Traditionally, the torture show consisted of various macabre exhibits involving mannequins contorted into all manner of horrible positions, forced or shoved into replicas of antiquated elements of torment. Their faces would be painted into contrived expressions of terror and suffering; their limbs might be decorated with bruises and blood, even bones poking through where they'd been supposedly broken. All depended, really, on the level of verisimilitude and horror that the presenter wished to convey. Some torture shows did not admit children (for prudent reasons).

Quaxton's torture show was something different altogether, though. In fact, Lilia wasn't aware she'd even wandered into it. When she'd first moved through that liquid coolness of the mirror, she'd been mistaken to believe she'd end up in the room she saw on the other side of it, the one with the macabre puppets. Instead, she'd found herself in some strange watery, reflective place, something like the mirror mazes of old traveling carnivals and yet . . . not quite like them at all. Wherever she looked, there were no walls but instead silvery, viscous screens. Or curtains—maybe they were curtains. It was difficult to tell what exactly they were beyond the fact that they resembled mercury, they reflected her image, and they were something more than liquid but less than solid. Had her mind been in a clearer state, Lilia might have attempted to touch what surrounded her, but she was afraid of it. She didn't understand what'd happened, where she was, why she hadn't gone where she'd thought she would, and so subsequently she knew only confusion. No one was nearby as far as she could sense, not the reflection-that-hadn't-been-her-reflection, not any members of her own family, not those puppets . . . nothing. She was lost in a moving maze, a labyrinth of transforming apparitions; one moment she saw her own dark-haired, pale-faced reflection and the next that of the other woman, and then those of her children, and Arthur, and her parents . . . another little girl just like herself . . .

Two little girls. Herself, and her duplicate. Yes, Lilia clearly watched the images of two little girls, twins, laughing with a childhood purity as they set up a makeshift theater in a meadow buzzing with glimmering tufts of pollen and insects indistinguishable from one another. Fat sunny beams gilded their heads and shoulders and the painted display, the memory itself—everything gold, golden, gold—and humming somewhere beyond it all the vibrancy of nostalgia, the dazzling aspirations of two perfectly joyful lives, two cosmic beings free from attachment. Unnetted. No strings.

Like minnows, the images darted silvery screen to silvery screen, and Lilia wished to catch them, to hold those laughing, carefree darlings in her hands, but they wouldn't be contained, those two. No, they wouldn't be contained.

Her movements were strange, slowed, as if she were underwater. Lilia struggled to progress either forward or backward, though she knew not where to go only that she must move, that she didn't want to watch those girls while they ran from her through flowers and sunlight, but suddenly the bright went dark, and the scintillating dust motes became the miniscule white-violet and sapphire illumination of aquatic life, flashing in small, silent, sporadic bursts at distances of disorienting variance. Confusion overwhelmed Lilia; she stumbled through the darkness, her senses dulled as if with medications or alcohol. How long she was lost, she didn't know, and though she found her thoughts on the little girls and where they'd gone—knew exactly who they'd been—she refused to think of them as anything more than two abstract beings, as if they existed, she existed, only as that memory.

Out of the gloom and intermittent incandescence, so suddenly it felt she must have been there the whole time, the other, the unidentical reflection in the mirror, was before Lilia. The other's anemic complexion was positively ghostly in the darkness, but in all her ugliness, her emaciation and malevolence, she drew so near Lilia that their bodies were flush with one another, their foreheads touching. And when the other pressed her mouth against Lilia's, took hold of her arms and pulled their bodies into one, Lilia could only allow it to happen, for she had no power or desire to fight it. Afterward, knowing where to go was instinct, though it wasn't exactly Lilia's instinct. She was herself, and yet she was something both more than and less than herself; she saw through her eyes but didn't quite feel as if she was the one looking through them, heard through her ears though didn't quite feel as if she were the one listening through them. The other inside of her knew where to go, and so she followed its directions, and soon the black, flare-speckled, aqueous milieu gave way to something more solid, more airy, more permanent. Lilia's back pressed against a hard wall and she found herself grateful, desiring that certainty after all the instability of reminiscence.

"Here you are, my woman," soothed a deep, foreign, intimately familiar voice that thrilled her to her core.

Her left wrist was secured in place above her head.

"And this one, also," the voice added, hot and bothersome at her ear.

Her right wrist was made immobile, up against the wall, as well.

Fingers, thumbs known to her ran along her calves, up her inner thighs, grazed the meeting place there, eliciting a sigh before retracting, drawing downward again to her ankles, spreading them apart and locking them in place, tightening straps around them.

