The guard picked up his nightstick and pushed Ward down the corridor. Ward kept his eyes on the floor, his vision swimming. His legs felt disconnected from his body.

They came to a stout iron door, which the guard opened it with a huge skeleton key. He opened the door to reveal a gloomy staircase. Ward didn't think he'd be able to get down the stairs. The guard, perceiving this, took him by the elbow.

At the bottom lay a long, low, damp corridor, poorly lit, and deathly silent. More iron doors stood on each side. They seemed absurdly low; perhaps they had been constructed back in the days when people were shorter. The atmosphere was heavy with memory, as if the terror of its occupants hung in the air still. It was an evil place.

A wan light spilled from an open doorway at the far end of the corridor.

Two Brothers were waiting for him inside the lit chamber. They stood as silent and still as monuments behind a wooden table. There was a doctor's bag on the table. The single lanthorn on the wall behind them guttered, as if feeding on the despair that circulated through this place.

Ward's eyes were drawn to the chair that faced the table. It was huge. Its timber was dark with years and blotchy with stains. It looked diseased. Manacles were fastened to the arms and the two front legs, and there was a thick leather collar woven through two vertical slits in the chair's high back – this allowed the collar to be raised or lowered. There were deep scores in the chair's arms where the varnish had long been scratched away. Below it a sinister drain opened in the floor.

There was one other thing in the room: a small door he hadn't noticed at first, standing as it did in the deepest shadows of the chamber. It was set at waist height above the floor. It was banded with ribs of iron, and an iron wheel was set in its centre. It looked like the door of a furnace. An incinerator perhaps.

Ward had recognised one of the Brothers immediately: Tamerlane. The other was short and cadaverous, with a hooked nose, eyes that seemed to have no whites (but perhaps it was just the gloom). He had a perfectly bald head, pointed at the top like an egg, and pale, as if it was kept in a dark cupboard to stop it hatching.

"You may leave us," Tamerlane said to the guard.

The guard wheeled about and left, closing the door behind him. Ward heard the lock clunk as the key was turned.

His terror had been building slowly by degrees, but only now, in the silence that followed the guard's departure, did Ward acknowledge it. This was something he had only ever heard about it in frightened whispers. You didn't know how much was true. But perhaps they only wanted to talk to him?

Why are you down here then?

"I'm Brother Tamerlane. This is Brother Ignatius. He's a doctor. A very skilled one. You have nothing to fear."

The Doctor's mouth performed a slight upwards tightening movement, perhaps his idea of a smile.

"His specialisation," Tamerlane said, "is making people talk."

And the music of Barbara Streisand.