Captain Partlet waddled to the bottom edge of the slab and stuck his head into the hole.  He couldn't see anything in the darkness.

"Well?" he called, and his voice echoed disturbingly. "What do you see?"

"There's stairs!" The twins called up in unison.

Queen Mab scooted down Partlet's neck and tried to cling there upside down to get a better look, but her skirts fell up over her head, and she lost her grip.  The captain had to catch her by the hem of a slip to keep her from hitting the stone.  Her glow turned an irritated and humiliated red as she righted herself in the air, and smacked Captain Partlet ineffectually on the beak for having seen up her skirt.  His cere blushed anyway.

"Ow!" one of the twins yelped from the blackness.

The captain ruffled in alarm "What happened!"

"I stubbed my toe!"

With the echo he couldn't tell which one had spoken, but he supposed it really didn't matter, anyway.

"All in the line of duty, my boy!" he replied. "Have you found anything important yet?"

Down below, the twins squatted down on one of the dry stone stairs and felt around with their palms for what the smaller one had kicked.  Their fingers touched rough metal, and the fat teeth of gears, up against the corner of the stair.  They touched it all over and they couldn't tell what it did, but there was a lever sticking out the top; a lever the exact right size for their hands, and there really are few things as irresistable as that.

"We found a lever!" the shouted up together.

Partlet's reply came back hollow from the echo "A lever?  For gods sake, man, don't pull it!  You don't know what it does!"

It was allready too late.  They pulled.  There came the squeal of gears and chains, and the creaking of the rollers up above.  Partlet screeched and grabbed Queen Mab under a wing as the slab began to shake.  It whined, jolted, and dropped like a guillotine, flinging the pair down into the mud and sealing the entrance with a crash.

Capain Partlet blinked and struggled to his feet.  After a quick check he deemed himself to be in one peice and spread his wing to let the queen out of the dusty little pocket underneath.  She came out red faced and stamped her silver shoe in the mud.

"WHY must EVERYTHING today end with me getting SQUISHED or MUDDY or WET or--AAUGH!!!!!!!"  She kicked at the feather that had come loose and stuck in the surface of the mud.  Seemingly oblivious to the presence of the Captain of the Flying Brigade she stamped her feet, hopped, pounded her fist against her skirt, and shrieked, for nearly a whole minute.  Then, tantrum over, she stood calmly, smoothed the rumples of her dress, and turned to face the captain in a smooth and regal posture.  He looked a little shellshocked.

"Captain Partlet, I want to go home now.  My sister can deal with her own terrible little island when she gets back!"

"But...My Queen, what about the deputies?"

"Her subjects.  Her problem."  She crossed her arms and pouted.  "I want you to take me home."

The Captain fidgeted uncomfortably. "But your majesty, those boys were made deputies under the Flying Brigade, which makes them YOUR deputies.  We can't just leave them!"

Her jaw dropped "Are you questioning me, Captain Partlet?"

Faced with the direct question, Captain Partlet's eyes went wide and he got a look over him that was allover puppydog-ish and extremely uncomfortable.  The Queen raised an eyebrow and put her fists on her hips.  Partlet whimpered.

"....yes I am, your majesty."

The Queen made an indignant little sound and stared at the captain, looking ever so much like a startled goldfish.  He shirked down miserably and whined.

"You....you dare!  You dare disobey your queen!"

"Yes!" he wailed.  He gave a little honking sob and sat down in the mud, covering his eyes with his wings and looking allover, entirely, miserable.

Now, it is a very unusual day for a Queen when she sees the Captain of her Flying Brigade sit down in the mud and cry, and she was terribly pleased that it was the act of disobedience to her that made him do it.  She decided that she would be nice and humor him, and let him go off to rescue his little deputies (she did have a streak of decent selflishness in her somewhere), but that she would wait a minute or two before she told him (though that streak was buried very very deep).  It really was a fascinating sight, seeing a full grown Captain honking and wailing and sniffling, and when she figured he'd had just about enough she patted him on the beak and he looked up, sniffing.

"I changed my mind." she declared.  "I've decided to let you rescue your deputies first.  In fact I..I order you to rescue them!"

