"Would you now?" asked the bottom mouth, in a voice slightly higher than the first.

Herya hesitated. "Yes."

"Right," the man said, the top mouth taking control again. He stepped to the side. "Well, you'd best go through, then."

Another hesitation. "What?" Herya glanced at Zac, then rallied a little. "I mean, yes. Right." She reached for the door, but the bouncer was back in front of her, both mouths grinning.

"Nah, only joking." His expression turned serious. "No one sees Mr Argus."

"It's important," Zac said.

"Oh. Right. Is it?" asked the bottom mouth. The bouncer stepped aside once again. "Well, in that case maybe you had better go through, then."

"Yes, well... I should think so too," Herya said. She was midway through grabbing for the handle when the man blocked her again.

"Joking again," said the top mouth. "No one sees Mr Argus. I thought I'd made that clear?"

"You did," confirmed the bottom mouth.

"Thanks," replied the top.

"Look," said Herya firmly. "Get out of the way or I'll... I'll... kick your ass."

The bouncer laughed. "You know why I got these two mouths? It's so I can eat twice as quick." All four sets of teeth snapped the air just a few centimetres from Herya's nose. "Now fly away, little birdie, and take your mortal with you."

Zac caught the Valkyrie by the arm and pulled her away. She resisted, but only for a moment.

"What did you do that for?" Herya demanded. "I've fought bigger than him. I could've taken him."

"Well, maybe you could, but you don't have to," Zac told her. "There's another way through."

Herya reluctantly tore her gaze from the bouncer. "How?" she asked.

"The lock on the door. It's a five-pin deadbolt."

"And? What does that even mean?"

Zac reached into a pocket and pulled out a slim leather case. He unzipped it and showed Herya the tools wrapped within. "It means I can open it. I just need to get that guy out of the way."

"I could slice out his lungs," the Valkyrie said, "and, er, make him wear them as a hat."

Zac blinked. "Well, there's that, but I was thinking something a bit more subtle," he said. "Just cause a distraction. Get him to walk away. Thirty seconds, that's all I'll need. Do you think you can do that?"

Herya snorted. "Well, yeah. I cause distractions all the time."

"Do you?" frowned Zac. "Why?"

"What?"

"Why do you cause distractions all the time?"

Herya chewed her lip. "Practice," she said at last. "Now let me do my thing so you can do yours."

Zac nodded. "Fair enough." He took one of the tools from his bag. It looked like a thin screwdriver with a slightly hooked point.

Herya turned and slipped off through the crowds, cursing herself below her breath. I cause distractions all the time, she thought. What in Thor's name did I say that for?

Contrary to everything she'd said to Zac, she had never actually been in Hades before. The creatures dancing and gyrating around her were like images from her childhood nightmares, all twisted and misshapen and wrong.

As she sidled through the throngs, Herya felt her mouth go dry. Zac would be watching her, she knew, waiting on her making her move. But what move? She had no idea how she was going to lure the bouncer away. She had no idea about anything.

Maybe there was a fire alarm somewhere that she could activate. That might work. She changed course and set off in the direction of the nearest wall. With any luck, it would have a fire alarm button on it somewhere.

A flailing foot caught her on the back of the knee. She cried out in shock as she stumbled forward, before thudding into the back of someone standing by the edge of the dance floor.

There was a crash as the person she had collided with dropped their drink and the glass shattered into slivers on the dirty floor.

"Not again," Herya groaned. She looked up, past a washboard stomach and a bodybuilder's chest, and up to the bull-like head of a Minotaur. A hot swirl of steam snorted out from the creature's nostrils as his mouth pulled into a snarl.

"You spilled my pint," the Minotaur growled.

"Um, yeah," said Herya, her voice coming out as a squeak. She glanced over to the bouncer and took a shaky breath. "What you going to do about it?"

Even over the sound of the music, Zac heard the roaring of the Minotaur. There was a sudden commotion and a frantic scuffle as the creature swung its arms in a wide arc. Herya ducked out of the way. The Gorgon wasn't so lucky. The Minotaur's fists sent her sprawling to the floor, the brown paper bag slipping off as she fell.

There was a scream as several dancers who had been looking the Gorgon's way turned to stone.

