Garth Marenghi's Incarcerat

by Garth Marenghi

Genres: Black Humor; Horror

Synopsis

Garth Marenghi - Frighternerman, Darkscribe, Doomsage - is back with volume two of his TerrorTome . . .

Horror novelist Nick Steen is abducted and imprisoned at Nulltec, a shadowy technological research facility with excellent conference parking, concealed deep on the Stalkford Downs. There he is observed, tested and 'interfered with' (physically) by a team of scientific experts led by Dr Barbara Nullman, determined to probe and 'nullify' his escaping imagination . . .

(P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: October 31, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER EIGHT
‘The Medusa Project’

As the elevator doors began to slide shut, Nick screamed a final warning at the two girls cheerily waving him goodbye from the far end of the corridor.

‘You’re prisoners!’ he yelled through the closing gap. ‘Incarcerats!’

‘Come back and play another day!’ said Christabel, as the psychic retriever’s face grinned back at Nick from between the two girls. ‘We can take Scorcher on a picnic! To another cell!’

‘You fools!’

‘Easy, boyo,’ said the Taffer, behind Nick. The Welchman had turned up in the nick of time, just as Scorcher was leaping on to his gurney with the clear intention of flambéing Nick’s personal pipe outlets. The Taffer had yanked Nick’s gurney back into the main corridor, keeping the dog at bay with his giant, hardened leek.

As the lift doors finally shut upon them, Nick glared at the Taffer’s reflection in the mirrored panelling.

‘What the hell was all that for?’ he yelled. ‘Why take me on a detour via the Nulltec holding cells? I already knew this place had a sinister side.’

‘I got the wrong bloody room, boyo,’ said the Taffer. ‘Thought I was on a different floor. It’s these bloody eyes, you see. I can’t see a damned thing, I can’t.’

‘Look, the Taffer, I know you’re not blind. You pulled those plastic eggshells out once and dangled them in front of my face, remember?’

‘Remember? Oh no, boyo. Me, I cannot remember a bloody thing, look you. Got the memory of a goldfish, I have.’

Nick closed his eyes and sighed deeply. Why was this guy pretending he was mad as a brush, when Nick knew he was all too sentient behind the mask? For what reason? Why had he wheeled Nick down to these cells? Was it merely to keep up the pretence of being an annoying blind Welchman with a stupid hat?

Unless the Taffer had suspected that Nulltec were growing suspicious of him? Maybe they’d seen him remove those false eyes in the lift via a hidden camera and he was therefore trying to cover up his mistake by acting extra stupid?

Nick watched a small digital display in the side of the elevator wall change as they ascended through the building. Beside each floor number they were passing, there appeared a small description of the corresponding floor level. Though the information vanished almost as soon as it appeared, Nick was able to glimpse several names against the corresponding wards they were rising through. Floor 7 (Genetic Manipulation Ward and Kennels); Floor 8 (Mutant Baby Wing: Important – Crèche Closed); Floor 10 (Coma Zone, Illegal Organ Transplants plus Mailing Department); Floor 12 (Virus Outbreak Contamination and Decontainment Wing; Floor 13 (Abandoned/Derelict Space plus Equipment Cupboard (self-operating)); Floor 14 (ISEEU); Floor 15 (OT 1 – Routine Disfigurements and Shock Recovery); Floor 16 (OT 2 – Cloning, Ocular X-Ray and Bodyswap); Floor 17 (Human Recycling Plant plus Restaurant-Café); Floor 19 (General Insanity).

As the lift reached Floor 24, marked ‘The Medusa Project’ on the lift’s digital display, Nick was suddenly struck by a terrifying realisation.

When they’d first dragged him into this place, he could have sworn Nulltec only had three levels. Arbitrarily shifting geography was one of Roz’s frequent editorial criticisms of his fiction, and though Nick was loath to acknowledge his former editor’s critical observations, he did wonder now whether Nulltec was indeed a genuine facility, or merely another bizarre figment of his own escaping imagination.

The frightening thought occurred to Nick that he could well be trapped inside one of his own stories again, albeit a tale that had evidently yet to be written. For Nick knew there was always the possibility that he’d dreamed this place up in some ideas notebook his conscious mind had long since forgotten.