Before she could understand what was going on, Lilia was spread as a starfish pegged to an examination board, her appendages leather-thonged to a circular board. When the lights came up, she saw the one she expected: tall, inexplicably dark in delicious ways, covered head-to-bare-chest in black markings, legs clad in loose breeches tied with a sash at the waist. His hair was a slice atop his head. His eyes were piercing voids, his hands invitations to deviance. Oh, Lilia had longed for him, for his touch, for his body against hers. Flesh to flesh—damn her husband. Forget it all.

As she thought it, he met her eyes. Some metallic object glimmered in his hand and Lilia wanted that knife, desired its point between her legs, in her breast, astride her throat—wherever he desired it to be.

Thwack!

The knife cut the air, embedded itself in the wood beside her left ribs.

Lilia met Jaska's black glare and shuddered within.

Thunk!

A second dagger cut the silence and found its home between Lilia's damp thighs, pinning her dress to the wood behind her. She worked to inch lower, to rub herself on the handle, unable to contain her mounting passion.

Jaska drew back somewhat, and the environment took form around him. It was some sort of work room, with benches and tables and strange apparati atop everything, human moldings and half-mannequins and casts of hands and feet and chest cavities cut open and spilling shiny rubber viscera. Faceless dummies and tools of all gruesome shapes were interspersed with piles of colorless string and bits of wood and stuffing, jars of glass eyes and wooden teeth and measuring tools and metal scales and other unidentifiable paraphernalia.

Lilia could concentrate on little of it, as her attention was overwhelmingly focused on the man throwing knives at her. One . . . two . . . three more, and she'd been nearly pierced at her throat, her right temple, and her lower stomach, yet with every throb of blade meeting board, her flesh grew only more aroused, her desire more animal. She couldn't contain herself, was sure she'd tear free and crawl from her very skin if she had to wait much longer. Lilia fought her restraints but could not break free of them, and at last her sobs of frustration brought the man himself to her.

"Let me go," she tried, longing to dig her fingers into the face hovering so near her own.

Jaska smiled, infuriatingly. He remained just far enough that Lilia could not reach him, even as she stretched her neck forward in attempt to bite his lips. Flipping the blade out of a knife he held hidden in his palm, the man ran the razor edge along the woman's flushed cheek, drawing a thin sanguine line. With his free hand, he tore loose the dress he'd pinned between Lilia's legs, crept his adept fingers beneath her skirt, and drew aside her panties.

Incapable of any movement or retaliation, Lilia gave in to both pleasure and pain as the man continued with his sharp tool down the side of her neck, across her shoulders where he slit the straps of her dress, along her now-exposed breast and simultaneously worked her to madness in her most intimate of places. She struggled to differentiate between the two sensations even as he began to tongue her nipples and cut deeper into the flesh of her torso—which of them, pleasure or pain—was wrong, and which was right? Was either . . . either? Were both . . . both? Oh God . . . the limbo in which he held her—Jaska possessed her very being. Where was anyone else, anything else in the world? Could anyone or anything ever excite her in such a way? Time didn't exist. Nothing existed. Only the response he drew from her, the excitation he elicited. Her world was that, alone. Him, alone.

Blood and sweat and saliva and tears mingled as they cascaded down the woman's nearly-nude body. Her sundress lay pooled at her feet; her panties sat askew at her hips, but they were soon removed with a flick of Jaska's blade while at the same time he began to work the sash at his waist. And the moment she was utterly revealed, absolutely vulnerable and hovering at the brink in ecstatic expectation of being devotedly and completely fulfilled . . . rather than free his quarry from persecution, the man ceased his torment entirely and stepped back.

Panting, lost in erotic clouds, aroused to the point of hysteria, Lilia attempted to apprehend her situation, her seducer's intentions. Jaska was . . . was not removing his sash, loosening his pants . . . he was . . . tightening them. Lilia's elation rapidly dipped as abrupt clarity swept into the vacuum of sound and touch and passion, as she began to recognize the pain of Jaska's carvings for what they were. Profound humiliation overwhelmed her, knowledge of her complete exposure, the betrayal made obvious when The Painted Man offered only a sneer before snapping his pocket knife shut and striding nonchalantly away from her, past two figures, a known and an unknown, as if now that he'd done his duty, performed his task, he could pass the torch to another. The woman could say or do nothing, could only watch her false lover as he left, knowing that whatever had happened and whatever was about to happen would be not only regrettable but grim.

