And then there was the added burden of Nick. In the end Nick had become exactly what Mary said he would become. The small brown smudge on his mouth, left there from candy he was eating the moment he died, grew like a fungus until nothing was left of him but that chocolate.

He would have dissolved into nothing, had it not been for Mikey, whose skill at soul-tweaking extended beyond just the changing of his own form. Mikey took buckets of bittersweet spiritual fudge, and with more patience than he knew he had, Mikey had shaped it back into humanoid form.

But Nick was not the same.

He had only the faintest memory of who and what he was. He was like a small child, entirely dependent on Mikey, with no will of his own. He had truly become a Chocolate Ogre.

Still, knowing the risks, Mikey took them both down, letting them sink into the living world.

“I’m scared,” the Ogre had said with a gurgling cocoa-rich voice.

Mikey had sworn to him that it would all be okay, and the Ogre had trusted him. It had taken only a few minutes in the ground, and away from daylight, for Mikey to realize that the task might be beyond him.

“Move your arms!” Mikey had commanded as they sank deeper and deeper. “Kick your legs like you’re swimming.”

“What’s swimming?” the Ogre responded. The spirit that had once been Nick was now a dim-witted thing with no survival skills. And so they struggled, moving ever downward as Mikey tried in vain to move them up.

That’s how it was for weeks. Mikey strained against gravity with the Chocolate Ogre clinging to him, a helpless weight around his neck. Mikey had no idea how deep they had gone, or even if they had moved far enough West to have passed under the Mississippi River, which now flowed somewhere far above them.

“It’s dark!” the Ogre would say every once in a while, each time like it was the first time he had noticed it.

“Dark is good,” Mikey would tell him. “If the rock around us starts to glow, and get molten, then we’re really in trouble.”

Molten magma would mean they were leaving the earth’s crust, and entering the mantle. The heat wouldn’t burn them, but they would sink faster, leaving them no hope of returning to the surface. They would sink until there was no direction but up, and they’d join all the others who were probably still singing a trillion bottles of beer on the wall, which Mikey had started when he was first down there, and calculated would go on for thirty-two thousand years.

But they weren’t there yet.

As long as the stone of the living world around them was dark and relatively cool, they couldn’t be more than a mile or two down, so there was still hope.