Benno drew his father’s revolver. He did not raise or point it, but only held it at his side. He knew it would have no effect on this creature atop his throne of flesh. He knew it was useless. But holding it gave him some kind of relief. It brought him closer to something.

The man’s gigantic face turned upward, and his lips rippled, and an obscene, booming laugh rose from him. It vibrated the sludge in which Benno stood, and the thick, vile air itself seemed to quaver. “Very cute,” he said through his laughter, betraying something comparable to a Texas accent. “Yer very cute, little buddy. You’d be even cuter with yer skin off.”

Benno did his best not to waver. “You can try, big guy.”

The man’s laughter waned.“Yer gonna call me August in my house,” he said. “Now I don’t have lots of rules here, and I know I can’t get yer skin off. But I gotta insist you remove yer clothes at least. Yer making my chattel uncomfortable.”

Benno peered around at the skinless throng—tearful eyes glinting from the room’s far reaches.

“I’m gonna pass on that, too,” Benno said.

For a moment, August’s huge face was still, his hanging jowls dripping with waxy sweat. Then, again, he threw back his head and laughed. “Lookit you.” He raised a bottle to his greasy lips and swigged greedily, purple liquid dribbling down his immense chin. Then the bottle was gone, and he held a small tin and a tiny fork, both dwarfed by his size, and shoveled mounds of shiny black beads into the cavern of his mouth. “I respect yer audacity,” he said, beads spraying over his lips. “But don’t have any doubts: I’ll get you naked. One way or the other.” He tossed the tin and fork away and wiped his mouth with a bloated wrist. “Now, you interrupted my orgy. So this better be good.”

Benno cleared his throat. “You already know I’m here for Onus. And I’m not leaving until I’ve spoken to him. It’s my only demand—”

“That one has his own special room.” August guzzled from another bottle before dumping another bucket of foul fluid over his head. “His contract is lengthy, and requires some creativity. And you might not know who yer talking to right now. I’m a Warden of Sul. This Bathhouse is my idyll. I see to its maintenance and to the preservation of Sul’s beautiful Gray Wastes.” He raised a cormous hand and snorted a small mound of white powder from the crook of his thumb into the folds of his face. “And in return Sul preserves me!” He gnashed a hunk of seared meat from a greasy turkey leg with his enormous, glassy teeth. “You can’t hurt me in here anymore than I can take yer skin off. So when you walk in making demands—well I take that as an affront, and a foolish one. And maybe you need a reminder that pain can come from all kinds of places.” A shape appeared on August’s lap, and Benno’s blood ran cold. A dark haired boy. A face Benno knew. The boy looked at Benno, dead-eyed and naked, and before Benno understood what was happening, August’s hands had rummaged the boy’s body in a brutal and grotesque series of molestations. Benno’s lungs turned to lead and he dropped his eyes to the sludgy floor, and when he looked back up the boy was gone, and August was dumping another bucket of fluid over his face, which hissed against his skin, and he moaned and sighed. “So watch yer tone, and check yer entitlement at the door.”

Benno took slow breaths through his nose. August was in his mind—like the Haruspex, he reasoned—able to see images and nothing more. The boy was an illusion. His face had been different—off enough—that he appeared like a composite, something cobbled together from Benno’s memories. He was not the real thing. There was no world in which he was here, suffering, all this time. There was no world…

“What exactly is this place?” Benno probed. “Some kind of afterlife?”

August plunged a syringe into the flank of his thigh and injected something reddish. “When you die, you die,” he said. “Only Sul has jurisdiction over death. This place—all my chattel are alive and well.”

The bloodshot, tearing eyes peered out of the skinless faces in the dark.

Benno exhaled, satisfied, at least, that August was telling the truth about that. Which meant his wife and son were safe. Safe in the empty infinitudes of death.

“So this is a prison.” Benno said.

August smiled a bank of glassy teeth. “Not to me.”

“And you get off on inflicting misery.”

“One man’s misery… You see, in truth, there’s no difference between one sensation and another. Feeling is feeling. It’s yer aversion that makes them seem boundaried. But down here, me and my chattel, we strike down those boundaries. We revel in sensation—every shape and size. It all blends into a perpetual plane of pleasure and pain. All one. Sul taught me that.” He licked his lips. “And we all get what we deserve.”

“There was a man upstairs,” Benno said. “A young man. Being whipped and scalded by his own parents. What could he possibly have done to deserve that?”

“What a lack of imagination,” August laughed. “That young man wasn’t sent to me. It was his parents. They are the ones being punished.”

Benno turned this over in his mind, a condition that hadn’t occurred to him and now elevated the whole scene into a new strata of nightmare. “What did they do to end up here?”

August’s breasts trembled as he laughed. “Do you ask what your hamburger did to end up on your plate?”

