BY THE TIME my mind came back to me, I had gone a long way up the broad corridor. Faces pressed out of the stone at me, but they were lifeless stone, the souls once housed in their tortured flesh long since faded. I felt that fate on my own heels like a snarling wolf hound, but eventually, I grew weak, and came to a staggering halt. I leaned on the wall, trying to catch my breath.

How far along did this road go?

Forever, I thought dully. Who knows where lie the walls of Hell?

Down that dark road lay madness, I realized. I had to find a way out. I hoisted the torch, which was by then beginning to gutter. I feared it going out, for that would bring the unyielding darkness again. But as I listened, I heard a distant scraping sound.

I padded up the corridor on aching, naked feet. Along the right, a portal opened up. At first, I thought it was an intersection, another broad corridor joining this one, but I was wrong. It was the foot of a great stair that fed upward, much further than I could see. The structure was different, too. The broad corridor was rectangular, more or less, but this stairway seemed almost organic. The ceiling met in a pitched arc three or for lengths above me, and was supported by riblike stone struts every fifteen paces or so. Stepping onto the lowest, foot-polished step, I had the unmistakable, and uncomfortable, feeling of climbing up something’s throat.

The scraping sound was coming from above, but no sooner had I begun to climb the stair than it stopped.

“Hello?” I said. My voice ran along ahead of me in a desperate-sounding whisper. The whisper of a small, panicked thing. The torchlight wasn’t going much further than a few paces now, and the darkness began to swallow me up.

I had climbed perhaps twenty steps when something flew at me from the dark. I saw it from the corner of my eye, and yelped with fright. An ugly black sword flashed out of the dark, nearly carving my skull in two. I caught sight of the hands holding that black sword, decrepit and withered, and then the rest of the thing lumbered into sight: a thing little more than a skeleton, with lightless sockets where eyes ought to have been, and its jaw smashed clean away. It made a hissing sound.

I shoved the creature back and struck it in the side of the head with my torch. Sparks splashed across the ground, and the fire nearly gave out. The thing fell to the stairs, dropping its sword and pawing at the air.

Whatever, or whoever, it might have been, it was a horror now. And it had tried to kill me. I seized up my torch and thrust it down into the thing’s face. The air filled with the stink of cooking meat, but it was sickening and cloying. The creature screamed and thrashed, but only for a moment. Then it convulsed once, and by the fading light of my smothered torch, died.

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In the darkness, it was clear what happened next. A thin thread of light flowed from the creature to the wound in my chest. And that was certainly brighter. I didn’t feel the same warming vitality as when the vicar had died. This was too thin, too hollow, to energize me. I wondered what it was. Had I absorbed some part of its life force? Some essence of the soul?

Damn my empty memory! Damn this whole place! I snarled in rage, and made to pick up my torch, the end of which was nothing more than dull, glowing cherries. That’s when it happened.

That’s when I learned the truth of hell damnation, the law of perdition.

As I bent down, groaning against the stiffness in my back and legs, I felt a sudden, cold chill, like ice right through my spine. A wave of white-hot pain followed it. I screamed, and my terror and outrage echoed off the walls, rushing down the throat-shaped hallway, but I didn’t care. My hands found a long, hard, sharp thing sticking through my belly, almost as long as my forearm.

And then I heard it: a ragged, whispered breath in my ear: “Geralda liked to play the checking game. Tomin always carried chese. Father Cascon led the blackest prayers, but his daughter was a virgin.” Whatever those words meant, they were nothing to me. Just the quiet ravings of a lunatic.

Another of the dead things had been lurking in the dark,

My legs gave out, and I slid off the blade. It tore my flesh as I fell, but I couldn’t stop it. I gasped, and hit the stones. Unable to stop my fall I tumbled down the stairs.

I don’t remember hitting the bottom.

But I do remember waking up.

There was darkness. Not only without, but within. A gnawing emptiness, like the worst hunger I’d ever felt before. Except… I had felt it before. It was like a deep, festering hornet worming its way into my gut. A scream boiled out of me, and before I knew it, I was awake, clutching my gut and gasping for air.

Something rolled off me. The bones. My eyes were gummed shut, and I kneaded them open, slow and painful as it was. And when I opened them, I found more darkness. I’d been here before. The sound, the smell of it, it was all familiar.

Except this time, I was holding something. It was smooth, almost liquid in my hand. I held it up to the little light leaking out of the wound in my chest: the silver tear. I still had that, I thought with some relief.

But what about the rest of it? Why was I back here? How had I gotten back here? I racked my memory, casting back… I remembered a stairway. And bright, sudden pain. A sword in my gut. And before that, another, sweeping out of the dark, because my torch was fading.

Fading. That word echoed through my skull like a scream. The light in my wound was faint. Was it weaker than before? Weaker than when I’d last awoken?

I stood on stiff, almost wooden legs. My head spun for a moment. I refused to fall again. I refused to kneel.

A dull glowing was beginning to fill the little cavern. I turned and watched as the first of the winged horrors swept by bearing their torchest, sweeping upwards with other wretches in their claws, crowing their bloody triumph to the lightless void above. Dozens, hundreds. And I backed up.

I inched my way back to the door, clutching the silver tear to my chest, afraid to lose it. Afraid to draw attention to myself.

When my probing hand felt the iron door, I wasted no more time. I had to get back to the vicar. I had questions to ask.