“We don’t have to take any shit from you,” another one said, and put the point of a rapier up under Hudson’s unshaven chin.

Hudson Greathouse laughed. It was as much a release of tension as it was a reaction to this incredible scene of—as Frederick Nash, the so-called mayor of this town had said—nonsense. Around Hudson was a village of small houses and well-kept streets that could have been any charming locale in the country, except for the structures that for some reason had been reduced to ruins. So far Hudson had been denied explanation of what had caused such wreckage. The smoke of kitchen and parlor hearths curled from chimneys, lanterns glowed cheerfully in the windows, people in their winter clothing strolled about as if advancing to dinner or the theater in the finest neighborhoods of London, and indeed last night in the village square there’d been a concert by a fiddle-player and an accordionist, attended by perhaps forty citizens and warmed by a generous bonfire. Yet here in this midst of weird civility Hudson thought it absolutely absurd that he stood on the street with a blade to his throat while Berry Grigsby was a mindless puppet to Frederick and Pamela Nash … and also, he had noted the abundance of bloodstains in spaces between the square’s stones, and whatever had recently taken place there had been gruesome indeed.

Hudson looked back toward Nash’s house and caught sight of a figure standing at the front window with a candlestick and burning taper in hand. He thought it might be Berry but he couldn’t tell because the glass had frosted over. Another figure—Nash? Or Nash’s wife?—came into view and with an arm around the shoulder pulled the first figure into the darker recesses of the house.

“Move,” said the man with the sword.

Hudson turned away from the house and began walking toward the cottage they’d afforded him, on Bluefish Lane. All the streets here were named after sea creatures … again, another ridiculous bow to the semblance of a real village, when in fact this was both a fort and a prison, as Hudson had determined in his walkabouts. Four strides further along Conger Street and the enormity—and tragedy—of what had befallen Berry hit Hudson like a ten-team lumber wagon. His broad-shouldered, six-foot-three-inch-tall frame trembled and staggered. His eyes burned with tears. He felt near fainting and devoid of strength, and when the man behind him gave him a shove he took it like a milksop. He had contained himself in Berry’s presence, but now the shock of the situation emerged in the presence of a crawling upon his arms and hands, and when he held his hands up into the torchlight upon them were dozens of large black spiders scurrying over and between his fingers.

Sweat burst forth on his face. He nearly cried out … and would have, if he hadn’t realized in a cooler part of his brain that this fearful hallucination was a remnant of the drug he’d been given on his arrival to this little corner of Hell. The torch flames themselves became horrors; like whips they flailed out at Hudson, and within them were the contorted and destroyed faces of the dead men he recalled on the field of battle, long ago when he was an English soldier in the last years of the Franco-Dutch war. The flames grew arms, as if to pluck him from this place and deposit him alongside the tormented souls on the shores from which no man returned.