At the end of the hallway, Zane bid Caliph wait at a pair of double doors similar to the ones they had passed but devoid of peep slots.
He approached a wooden cabinet mounted on the wall under a flickering lamp. Upon opening it he dragged a pair of strange objects out into the light. One he handed to Caliph.
“You may want this,” he said without explanation.
It was a leather mask with glass eyes and a strange canister that hung like a proboscis over the mouth and nose. It fit snugly by means of adjustable straps that netted over the back of the head.
Caliph took it limply with a growing sense of unease. Vhortghast turned the handle on the doors and a dull echoing thud sounded as some metal pinion retracted. The doors swung in.
Caliph stepped forward, hesitantly, eyes adjusting to the gloom. At first he could see nothing. Then the stench hit him in the face like a blacksmith’s hammer.
The vile, overpowering fume of concentrated piss and sewage choked him as if a bottle of pure ammonia had splashed across his face. Caliph fumbled mindlessly for his gas mask, trying to pull it on before he convulsed.
Vhortghast helped him unsympathetically, tightening the straps that hung off the back of Caliph’s head like drooping antennae.
For a moment Caliph concentrated on breathing. He closed his eyes and rested his palms on his knees, sucking odorless air into the close leather funnel around his mouth. After a moment he felt better and stood up.
The room seemed to sway before him. But it was not an illusion brought on by nausea. The room did in fact sway, or rather the contents of the room swayed.
Caliph could see men in headgear similar to his own moving between row upon row of large caliginous shapes. They carried rods and wore seemingly one-piece uniforms and high top boots with cleats. Occasionally they reached out and touched one of the hanging shapes with their rods and the shapes jolted mindlessly in response, swaying on creaking chains.
Caliph felt his gorge rise. A network of pipes along the ceiling knitted in perfect symmetry over the prodigious objects hung beneath them, elbows of black ribbed metal turning down at every cross section, thrusting into the top of huge breathing bulbs of meat.
Like a cattle yard, where butchered animals were hung on hooks to drain. Only these great carcasses were alive and three times the size of a butchered cow. Three heavy chains hooked onto iron rings that pierced their upper portion and suspended each living meat several feet above the floor. They were vaguely the shape of a human heart and the iron rings that suspended them pulled the tissue into painful-looking triangles, like the masochists in Ghoul Court who pierced their nipples and stretched their skin until it bled.
The meat had no head or arms or legs. It had no skin but a translucent bluish white membrane that covered the dark maroon muscle tissue and bulging blue veins underneath. Lumpy patches of yellow adipose clustered in grooves and seams where the muscles joined in useless perfection.
Cable-thick tubing ran from above, bundled together and coupled into various implanted sockets for reasons obviously associated with sustaining dubious life.
Occasionally, muscles twitched or a sudden shudder went through the enormous cohesion of mindless flesh and sent the body swinging in the slow tight spiral allowed by the chains.
At the bottom of the meat, near the more pointed but snubbed posterior, something like an anus spewed filth with peristaltic violence into a square depression in the floor. Urine dribbled or sprayed from some hidden hole proximal to the defecating sphincter, helping to wash soupy piles of shit and blood toward runnels in the floor.
Caliph stood in stupefied horror, trying to digest the scene before him. Thousands of living meats hung in orderly rows throughout the darkened room. Caliph tried to speak through his mask but it was no use.
Vhortghast beckoned him through a side door and then through a secondary door into an observation hall with large windows that looked out on the mindless herd. Caliph removed his mask. The air was tolerable and Vhortghast did the same.
“How do they breathe?” asked Caliph. It was the first of many horrified questions that he raised.
“The tubing supplies oxygen directly into the lungs and likewise removes spent air with every exhalation by means of one-way valves. I’m not sure what the other small cables do myself but I’m sure it’s important. The main