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small room, Daniel was barely conscious now and barely aware of the wooden splinters piercing the muscles where his forearms touched the rests on the chair. The fragments adroitly avoided all major arteries, making deep connections within the flesh. The morbid tapestry of the chair’s engraving was now fed with Daniel’s blood, giving the scenes vivid color. The spindled backrest peeled into wooden shoots that penetrated Daniel’s back in small, precise punctures from nape to base, breaching the skin on either side of his spine and seeking the central nervous system. Synchronized arachnid legs of wood sprang from the top of the high back, splaying outwards to close around Daniel’s skull, and began to drill into the hard, dense tissue like medieval brain surgeons’ instruments.
    Fingers of energy leaped from a single bronze dish mounted on the generator, crackling and fizzing as they hit Daniel’s skin. Charred patches of necrotic tissue were left in the wake of the bolts as they hurried like miniature tornadoes across his body and ignited his clothes where they lingered. The light fittings began to sway, rotating beams of light around the two rooms, turning the inmates’ agonies into the motion of characters drawn on the edges of a rapidly flicked sketchbook. The generator began to emit a high-pitched screech as the chair began to vibrate. Molecules were disassembled and Daniel seemed to be fused with the chair on an atomic level, the distinction between his flesh and the chair’s timber becoming less defined.
    A brilliant, dazzling pure white light blinked into existence in front of Daniel’s face, but his eyes were closed now as the wooden fingers surveyed the matter of his brain. His face twisted into a grimace of pleasure, as his subconscious became responsive to levels of awareness beyond normal human experience and worlds beyond the physical plane. The light rippled like liquid sky in front of Daniel, the edges changing from blue to green to black as the centre began to shimmer silver and blossom outwards like the unfolding of a steel flower. The layers folded and peeled, to be replaced again and again, as the centre expanded until the dimensions of the phenomenon paralleled the chair.
    Although the floating, mushrooming shape was suspended, independent of the space around it, viewed from the front it seemed to possess depth and three dimensions. However, from the side aspect it was razor thin, almost invisible. The light radiating from the interior quivered as if the surface of a lake had been disturbed by something coming out of its depths. The immediate area surrounding the happening began to reek of the stench of deprivation, of the corruption of flesh in all its facets, blood, sex, waste; and Daniel’s eyes flickered as if smelling salts had been passed under his nostrils. An acrid, metallic taste filled his mouth and he heard the pitch of the generator, even though it was beyond the range of human hearing.
    The opening at the heart of the distortion warped and buckled as something solid emerged, something stepping from the void into this world. Its tread was hesitant and unsure, like a wild animal testing unfamiliar territory. The limb was moist, dripping with a thick, gelatinous substance like mucus, and it issued a thin vapor as it came into contact with an environment markedly colder than its own. The skin was paper thin, almost invisible, so that the muscles and sinews were visible, working beneath the transparent film as the body parts moved. The remainder of the entity emerged from the opening, and as it did so, it trailed a wet jellied membrane that secreted from the rift and attached to the thing’s body like a placenta.
    But the being was fighting to be free of the link and its internal organs and muscles were visibly stretching beneath its sheer skin, as if they were magnetized and resisting the strong attraction of the opening. The thing was seven feet in height and humanoid but it had the