Tables are bolted to floor around the walls. There’s a dark booth projecting from an upper story with a spiral staircase drooping from its underside. The dim glow of the chamber illuminates a few dials on the back wall of the booth—I see their needles flicker convulsively every time Thrushchurl touches the cells. I point this out to him, and his reverie breaks. He crosses to one of the tables and picks up a pink-red vessel of glass or ceramic; the vessel is heart-shaped and pearly, like a red conch turned inside-out. There is no lid, and Thrushchurl sniffs at the contents, then pours out some of the thick scarlet fluid onto the table. Setting the vessel aside, he crouches down and peers at the stuff, sniffing and prodding it with a piece of metal that might once have been something. I detect a thin sour odor, like the smell of rotting brawn that came from the square structure on the tower.

Thrushchurl withdraws from his pocket a pinch of mercury—where did he find that? has he always had it?—and drops it into the center of the dish-like pool of scarlet fluid. The shapeless mercury gathers itself in the center, its blue-white radiance brilliant against the red. I’d barely noticed how his hands shake now. The grooves in his fingers seem all filled with dark mercury.

I notice that the scarlet fluid on the table has coagulated into a single layer, with the mercury resting like a wafer on top of it, without mixing. I feel the steady earthquake of the building and dizzily suggest we get outside.

Thrushchurl breathes, “For a moment ...”

Our going is interrupted by a machine sound, and sharp knocks.

The black panel in the floor sinks a foot or so and slides out of sight moving in our direction evidently under the floor. A few of the cells on the edge opposite us emerge a bit from the floor, their lids tossed back. A body drops from an enormous ragged hole in the ceiling and, flashing down, lands in the capsule with a thud. The capsule slides into the floor closing itself, and, I can see, filling from below with red fluid. This happens until there are no more empty capsules.

Another sound of distant machines. The bodies drop down out of sight as though each had been tugged down by a single hand, and withered black hares rise through the fluid, are squashed against the transparent upper panels.