripping water echoed. The sigils on the lids began to glow.

"What are you?" Laszlo screamed.

She twisted this way and that, scanning the hexagonal room, every muscle poised for flight. From each chest the blue glow rose, ethereal and lovely as azure borealis. It coalesced, five strands becoming one. Laszlo gazed up at it, knowing she should run, but unable to move. The phenomena mutated, took the shape of an obscene long fingered hand.

She sank to her knees when it touched her.

Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil

With the remnants of her mind, Laszlo almost admired the simplicity of what took her. An ancient parasite and cyclic. Every three thousand years it fed, an infestation that gorged on energies released from the dying. The more traumatic the death, the richer the yield and each servitor acted as a current to send that energy back to its maker. It mattered not that water demolished the human vessels, their job was done with each fresh kill.

"But why?" Laszlo's mind cried out.

"Because you humans become too many," the Great Old One answered. "And because I need..."

Some things can not be prevented