The darkness is almost palpable, at this depth. It seems as if we have gone deeper than ever before, down a spiral path halfway to the center of the Earth.

Nothing moves here. Nothing breathes. I suck in the stale air, exhale. Mister Nomura moves slowly, carefully. He stops every now and then at a fork in the road, picks one direction at random. From my limited vantage point, I can see that the hairs on the back of his neck are standing at attention. He's mad as hell, but he's keeping a lid on it.

“He would have died, if I didn’t help him! That’s what we are supposed to do, isn’t it?” I finally ask him. My voice sounds strange, distorted in this place. We don’t in these depths were the walls are smooth and the ground crunches like bird-skulls, crushed beneath our feet.

Mister Nomura doesn’t answer. He takes a left.

“I saved him. The werewolves would have cut him to ribbons if I hadn’t intervened. He didn’t stand a chance against them on his own.” I say and I can feel it now, the ground giving way under my feet, the soles digging into the yellowed dust below. I don’t dare look back. Sweat drips down my forehead, drips down to my lips.

Mister Nomura makes a right. We reach a chamber that opens up to a crossroads. I look at Mister Nomura. He avoids my gaze as he scans each path carefully.

“Is that it? Are you going to give me the silent treatment from now on? That’s your idea of punishment?” I tell Mister Nomura. My voice echoes in the chamber and I can just hear every word dripping with malice. Do I really sound like that? So bitter and angry? “You’re just like my father.” I say, before I have a chance to stop myself.

Mister Nomura looks at me when I say that. He reaches out his hand and points at a path, motions me to move ahead. I move forward, kneeling slightly as the tunnel begins to narrow.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” I say and prick up my ears, trying to pick up the sound of his footsteps. He’s still right behind me, keeping pace with me. We bend lower and lower until we finally crawl through a narrow space, through a tiny aperture in the rock. I point my flashlight below. Under a rocky outcropping, there's a stretch of hewn stone strewn with rubble. “You want me to go in there?”

No answer. Then a shove. Mister Nomura pushes me through the opening and I tumble down, through the dust of decades. I land awkwardly, on my back. It knocks the wind out of me.

“I am not your father, little girl.” Mister Nomura’s voice comes from someplace above. I scan the rocky face of the well I am in, looking for him. He's gone. Panting, I fight back against the rising tide of terror in me, clench my fists. I try to think back to my training, look for a way to stop the hammering of my heart in my chest. I fail.

“Don’t leave me here.” I whimper and I realize exactly how tired, how frightened and pathetic I sound. “Don’t leave me here…” I mutter, my knees giving way from under me. The stone is cold to the touch. The air is full of maggots and old dead things. At the very edge of my vision, I see a sightless, pale thing scurrying away as the light sweeps over it.

A minute goes by. Or is it an hour? It’s hard to tell in this place. No light from above. My flashlight begins to flicker, the light dimming. The dark creeps in, long tendrils of it lapping at my toes, reaching around my back to grasp my neck. Shooting up from the floor, I start to run around the chamber, looking for anything I could use to climb up, to find my way out of this place.

Among the debris, I find a pulley. It’s rusted and nearly falling apart, but the rope looks like it will hold. A quick tug proves otherwise. The length frays at the edges, falls apart like dried twine. I start checking the length of it, looking for any part of it I can still use. Barely two good meters on it. I look back up, try to gauge the distance in the dim light. It will have to do. I’ll find a way.

“You can’t stop me. I won't stay here.” I babble, as I search around the room, tossing aside planks of rotting wood, tear open old strongboxes that have been overtaken by rust looking for something that might help me. In a corner, a generator that’s long since been reduced to a homogenous pile of rust. It doesn’t look anywhere near as ancient as the equipment ought to be. A quick look above reveals wooden scaffolding reinforcing a tunnel, going all the way down to the center of the Earth and all the way up to God knows where. Steel cables (their sheen long since tarnished) snake up into the darkness. Dangling uselessly in the air, gutted couplings that were once probably connected to something like an elevator. They’re crooked and useless, but they will have to do.

The couplings take a while to remove. Grime and rust has fused them at the ends of the cables. I grab on to them and dangle over the ground until they give under my thrashing. Then, I tie them to the salvaged rotted rope.

“I’m getting out of here. And then I’m kicking your ass” I ramble through clenched teeth. “I am getting out and when I see you, I am going to knock your teeth out of your stupid, smiling face. And then I am getting out of your mad little house, out of GoodSushi.” I look up and scream at the darkness “And I am going back home, out of this crazy bastard town!”

