He swung easily across the intervening space from window to window, lifted the dirt-smudged glass portal one last time with his grip on its wooden frame—“could use some paint,” mused a ghostly part of him—and stepped through into the morning gloom, the few windows doing their part.

He could smell the Black Dog immediately, wearing some man-woman’s perfume.

He saw him there, rising from the judo mat bed that this avenger would never again rest upon, and coming to stand haughtily next to the electrical spool that had been this man’s kitchen table and tea-imbibing stand for these faded years.

The hulking muscle man, the scion of slave master breeding no doubt, stood with his suit coat open to reveal his shoulder holster and massive handgun, even as his other hand motioned to the gun that had belonged to that fool Akbar Qama, stripped down and on display like a hunted animal’s claws next to the empty teapot.

As the avenger stalked forward, the man continued to show his holstered weapon with his left hand propping open the curtain of his jester’s garb as the trophy pointing gun hand returned to its true task and slid across the chest as the avenger advanced.

The Black Dog called him by his long-forgotten, childhood, government name, which failed to form in his mind’s eye as anything other than a frightened little boy sucking his thumb and watching a giant yellow chicken dance.

As the avenger stalked to within four paces the Black Dog spoke of the woman-child who had rescued the remains of Akbar Qama from the brick dust of humiliation in the very alley above where they now stood. The Black Dog spoke of how he would make her into a woman with his mighty member in order to elicit a leap of rage from the ghost of the man she tried to save.

But the Black Dog had died ages ago and would be easily returned to his grave.

The eyes of the Black Dog grew wider as he realized that the avenger would not leap, would not eat his hollow-pointed slugs of lead, but had adopted the open eyes of the dead.

Nothing frightens The Dead that threaten the living, more than to find that their victim has decided to join them and fly down to Dark Mother together.

The swollen hand did as it was told, popping joint sacks as the hilt of the great knife was seized.

The big eyes of the Black Dog became, bigger, blacker, more dog-like as his hand slipped easily onto the grip of his auto, which was as over-wrought as its owner, a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, that tugged just slowly enough from its custom leather holster that could never offer a proper draw across such an expanded chest. The muscular breast pushed the wrist that much off slide to require a hand adjustment, an adjustment that the maker knew was his undoing as the eyes grew ever larger, ever more filled with the boyish doom-sense that still clung to him like his crooked mother's afterbirth.

The scared knife of Akbar Qama—he who died so recently down in that alley, and whose avenging ghost wielded it—had thudded into a hanging four-by-four from this distance three thousand times, and no more.

The other 11 great knives had shattered just above the full tang hilt after 7,200 casts. 11 great knives had shivered to death as they thudded deeply into spinning pine in order to send this one true on its way. Cast like an elongated baseball from behind the hip, the long arm of the thrower extended, and the hand releasing before coming true on target, causing the blade to streak downward into the massive forearm of the Black Dog, to sing its fleshly song as it continued on into the great turkey breast that forever housed a moan that could not escape as the hulking dog in man form reeled back and fell to his back, his gun-hand pinned to his chest at the solar plexus, which would not expand.

The fallen thing, unable even to whimper, looked up into his eyes for mercy and saw only the left hand of death forming into a spear point, and plunging into the open mouth that sought to chatter like a pleading ape. But the sinewy, dusk-colored forearm disappeared into the mouth as the questing hand twisted and turned through separating jaw and tearing swallow-tube, the elbow eventually following as the hand found something that seemed appropriate and then let it go, for the thing at his feet was dead.

Yanking his arm free from the husk of the hound, he retrieved Akbar Qama’s great knife, sheathed it, and took the clumsy handgun, as the more practical one had been ruined, stamped parts bent with those great senseless fists as they raged at the man they had not been able to touch with glove.

He heard the sound of an old conversion van out in the alley and smiled slightly, proud for a moment of Usef for whisking away such a drably vaporous devil in such style.

The suffering woman-child was safe from this brute’s attention and he could go without further consideration. And he did, the sound of bricks crunching under his jump boots as he walked down the tumbledown wall at the back of his lair, the half of which that hulking brute seemed to have scattered on his climb.

Before him was the van occupied by two strange white men—a sissy of the hippie type and a sagging sack of liquor with a policeman’s fallen face and a faraway place in his haunted eyes. Before the van, confusedly, stood Usef and the Big-Brained White Devil.

Off to damnation he walked, the great knife scabbarded across his hips and the ugly gun holstered in his sure left hand.

The van rumbled and it moved him to think, Might the Devil’s own donkey bray so as it negotiated the craggy pass down into Her Pit?