“Abraham Setrakian,” it purred. “A name so soft, so sweet, for a boy so full of spirit…” It moved close to his face. “But why destroy me, boy? Why am I so deserving of your wrath, when around you you find even more death in my absence. I am not the monster here. It is God. Your God and mine, the absent Father who left us all so long ago…In your eyes I see what you fear most, young Abraham, and it is not me…It is the pit. So now you shall see what happens when I feed you to it and God does nothing to stop it.”

And then, with a brutal cracking noise, the Thing shattered the bones in the hands of young Abraham.

The boy fell to the floor, curled in a ball of pain, his crushed fingers near his chest. He had landed in a faint pool of sunlight.

Dawn.

The Thing hissed, attempting to move close to him one more time.

But the prisoners in the barracks began to stir, and as young Abraham lost consciousness, the Thing vanished.

Abraham was discovered bleeding and injured before roll call. He was dispatched to the infirmary from which wounded prisoners never returned. A carpenter with broken hands served no purpose in the camp, and the head overseer immediately approved his disposal. He was dragged out to the burning hole with the rest of the roll-call failures, made to kneel in a line. Thick, greasy, black smoke occluded the sun above, searing hot and merciless. Setrakian was stripped and dragged to the very edge, cradling his destroyed hands, shivering in fear as he gazed into the pit.

The searing pit. The hungry flames twisting, the greasy smoke lifting away in a kind of hypnotic ballet. And the rhythm of the execution line—gunshot, gun carriage clicking, the soft bouncing tinkle of the bullet casing against the dirt ground—lulled him into a death trance. Staring down into the flames stripping away flesh and bone, unveiling man for what he is: mere matter. Disposable, crushable, flammable sacks of meat—easily revertible to carbon.

The Thing was an expert in horror, but this human horror indeed exceeded any other possible fate. Not only because it was without mercy, but because it was acted upon rationally and without compulsion. It was a choice. The killing was unrelated to the larger war, and served no purpose other than evil. Men chose to do this to other men and invented reasons and places and myths in order to satisfy their desire in a logical and methodical way.

As the Nazi officer mechanically shot each man in the back of the head and kicked them forward into the consuming pit, Abraham’s will eroded. He felt nausea, not at the smells or the sights but at the knowledge—the certainty—that God was no longer in his heart. Only this pit.