Old Bailey shook his head. "Things like that, they're too vicious to die. Too old and big and nasty."

The marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."

Old Bailey nodded, sagely. "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Bailey handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand and snapped it, like a crocodile head, at de Carabas. "It was okay," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another."

Hunter's voice was quiet and intense. She did not break her step as she spoke. "I fought in the sewers beneath New York with the great blind white alligator-king. He was thirty feet long, fat from sewage and fierce in battle. And I bested him, and I killed him. His eyes were like huge pearls in the darkness." Her strangely accented voice echoed in the underground, twined in the mist, in the night beneath the Earth.