“Then how do you know they deserve it?”

“Everyone deserves it.”

Benno felt Holes creeping slowly toward the collar of his raincoat—compelled by curiosity—and as inconspicuously as possible he adjusted the collar higher, guiding Holes to a stop as he did.

“What is Sul?”

August slurped down a mucusy oyster from a barnacle-caked shell. “The smoke asks what the fire is.”

Benno had heard the word before. Somewhere, a long time ago…

Sul draws gray wastes ahead…

And for some reason, his memory churned forth a pair of headlights, coming too fast toward the side of the car…

“Why don’t you stay, little buddy?” August said. “I can pull up a chair for ya.” He patted the leathery skin throne beneath him, then gestured around at his cowering chattel. “It’s the greatest show on any earth, and at the very least I can promise you’ve never seen anything like it and never will anywhere else.”

Benno nodded solemnly, as if considering the despicable offer. “There was this riddle my mom used to tell me and my brother,” Benno said after a few seconds. “Back when we were little kids. It’s one of my only memories of her, which is weird because I was old enough to remember more. But she feels like a dream, like a dream that dissolves after you wake up, gone more completely every second that passes…”

August’s oily skin glistened in Gemma’s light.

“A sick man is given an opportunity to see both Heaven and Hell before he dies,” Benno went on. “He’s taken first to Hell, where he finds an enormous banquet hall, and people sitting around tables covered in plates upon plates of delicious looking food. The people in this banquet hall all have forks that are four feet long. And they’re miserable and starving.

“Next he’s taken to Heaven, and is surprised to find the exact same thing: a banquet hall with tables covered in delicious food, and people sitting around the table holding four-foot long forks. The difference is that here in Heaven, the people are joyous, and well fed.”

August’s shiny lips parted, then closed silently.

“So what was the difference?” Benno asked.

August’s rotund shoulders rose and fell.

“See in both Heaven and Hell,” Benno said. “The forks were too long for people to feed themselves. So in Hell, they were unable to eat, and thus miserable. But in Heaven, they simple fed each other across the table. And they were happy.”

The room was silent save for August’s slow, deep breathing.

“This room where you keep Onus,” Benno said. “How do I get to it?”

The grotesque trenches of August’s face churned. “You don’t know when to quit, do you?” He snorted another mound of powder from the outside of his hand, then coughed thrice, brown spittle whipping across his lips. When he regained his breath he looked at Benno—or at least appeared to from the folds of fat over his eyes—for a long moment. It was true Benno could do nothing to hurt him. He was a Warden of Sul after all—whatever the fuck that meant—but it was also true that he could do nothing to hurt Benno. A stalemate, then. At least for the moment.

“Tell you what,” August said finally. “You have something you need to tell the Lonely Son, you tell it to me, and I’ll make sure to pass it along.”

Benno kept his hand on the butt of his father’s revolver. “That won’t work,” he said, surprised and satisfied with the sturdiness of his own voice. “I’ll be taking Onus with me.”

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August’s face rippled. “And when did you decide that?” he asked, his deep voice betraying unease.

“When I decided there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

August’s lips spread into a wide smile, his glassy teeth glistening, but the smile shrunk away quickly. “I could make you lost in here forever.”

“Maybe,” Benno said, his fingers tracing the shape of the revolver’s handle. “But I can make things hard for you too.” He drew the revolver and leveled it out to his side, toward the throng of eyes huddled in the dark.

BANG.

One of the skinless chattel’s heads bloomed into a pall of brains, and its raw, broken body sploshed into the murk. The rest of the throng made no effort to flee.

BANG.

Splosh.

BANG.

Splosh.

August’s throne of skin whined as he shifted his weight, his fleshy hand clutching the armrests, his wet lips hanging open.

“You mentioned Onus was under a contract,” Benno said. “I suspect the rest of these poor people are as well. That’s what gives you control over them, why they don’t try to flee. But without that contract, your influence is a bit… impotent.”

“That’s a dangerous assumption, little buddy.” The creases of August’s face wobbled.

“But it’s a good one.” BANG—Splosh. “Because if you could stop me—” BANG—Splosh. “—you would have by now.”

“There are always more chattel.”

“Okay.” BANG—Splosh. BANG—Splosh. “Gemma, I need more bullets.”

A rain of golden bullets fell from the air, and Benno managed to catch a handful before the rest disappeared into the ooze. He loaded them slowly into the cylinder.

“Wait.” August’s voice was tremulous. “Just hold on a goddamn second.” He pattered his thick fingers on his thigh, his leg jouncing.

Benno swatted the cylinder shut and aimed the gun back into the throng.

“Maybe we can work something out,” August said. “Just… just give me a second to think.” He adjusted his bulbous penis with a greasy hand. “Just a second…”

BANG.

Splosh.

