Companioned only by a fitful lamp and holding to the key extracted from his father's money pouch, he had, it seemed, unlocked the realm of Dis, the god of death.  (Stella, he thought.  Only for you.)  The long and ragged flight of stairs wrenched from the earth had not bespoken casks of wine awaiting at the foot; still, his father had emerged from his mysterious descents with wine and only wine; a pigskin in the days before he had assumed the Christian faith; a simple flagon, wrought of fired clay, since Christianity had further darkened and subdued his ways.

If not a wealth of wine, why, then, some Christian artifacts, Nod thought, to hush the voice which whispered, "Watch your step, my boy."  A crucifix, that gruesome relic of a godling's death.  A shrine perhaps where Christian men commune with God; a god too lordly for a woman and a boy; the stern and bearded giant adored as Yahweh or the Desert King, jealous and cruel, and doom to cities whose inhabitants preferred the Lady with her many faces and her single love.  Sodom and Gomorrah... Jericho....

But in the fickle sputter of his lamp, he saw a space which might have been a tomb with several openings like dusky mouths into a deeper earth; a tomb such as the sad Etruscans dug in after days, when Rome was threatening their dwindled power and they foresaw defeat in life and could not contemplate a happy afterlife.  No longer hunts and games and banquetings; nor men on horseback, youths and maidens dancing to a double flute; divers, nude and sun-embraced, arising from a sea where dolphins sported like a circus troop.

Instead, funerary urns like bloated skulls; muraled walls depicting perils on the highway to the throne of Pluto - Dis, the Romans said - and his grave, stolen queen, Proserpine; Cerberus, the triple-headed dog; Charon, that gray ferryman, and demons by the multitude... ovine, equine, lupine... tails like whips for insubordinate slaves... horns to please a Minotaur, that monster born of an unholy liaison between a queen and bull... hooves, but not for dancing under harvest moons.

Demons ... nightmares from the pagan underworld, enemies of men who worshipped spirits of the upper air.  Such beings had escaped before the coming of the Christ, or so his father said, and hidden in the North, or stolen ships and sailed to Caledonia through the Nether Seas.

in such a place he might discover skulls.  He sniffed for mushrooms, lichens, roots, especially wine, the distillation of the bounteous grape - any growing thing - but death, not growth, was emperor in this tomb.  He turned to mount the stairs.  So much for Stella's wine.  Perhaps a flagon smuggled from the dining room....

Then he saw the hoofprints in the dust and caught a lingering smell: decomposing flesh and fetid breath.

"Jove," he swore.  "If I were Roustabout instead of Goldilocks!"  He flexed his muscles, felt them firm but small, and wished himself into a Hercules.  He sensed the imminent return of - something - man or beast - and father to no child except a ghoul.  Well, he did not need to wait and meet the owner of the room.  The stairs became his friends, like helpful rabbits standing on each other's backs.

Except....

Something slouched between him and the stairs, a living gate.