Some rooms are relatively safe. It is easy to go into 804 and avoid the red leather chair that has dissolved more than a few geriatric guests looking for an upright nap.

Every now and again I find a trap that’s been set off. A baseball bat rigged to lash out at anyone entering the kitchen, blood and hair dripping from the bent nails hammered into the wood. No sign of the poor fucker who set it off.

It stood out in the woods like someone had cut a hole right in the fabric of reality, the darkness so deep and black it almost ached to look at. The sight of it made my heart drop into my stomach. It radiated pain.

Beneath her lay the remnants of an ancient bonfire. Above her, the branches and canopy had been scorched black. But the woman appeared to have been untouched by flame, a ghostly image of death. The sight of her made my heartbreak, even if I couldn’t say why.

Something made me hesitate at the last moment. I couldn’t say what, just a vague sense that the fist that had hammered against the door was not one pleading for help.

Nothing gives us the right to be this cruel

They reckon this guy scratched himself on a nail and caught gangrene like it was the 1800s. Never went to the hospital. Just laid there and died slowly and painfully as the infection spread, but not before he took every last bit of furniture in the room and shoved it against the door.

“Next thing he knows, its wrapped around him and he can’t get out. So his wife goes to help, and then a brother and a cousin…” I shrugged. “Mimics don’t normally get exposed to so many people. It would be like dropping a lion in a supermarket.”

Watson sucked air through his teeth but didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. It was obvious how the machine would work. Put someone in the centre, suspended over the ground, legs and arms pulled as far apart as you could, and then turn the winch to wring their whole body like a wet towel.

“Anything can pray,” he told me, smiling like it was a secret. “We prayed before we walked upright. We prayed to leave the trees, to escape the snakes and birds who snatched babies. Now it’s their turn, down below.”

“Aren’t we doing a show today?”

The woman looked at me like I was insane, her anxiety momentarily overridden by confusion.

“Do you even know what’s out there?” she asked. “What’s happening to us one by one!?”

Click clack

He’ll break your back

Follow his laws and stay on track

She recommended that I stay home until I felt 100% myself again, which of course meant that I never went back to work because I never ever felt like myself again.

The water looked undisturbed, but then again it would, wouldn’t it? It was hardly even water, more like a tangle of weeds and slimy algae suspended in ooze. Something was in there, I knew it. It was an irrational thought, one of many I’d had in the last few minutes, but God I was certain that there was something in that damned water!

And after that he’d scream for months, maybe years, until eventually the dark and the quiet and the total absence of sensory input would liquefy his mind and that scream would wither until it was nothing more than… well, a wisp of smoke.

And just as slowly as it had reached out, it started to pull him back in. It dragged him all the way, his screaming desperate and pitiful until finally, he reached the metal grate.

When it was over the can looked like a spent bullet, all frayed around the edges like a blooming flower. And the man was… well, he woke up when the first finger bent backwards at the knuckle.

It was a barely glimpsed shape in the dark, a patch of white overhead that caught my torch and made me jump. Lowering the light brought the rest of the ship into view, and for a split-second I was dumbstruck with awe.

“What’s on the other side?”

When the old man spoke it was like his voice carried an epoch of suffering and weariness.

“Servitude,” he answered

“Those things would stand there and watch as you fed their companions into a wood chipper and they wouldn’t even blink. But three weeks in the holds of some cargo ship, three weeks in the dark and the cold, and they were whimpering and cradling each other for warmth. Freaks me out.”