“Alright!” August boomed, his voice an octave higher. “Alright. There is something. Something you can do for me, in exchange for an amendment to the Lonely Son’s contract.”

“What?”

“An errand.”

Benno waited.

“One of the few… handicaps of my position,” August said. “Is that I can’t leave the Bathhouse. Not that I would ever want to. This place is perfection. But… There’s a message I need delivered. Long overdue.”

Benno continued to hold the revolver out to the side, its muzzle unmoving. “To who?”

“To my wife and son.”

Benno blenched. Nothing about this beast signaled a propensity for family, for sentimentality, for relationships of any kind. It made no sense that someone—something—so cruel and violent could have the capacity for tenderness. Could be involved in another life to any end beyond destruction…

The revolver felt suddenly heavy in Benno’s hand. “Where do they live?”

“They don’t.” August poured another bucket over his face. “They’ve been dead longer than you or anyone you know has been alive.”

“So how do I deliver a message to them?”

“To their graves,” August said, dragging a pair of cigarettes simultaneously. “They’re buried in the necropolis of Noth. A dignified Realm. Fit for them.” He plunged another syringe into his thigh, and shuddered faintly as the reddish fluid disappeared into him. “I used to visit them all the time, before Sul touched me. Of course preserving the Gray Wastes is the great privilege of my long, long life, but it is not without its…”

“Handicaps?”

August grinned. “Yer good for this errand. Perfect, in fact. Seeing as yer already a congregant of Sul.”

“I do not worship Sul.”

“Everybody worships Sul,” August licked his lips. “Whether they know it or not.”

Benno allowed the revolver to drop slightly. “And what are their names? How will I know their graves when I see them?”

August chewed his fat lips with his glassy teeth for a long moment, the folds over his eyes twitching. “I don’t remember,” he said. “You’ll have to find them yerself.”

“And what is the message?”

“You know it already.”

Benno hoisted the revolver back up. “I am done playing games with you.”

August cracked his knuckles, each one splitting like a gunshot. “I will remind you, then,” he said, his deep voice betraying relish.

Benno looked over at the gathered eyes in the dark, and the eight skinless bodies floating in the sludge.

“The message is simple.” August snorted with glee. “Tell them I’m glad they’re dead. Tell them their deaths freed me. Tell them, when I drove them into the path of that car, it was the best choice I ever made, because I just wanted to be left alone…”

Benno fired the revolver—

BANG.

—but this time into August’s tumescent gut. The oily skin rippled and tapered inward, and August’s wide, glassy smile widened.

“Yer gonna have to do better than that, little bu—”

Benno had dropped the revolver—and Gemma—into the murk, plunging the room into a crimson haze. He saw nothing but August’s execrable face as he mounted his lap and drove his hands into the folds of his oily lips.

August’s laughter sputtered into a gag, and his huge hands groped at Benno’s back.

Benno gripped the Warden’s jaws—one hand on the top, one on the bottom—and pulled. The bones whined, and resisted. The tongue writhed. Benno pulled harder, glowering into the dark throat beyond, unthinking but for a manifest rage.

August gurgled and pulled at Benno’s clothes. His huge legs kicked, and his lap bucked. Benno clenched tighter, rooting himself, his arms shaking with exertion and his muscles crepitating as he strained, harder and harder, tearing the Warden’s mouth wide, his mind burning with visions of two graves, a coil of charred metal, bloodstained fur, a beaten boy cowering, a town desolated—until the jaw popped, and the tension gave, and August bayed with agony as Benno tore the ugly head into two halves of frayed flesh and an arc of hot, thick blood.

A gust of hot wind howled forth from the cavity.

Benno panted, his mind flooded with red, his fists—closed around flabs of bone and flesh—shaking. August’s body convulsed beneath him, then shuddered, then twitched, and was still. And as Benno’s rage and adrenaline receded, and his vision returned, he looked down into the mutilated thuck of August’s head, where, looking back at him, was his own flushed face.

There was a mirror. A mirror lodged in the folds of bleeding tissue.

Benno tried to drop the hunks of face, to reach for the mirror, to withdraw it or smash it. But his fists were stuck tight. So too were his arms sutured to his sides, and his legs bound by some monstrous force, and he could not look away from his own eyes. He tried to speak—to curse August for his final duplicity—but the sounds that came out were not language. Instead, a horrible spate of consonant gibberish emerged, and the mirror’s glass shook so that Benno’s reflection trembled as if with terror.