‘How come there are twenty-four floors?’ he asked the Taffer. ‘There were only three when I arrived.’

‘Well, boyo, these top floors are part of ongoing stealth experiments,’ said the Taffer. ‘From the outside, they’re invisible to the naked eye. Which is why I, more than anyone else, look you, cannot see them.’

Nick grew a little calmer. At least, then, on this occasion, he wasn’t living in a nightmare of his own making. Even if he was technically still living in a nightmare of his own making. Ultimately, he guessed Nulltec had abducted him as a direct result of his leaking imagination, which itself had been brought about by his own diabolical lust for a possessed typing implement intent on conquering, then destroying, earthly reality. But even if all this was still a nightmare of his own making, this particular nightmare within a nightmare of his own making was not a nightmare of his own making. And for that, Nick was grateful.

‘What’s the Medusa Project?’ asked Nick as the Taffer wheeled him out on to Floor 24. Another lengthy, endless, white-walled corridor led off into the distance.

‘Top-secret security wing, boyo. Where I should have taken you in the first place. Instead of those cells downstairs. Why, if Nulltec knew I’d taken you down to th—’ The Taffer gasped loudly, slamming a large hand over his mouth.

‘Relax,’ said Nick, sensing there may indeed have been secret purpose in the Taffer’s supposed ‘mistake’. For some undisclosed reason, the bulky assistant had brought Nick down to the lower cell level without anyone else in the building knowing.

Nick thought again about those two imprisoned youths. While both were deeply annoying, they were effectively dumb innocents. At their age, Nick figured, they ought to be left alone by sinister government agencies. Ridiculed, sure. Punished, certainly. No one likes an attitude problem. But to keep them in a top-secret research facility against their will, simply to manipulate, exploit or conceal their own latent psychic powers – that took the proverbial biscuit. Nick vowed to break out of Nulltec and rescue them, if he could. And if he couldn’t, whatever. The main thing was for him to get out and alert the authorities. Then they could rescue the girls. If it was even worth their while.

Nick’s gurney reached the end of the corridor, pausing outside a room marked ‘Observation Deck’. He realised the Taffer hadn’t bashed him into a single wall along this particular corridor. Either this floor was so secret that there was no need for any hidden cameras, or the Taffer was trying to tell him something.

‘Look you,’ whispered the Taffer behind Nick, as he ran his ID card through another slotted lock, sliding the door in front open. ‘Look you . . .’

That would be it then, Nick thought, nodding to himself. A subtle warning by the Taffer to look around and keep watch for something. Evidently, the place he was entering now was a particularly threatening environment, one where no doubt the toughest, most challenging chapter of Nick’s incarceration tale would play itself out, one way or t’other, for better or worse, this way or that, by high road or low road.FN25 It felt to Nick like the culmination of some sprawling heroic narrative. An epic journey beginning to near its dramatic conclusion. A climactic denouement in waiting, with Nick as its chief protagonist, and Nullman, say, as its main antagonist. The whole shebang was coming to a head, Nick figured. To use a writing analogy that he felt was somewhat apt, given Nick was a writer by trade, he sensed that he was heading for the final few chapters in this unfolding tale of real-life terror. One that, if this were chapter eight, say, would most likely be concluded around chapter twelve.

Not that he was in the old Act-Three doldrums just yet, to continue his writing analogy, but he was certainly nearing it. And if Nick’s instincts were right, and oft they were, then said doldrums would soon be rearing their ugly head, he feared. Sooner than he wanted them to, that’s for sure – in, say, chapter nine or ten of that figurative tale he felt he was inhabiting.

The Taffer pushed Nick through the open door on to a vast observation deck.

‘So this is why the door was marked “Observation Deck”,’ Nick said as his gurney travelled through the room, once again in awkward, directionless arcs as the Taffer swiftly rediscovered his official ‘blindness’. The vast room was not dissimilar to the main operating centre of Stalkford Airport’s Flight Control Tower, which Nick was somewhat familiar with having used it for several illicit physical liaisons with Julia Thurscott (finally, he remembered her surname), and not completely dissimilar to the observation area overlooking the lecture theatre he’d been wheeled into earlier on.