"Sorry, everyone, sorry!" stammered the snake-headed Gorgon, but panic had already gripped the crowd. It surged away from the Gorgon, only to be battered back by the raging Minotaur.

Demons and monsters alike began to clash, and in seconds the club had become the scene of a full-scale riot.

Zac watched and found himself admiring the Valkyrie's work. The dancers who weren't yet fighting were now rushing to get involved. Revellers knocked one another over, then trampled across the fallen in their hurry to get stuck into someone. The club had been chaotic before Herya had done anything, but now it was a very specific type of chaos. One that was taking place well away from the guarded door.

"Oi! What's going on?" the bouncer's upper mouth demanded, as the bottom one bit down on another stick of gum. He pushed into the crowd, ducking something short and hairy and vaguely troll-like as it flailed by above his head. "Cut it out, the lot of you!"

Zac sidled along the wall to the now unprotected door. He didn't hear the faint sloppy schlurp the eyeball on the ceiling made, or see it slowly swivel to look at him as he knelt down beside the door handle.

After a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure the bouncer wasn't coming, Zac slid the pick into the waiting lock. Before he could find the first pin, the door opened with a faint click.

Zac gave it a cautious push. It swung inward, revealing a long dark corridor. A stale breeze breathed at him from deep within the darkness.

"Come, Zac Corgan," it said. "I have been expecting you."

NGELO STOOD OUTSIDE Eyedol with his back pushed firmly against it. The flickering neon glow of the sign washed the surrounding area in shades of red, but he'd discovered that if he pressed right up against the wall he could tuck himself up in a pocket of shadow, out of sight of the rest of the underworld.

His breathing was steady now and he was no longer sweating. He thought he could probably do with going to the toilet again, but it wasn't a pressing emergency quite yet.

He felt stupid. That was the worst part. He'd been scared by the sights and the sounds in the nightclub and he'd made a fool of himself in front of Zac and Herya. In front of his friends.

He thought about praying, but he didn't know if anyone would hear him from way down there in the underworld. Then again, with God gone, he'd never been really sure if anyone was even listening any more.

He prayed anyway.

"Hello, it's me, Angelo," he said into his pressed-together palms. "I'm in Hades, so this might be a bad line, but if you can hear me, please look after my friends. They're the only ones I've got. So, um, yeah. Love to everyone. Amen."

There was a sound of breaking glass from over by the front entrance. Someone big and heavy came crashing through the doors before they had a chance to swish all the way open. The monstrous figure landed heavily on its misshapen torso, dragged itself back up on to all four feet, then plunged once more into the club.

Angelo squashed himself further into the shadows as the sounds of battle rang out through the broken doors of Eyedol. He tried to think about Batman, lurking in the dark just like he was. Batman wouldn't be scared. Batman wasn't scared of anything.

But he wasn't Batman. And he was terrified.

"An. Gel. Lo."

His name came as a whisper, broken into three syllables by a voice that sounded parchment dry. Angelo froze exactly like Batman wouldn't.

"An. Gel. Lo."

The voice seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It was just there, loitering around his ears, up to no good.

"An. Gel. Lo."

"Um, h-hello?" he whimpered. "Who... who's there?"

"An. Gel. Lo. An. Gel. Lo."

"Stop it. I'm w-warning you. I know karate."

There was a soft giggle from the darkness. "No, An. Gel. Lo," said the whispers. "You don't."

And with a rustle, the night snapped shut around him.

Zac stepped into the corridor and the door blew closed, cutting off what little light there had been. He heard the lock slide into place, and knew that there was no going back.

He took a moment to replace his lock-picking tools, before he went for another pocket and pulled out a short plastic tube about the size of a marker pen. It gave a krik as he bent it, and a weak green glow spread along the tube's length.

The walls on both sides of him blinked in the emerald light. Literally blinked. Hundreds of eyes, each the size of a marble, were embedded into the plaster. They stared at Zac, and Zac stared back. He brought the glow-stick closer to one wall and watched the pupils dilate in response.

"I can see you, Zac Corgan," said the voice from along the corridor. "Can you see me?"

The voice sounded like it was close to laughter. There was an accent to it too. Greek, probably, considering which underworld they'd ended up in.

