Checking his watch, Kurt saw that he'd been only been walking for about ten minutes, even if it felt like an hour. He used the rising slope of the cavern's roof to guide him and he was still in the forest. Thankfully, there had been no sign of "Robe Guy"; no sound of a twig breaking nearby or Robe Guy yelling in the distance. In fact, it had been eerily silent. There were no bird noises. He'd seen no insects. It was as if the VapoRub trees were the only living things in the forest, save for him.

After another fifteen minutes of hiking, the forest came to an abrupt end, bordered by a grassy strip of land about 50 yards across, leading down to the rocky bank of a river. The bulk of the river was shrouded in a fog bank about 20 feet high that tracked the curve of the river. It ran away to both sides as far as he could see, curving along with the line of the cavern wall. The forest did too. It was like they'd been planned, running in a semi-circle along the walls of a cavern whose far end was lost in the distance.

Directly in front of him, there was the fog bank, then empty air as the cavern's roof rose higher and higher, blurring in the far distance miles away. At what seemed to be the center of the roof, a giant jet of red flame shot down through a bank of clouds like the exhaust of a larger rocket than Kurt had ever seen. It was the light source for the cavern, and it burned almost as bright as the sun.

It was hot too. Kurt hadn't noticed the heat when he first fell into the cavern, but it had to be in the low 80s at least. He was tired, sweaty, and thirsty; his coat had been tied around his waist early into his walk.

He walked down toward the river. He'd get a drink from it and then follow it along until he came to a place where he could cross, perhaps even find some sign of habitation. Any sign of life would be nice, actually. It felt like he was the only living soul for miles.

As he reached the bank of the river, the idea of drinking from it became less attractive. He had no idea where he was and river water wasn't necessarily all that safe. With only the printouts in his backpack or those six-pointed leaves to serve as emergency toilet paper, he really didn't need to pick up a case of Montezuma's Revenge. Still, if the water was cool, he could splash some on his head and neck.

He knelt down on one of the rocks and was lowering his hand toward the water when he heard an outboard motor out on the river. He couldn't locate its source in the fog, but the noise was unmistakable. It was a boat. "Hey," he shouted, standing up and waving his hands. "Hey! Over here!"

Slowly the sound grew nearer, coming out of the dense fog, gradually turning into a canopied flat-bottom boat with a driver and no passengers. Kurt stood on the bank, waving his arm and watching the boat approach.

As the boat neared within a few feet, the boatman, a scraggly and dirty looking man in a robe, cut the engine and threw a rope. Kurt caught it and pulled, towing the boat into shore. As the old tires on the side of the boat bounced against the rocks, Kurt jumped into the rear. The boatman's back was to him and Kurt could see rips and patches on his robe as a hank of dirty, matted hair fell down from his head to just under his shoulders, looking more like a group of hair slabs than like individual strands. "Fare for crossing is one coin," the man said, turning in his seat to face Kurt.

As their eyes met, the man's jaw dropped, showing the five or so teeth in his mouth, and his dull eyes went wide. "Bouncin' Beelzebub," the man said in a whisper, "you're alive."

Kurt reached into his pocket, jingling the change. "Sure I'm alive," he said as he dug, giving the man a look of disdain. "Why shouldn't I be..." His look shifted to one of amusement. "Have I been on the news? Did they say those girls killed me?"

Kurt pulled a quarter out of his pocket and dropped it in the man's hand, looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.

The man's face was riddled with tiny scars, as if he'd had horrendous acne or a bad case of the Chicken Pox as a kid, and they had to be pretty bad to be visible underneath the layers of grime. There was a large boil under his left eye and the three hairs growing out of the mole on his right cheek looked like they might be longer than the scraggly beard that grew along his jaw. A slimy tongue dropped out of the man's mouth and wiped saliva across his lower lip. "No," he said.

Kurt laughed. The guy had to be pulling his leg. "Then why are you surprised I'm alive? Did you hear about that fight?"

The man's jaw slowly rose, closing his mouth as the tongue flicked out to wet his lips again. "You don't have any idea where you are, do you?"

