My terror was so deep that at first I was unable to speak. When I finally realized that he wasn’t going to kill me on the spot, I asked in a trembling voice, “Who are you?”

“You mean you don’t know?” he replied, sounding genuinely astonished.

I shook my head.

He laughed. “Weztix will tell you,” he said, making an odd little leap. “Weztix will tell you!”

He reached for my hand. When I drew back, his eyes blazed. “Stand up!” he snapped. “We’re going to ssssee Weztix.”

“I want to go home,” I whimpered.

“Don’t be sssstupid! Now come along. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

He said this last with such feeling that I actually believed him—though if I had understood just why he didn’t want to hurt me, I might have been even more terrified than I already was.

It was a terrible journey. The place into which I had fallen was a sort of living nightmare, darkened by strange shadows that stretched and twisted around us, though I could see no source of light, nor anything to block it and cause the shadows. It was as if the darkness had a life and a mind of its own.

I could hear unpleasant noises in the distance: desperate, cackling laughter, sighs so deep they could have been made by a mountain; an odd rumbling, an occasional scream. The dank air smelled so weird I was almost afraid to breathe it.

Eyes peered out at us from the darkness. I was terrified that they might belong to some new creature that would reach out to snatch me away. (Though what could be worse than the situation I was in already is hard to imagine.) Later, unseen hands did pluck at me, but my captor shouted and drove them away. In several places spiderwebs stretched across our path, and since I was forced to walk in the lead, they continually wrapped themselves across my face. I shuddered each time they did. Other things, less familiar, seemed to brush over my face as well, which was even more frightening.

“Are we in hell?” I asked at one point.

The creature behind me hissed and said, “Don’t be ssssilly.”

We entered a cave and began to follow a series of tunnels through other caves, some small, some enormous. The tunnels were pitch-black in places, lit by torches in others. At one point we walked along a narrow path that had a rock wall on one side, an immeasurable drop on the other. Though I’m used to that path now, I was terrified at the time.

Sharp stones cut my bare feet, and they began to bleed.