Zac stepped away from the wall and peered along the corridor. The green light only extended a metre or two along it, leaving the rest behind a curtain of impenetrable black.

Watched from both sides by countless tiny eyes, Zac pushed on into the darkness until he came to a smooth metal door set into the back wall of the corridor. It opened with a ding, revealing a windowless metal box. There was a light mounted in the ceiling and a rectangular LCD display built into one of the walls.

"Going up," said the voice.

Zac took a look back along the corridor and found it still in darkness. He could hear the faint clicking sound of ten thousand blinking eyelids, and the distant din of fighting from beyond the door.

"Hurry, Zac Corgan. I do not have all day."

"All right, all right. Keep your hair on," Zac muttered, then he stepped into the elevator, turned round, and watched the doors slide closed. The number 666 flashed up in red on the display and the lift began to climb, slowly at first, but quickly picking up speed until Zac felt the G-force pressing down on him.

Just a minute or so later, he experienced a tiny moment of near-weightlessness as the lift came to an abrupt stop. He waited for the doors to open and, after what felt like a very long time, they did.

He stepped out of the lift and gazed around at the room he had arrived in.

It took up roughly the same amount of space as the dance floor downstairs had done, but it couldn't have looked more different. A luxurious red carpet covered the floor. Vast chandeliers hung from the high, domed ceiling, casting a twinkling glow across the antique furniture. Something classical and dreary was being played on a vintage gramophone over in the corner, and the thudding of the dance music downstairs felt like a dim and distant memory.

"Greetings, Zac Corgan. Welcome to the home of Argus."

"Where are you?" Zac asked. He looked over the room. "Show yourself."

"I am here, Zac Corgan," the voice said. Greek. It was definitely Greek. "I am behind you."

Zac spun round and saw the lift doors close. There were pillars on either side of the lift, each several times wider than he was. Something about them drew his eye, and it took him just a moment to realise that they weren't pillars at all. They were legs.

Slowly a" ever so slowly a" Zac looked up.

Angelo's heart was playing the bongos in his chest. His arms were pinned by his sides and he could now say with absolute certainty that he definitely needed the toilet.

He was wrapped in a tight cocoon, unable to move, barely able to breathe. He felt as if he were dangling from a great height, being buffeted back and forth on the breeze, and occasionally bumped against something solid and flat. He was absolutely correct in every one of these assumptions.

It was warm in the cocoon, and as panic tightened round Angelo like a noose, it began to get considerably warmer.

Zac didn't believe in giants. Or rather, he hadn't believed in giants, until now.

The giant sitting in front of him had changed his mind. He was perched on an enormous throne, into the base of which the elevator doors had been built. He sat forward in the chair, his metre-long fingers gripping the armrests, his shed-sized head lolling down almost to his chest.

The clothes he wore were musty and thick with dust, giving him the look of a long-neglected museum exhibit. His skin was blotchy and held together with stitches. They criss-crossed his face like a city-centre road map, and Zac would've sworn that the thing in the chair was long dead, had it not been for the eyes.

The eyes were open. And they were staring down at him.

"Hi," Zac said. "Almost didn't see you there."

"Hello, Zac Corgan," said that voice again. The giant on the throne made no movement. "Will you bow before the all-seeing Argus?"

Zac gave the question all the consideration it deserved. "Doubt it," he said.

The voice suddenly brightened. "Good. I cannot stand a kiss-ass!" it cried, and Zac realised it was coming from elsewhere in the room.

He turned to find a man grinning at him from behind dark-tinted glasses. The man was a little shorter than Zac, but considerably wider. He was bare from the waist up, his bulging belly sagging down over a baggy pair of white shorts that were tied with red bows round his knees.

His head was bald, but partially covered by a small red fez that he wore at a jaunty angle. The centre of the man's chest was matted with thick black hair, and his top lip was weighed down by an equally thick, equally black moustache.

All these things registered just barely at the back of Zac's mind. The front of his mind, meanwhile, was fully occupied with just one thought: nipples.

Where the man's nipples should have been, there were eyes. Zac stared at them. He couldn't help himself. How could he not stare? After a moment, one of the nipples gave him a cheeky wink.