A moment of silence settled over all of them. Then Velva broke it. __e are the hunter and the haunter, the haunted and hunted.___ut for what purpose?_ asked Sir Sun.__t is all for the same purpose, Timothy._ The empty that wish to be full.

Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become.

An Undergrounder is one who comes back after he__ or she____ou know, under the ground._ Daniel__ green eyes flared again. __hat isn__ supposed to happen._ Sir Sun nodded in agreement. __ost certainly not.

It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature__ tough bracken, all picture-postcard like.

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking.

Velva wasn__ merely a rose among the thorns, the lily of the valleys, she was Empress amongst the stars and planet.