“Perhaps my hand could use a softer, gentler touch,” he said. “I’ll work on it.”

Allie resisted the urge to look at him. Please don’t tell me the monster is falling in love with me, she thought. She was simply not the compassionate kind of girl who could handle it. “Don’t try to charm me,” she told him. “The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ thing doesn’t work with me, okay?”

“I’m not trying to charm you. I just came down here to make sure you weren’t planning to jump.”

“Why would I jump?”

“Sometimes people do,” the McGill told her. “Crew members who think sinking would be better than serving me.”

“Maybe they have the right idea,” Allie told him. “You won’t release my friends, you won’t answer my questions—maybe I’d be better off down there.”

The McGill shook his head. “You’re just saying that because you don’t know—but I know what happens when you sink.” And then the McGill became quiet. His dangling eyes, which never seemed to be looking in the same direction, now seemed to be looking off somewhere else entirely. Somewhere no one else could see.

“It may begin with water,” he said, “but it always ends with dirt. Dirt, then stone. When you first pass into the Earth, it’s stifling dark, and cold. You feel the stone in your body.”

Allie thought back to the time Johnnie-O had almost pushed her down. She remembered that feeling of the earth in her body. It was not something she ever wanted to experience again.

“You feel the pressure growing greater all around you as gravity pulls you down,” the McGill said. “And then it begins to get hot. It gets hotter than a living body could stand. The stone glows red. It turns liquid. You feel the heat. It should burn you into nothing but it doesn’t. It doesn’t even hurt, because you can’t feel hurt, but you do feel the intensity of the heat … it’s maddening. All you see is the bright molten red, then molten white the hotter it gets. And that’s all there is for you. The light, and the heat, and the steady drop down and down.”

Allie wanted to make him stop, but found she couldn’t, for as much as she didn’t want to know, she felt she had to know.

“You sink for years, and from time to time, you come across others,” the McGill said. “You feel their presence around you. Their voices are muffled by the molten rock. They tell you their names, if they remember them. And then in twenty years time, you reach a place where the world is so thick around you with sunken spirits, you stop. Once you’re there, once you’ve stopped falling and realize you’re not going anywhere anymore, that’s when you begin waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Allie didn’t dare guess what he was talking about.

“Waiting for the end of the world,” the McGill said.

“The world … is going to end?”