Naturally, when my girlfriend Dora asked me to help her hunt for Gog's grave, my first impulse was to argue with her. I'm a natural-born skeptic. I'm told - I don't believe it - that my first words were, "There ain't no Santy Claus." But I fought the impulse and said yes, figuring it would turn out to be a lark in the bone park that would result in nothing more serious than skinned shins and maybe a few feelcops.

Gog was a legend, nothing more. It seems that before the first white settlers had come to Center City, the Indians had told stories about a huge man-monster who lived nearby. This creature was humanoid - only three times as big as a man - hairy, fanged like a wild animal, and pretty near immortal. The Indian legend had it that Gog had always been here - that he'd haunted the locality even before the redskins had arrived. Still, when it came right down to it, nobody had ever claimed to have seen Gog, so the founding fathers had located the first colonial graveyard just about where Gog's grave, or cave, or fave spot was supposed to be - which shows what little regard Europeans had for the native folktales.

For a while, everything was all right. Then there was a series of midnight mysteries. Something kidnapped a number of colonists, and their bodies were never found. Something broke into some houses . . . from the roof. Something left impossibly big footprints along the roads.

The colonists suspected the Indians, but they couldn't prove it. Anyway, the disturbances stopped after a while.

About fifty years later, another outbreak occurred - people missing, big footprints, the whole carbon copy. Then another fifty years, and another, and now, just recently, again. The whole city had had a recent recurrence of stories about Gog. There'd been some mighty mysterious footprints found in mud on rainy mornings at the city edge where the old cemetery's located. I'd seen them myself. They were pretty big, I'll admit - much too big for any bear or circus giant's foot. The foot had to have been maybe twenty inches long, with awfully long claws. Personally, I thought it was a gag.

But the newspaper people picked up on it, dug up all the old legends of Gog, and rewrote them for the Sunday specials. From the records and old newspaper accounts, the reporters figured out that Gog evidently slept for about fifty years, then came out from wherever he was hiding, satisfied his hunger with a few peopleburgers, and went back to his pad. This, they said, must have been going on for centuries, and it was now just about fifty years since his last visitation. The native, they concluded, was evidently getting restless.

The stories sounded like fodder for Fate magazine. Being a skeptic, I don't believe in that sort of thing. Old wives' tales and fairy stories, that's all they are to me. But my girl Dora's got a hyperactive imagination. She decided she'd find out for herself, and maybe sell the account of the adventure to the papers. So when she asked me to join her at the old underground dormitory that night, I said, "Anything you dig, baby, I dig, too. I'm all a-Gog over you!"

Around midnight, we drove my old heap out to the edge of the city, parked it by the ghouly gates, and, lugging a shovel and pick that Dora had picked up from somewhere, we hoofed it into the cemetery. The place was abandoned. There wasn't any watchman because nobody had been buried there in over seventy years. The colonists had used it, and now it was sort of a public park, only the city had never quite gotten around to fixing it up. It was all overrun with weeds, and the limestone tombstones from a hundred or two hundred years back were mostly fallen over or unreadable with age.

Dora figured Gog's grave would be somewhere near the center. She was going to turn over the old tombstones and see if any of them mentioned it. Could be the original settlers had marked the spot the Indians had thought was Gog's underground teepee.

Anyway, it was a hard night's work for sure. I figured maybe I could make out a bit with Dora during the rest breaks. She might even be so grateful for my help she'd say yes the next time I asked her to marry me. We turned over a number of tombstones, but didn't find anything helpful. We read a lot of funny old inscriptions and found some graves that were as old as the city. We came finally to one big old slab set in the ground - the kind of headstone that usually marks the resting place of some bigwig - and sat down on it for a while. My hand started wandering, and Dora, meaning to kick me, kicked the stone instead.

It rocked.

"Hey!" she yelped. "What's this?"

We got up and looked. Sure enough, the headstone was loose. It looked like it had only just fallen over. I pushed the pick under one end and levered it. The stone moved slowly aside. An opening was revealed. The slab covered a hole in the ground - an opening like an open grave.

No, not a grave. More like an entrance. There were old stone stairs going down into total darkness beneath the ground. We looked at each other, wondering what to do. If it weren't for the fact that I didn't want my girl to think I was curiously yellow, I'd have set a new Olympic record getting out of there. I was scared witless.

But Dora wasn't. She was only excited. She said, "Let's go down and see where they lead us!"

Like a zombie I nodded. I carried the pick, she carried the lantern, and we carried on together down those spooky stairs. They were awful old and worn. Down we went into the black hole beneath that slab in the center of the city's haunted graveyard. It was dampish, and the moldy dirt of the wall around us had a morgue-like smell. We were descending a sort of sloping shaft and getting deep, far below burying level. We went down about thirty steps and around a little curve, then came out into a sort of cave-like room. Not exactly my idea of an underground theater.

We looked around. It was a stone-enclosed place, maybe half a hundred feet long. There was no other exit, just the old stairs leading in. I breathed easier when I saw there was nothing moving down there, not even a rat or a beetle. I suppose, going down those stairs, I hadn't quite known what to expect. Maybe Gog. But all there was in that old cave were skeletons.

Lots of skeletons.

We walked around among the bones. They were all bare and white and old. There were maybe a couple of hundred of them. They had to have been lying there for years on end.

"I guess maybe this was a mass grave back in colonial days," I said at last. "Maybe even earlier. That has to be where the Gog story came from. 'Gog' was really an epidemic, or a massacre, and they buried all the bodies here in 'Great Gog's Grave.' That's where the story came from!"

"Y-yes," Dora said uneasily. It seemed a logical explanation. She bent over, fumbling amid the dirt and scraps on the floor, and picked up something. It was a coin. A copper cent. The light from the lantern lit the date on the penny. We looked at it: 1931.

We looked at each other wordlessly.

There had been no epidemic - nothing - in 1931... just the last time there had been so many mysterious disappearances.

We turned around and started on the double back up those stairs. Halfway up, I started trying to talk myself out of it. "Jesus," I said, "we're acting like a couple of fools to run out without checking out the cave further. I bet the cops know all about those bodies. I bet we'll just look like a couple of kids when we tell them about this. There just can't be anything like this Gog thing."

"No," said Dora as we were nearing the top, "there must be some perfectly simple explanation. I don't really believe in that foolish old fable." We reached the surface level and panted up the last two or three steps. "There is no such thing as Gog."

"Oh, yes there is, my pretty," said a deep voice.

We turned in tandem and saw bloodrust on the talons of the monster reaching for us as it crouched by the entrance to its hidden grave, its huge hungry eyes feverish with bloodlust as its slavering tusks opened cavernously for its first meal in fifty years.

Tomorrow the papers and radio and TV will report the first of a new series of mysterious disappearances.

But if Gog was expecting a warm meal in Dora and me, he was disappointed. Our blood was running as cold as ice.