I test the makeshift grappling hook. It’s garbage, strung together but it will have to do. I swing it around, throw it with an overhand toss. It clangs in the dark place and falls down. I try again even as the sweat is pouring down my eyelids, stinging my eyes. This time, it finds purchase. When I tug at it, loose rocks and soil come tumbling down. “Noooo!” I roar in the dark, almost hysterical. It’s the sound of it that makes me wake up, kicks me into gear. Swallowing back fear I try again, this time gathering more momentum.

The hook grabs on to something solid. This one holds. I cackle, like a maniac. “Yes! To hell with you, Mister Nomura and to Hell with Orsonville and your stupid mine and this place! To hell with all of you!”

I climb up the rock face, distributing my weight carefully, testing for weak spots. More than a few times, I almost trip and slide down a good half-meter before I can stop myself. The flashlight is beginning to dim so I switch it off, to conserve what little battery charge I might have left. I can see the opening now, almost reach out and grasp it.

I did this I find myself thinking, as I grasp at the edges of the outcropping, fumble around for purchase and then finally pull myself up, slide down in the dirt. I did this. I made it, I made it, I made it.

“I made it.” I gasp. Mister Nomura’s flashlight comes on, blinding me.

“Yes, you did.” he says. My hands grasp the hem of his jacket before I even know that I am doing it. We tumble around in the dust. Mister Nomura breaks my grip easily, again and again, with a wave of his hand. I am panting, howling like a beast. My nails scratch his cheek. He pushes me away. “Enough!” he barks. I still swing at him.

“You left me there…” I manage, through gritted teeth. I kick at his shins. He takes it, doesn’t even wince. When I am good and spent, he reaches his hand out, helps me up. I’m too tired to even push him away.

“Lead the way” he says in a soft, commanding tone. The cancerous, spiteful thing that was eating away at me cracks and falls into pieces inside me. I try too stay angry at him, but I can't find the strength. “No more leading you around. No more child’s play.”

“If you ever do this again…” I say and I do my best to sound threatening.

“I won’t. This was punishment intended for a child. You are no longer a child.”

I nod, flicking my flashlight on. Silently, we wend our way back to the surface, to the basement of GoodSushi. In the fluorescent light, we look like a pair of b-movie zombies fresh from the grave.

“They were going to kill Anton.” I say, dusting myself off. “There are werewolves in Orsonville, an entire pack. The alpha male, that’s the one that tried to kill him. We got one of them. It got run over by a truck. Not that that will stop it.”

“You seem to know a lot about werewolves.” Mister Nomura says. “Anton, he knows more than you do. His father used to do my line of work in Orsonville. He is the one that passed the mantle on to me. The boy knew what he was in for.”

“He’s just a boy.”

“The Deryabins came from Siberia. Cold, harsh place.” Mister Nomura goes on. “Lots of things prowling the snow in the dead of winter, picking off children and the weak. The Deryabins would defend the people against these things. They had a penchant for the weird.”

I wrack my mind, trying to think back to the name. Trying to link the Deryabins to a Helfwir offshoot but I can’t. Perhaps they were regular people who taught themselves to fight monsters. Generation after generation, teaching themselves to overcome the night terrors by trial and error, unaided by the Helfwir’s natural talents.

“Mikhail came to Orsonville around the same time my father reached America. He was a young boy, back then. Learned Orsonville inside and out. When I met him, he was the one that showed me the insides of the town, taught me all I needed to know.”

“What happened to him?” I ask. The look that Mister Nomura gives me says everything. Natural causes, as Dad would have put it.

“I took up in his place. He hadn’t asked much of me, when he showed me the ropes; all I needed to do was keep the town safe. The things-that’s what he called them, things- they know their place. Anton will keep out of trouble.”

“But what if they don’t want to keep their place? What if they want more?”

“If the pack has gone astray, if they begin to overstep their boundaries, then we will set them straight.” Mister Nomura says. “What you did last night, that was the first strike. In their eyes, we landed the first punch. It might well start a war.”

“So what are we supposed to do? Stand around twiddling our thumbs?”

“No. We will bide our time. We will prepare. We will conserve our strength. If you fought the Alpha male and you survived, it means that you made him seem weak. The pack will contest it. The new leader will be hot-headed, reckless. It will not be long before they give us reason enough to take action.”

Mister Nomura gets up, removes the canvas cover from one of the industrial vats in the basement. He flicks a switch and the machine begins to whirr and vibrate. Something that smells a lot like chlorine fills the air.

“We have silver. We have weapons. All we lack is patience and training.” He says, then adds: “If you want, you can leave.”

“I was angry before. I didn’t mean it. I thought you’d left me.”

Mister Nomura reaches out his hand, grasps mine, shakes it. “I would never leave you.”

“Samurai code of honour?” I joke.

“Warrior’s code. Less frills.” he says, giving me his big, wolflike grin.