My first impression of Gravejaw House was that I had somehow fallen out of Hell and landed smack dab in the middle of Shoreline Park, the abandoned and thoroughly dilapidated amusement park back home in San Judas. The commissar’s fortress, rising like a bizarre tumor from the crest of the hill, looked less like a castle than a pile of giant toy blocks left behind by some bored and colossal infant. It was hard to tell under the red lantern-light of Hell, but the leaning walls and the bottoms of the crooked towers seemed to be painted in broad multicolored stripes and whorls and other odd patterns. The entrance road wound through vast, chaotic gardens, which seemed to consist mostly of partially skeletonized corpses planted waist-deep in dry, stony ground, tangled in vines and prickling thorns so that it was hard to tell where the foliage left off and the muscle fibers and slickly gleaming nerves began. When I saw one of them twitch and its ragged mouth form a soundless cry for help, I was reminded that nothing in Hell really dies.

“Ah,” said Niloch, watching my face. “Do you like it? It is so hard in these rustic areas to know what to do with servants when they become too decrepit to work. I could have sold them for scrap, but I wouldn’t have got much. This way they continue to serve.”

“Wonderful,” I said, which was as much as I could manage without throwing up. The worst part was that all the shrub people struggled to turn as we passed, trying to catch the commissar’s attention, their mouths gaping and eyes (where eyes still remained) bulging as they struggled to make their ruined bodies plead for them. Not that Niloch would have cared.

“Did you see this one?” he asked. “My old butler.” He pointed to a thing I wouldn’t have noticed, since it was one of the few ornaments not moving. There was only the barest hint of a face and limbs. “He dropped an entire jeroboam of maiden’s tears.” The shrub was bent beneath the weight of a stone dish the size of a truck tire. “I told him when he catches enough to make up for what he spilled, I’ll put him back to work.” The unlikely chance of any maidens happening by and crying into that huge stone bowl, let alone enough of them to fill it, seemed to make Niloch very cheerful. As I went past I saw that I had been wrong, and the shrub was moving, trembling so slightly beneath the great weight of stone that there might have been a breeze, but no breeze was blowing.

We reached the front gate, a pair of crude demon-statues with a length of iron grille between them, which swung open at our approach. Beyond it lay a couple dozen yards of curious, bumpy pathway and then the big, black door.