"Not really," Kurt said cautiously.

The man licked his lips again. "What religion are you?"

"Why?"

"So I can name it with the name you use."

Kurt shrugged. "I was raised Jewish, but I'm sort of agnostic... guess I'm more spiritual than religious." Kurt paused as the man looked at him impatiently. "Just tell me all the names."

The man shoved the quarter into the pocket of his robe. "Well, some called it Abaddon, Gehenna, Sheol, Hades... But most people nowadays call it Hell."

Kurt stepped to the side of the boat and looked up, staring at the fire shooting down from the roof of the cavern. "Your name's Charon," he said slowly, just above a whisper, as he looked at the flames and remembered a college mythology class, "the ferryman."

"Now you know where you are," the man said quietly. "Still want to cross?"

Kurt looked toward the cavern wall. "Is there a way out back there?"

"There used to be a tunnel, but the Greeks kept coming down and trying to rescue people, so they closed it off. The only way out is to go all the way through."

Kurt sat down slowly on the hard wood bench. He looked at his hands, turning them in front of him. "And I'm not dead?"

"No. Doesn't seem so."

Kurt sat in stony silence, his eyes unfocused. "Look," Charon said, "I've got a business to run. Are you crossing or not?"

"Might as well, I guess."

Charon kicked the engine into gear and began the slow trek into the fog.

The first touch of the fog on Kurt's skin wasn't cool. It was cold, close to freezing, and though they moved slowly through it, he could hear the wind scream past his ears as if they were racing. He couldn't think. He could barely breathe, the fog burning his throat with its chill each time he inhaled. He looked out into the fog, watching it swirl around him, blown by the same wind he heard but couldn't feel, just as the fog was cold but not wet. The eddies of the fog made patterns, and sometimes it would seem as if a swirl gaped open in the center, a hole appearing in it, issuing out the wind's mournful wail.

His jacket was quickly untied from his waist, put on, zipped up, and he put his hands over his ears, both for warmth and to block out the shriek of the wind. It was the saddest sound he'd ever heard, like a mother crying over her dead child, and it nearly broke his heart. Between the chill and that wind, Kurt just wanted to curl up into a fetal position on the floor of the boat, trying to preserve both his body heat and his sanity.

As the boat found its way out of the mist, the wind's wail fell behind them, the air warmed, and the white mist gradually turned to pink, then orange, then they moved into the open air. Kurt felt like he'd stepped out of a freezer and into an oven, the difference was so marked. But it was a relief. The shore ahead was a gently sloping dirt bank, another grassy meadow beyond it. And beyond that, signs of life... Kurt shook his head. They were signs of habitation. Signs of life would be too much to hope for.

"How do you stand that noise," Kurt asked Charon, taking off his jacket and tying it around his waist again.

"Oh," Charon said nonchalantly, "you get used to it."

Kurt shuddered. The human mind had a capacity for adaptation that let it get used to some pretty awful stuff, but getting used to that... Still, Charon was pretty much created for the job as far as Kurt knew. It's not like he got the job off Craigslist. Now there was a thought: "hades craigslist > men seeking women: ROLLIN' ON THE RIVER. I'm looking for a lady who likes seamen. JK. LOL."

He wasn't sure whether to laugh or cringe at that one, though the word "inappropriate" blinked on and off in his mind's eye. Kurt was tossed out of his mental amusement park when Charon cut the motor ten feet from shore, poling them in to the soft bank. "Far side," Charon said, smiling, his hand out for a tip as they nudged up against the shore.

Kurt stood and looked at the hand. The palm was as dirty as the rest of the man. He reached into his pocket and grabbed whatever coins were left, reaching out to drop them into it, and stopped. "No," he said, putting the coins back in his pocket, "I might need these for a return trip."

A sound came from Charon; a chuckle building slowly into a guffaw and then into a laugh. The laugh grew into a roar and he had to grip one of the poles holding up the tattered canopy to steady himself. Kurt leapt out of the boat onto the bank, making sure not to splash into the water, and walked away, Charon still in stitches behind him.