Erik woke up to a blinding headache. He sat up and tried to get his bearings, but everything seemed to be moving, as if he were on one of those thrill rides that toss you upside down and around in circles until everything becomes a blur. His stomach felt like he was on a thrill ride, too, as it jumped up and down as if on a trampoline.
“Just relax.” It was Dovecrest’s voice. He felt the Indian’s hand on his shoulder. “You’ve taken quite a whack to the head. We both have. Just close your eyes for a minute and let it come back slowly.”
“Where’s Vickie and Todd?”
“I don’t know,” Dovecrest replied. “I guess it took them again.”
Erik felt all of his hope disappear once again. He opened his eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning. Eventually, it did.
He found himself sitting in the middle of a sand pit that was perhaps fifty feet deep and about the size of an average living room. There were no rock outcroppings, no stairs or ladder-no way out short of scaling up the soft sand walls.
“I already tried it,” Dovecrest said, anticipating his question. “There’s nothing to hold on to. The sand just slides out from underneath your feet. We can’t climb out of here.”
“So it’s left us here to die?”
“That’s the real hell of it,” Dovecrest said. “Pardon the pun. We won’t die.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it for a minute. When was the last time you ate? Or drank?”
“I don’t remember. It must have been hours.”
“Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“No. Not the least. But I should be. I should be, shouldn’t I?”
Dovecrest nodded. “We should be hungry. We should be thirsty. We should be tired. Look at my face. I should be dead.”
Sure enough, the Indian’s skull was cracked and broken. The injury should at least have landed him in intensive care, if not the morgue. But here he was standing there talking like it was nothing more than a scratch.
“You see, we can’t die. We’re already in the world of the dead. That means we’re either already dead, or else we can’t die, not as long as we’re here, anyway.”
“So that’s why the demon didn’t kill us.”
“Exactly. We are as immortal as it is-at least while we’re here.”
“So now all we have to do is get out of this sand trap and find the demon again. Only we still don’t know how to stop him. And why did it keep Vickie and Todd? What’s it got in mind for them?”
“I don’t know. But we’d better figure a way out of here if we expect to find out.”
Erik sat in the middle of the pit and pondered the problem.
“Give me a boost,” he said.
Dovecrest knelt down and he stood on the Indian’s shoulders at the edge of the pit. He was still nowhere near high enough to escape. He reached out to grab what edge there was, but it just collapsed. There was nothing to hold onto. It just crumbled away at his touch.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said. Then he climbed down from the Indian’s shoulders.
“Maybe we could make a rope out of our clothes,” Dovecrest suggested.
“Maybe. But I don’t think we have enough to make a rope that long. And we’d have nothing to hook it on to at the top.”
“You’re right. I’m grasping at straws.”
“Yeah, me too,” Erik said. “I don’t suppose we could dig ourselves out.”
Dovecrest forced a laugh. “I think we’re already as far down as we want to go.”
“I’d hate to think what’s down deeper than hell.”
“Wait a minute,” Dovecrest said. “Suppose we don’t dig down, but dig up.”
“Dig up. What do you mean?”
“When you stood on my shoulders and dug at the side, what happened?”
“I got sand all over you.”
“Exactly. And that sand fell to the bottom of the pit. If we dig at the sides, it’ll fill in the bottom. Eventually, we can fill in the hole enough to be able to climb out.”
Erik thought for a minute. “It might work. But it’ll take forever, won’t it?”
“I don’t know. But do you have anything else to do to pass the time?”
Erik shook his head. “Unfortunately, I don’t. Let’s get started.”