[he'd been too slow to offer to help her to her feet - she has feet, he sees, a pair of dampened boots, which does nothing to solidify her in the real/unreal camp (a damp footed spirit trailing tears and wellwater, there are plenty of those banshees to recall, drowned souls and their watery footprints) - but something about these boots appeals to what little sense of reason his mind possesses now.

and into a small recorder he is not holding, this soft, small near whispered aside:]

How about that, she took a boat.

[the sulky observation of:]

I didn't get a boat.

[hadn't seen a boat. hadn't seen anything but these unreachable rocks, this bleak, blackened shore and that ruin of a spire that makes him both want to look directly at it and dry heave at the same time.

you'll attract crabs - he almost laughs at this until:

---awful clacking claws - that's an ominous phrase that conjures just what it threatens to - a sound he has to shake his head to clear it of - and with the clacking comes a sort of static. he does look down at his feet - the blood looks black with luminous darkness in this nothinglight, a different sort of darkness than the thing behind them.]

Wouldn't want to do that, nope. What I want---

[oh but he doesn't. oh, but he does.]

---the light. We have to put it back. Please help me put it back.

[he shudders as he feels himself turning toward it - the pull seems inevitable.]