He could do nothing but look on as his eyes darkened, withered, and turned to dirt, which spilled from his sockets. His teeth too crumbled from his gums, and his tongue desiccated into something like a sponge. The gibberish descended into a droning sound that bombinated from the toothless cavity of his mouth. His thoughts panicked into incoherence as, in the oval of the mirror, he watched a section of his forehead bulge and blister, and the skin and plate of his skull break open. Inside the hole quivered a tenebrous dark where his brain should have been. Then something stirred in the hole, and emerged, and a pair of small, raggy creatures scuttled forward and peeked out. They were no bigger than mice, but their faces, swathed in oily cloth, were human. And despite their mummified and shrunken state, Benno recognized them. The two most familiar faces in the world. Not composites. Not cobbled together. It was them. Dead and shriveled and small. But it was them.

Their little hands scrambled onto Benno’s scalp and perched there, then leapt into the glass of the mirror, which splashed and rippled like bloody sludge, and as it settled, Benno’s reflection began to change, to calcify and etiolate, until soon it had shrunken into a gray pyramid, suspended in the air.

The mirror darkened into nothing, but the gray pyramid remained. And as it hung there—like an unbounded and misshapen planet alone in the bowels of space—words came. Voiceless, silent, and yet, deep inside Benno’s vanished mind, profoundly and completely familiar.

—dlorsulproxim—

—dlorsulgrammath—

The pyramid hung in endless nothingness, the only material aspect of an otherwise empty world. It chattered silently, rapid and delirious.

—dlorsulmisdlorsuldenotondlorsulbref—

Benno felt nothing. He was not in the Bathhouse. He had nothing to speak with. He had no body. There was no time.

—dlorsulmetamaldlorsulanafor—

And all at once the pyramid grew—or rushed toward him—and swallowed his vision and everything else, and he was amidst a sprawling homogenous waste of gray, all gray without fault above and below.

Then he was falling, backwards, down and down through the gray, faster and faster.

—dlorsulsynactocondlorsulsemiadlorsulpaladex—

And landed—splosh—on his back in the blood and shit.

He flailed—at once back in his body—the putrid sludge filling his nostrils and throat, ears and eyes. He hauled himself to his feet, his eyes blurry with muck and his heart thudding, gagging and retching as he managed to snatch up Gemma and the revolver before stumbling through the shin-high ooze and back into the concrete hallway. He threw off his raincoat, and tugged his soaked and stinking shirt over his head. Holes scrambled up his neck and clung to his head, dripping shit and blood.

Behind him, the skinless chattel—unshackled from their silence and whatever state of trance August had kept them ensnared—started screaming.

Benno kicked off his shoes as he ran up the stairs, and tugged off his sopping jeans. His slick socks slid on the steps, and he hopped on one foot at a time to pull them off. As he neared the top of the stairs—the fake ferns bracketing the doorway ahead—he tore his underwear off and tossed them behind him, and tumbled out of the stairwell and into the blue room, where he collapsed to his knees, his skin slimy, his beard soaked and rancid, and panted and heaved.

Behind him, the shrieks pitched.

And in his mind, the silent words unfurled.

—dlorsulepitondlorsulnotadlorsulidicaldlorsulhoros—

Benno touched his head, from where it felt like the seething silent words came, and started as his fingertips touched something. It protruded from his forehead, underneath his skin. A point. A pyramid. In the spot where the hole had appeared, the hole from which his wife and son had crawled. He trembled as he probed it. He could feel, from the narrow seam between its base and his skull, that it rose through the bone. There was no pain—there was never pain, safe, forever—but his skull had been opened. There was something under his skin.

His skull had been opened.

There was something under his skin.

Benno stood slowly, his mind hemorrhaging countless small, desperate thoughts.

There was something under his skin.

His skull had been opened.

For fourteen years, the misery couched deep in the folds of his mind had grown arrogant. And rightly. It had nothing to fear from him. Its house, his skin and skull—his body—was impenetrable.

But now…

His skull had been opened.

There was something under his skin.

Benno was so distracted with the implications of this revelation—and by the relentless delirious gibberish—

—dlorsullexigogdlorsulconcest—

—that for nearly a minute he stood naked, his eyes trained on the floor, his fingertips roaming the new addition to his anatomy, oblivious to the gaunt, pale man who had lurched into the room and now sat on the floor, a blanket draped over him like a hood, his damp skin littered with thousands of deep, white cuts, watching Benno from orange eyes.

When Benno finally looked up, he startled, and covered his crotch with his empty hand, the other clinging to both Gemma and his father’s revolver.

Holes, its threads clinging to Benno’s hair, the bloody sludge dripping off its plasticky petals, spoke first. “I’m Holes!”

The man did not react. He watched Benno from a face resemblant in so many ways of his sister’s. Even seated on the floor, he and Benno were eye-level. He was anywhere from thirty to sixty years old.

“Hello, Holes,” he said finally, his voice robust and weary at once, his Luridian accent a bit more clipped—a bit rougher—than the few previous examples Benno had heard. His eyes peered deep into Benno’s from beneath the blanket, grave and earnest. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said. “But I think I love you very much.”