There was motion behind me, and then I was tipped back suddenly. The jerky movement made me feel nauseous, but the tilt halted at fifteen degrees or so, and then I was rolled forward. One of the cultists wheeled my hand-truck to the podium, and dropped me roughly back upright. I gagged aloud as the chains across my midsection squeezed the wind out of me. Once again, I was but inches from the vile woman. The proximity made my skin gallop.

“That was an ugly sound, darling,” she sneered. “But only the first of many that will be escaping that shapeless little body of yours tonight. If we hit our marks right.”

So my suspicions were true. “You’re going to torture me?” I tried not to whimper.

“Without a doubt. But there is so much more to it than that! There is to be utilitarian and recreational torture. Do you see this?”

She tapped the low covered shape with the toe of her ridiculous boot, producing a hollow tink. She looked at me for a moment, then rapped sharply on my forehead with her knuckles.

“Hello? Teacher has asked a question, darling. Do you see this?”

“Ow! Yes! I see it!”

“Good, very very good. Well, it’s been brought to my attention that young Miss Slate suffers a certain irrational phobia.”

Oh god. My face must have reflected my sudden surge of terror, because her loathsome grin widened.

“I see what I’ve been told is true,” she preened. “Well, let me tell you, my dear, I was overjoyed to learn about it. For you see, our performance tonight happens to feature, as its centerpiece—”

She whipped the tarp away.

“—an anti-baptism. Death by drowning, dear.”

She’d revealed an ancient bathtub that looked like it had been scavenged from some dilapidated dressing room in the theatre’s bowels. It was filled with brackish water and covered in the same arcane runes that danced over the floor and walls.

I now had my answer: I would not have been able to walk into the ocean. My desire to live had never been so strong, if only to survive long enough to not die like that. Submerged. Suffocated by that hideous element, its icy tendrils working their way into all my inner hiding places. I began to shake. I began to cry again. Hope followed in the wake of love and likewise utterly abandoned me.

“Yes, please do cry, little girl. It is delicious. It nourishes me. But allow me to sprinkle a bit of seasoning, just for extra flavor,” Epistola crowed. “I’ll bet that little swimwear model of yours and his obnoxious old uncle thought that I’d been beaten, no? That I’d been deprived of my reprisal on existence for these years of unbearable scorn, when Dead Cthulhu refused my call?”

She grabbed the Necronomicon from the podium and thrust it violently in my face.