Enveloped in some screams I felt a gasp building. The chains said no, and there was rattling, and a letting go that couldn’t be sustained, because to release the core, to relax my midsection and let it fall, would arc pain into the lower back so it felt my spine would snap, and I had to pull back up, pelvic floor locking as though it were itself becoming ungainly steel.

I tried to take in the space I was in, to understand what was happening.

There were floating stairs leading down into the dark hall from the floor above. Brushed steel steps in the walls of a black enamel. Birdcrash pressed a button on a remote and the stairs retracted into the wall.

There were dead birds scattered around the floor, small songbirds and crows and two herons, necks curled around each other. The air was alive and thick with decomposition. His voice, when it came, came from a distance, an underwater sound burbling and self-satisfied. And he moved as though he was not a creature of the land. He was extraordinarily tall and slender, and he moved in slow motion, loose limbed and almost cartoonish, rocking from side to side as he spoke, and he would hold the drill over his head, and pump the trigger, make it whir, to punctuate what he was saying. His skin was pale and glistening. The eyes were huge, golder than any I’d ever seen—sprung, and rolling. Tufts of hair stuck out, and there were big round scabs on his forehead.

Then his arm was around my neck in a headlock and he was drilling, boring through the broad bones of my skull, a shrilled sharp pain that lit me up, my whole system, it rattled my teeth down into my pelvis and seized my legs and feet, my body shot through with shattered teeth.