“You don’t have the burning arrow,” Vicky said, finally. She was correct. I had left it behind at the gates of Dis, plugged into the ground as my makeshift altar. Perhaps it was burning still, a testament to the fact that I had been there. “It’s no matter. You won’t need it here.”

“What do I do next?”

“Maybe it’s your time to wait too.” She dug the heels of her boots firmly into the ground and set her shoulders more stiffly against the sea breeze. “Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.”

In this moment, I was allowed to glance into the grand nothingness of her existence: she really would stand forever, awaiting Tom’s return. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t even noticed my nakedness. I doubted that she noticed anything other than the promise of the water that stretched in front of her.

“This is not my place,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“I think I’ll head inland.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the sea. “Good luck.”

There was something about the way she wished me luck that I didn’t understand-until I took my first steps. I felt the ground tremble as if something were happening behind me, under me, all around me. I momentarily wondered whether it was the return of Michael, until I saw that the edge of the cliff was shifting. Afraid that it would collapse beneath me, I bolted. There was the tremendous crack of rock breaking away and I churned my legs as quickly as I could. When I looked over my shoulder, I expected to see the cliff falling away behind me.

But the cliff had not fallen away. Its edge was following me, always the same distance behind despite the fact that I was now running. I felt the familiar swish in my spine. I AM HERE.

My first thought was that I might have been running in place, on a sort of soil treadmill, but this was not the case. When I say the edge of the cliff was following me, I mean that literally. The stone constantly changed its shape to stalk me, keeping pace so that I never moved any farther from the precipice. When I veered to one side, the cliff circled like a well-trained sheepdog. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I ran for as long as I could, darting this way and that, but the cliff was unrelenting. It doesn’t matter how fast you move, I learned, if you never go anywhere. YOU CANNOT LEAVE. Soon I recognized that I was not in any immediate danger. If the cliff were going to swallow me, it would have done so already. I headed back to where Vicky was standing.

“I tried to leave once too,” she said, “and the cliff followed me.”

“That’s why you stand here?”

“No.”

I looked over the edge of the cliff, to see that at its bottom were rocks that could shred a person.

“If you jump,” Vicky whispered, as if worried that the very stone under our feet would overhear, “you’ll lose the skin that you have regrown and be put back in your burnt body.”

“But this is only a hallucination. None of this is real.”

She shrugged. “Is that what you learned from the Archangel’s smile?”

YOU SHOULD JUMP.

Why would the snake tell me to jump? To cause me pain. That was in the interest of the snake, because the bitch thrived on my pain. I touched my skin where the nerve endings had once been incinerated.

If I jump, I thought, I lose this. I lose my nerves and my hair and my health and my beauty. My fingers and penis will recede again. My face will become weathered granite. My lips will wither, and my voice will be ground back into sharp ugly bits. I’ll become the gargoyle again, but this time by my own choice.

YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A GARGOYLE, BRANDED IN HELL BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN.

I asked Vicky what would happen if I stayed on the cliff.

I WAS NOT PUT IN YOUR SPINE AFTER YOUR ACCIDENT. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.

“I think,” Vicky answered, “that Marianne Engel will come for you.”

SHE IS NOT COMING FOR YOU.

“Why do you think that?”

Vicky answered, “Sometimes love outlasts even death.”

HOW COULD SHE LOVE ONE SUCH AS YOU?

I looked into the thrashing tide below us, crashing over the rocks. YOU SHOULD JUMP.Perhaps Vicky is right. Perhaps this is a test of my patience.YOU SHOULD END. Marianne Engel came to me in the hospital when I needed her most, and she will come for me now. Right?

BUT THIS IS NOT EVEN YOUR HELL. YOURS IS YET TO COME.

Hell is a choice.

I THOUGHT YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE IN HELL.

“Vicky,” I asked, “am I dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you dead?”

“Not as long as I wait for Tom.”

I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO REALLY KNOWS YOU.

Sunlight sparkled on the waves. The entire ocean stretched out in front of me.

YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BELIEVE WE ARE DIFFERENT…

I looked down and-though I can’t explain why I felt it so strongly-I was certain about what I had to do next.

… BUT YOU CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT ME.

A calm entered my body. As my fear left me, it entered the snake. Because the serpent knew that I’d made a decision that was good for me, bad for it.

YOU ARE ME.

I turned to Vicky and asked, “Shall I give your regards to Marianne Engel?”

“Please do.”

THIS IS A MISTAKE.

My legs pushed me up into the air. As I leapt towards the sun, I felt the snake rip backwards out of my body. As I moved forward, the snake could not. It left through my asshole, fittingly enough, yanked out like an anchor plunging from a boat.

There was a brief weightlessness; a balancing point between air and the water waiting below. How strange, I thought, how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion. There was a moment of perfect suspended weightlessness at the top of the arc. Just for this one beautiful moment, I imagined myself moving into the sky forever.

But, as it always does, the battle of gravity won. I was sucked perfectly down and cut the air like a dropped knife, the rush of the water coming up to meet me. Even as I was falling, I knew I was doing the correct thing. I closed my eyes and thought about Marianne Engel.

Contact, and the calm sheen of water opened to envelop me. As I cut the surface, I felt as if I’d come home and I-

XXX.

– looked up into the eyes of Marianne Engel.

My body was wrapped in layers of wet cloth, to lower my fever. I was back in her bed, in our home, and her hand was resting on my cheek. She told me that it was over and I told her that I had been in Hell. She said that it sure looked that way, and handed me a cup of tea. I felt as if I hadn’t had a drink in years. “How long was I…?”

“Three days, but nothing is better than having suffered. It is a short hardship that ends in joy.” Same old Marianne Engel.

“Let’s agree to disagree.”

She steadied my hand on the cup, as it was shaking badly. “How do you feel?”

“Like a brand plucked out of the fire.”

She smiled. “Zechariah 3:2.”

I checked my body: my skin had returned to its damaged state; my face had tightened; my lips had receded; fingers were missing; my knee was stiff; the hair on my forearms was gone and there were only wisps on my head.

My hand, just as it always had, went to my chest. Where I expected to find my angel coin, I found nothing, despite the fact that it had not been off my body since Marianne Engel had given it to me almost fourteen months earlier.

“Your coin served its purpose,” she said.

I checked in the sheets, under the bed, all around, but my neck chain was nowhere to be found. Marianne Engel must have removed it during my withdrawal. I told myself it was only a strange coincidence that she had done so while I was hallucinating about handing it over to Charon.