Strapped down, lying on top of the table, was Billings.

The assistant, hired hand, butler, whatever-he-was, was straining against his bonds. There was defiance in his face but no fear, and Norton walked slowly over and looked down at him. Billings was still in his formal attire, and even under these circumstances he seemed to retain a sense of dignity. He stared up at Norton, and it was clear that he wanted to be released, but he was not about to beg, and he said nothing.

There was a tug on his arm, and Norton looked down to see Donna pulling on his sleeve. “Come here,” she said softly, and a slight smile played about her lips. “Come look.”

He noticed for the first time that the room was crowded, filled with tables and display cases and huge heavy pieces of furniture that served functions he did not understand. He saw what looked like severed hands and genitalia lying on a long glass shelf on one wall. Something small and dark and furry ran past his feet, chattering to itself.

He did not see either a door or a window, an entrance or an exit to the room.

Donna pulled him around a large stationary object of mirror and wood that he did not recognize, and he found himself in a corner area even more jumbled and chaotic than the rest of the room. There was no furniture here, though.

There were bodies.

And body parts.

His first instinct was to back away. The floor was sticky with blood, and what looked like deflated clouds, the pale empty husks of the ghosts he’d seen in the House on the Other Side, hung from staggered hooks on the black wall. The torso of some unknown rainbow-colored creature sat atop a cube made from interlocking bones, next to the discarded head of an evil-looking old woman. The stench was horrendous, and he held his hand to his nose, gagging.

But Donna would not let him go. She held tightly to his wrist, her strength both unforced and unnatural, and she talked to him softly. There was no true death, she said. There was only a transformation from one form into another, a passage from one world to the next. Why should he hold on to his outdated notions of morality, his prudish small-town conceptions of what was right? There was nothing wrong with killing. It only facilitated the inevitable.

He heard her, understood her, and though he should have had arguments with which to dispute her, he did not. She led him through the abattoir, still softly talking, lovingly touching the remains of the dispatched.

There was beauty in the bones, he saw now, a poetry in the eviscerated flesh.

Donna reached the wall, and from a skin sheath hanging from a spike, she withdrew a dull rusty knife. She handed it to him. “Mr. Billings is yours.”

“What?”