Doctor Teddy made Niloch’s torturer look like the weekend amateur he’d been. Not only did he give me everything all over again, Doctor Teddy also had a few cute ideas of his own, but even my furry new friend seemed to run out of ideas after a while, and at last I was sent back to the gray place again, weeping and trying to remember my name, even though I knew that if I remembered that I would also remember why I was here and what was happening to me. They’d done something strange to me so I couldn’t sleep, and although I could tell time was passing by the slow easing of my suffering, there was nothing else to make the hours and days pass in that dreadful, empty, uncolored place.

When things finally changed, I was at first aware only that something was in the gray with me, and that whatever it was wasn’t quite in or out. The best way I can explain it is like being underwater, somewhere there’s more shadow than light and distance distorts things and plays tricks. For long moments what I was looking at was only a slantingly vertical shape, wildly distorted as though coming at me from a dimension I couldn’t entirely see, and then it stood over me, gray corpse face and pinhole eyes, that weird underslung jaw hanging open like a fish’s as it stared at me. The rest of it was gray, too, gray dead skin stretched over bone. Smyler hadn’t gotten any prettier since our last encounter.

I didn’t even care much anymore, to be honest, but I still flinched a little at the sight. “What do you want, Handsome?” I said when I found my voice. “Getting impatient? I’m sure you’ll get to play with me when your master’s done.”

Smyler leaned in so close I could see the lines on his skin clearly for the first time ever in the flat, medical light of the gray, and I realized that they were not just random wrinkles or even a tattoo but something much more intricate, much more strange. The murderer was covered in writing—trails of tiny letters laboriously cut into the skin with something very sharp, thousands of characters in some illegible text that covered every exposed inch of his skin. I looked down to the grayish hand pointing the four-bladed knife at my face and saw that the skin on his gnarled fingers was decorated too. His other hand was hidden behind his back, but I would have bet it was the same, covered in little scars as numerous as crawling ants.

“Why did you do . . . what was reason?” Smyler still ran his words together in the same slow but breathless way, monotonous as a bored priest reciting a too-familiar catechism. “Why you not run?”