I WAS IN the process of tearing away the top half of Olivia Vandemore's silver-spangled evening gown when Escott abruptly opened the basement door and called my name. "Are you down there?" His voice was necessarily pitched to carry through a brick wall. "In a minute," I growled back. The last fragile strap gave way under feverish, brutal hands. A terrible shriek of pure horror rushed from her perfect coral lips and echoed throughout the dank stone passages. "Jack?" He was coming down the basement steps. Her warm, white body writhed helplessly on the carved stone altar-an altar stained black with the Wood of uncounted victims hideously sacrificed to slake the unholy thirst of... "Jack?" He rapped a knuckle experimentally against the wall of my inner sanctum. ... Sabajajji, the Spider God. I hit the period and debated whether to turn it into an exclamation point. A quick look through the other pages confirmed that I hadn't used one for some time now, and it seemed appropriate for the scene. The reader was going to be far more concerned with the upcoming description of Olivia's writhing body than my punctuation. I backspaced, tapped the apostrophe key, and rolled out the sheet, adding it to the stack of deathless prose next to my portable. Further excitement would have to wait until after I found out what the hell Escott wanted. "I was working, you know," I told him, emerging wraithlike from