The Jaws of Ouroboros
By Steve Toase, first published in the Fiends in the Farrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror
In an environment where the earth is devouring itself and human beings and producing valuable drugs, a successful drug-harvesting team tries to escape a deal with a powerful businessman but face terrifying consequences for defying his orders.
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Plot Summary
Hiding in a ditch with Pasha, the collector checks the climbing rope tied around their waist. The landscape around them is eating itself, using stone teeth to devour the topsoil. Pasha reports that four other teams are around the corner from them. He cuts the other team's safety ropes with his machete, slits their throats, and then they watch as the bodies are rolled by the rocks over to the mouth to be digested by the earth.
With the competing agents out of the way, the collector goes to collect the valuable white ambergris from underneath the moving soil near the stone mouth for their client. The collector tries to not think about what lies in the mouth and thinks about the failed expeditions that experienced cavers never returned from. Gathering four bags, the collector brings the loot back to Pasha.
They take the bags to the reception committee outside of a fortress-like structure and are greeted by a large dragline and dead moles. Five bodyguards approach them and search them for weapons. A sixth figure, the infamously dangerous Papa Yaga, outstretches a hand to the pair and walks them to his office. They show Yaga the bags of white paste. Yaga pulls out a splinter of bone and says he markets the mixture as “Giant’s Dough” to his clients. He rubs the mixture on his gums and the whites of his eyes turn amber.
When his eyes turn back to normal, he asks them how many people went into the mixture to which Pasha replies ten, with some still breathing. Pasha offers to kill more people next time for more money and the collector requests canvas bags to avoid contamination. Yaga weighs the mixtures and then leads them up ladders to a penthouse where two half-naked models sit on a couch. Yaga hands them stacks of money and requests more of the mixture.
As the collector watches Pasha become increasingly more violent, they decide to retire and tell Yaga it is for family reasons. Then, they move out to Hamburg alone. Six months later, they catch the collector in Munich and give them a painful injection in the arm. The collector is tortured and brought back to the dragline where Yaga tells them that Pasha had tried to rip him off and shows them Pasha’s captured cousin. Yaga forces the collector to watch as the cousin is ripped apart by Yaga’s machine and devoured by the earth. Yaga then asks for the collector to track down Pasha and bring the killer to him. He treats their wounds and the collector finds Pasha overdosed on Giant’s Dough in a basement in his hometown. All of his teeth had turned to stone and he was oozing the white ambergris.
The collector brings Yaga to the basement and he buys the building and imprisons the house’s inhabitants to feed to Pasha. Yaga gives the collector a chance to run and they take it.