Bernard reeled and dropped to his knees, retching a thin, black gruel. Still retching, he scrabbled at the floor, tried to stand again before the scarred man could recover, could attack.

Love … he thought.

The scarred man did not recover. He hung on the edge of the sarcophagus as if he were searching for something within. Then, slowly, he began to slide off it. Then more quickly. Then his big body dropped to the crypt’s stone floor.

Bernard climbed to his feet. He stumbled to the coffin and grabbed hold of it before he fell again. He bent over the open tomb, his stomach convulsing.

The smell from within the coffin rose up to him. His own smell, the smell of his own death. And there, in the dust at the bottom of the thing, sat the human skull, its mandible missing, its eye sockets scored and broken. It looked bucktoothed and stupid there, staring blind.

Panting, Bernard reached down for it. The bone was rotten, it was soft and thin to the touch. As he clutched it, a circle of brain pan caved in under the pressure of his thumb. He lifted the skull and brought it up before him. Bernard, with his bald head, with his gray skin, his sunken cheeks, his deathlike grin, might have been looking at his own reflection.

He whispered to it almost sweetly, “Sell your soul to the devil, you bastard. Because your ass belongs to me.”

And with a deep, animal growl, he hoisted his arm. Dashed the rotting thing back into the tomb. It crunched against the stone, spitting fragments, then fell broken on its side.

Bernard turned away from it, and his eyes were wild with fury. The scarred man lay curled and unconscious at his feet, the blood pooling on the floor around his head. Bernard pushed off the coffin and stepped around him.

He started staggering towards the stairs.

They were stone, the stairs, and winding. He mounted one by one. A rope run through a set of metal rings in the rock wall was the only banister and he clutched it in both his hands. Pulled on it. Lugged himself upward. The curving stairwell seemed to close and widen like an accordion around him. He began to feel sick again. His head felt as if a chisel were being pummeled through it from within. The blow fell repeatedly as he climbed. He gritted his teeth against it and went up, went on. The staircase grew blacker and blacker around him. The splashes of red grew brighter and brighter behind his eyes.

“Goddamn it,” he gasped.

Bile bubbled up over his tongue to his grit teeth. He swallowed it back. Pulled himself up hand over hand, stair after stair.