The red key.

The Key of the Demon with a Thousand Fingers on its Tongue that Drank the Soul Off Your Lips, or whatever it was, Pheel couldn't recall; everything had a really, overlong title.

“You got that shit?”

“Yeah I got it here.”

“Stick it in -”

“Why?”

“We're riding this – no offence – sucker out.”

“Why would that offend me?”

“I was sucked inside your organs?”

“Let us never discuss.” - This was the end of the sentence, and those organs on his throat, and that transparent skin, and the weird colours beneath, that formed now his face, stood no arguments; rebuked them necessarily, and Pheel didn't particularly wish to relive any of it anyway/for any -

Art reached/stuck the weird key in the lock on the surface of the Black Chest of the Scrolls of the Prophecies of the Queen of Waat that was there for that purpose. Lid popped: opened-up.

“After you,”Art indicated.

“We're going in?”

“We're absolutely going in.”

This was the conversation they were having shouting/swimming in a river of blood.

“You first,” Pheel said it.

Art looked at him, obviously didn't give a care, started scrambling over the side, fell back, in; swam over by Pheel, arm on the shoulder, and in a move of athletic adeptness that Pheel couldn't manage anyway, flipped up and in but almost - and in that same instant pulled Pheel over the side with him.

Ridiculously in that instant, the last, Pheel's final thought was: shouldn't they really try not to get, this was what they were after, after all, the scrolls - wet -

But then they were both inside.

And -

But -

The lid slammed shut, and reality fell out beneath them.

Pheel and Art and - whoever it was/whoever they were, saw the final entity pouring out her genitals, and Pry and Massimo, and the women, both of them – when he saw what it was consuming; when he saw that angled passage in which Hill Cassons inducted him, and the corpses of ten thousand Cyclops, and – and when he saw New Works itself pour out beneath those vaginal lips. And everything Old breached; disentangled, eradicated, across the flat surface of that terrible mind - when - he saw the eyes of the child and what

it

knew -

All other thoughts were infinitesimal.