"And yet you are here, warm, whole."

"My men? My ship?"

"They are dead, your ship destroyed. But you are not."

I thought of Doxey, my first mate, loud and crude, loyal to me and no one else, and Elkins, the cook, always singing filthy ditties, always making lumpy porridge everyone hated. I said, "Perhaps I am dead, perhaps you are the Devil and you are toying with me, amusing yourself, making me believe I am still alive, when I am really as dead as-"

A laugh. Yes, it was a laugh, low and strangely hollow, and something else-the laugh wasn't quite a man's laugh- it seemed to me it was more the imitation of a laugh. Was I in Hell? Would evil Uncle Ulson trip into my line of vision, ready to welcome die to his home? Why was I not afraid? Perhaps death removed a human's fear.

"I am not the Devil. He is a creature that is something else entirely. Will you pay your debt to me?"

"Yes, if I am actually alive."

I felt a bolt of pain so horrendous I would have welcomed death as a savior. My side gaped open; I could feel my flesh ripped away to my bones. I felt my guts oozing out of my belly. I screamed into the blackness. The Cretan light shot high, a wild mad blue. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the pain stopped. The Cretan light calmed.

"Did you feel your death blow from that falling beam?"

For a moment, I couldn't speak I was breathing so hard, bound in the memory of that ghastly agony. "Yes. I felt my own death but an instant away, so I must be dead, or-"

I heard amusement in that black voice, again somehow hollow, not quite right. "Or what?"

"If I am truly alive then you are a magician, a sorcerer, a wizard, though I am not at all certain there are grand differences amongst those titles. Or you are a being from above or below that a man of reason cannot accept. I know not and you will not tell me.