Perhaps they’d taken to the air again, spread their invisible wings and flown high towards the stars. If only the hand of God would pluck them out of the sky and rub them to powder between its thumb and forefinger.

A scratching noise distracted him. A low scratching sound. Something alive and moving in this cell. No, not a rat, that he couldn’t bear, not a rat come to gloat and mock him and somehow escape beneath a door that rendered his own escape absolutely impossible, a rat that might seek to bite him as they’d done in the past.

But if a rat had come, he would chase it from this place, that much he would do for himself.

He opened his eyes, praying for the strength to do it, and gazed forward.

In the light of the fire he saw a long black shape hunching and moving on the stone floor, propelled, it seemed, by a collection of curling legs at one end, hunching and lurching and coming right towards him!

His mind was wiped clean of words. What he was seeing could not be. Yet he knew what he was seeing.

The arm, his own severed left arm, was crawling away from the fire and straight towards him, by means of the fingers of the left hand, which reached out to gain an inch and pull the arm behind them over and over again. This was impossible. He was hallucinating. Mortals hallucinate. Why couldn’t he?

He’d had little food for days and nights. Unspeakable things had been done to him.

He rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. How the shadows danced from the licking flames of the fire. And the scratching noise continued.

Sharply, defiantly, he turned his head. The advancing hand was now only a yard from him. The fingers reached out, curled, lifting the hand, the thumb tucked underneath, and dragged the arm forward. Then once more the fingers reached, then curled and lifted, and the arm dropped down again on the stones, and again they reached.

Losing my mind, losing my soul, mad. Mad before they ever find me or free me. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He couldn’t not look at it making its way towards him. Is it going to connect again? It is going to attach to my shoulder!

His horror slowly turned to hope. But as it drew closer, he caught sight of something on the palm of the hand, something glittering, indeed a pair of small glittering particles and something that resembled a mouth.

He gasped. He couldn’t move. It was a face that had formed on the palm of the hand, and the small gleaming eyes were fixed on him, and the small mouth was making soft sucking noises, gaping, smacking its lips, its tiny thin lips, and the eyes met his eyes.