The Captain blinked, then perked when he registered what she had said.  He gave a joyous litle yelp and wrapped her up in his wings to hug her harder than anyone had dared to hug the Queen of the Faries before.  She winced at the mud in his feathers and squirmed uncomfortably.

"You, ah, you can put me down now.  Captain.  Captain!"

And that was exactly how Nibs found them when he came drifting over the edge of the briar valley, called by it's mysterious newness to investigate, and to find the missing boys.
 

The twins had never realized just how dark darkness could be.  With the questionable glow of the fairy queen above them they had thought that this, indeed, was darkness; but now their eyes had nothing to receive, and no point of reference to get their bearings on.  Their orientation lasted just long enough to wretch the lever back into position, but it did so with no resistance.  The mechanism did not reset.  The pair sent themselves stumbling back up the stairs to pound and claw at the smooth backside of the door, but it was to no avail.  The Captain and the Queen didn't even hear them shouting.

They gave up soon enough, just as their hands ached nastily from striking the door.  There wasn't any way to go but down now.  They grabbed each other's fingers and turned slowly on the stairs, checked the next step down with their toes, and began their decent again.  It wasn't nearly so swift as the last set had been; they had no idea how many stairs they had covered and how many more were left, but it was tedious and tiresome to run the ball of the foot over the stair below them each time, to scope out it's integrity and whether it was even there.  This was mostly the job of the taller twin, for his legs were longer and he was more difficult to topple if he slipped.

He began to notice something off about the stairs.  On this one, there was a dent on the middle of the left side.  On the next, a dent in the middle of the right.  They alternated perfectly like footsteps, on stairs that had been traversed for a hundred years, or even more.  There were steps like that on the island in village ruins, where all that was left of some terrible tribe that had come before the Piccaninies was the rising steps of a temple, worn down and covered over with bramble.  The faries said it was the remains of the little city of Eldorado, or something like that; a condensed little place that had flowed with spanish children when they dreamed, some three hundred years ago.  It hadn't lasted long.  The children had left and the people had vanished, and the remains of the city were cannibalized by the rest of the island overnight.  Nothing dead ever lasted long in Neverland.

If they listened carefully past their breathing (which seemed so awfully loud in the dark) and ignord the echoing pat of their feet, another sound began to play beneath them both.  It shushed past them through the walls in a constant, heated rush, and when they but their hands out to steady themselves it burned in patches and veins.  They soon became aware of another sound.

Snoring.

What in the world could be snoring this far down in the ground? (if indeed they were as deep as they thought they were)  With their luck it would be the King of the Worms, or something equally large and nasty; though they supposed it wouldn't be so bad to have to meet a worm king, because what could he really do besides slime on them?  Unless the King of the Worms had terrible teeth and leaked acid through his skin instead of slime!  They both wrinkled up their faces as the thought occured to them simultaniously.  They'd best hope it was something far less nasty than that!

The snoring grew louder as they were forced to hop a step that had fallen through (though what it could have fallen through to they would really rather not imagine) and they became unhappily aware that the stone of the stairs was getting thinner.  Would it get too thin to hold them?

Fortunatly, it didn't come to that.  The stairs leveled out quite abruptly and fed them into a wall of stone.  Had they been more witless children they might have panicked at the feeling they were trapped, but these were the Twins, and they had wits aplenty in their odd little heads.  Both splayed their arms in front of them and felt along the wall, finding it to lead off to the left where the ground began to drop.  It went forward for a good thirty yards, then curled to the right, dropped down three stairs, and knotted itself up in an infuriating mess of turns and tangles that made the twins want to scream with frustration at the thing.

With no warning at all, there was light.

They blinked furiously as their eyes adjusted to the brightness (it was, in fact, only the dimness of twilight that they saw, but to their eyes that had been stretched to the fullest in the dark, it might as well have been the noon day sun).  The snoring had become louder now, so deep that they couldn't imagine a pair of lungs large enough to produce that noise (except maybe Captain Hook) and it seemed terribly close.  Both sniffed and forced their eyes to open.

