The foggy man’s pistol pointed at his back and an ominous darkness waiting below, Eric descended the wooden stairs into the black depths of the cathedral.

Nothing about this situation gave him a good feeling.  All things considered, the gun was probably the least of his worries at this point.  (But it still pissed him off to think that the little bastard had so completely taken control of the situation.)

He promised Isabelle he would be careful, yet here he was, in a very vulnerable position, shepherded into this nightmare hole in the ground at gunpoint, his very fate in the hands of the enemy and his odds of making it out alive dwindling with each passing second.

He was ashamed to admit that he had let his guard down a little.  Discovering that the foggy man was no longer foggy, that he no longer had his ghostly tricks at his disposal, made him careless.

Karen would be so disappointed in him.

The sun still shined overhead.  Eric could still feel it on the sunburned skin of his arms, neck and face.  Yet there was also that peculiar chill in the air, the cold from that other world as it crushed down on him.  The duality of the fissure was distinctly noticeable here.  He felt as if he could feel both worlds at once, their opposing forces at work on him, the hot and the cold, the light and the dark.

He felt as if he were growing heavier with each step.  His ears popped.  His eyes felt dry and heavy, like they did when he rose with too little sleep.  His head ached.  His feet hurt.

Miserable, Eric descended deeper and deeper into the darkness.

He looked up at the sky, expecting to find that it had grown black, but in spite of the gloom that was quickly enveloping him, it remained clear and blue.

Lowering his eyes to the steps before him, Eric found that the cathedral’s rock wall had inexplicably turned into huge stone columns that appeared to run all the way up to the rim of the hole, yet there had been no such columns there when he stood at the top looking down.  The walls had been nothing but rough stone.

And he found himself not entirely surprised by this transformation.  The columns were familiar.  They had been in his dream.  As he carefully descended the steps, his thoughts muddled in a fog of pain and morphine, he had marveled at these same massive columns, his weary mind struggling to recall whether they had been here all along.

Soon the gloom thickened, his sight reduced to a few yards and then only a few feet, a few inches…

Eric stepped carefully, willing himself not to stumble beneath his inexplicably increasing weight.

He could no longer see anything in front of or below him.  All he could see was the sky above, still blue and bright, but utterly unaffecting the shadows of the cathedral.  He gazed up into that blueness, but had to lower his eyes.  It was unnervingly alien to see something like this.  His mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around the concept.  He felt like he would go mad if he kept trying.

But navigating these steps in the dark was almost as unnerving.  He kept expecting the steps to end without warning and spill him screaming into the black emptiness beneath him.

He considered turning around and making a move for the gun now that the light had gone, but he didn’t quite dare risk it.  He couldn’t be sure the young man didn’t possess unnatural night vision in addition to spectrum-shifting and golem-conjuring.

Besides, he would probably only end up getting himself shot as he fumbled awkwardly in the dark.  He was hardly James Bond.  The foggy man, in his curious line of dark work, would almost certainly have the advantage over him in any confrontation.

The foggy man…  He’d grown tired of that.  Over his shoulder, he asked, “Do you have a name?”

“Yes.”

“You going to share it with the rest of the class?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

Eric shrugged and faced forward again.  Foggy it was, then.  “So what is it we’re looking for down here?”

“No idea,” replied Foggy.  “You tell me.”

“How the hell should I know?  You’re the agent of darkness.  Don’t you know what you came here for?”

“Nope.”

“What did your bosses tell you to find?”

“I was just told to find what’s here and bring it back.”

“But they didn’t tell you what it is?”

“They didn’t say.  I didn’t ask.”

Eric recalled Father Billy telling him that his old bosses paid him to not ask questions.  It seemed that Foggy here worked under the same contract.  “Sounds like information I’d demand to have before I took a job like this.”

“You don’t demand anything from the people I work for.”

“Who are the people you work for?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“You don’t know who you work for?”

Foggy fell silent.

“Right.  If you say so.”

“It’s a need-to-know kind of thing.”

Just like Father Billy said.  “And you don’t need to know.  It’s only your ass on the line.”

“Just shut up and keep walking.”

Clearly, Eric had found a touchy spot.  If he had to hazard a guess, he’d say that Foggy wasn’t too happy about the lack of information he was given.  But he was far too stubborn to admit that he was nothing more than someone’s loyal little, waggily-tailed lapdog.

He didn’t push the subject.  He had no doubt that Foggy would kill him if he grew tired of his mouth, but he was beginning to agree with Isabelle.  The people this man worked for were bad.  It was unsettling to know that there was an organization like this out there somewhere.

Although it would tickle the hell out of the conspiracy theorists, he imagined.

Abruptly, the light began to return.  The sky above never changed, but suddenly the sun’s rays were able to reach them again.  Eric’s visibility grew from a few inches to a few feet to a few yards.  But with the visibility came unsettling things.

The columns were gone again.  Only smooth bedrock covered the wall.  But far more disturbing than that was the fact that the wall had inexplicably changed sides.  It was now on their right, and they were spiraling down into the darkness counter-clockwise, in the opposite direction, with no memory of having turned around.

Eric stopped, forgetting about the gun at his back.  “Are you seeing this?”

“I am.”

“Good.  Just checking.”

“Keep going.”

“You do realize that if you kill me you’ll be all alone down here, right?”

“If I have to take my chances, I will.”

“Suit yourself.”  Clearly, he wasn’t going to reason his way out of this.

The cathedral was silent but for the sounds of their footfalls on the steps, and even that noise was eerily hushed within these walls.  The wood did not creak, despite its obvious age, and there had been no echoing of their voices when they spoke.

Nothing down here seemed to be working quite like it should.

Darkness fell again.

Darkness went away.

Things changed.

Openings appeared in the walls here and there and Eric peered into great, cavernous chambers where shadowy things seemed to stir in the stillness.  Odd shuffling noises rose from beneath the steps.  Sometimes strange lights seemed to flicker through the darkness at the far side of the hole.

The wall was on their left again.  Then it was on the right and Eric was sure he’d only imagined that it had ever been on the left.  Without being aware of exactly when the steps ended, he was walking on a flat surface, stumbling blindly through the darkness.

Were they at the bottom already?

Had only a few minutes passed?  Or had it already been a few hours?

The sky above remained blue and calm.

Were the walls moaning at him?

Was that a face peering at him from the gloom?

Pressing his hands to his eyes, Eric tried to force himself to focus.  Something was terribly wrong here.  Nothing made sense.  It felt like his mind was breaking.