But this room was larger than both. As if to suggest that whatever events were about to transpire might be eerily similar to, yet infinitely worse than, anything that had come before. As Nick felt a familiar rush of anxiety flooding his mind, he thought back to those recurring psychological harbingers of doom: those terrifying portentums that had been continually plaguing his mind.

Somehow, Nick felt, this room was to be the final piece in that ongoing psychic puzzle. Whatever transpired here in the next hour or two would, he felt sure, decide whether Nick escaped or remained here a prisoner – an incarcerat. It might even decide whether he, nay Stalkford, too, mayhap e’en the world, lived or died.

Nick forced himself to take in his surroundings while he still had time. Against one side of the room stood a vast wall of reinforced glass, looking out in a south-westerly direction over miles of unbroken countryside. In the far distance, beneath the red sun now setting in the evening sky, he spied a familiar jagged crust of black jutting upward against the horizon like a well-picked scab.

Stalkford City.

He shifted his gaze to take in the rest of his surroundings. To the left and right of the building he was imprisoned within grew vast swathes of thick, primeval forest. Chokewood to the west, and neighbouring that, the old, abandoned mine (which, even more spookily, had never been inhabited in the first place). Beyond it, Nick could just make out traces of the Great Widdershins Pathway running straight through the still-unexplored depths of Stalkford’s Wyrden Wodelands.

‘A glorious view,’ said Barbara Nullman, walking towards Nick from the far side of the space. Nick turned and saw, on the wall behind them, the now-familiar sight of banked computer terminals and beeping technical equipment. And, in front, wheeled in once more by Valesco’s assistants, that familiar-looking casket, patched up on one side now with masking tape and an inverted coat hanger stuck into the top, just in front of the revolving beacon, with a disorderly array of metallic netting, resembling a mass of silver tinsel, dangling around the back.

The God Socket.

‘If you think you’re plugging me up to that thing again, you’ve got another think coming,’ said Nick.

‘Wrong,’ Nullman replied. ‘You’ve got another think coming. Quite literally.’

She took hold of the gurney’s handle and wheeled Nick round again so that he was looking out once more into the open countryside.

‘Phase Three of our experiment,’ she continued, ‘will build on previous achievements and turn you, Mr Steen, from a reluctant work-in-progress into Nulltec’s first fully fledged psychic super-soldier.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Nick, unable to think of anything more cutting owing to all the stress he’d been under.

‘We’ve been tweaking the God Socket quite extensively while you’ve been floating in that sensory deprivation tank and recovering what little remained of your sanity.’

She was right there, Nick conceded. He did feel slightly saner than before. Even if the knowledge that he’d been imbibing his own effluence over and over for several days now threatened to destroy that very element of sanity he’d recovered.

‘I think you’ll find we’re quite prepared for any psychic ‘resistance’ you may feel you’ve retained,’ said Nullman. She pointed abruptly outward into the stretch of open countryside beyond them. ‘Look out there, Mr Steen. What do you see?’

‘Stalkfordshire,’ said Nick.

‘And that small black stain on its horizon?’

‘My home. Well, Stalkford City.’

‘And beyond Stalkford City?’

‘The outskirts of Stalkford City?’

‘And beyond the outskirts of Stalkford City?’

‘Landfill?’

Nullman sighed, becoming annoyed. ‘And beyond the landfill?’

Nick finally twigged. ‘Ahh, the airport.’

‘Correct, Mr Steen,’ said Nullman, clicking her fingers at a team of scientists filing in from a door opposite. ‘Stalkford Airport. Scene of your many miraculous “survivals”. A place where, in precisely five minutes from now, a privately chartered jumbo jet will take off on an initial flight path across the width of airspace beyond this very window.’

‘Good job I’m not flying it,’ quipped Nick.

‘In a way, Mr Steen, you will be,’ replied Nullman, looking down at him with the strangest of smiles on her face. ‘Perhaps you will not be physically piloting that plane towards its ultimate destruction, but you will certainly be doing so mentally.’