The cavern they had wandered into was larger that the hull of the Jolly Roger.  It's height tapered off into corroded vaults that webbed with glass piping, which ran down the walls in clumsy curves and met with new sources along the way.  They all trickled with yellowish, gritty water that looked unpleasant.  In tight rows of two, four feet from the floor and again at forty feet, were stone basins stuck to the wall with iron pegs.  It was from these which came the light.  Each one sat with a belly full of something that glowed gently.  The larger twin curiously stuck his fingers into the one nearby, and they came out coated with luminescent liquid.  It did not burn and didn't sting, but it felt cold like the back of a poison toad.  He wiped it off on the edge of the basin just to be safe.

"What do you suppose is in there?" the white twin shouted over the snoring, pointing.  His brother looked up to see.  Stuck in the walls at intervals were enormous metal sheets with gothic points; so large he hadn't even realized they were doors.  Each one had a smaller, boy sized door inset at the bottom.

"Maybe the worm king is in there!" he yelped, and his brother grabbed hold of his hand.  It was still silly.  How could a worm snore?

Of course, if most people suspected that the doors before them led to the terrible monsterous Worm King, with dripping fangs and acidic slime, they would avoid opening those doors.  But these were children, and boys to boot, and they couldn't resist the pull of it.  Twining their fingers together, they crept forward to the first door.

It wasn't an impressive door.  It was dented, thick, scratched, and the handle and it's surroundings were smudged with crackled stains of something old and biological.  The pointless decorative curves at the fittings of the handle were caked thickly, and neither boy really wanted to touch it, but a long game of Rock, Paper, Scissors (they kept picking the same ones) meant the smallest twin had to open it.  He grabbed the handle and pulled, but it took their combined strengths to budge the whining metal anyway.  They wiped their hands on their trouser legs in disgust and stuck their heads into the room.

This wasn't where the snoring was coming from.  All this room contained was boxes; cabinets, really, or perhaps lockers.  The twins had never seen the latter two and so couldn't give an accurate word.  They were irregularly shaped but a generally constant height, with doors that were wide and well fit.  This room had again been made in mind with massive proportions, but the cabinets were arranged neatly in the middle, in two rows of four with a large space between the two.  They gave the ramshakle impression of a shanty town made from cannibalized parts.

The Twins knew the doors to the cabinets wouldn't open before they even tried them, though they did try.  Stressed iron poles were wrapped around the middle of them like string on a package, and they looked like they had been there for a very long time.  One was new, though.  It's base was surrounded by a flaking of rust, and the red lines of where the iron had once been were visible beside the new wrapping.

There was a smudged palm print of rust on the front of the cabinet.

No.  It wasn't rust.  It was crusted and flaking, darkening into the same color that had been on the door handle.  But this was newer.  It was redder.

It was blood.

The abstract notions of their What-If game suddenly seemed all too real.  There wasn't REALLY supposed to be a monster under the ground, not a real monster, anyway.  There was supposed to be some vast snoring Behemoth with the temperment of a kitten, because one must always reinforce the reccuring moral that appearances can be deceiving.  There wasn't supposed to be any blood!

Honest fright began to seep upwards from their bellies and their fingers clenched tight, leaving red half-moon prints on their skin from each other's nails.  The black twin leaned closer and, unable to help himself, scratched at the flaking blood to make sure it was real.  He could hear his fingertip rasping against the corroded metal sheet.

Something inside the cabinet lashed out.  They couldn't help themselves now; they screamed, shrilly like only children can scream, and bolted towards the door.  As they turned and pushed the metal entrance shut behind them they didn't hear that the snoring had stopped in a startled grunt, but as they leaned their backs against it and puffed, the whine of iron hinges made itself known over their pulses as one of the terrible, enormous doors pushed open into the room.  Out came a paw, then forty feet from the ground came a blunt muzzle that brimmed with teeth and horn.  It turned it's scaly skull to the side and looked down at them with one misproportioned eye that was thick and yellow and scarred about the lids.

They didn't wait for the rest of it.  They shrieked and ran in the other direction towards the end of the chamber; to a wall they had only one door, and that was boy sized.  They wretched it open, fell in, and clacked it shut hard behind them.  The beast's footsteps scratched the stone and they could feel it's great muzzle snuff against the foot of the door.  It whined, grumbled, and the light from under the door vanished as it sat down to wait.

They were trapped.