Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce

Company's Coming...

     "What, Twonky," Nathan said, with a kind of smirk, "You think it's the voices of the damned drifting up from Hell?"
     Well, the idea had crossed my mind (I didn't say). Hey, you'd have thought the same damn thing! But what I actually said was, "So what is it then?", with a (hopefully) disinterested-sounding nonchalance.
     "House settling. Not surprising with all that ground just eaten away down there, not to mention these tunnels. This whole place is a collapse just waiting to teeter."
     "So the House of the Lord is a House of Cards?" A good line. I get them sometimes.
     "Just about. Come on, let's go check things out, see if we can scare up Cerberus."
     That didn't sound like such a good idea, but how do you argue with Nathan when he's "investigating"? So I tagged after him, feet on the ready for a swift retreat.
     Oddly, it was Nathan who called for a retreat.
     We hadn't gotten more than a dozen feet or so down the tunnel when a sudden wave of Smell hit us like a wall of sheer stink. It was a rotten eggs mixed with raw sewage and stored for a year in a gym sock kind of smell. That was enough to stop me in my tracks but it sent Nathan spinning. He whirled, tapped me on the shoulder, and jogged back in the direction we'd come from with a shouted "Come on!"
     Now, Nathan's a bit neat, but he's not really what you'd call fussy; I mean, he was creeping through the muck just a few minutes and liking it fine. The smell was bad, but not exactly knock-you-off-your-feet bad. Nonetheless, when Nathan's running away I don't stop to ask questions; he's more of a "run towards" kind of guy, so if something worries him enough for him to make tracks, it should worry me at least three times as much. So I nearly beat him to the Hell-Door, which blocked our exit.
     "Methane!" he said, panting.
     "What?" I said, panting harder.
     "It's methane gas. Toxic. Explosive."
     "What? How?"
     "Deteriorating vegetation. This tunnel must end up in a swamp somewhere. Must be a lot of it for the smell to be that strong."
     "So we're standing under a house that's about to collapse, sniffing great lungfulls of explosive gas."
     "That's abo
    ut the size of it." "God! The things you get me into. Are you absolutely sure about this gas business?"
     "Well, it might not be methane..."
     "What could it be?"
     He grinned at me. "Brimstone."

Next: I Know a Way Out of Hell