"They don't talk," a woman's voice said from behind them.

Jay turned around. He could barely make her out, just a shadowy form sitting under a tree. "I heard them singing," he said.

"They sing," the calm voice replied. It was a young woman. Through the branches, he could see the moonlight reflected on pale white skin. Her dress was unbuttoned down the front, and she was cradling something in her arms. "They sing, but they don't talk."

"Oh," Jay said. He stopped a few feet away from her. He could see one breast, pale and cone-shaped. A baby was nursing at the other. She stroked it gently as it sucked. She looked very young, no more than eighteen, sad and pretty. Her baby in her arms was a round red thing, like a bowling ball made of flesh. "I'm sorry," Jay said. "I didn't mean to intrude…"

"I know where Sascha is," the woman said.

In the darkness behind her, someone moved. Jay looked up, saw eyes peering out of the bushes. They were pale green, and burned with a dim feral glow. He was staring at them when he heard a soft footstep behind him. The hairs on the back of his neck stirred. There was a sudden overwhelming sense of being watched, and all at once Jay was terrified.

He backed away from the woman and the sad twisted creature in her arms, trying not to show any of the fear that was tearing at his guts inside. "Blaise, we're getting the fuck out of here;" he said. He turned.

Sascha stood behind the boy, his eyeless stare fixed on Jay. Ezili was there, too. He could see her body, full and lush. She was naked, and in the darkness, her eyes glowed red, brighter than the embers in the fire. She smiled at him and said nothing.

Jay must have made some kind of noise, because Blaise turned around. He saw Sascha, but then his eyes went to Ezili and got big. He grinned, then gave a low hoot of approval that Jay knew he hadn't learned from Tachyon. The boy had no idea of the shit they were in. "Sascha…" Jay began.

"No," Sascha replied. "Now it's too late for talking."

A man with a club came sliding out of the darkness, his feet bare, silent as a shadow. He swung, missed, Jay danced aside, and made his gun with his fingers and popped him away. Someone leaped onto his back. He went down hard and rolled. Long fingernails raked across his face, clawing for his eyes. Jay caught the hands, pried them loose, tried to untangle himself. He got his right hand free just in time to pop off a small girl who was coming at him from the right, but by then the woman had sunk her teeth in the fleshy part of his left hand just beneath the thumb.

He cried out. Blaise finally took his eyes off Ezili's tits long enough to see what was going on. "Hey!" the boy called out.

The woman worried at his thumb with her teeth and tried to kick him in the balls at the same time. Jay slapped her hard alongside the head, got his hand loose, and popped her right out from under him. Sascha shouted out, "Stop itl Leave them alone!"

It was enough to freeze everyone for a second. Blaise was staring at Sascha with fierce concentration, holding him in the palm of his mind. Behind him, Jay saw the vast shadow of the Siamese quint lurch unsteadily to its feet and stumble forward. Oh Jesus, he thought. "Run!" he screamed at Blaise. He saw motion out of the corner of his eye, and whirled. The thing with the pale green eyes had emerged from the bushes and was gliding silently across the grass, five feet off the ground, like some obscene manta ray with a semihuman face. It was naked, its skin pale and pimpled. Male genitalia drooped from the center of its face beneath those hideous eyes. Jay fought to keep down his lunch as he sent it away, but behind it came others. The looming joker with flesh soft and dark as blood pudding, the boy with the ice pick, the human centipede skittering forward with knives in half his hands. They were all around him.

He got rid of the ice pick when he saw the sad-voiced young woman coming at him, her baby lifted over her head like a weapon. It made him hesitate, only for a second, but it was enough.

A dozen strong hands seized him from behind, the ground dropped away under his feet, and pain erupted everywhere.

Sunday July 24, 1988

His arms were on fire.

He didn't remember waking up. He wasn't sure he had. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, his nightmare come to haunt him once again, only this was a new part, after the cone-faced thing began to howl. He tried to open his eyes, and saw only darkness. The world had a damp, fetid smell. He couldn't move his fingers. He could feel burning in his shoulders and his wrists, but otherwise his arms were numb. He kicked feebly, and his body began to twist. He was suspended somewhere, adrift above some vast black abyss.

Far off in the darkness he heard coarse laughter and dim, whispering voices. The cone-faced things were talking about him, Jay thought. He remembered his name then; somehow that helped. He tried not to listen to the voices. They reminded him of the trees in his dream, whispering secrets, terrible secrets he did not want to hear.

Then there were footsteps coming up behind him, and the fear rose in his throat. They were coming after him, and when he tried to run, his legs pumped uselessly against nothing.

The blindfold was ripped off his face. Sudden light stung his eyes. Jay closed them, whimpering feebly. "Cut him down," a familiar voice said, close at hand.

Someone grunted. Against his best instincts, Jay opened his eyes a crack. His vision was blurred and painful. The room took shape around him. A basement, he thought groggily. He was hanging from a pipe, swaying in the air, dangling by his arms. A human centipede advanced toward him, hands full of shiny metal, while a man with an eyeless face watched from below. Sascha, he thought, but when he tried to say the name, nothing came out.-

Then he was falling. His legs tangled under him, unable to support his weight, and he collapsed, his head hitting the damp stone beneath a solid crack as he fell. Jay groaned.

"Give him another shot," a distant voice said. " I don't want to take any chances with him until we reach Ti Malice." No, Jay tried to say. All he produced was a moan. Someone kicked at his broken rib, rolling him over with a foot. Then there was a bright light shining in his eyes, a sharp pain inside his elbow. After that he slept.

Chrysalis smiled at him. Brennan thought it was strange to see her again, because he was pretty sure that she was dead. Or maybe she'd just been out of town.

He smiled back tentatively. Now that she was back, how would he explain her to Jennifer? And vice versa? He decided to worry about it later and reached for her. They embraced and he pulled back to arms' length to look at her. His smile froze.

Chrysalis was deteriorating before his eyes. Her crystal flesh clouded with corruption and fell away from her face and body in rotten chunks. Blood ran in sluggish tears from her eyes, her breath whispered in a ghastly rattle from her laboring lungs. He held a corpse in his arms. He felt guilt tear angrily at him and with her last gasp she said, "Brennan," and he awoke soaked with sweat and shaking from horror and anesthesia reaction.

"How do you feel?" someone asked from his bedside. "Fine," Brennan lied. "Where am I?"

Brennan turned and looked at the speaker for the first time. He was a young man in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck. He looked like a cross between a surfer boy and a palomino pony. Dr… Finn. That was his name.

"The Jokertown Clinic," Dr. Finn told him. Brennan nodded wearily.

"You know," Finn went on, "it's most astonishing that you're with us at all."