Packs of rotting skeletons trying to eat my face as I struggled to escape over mounds of garbage. This was less fun than it sounds.

My skin trying to tear itself loose from my body. Exactly as fun as it sounds.

A chamber full of stinging ants and biting flies the size of pigeons. Me with no arms or legs.

An all-black room, where nothing happened except an excruciating pain blooming right in the middle of my skull, like an insane sea urchin with thumbtack spines trying to shove its way out through one of my eye sockets. It got worse and worse until I finally tore my own head off my neck, at which point my head grew back and the process started over.

And every now and then, just to remind me why I was literally suffering the tortures of the damned, I would be back in the original conference room with Eligor. He would ask me a few more questions, or the same questions again. Sometimes he just looked at me and laughed, then I went back into the acid bath or dangled on the electric fence again. A couple of times he was reading emails on his cellphone and didn’t even look up. Once I saw Caz, standing straight and silent as Eligor held her with one hand around her neck, like a chicken going to the chopping block. Her eyes were wet and her lashes frosty with crystallizing tears, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

Back to the crematory flames again, but this time all my friends from the Compasses were there with me—Monica, Sweetheart, Walter Sanders, all of them shrieking as they burned, begging me to help them.

The next time I came back to the conference room, Lady Zinc was waiting for me, eyes bright with madness. While Eligor watched and drank his coffee Vera raped me again, just as she had before. Then she took me in ways she hadn’t been able to do before. It all hurt worse than you can imagine—merciful God, a lot worse.

Vera disappeared after a few thousand hours.

“Little man,” said the grand duke, grinning. “You’ve had a busy day.”

He sent me to a room whose floor was wire mesh painted with acid. The flesh kept melting off my bones and dripping through, and as determinedly as I crawled, the door remained just as far away.

An endless desert of broken glass and salt.

A dim forest full of predatory birds with teeth. They laughed like demented children.

More fire. Needles. Filth. Innocents suffering. Over and over and over.

Over and over.

As kind of a break between bouts of indescribable agony, Eligor would pause the torture ride to explain how things in the universe really worked. Kind of like those old educational fillers they used to run between the Saturday morning kids’ cartoons.