Standing immediately before her, quiet until Jaska left the room through some gloomy curtain, was a strange-looking man, ugly and short yet authoritative for all his misfortune. He was dressed in dark slacks and a dirtied cropped apron; round glasses were hooked into its pocket. His face consisted of angles too sharp for a human being, cheekbones severe enough to create shadows beneath them and ocular caverns so deep it was as if his skin, which itself stretched so taut it sweat dingy pearls, had already given way to the skull below. Something about his perfectly combed and parted hair in combination with his rigid skeletal features was utterly disturbing, and Lilia felt immediately and horribly vulnerable. She strove to pull in her hands and feet, to somehow cover her nakedness, but wrists and ankles were fastened firm to the board, and her used and abused body dripped beyond her control.

"There's no need to hide from me," said the man, reaching into the pocket of his white lab coat to pull out clear latex gloves, which he then snapped onto his hands. "Before this day is done, I will know every intimate detail of your innards and outards, Lilia."

Having regained control of her faculties, the woman understood the impossible grotesquerie of what was occurring before her. This hideous creature meant to harm her. Whatever had happened with the mirror, with Jaska . . . it hadn't frightened her; it'd been some nightmarish, hallucinatory delusion. But this—the pasty man with his weeping flesh, the oddly familiar serious boy at his side, the room of tortuous instruments behind him—this was something far more terrible. "L-let me go. Please!" Her voice was feeble at best, weakened from the lacerations Jaska had traced along her throat.

"Oh, no. No. I can't do that, can I?" The ugly man grinned an ugly grin, showing no teeth. His deep-set irises floated colors like oil slicks. The serious boy at his side, who, Lilia realized for the first time, had antler-like appendages coming out of the sides of his head, grinned as well, but he revealed his teeth, sharp little daggers all.

She recognized him, suddenly—the boy she'd seen weeks earlier, when they'd first arrived. He'd accosted her outside Quaxton's Manikins and Marionettes when the shop was shut down and dusty, that strange, hungry boy. She'd offered him food, but he hadn't wanted any. He'd been hungry for something else . . . They hunger for you . . . That insane old fortune-teller had said it to her; they hungered for her. Jaska, she'd thought. But maybe . . . maybe it hadn't been just him. Maybe it'd meant something worse, more monstrous.

The effects of Jaska's knife, the numerous lines he'd carved across her body, began to burn more intensely, to ache deeper. Glancing down, Lilia realized how much blood she'd lost. It ran down her limbs, pooled around her feet, dripped down her stomach, through her pubic hair, onto the floor. Vertigo claimed her; she was forced to close her eyes though she feared doing so. Contempt overcame her, self-hatred for everything that'd happened, everything she'd done to her family, and yet she could not understand how she'd arrived at this place, where she was or what was happening or why it'd been forced upon her until . . .

She lifted her head, opened her eyes.

"My sister," she asserted.

The ugly man, who'd drawn slightly nearer, who now held a sharp and ugly tool in his hand, made no move to confirm or deny. "You may call me Quaxton," he said instead. "I'm in the business of dressing what's been caught. For one scales and de-bones a fish, does one not, before one presents the feast?"

Lilia was at a loss for words.

The boy in his khaki shorts and white cotton shirt, his bare and dirty feet, his serious eyes and his devilish antlers, sidled up beside Quaxton. Together, they stood before the trapped woman.

"I've already taken care of your sons," the man continued, "and I'm happy to—"

"My sons? My sons?" She began in vain to pull harder on her bindings. "What—what are you talking about? What have you—"

"And I'm pleased to take care of you, too, now!" Quaxton finished, speaking over the panicking woman.

"My boys? Ivan—Oliver? Have you done something . . . what have you done to them?"

Quaxton ignored Lilia's pleas for information. He nodded to the boy at his side. "Go on then, Diablo. I know you've hungered for some time, and The Painted Man carved her nicely for you. I'll work with what's left behind."

The boy flicked out a red tongue, ran it across pale lips, and stepped closer. Without prelude he took hold of the woman's right thigh and lurched forward, tearing away a chunk of flesh with his sharp teeth.

Lilia cried out, but no scream for help would draw Quaxton's attention from his work, which seemed to consist of measuring and cutting vast amounts of string at one of his many tables, and as the boy, the thing, continued for some while to eat her alive, Lilia at last fell into a delirium of meadows made for drowning and little girls drenched in blood.