and finally into a dank, uncarpeted space where the sound of shuffling feet echoes off the walls. There is a bass thrum of machinery. Through the burlap hood he can see twinkles of flame.
They sit him on the cold concrete floor and hog-tie his wrists to his ankles. His hood is removed.
Henry looks blearily around. He is in a large basement of some kind—a cavernous room with stone walls and a low ceiling of plumbing and heating conduits, everything furred black with greasy filth, the pipes densely interwoven as the roots of an enormous tree. The tangled machinery glimmers redly overhead, lit by torches mounted to either side of a massive steel door. An industrial dungeon.
Around him are at least a dozen other people, all gagged and bound, staring around in logy wonder. They are strangers to Henry, and seemingly to each other as well; there is no sense of fellowship or recognition. Like him, they are all doped up. The whole group has been propped in a semicircle facing the imposing door. Some are trembling with fear or cold.
We look like a bunch of POWs, Henry thinks.
For a long time nothing happens.
The floor is hard, and Henry’s tailbone begins to ache. It’s a bad position to be stuck in: with his wrists and ankles tied together, he can’t shift his weight as he’d like—the only option is to let himself fall over, and he won’t do that. He is still dizzy from the drugs, so it’s hard to stay alert.
There is a sudden loud clanking of bolts and the door is heaved open. It is fiery-bright inside, and two men in coal-black leotards and blackened faces emerge from this furnace to grab a man in the first row and drag him through the door. It slams heavily shut behind them.
It was so sudden, Henry doesn’t know what to make of it. Those men looked exactly like the weird stagehands from the play—if they weren’t actually the same ones. Is this part of the show, too? He looks around at the other captives, trying to make significant eye contact, but they’re far away, lost in their own dark musings.
The door crashes open again, the creepy mimes popping out to drag another victim inside. Like the first man, this one does not struggle, going limply to whatever fate lies within that burning room. But this time, just before the door closes, Henry hears a gag-muffled scream—a scream of total blubbering terror.
“Behold Iacchus,” a powerful voice says.
The scream is cut short.
Shit, Henry thinks. I gotta get outta here.
Trying to clear his head, he takes a few deep breaths and scoots sideways, bumping into the prisoner on his right. The man looks at him with alarm, and Henry indicates as best he can that they should work together to undo each other’s bindings. The man watches Henry’s performance with maddening incomprehension, as if escape is an alien concept. Frustrated, Henry looks down the row for any sign of understanding, but the other men are either staring at him in the same stupefied way or completely out of it.
The door opens again and another man is taken.
Over the course of the next…half hour? Hour?—he can’t see his watch—Henry works on persuading the men and on loosening his own bindings, twisting his hands every which way to try and attack the knots. Every five or ten minutes he is forced to stop and play it cool as their captors select another victim.
No good. The twine is too tight, and the more Henry struggles the tighter the knots become—these creeps really know how to tie them. The only other alternative is to cut it, but there’s no sharp edge of any kind to rub against.
Finally it is down to him and one other man. Henry implores the guy to help him, making what sounds he can to get across the urgency of the situation, but the man is a zombie. Henry even tries to force help on him, clutching at his bindings, but the idiot catches him by surprise with a head-butt to the temple that almost knocks Henry senseless. When the door is flung open again and the man dragged through, Henry watches with a sense of furious contempt: Good choice, asshole.
As a last shot Henry squirms across to the wall, trying to find a protruding edge of stone that he can scrape against. Anything. He does manage to loosen his gag and goes into an all-or-nothing frenzy of contortions hoping something else will give