So that’s what Nullman had planned. She was going to use the God Socket to make Nick bring the plane down in front of them all by thought alone! She would use the box’s godlike power to supercharge his dormant psychic powers again, drawing on his base instincts of anger and rage to force the stricken jumbo down into a muddy field.

‘I won’t do it,’ said Nick. ‘And you can’t make me. I guess you think that because I’ve already caused the deaths of thousands of airline passengers, a few hundred more won’t make much of a dent in my numbed-by-necessity-and-therefore-suitably-assuaged conscience. But you’re wrong, Nullman. This time, I’ll be fighting back.’

‘Naturally, Mr Steen,’ said Nullman. ‘However, this particular flight contains, among its many passengers, one travelling by the name of Rosalind Bloom.’

Roz!

Nick gasped audibly, inwardly. Roz was on that plane! He calmed himself, forcing himself to think things through before giving way to panic. If Roz was indeed on that plane, then Nullman’s intention was presumably to give Nick the opportunity to destroy his former editor.

In that case, he had nothing to worry about.

‘Bad luck, Nullman,’ Nick said. ‘Roz and I are friends now. We’re united in our battle to destroy all the demonic lifeforms my leaking brain has unleashed. Hell, with my help, she rescued me from the terrifying Prolix, where I got flayed by hell-demons.’

‘But she is nevertheless your former editor,’ said Nullman. ‘You forget that with our advanced technical machinery here at Nulltec, we are able to access your innermost thoughts.’

Nick sneered at her. ‘Well, if you think putting my former editor on that plane will somehow stoke up feelings of repressed anger and rage at all the incorrect advice she’s given me over the years, you can think again. You’re forgetting that I’ve roundly rejected all Roz’s ideas, bar one or two that I was legally required to implement in order to stave off a pressing lawsuit. We’ve also slept together figuratively, numerous times. There’s no way my subconscious urges, however dark or ruthless they may be, would ever dream of bringing that plane down. You’re placing far too much faith in the deep-rooted reptilian instinct also known as the basal ganglia or basal nuclei, containing the brain stem, limbic region and the amygdala that we call the R-Complex, Nullman. And you’re forgetting those other two complexes, N and S. N for Nick and S for Steen. They’re not technically actual complexes in the human brain, but they’re there, believe me. So go tell that to your so-called God Socket.’

Nullman smiled gently, nodding. ‘Do you know what a reptilian instinct actually looks like, Mr Steen?’ she said, snapping her fingers at Valesco.

Nick watched as the sinister-looking physician removed a small jar from a nearby fridge unit and walked over towards them. He was smiling, almost malevolently, Nick noticed, while Nullman continued speaking.

‘Do you know what the R-Complex actually is?’ she said.

Nick stifled a gasp as Valesco reached Nick’s gurney, held out the jar and lifted off the lid. Then Nullman reached into her pocket and drew forth a pair of forceps.

She reached into the jar with them and removed a glistening, writhing object from the interior. It was a long, steaming piece of animate scaled matter, jet black in hue with an unholy peppering of bright yellow spots, looking much to Nick like a severed reptilian’s tail.

The tail . . . of a salamander.

‘That lives in the human mind?’

‘It is the human mind,’ said Valesco, ‘at its most primitive.’ He waggled the forceps playfully, forcing the specimen’s tail to rear upwards and lunge in vain at his wrist with cold, reptilian fury. ‘One of these specimens forms part of every single human brain.’

‘And this particular example, if you recall,’ said Nullman, moving round to place her burgundy nails once more on Nick’s cheeks, ‘was taken from a murderous, psychopathic killerFN26.’

Good gravy, thought Nick, in sudden alarm. Were they planning to do what he thought they were planning to do? Would they really do that? Was that what they were planning? Was what they were planning to do really the thing Nick thought they were planning to do? Would they really do it? What it was they were planning? Would they do that?

‘Thanks, I’ve seen enough,’ said Nick, hoping to God Nullman would never, ever, throw that damned thing in his direction. For that was the thing Nick thought they were planning to do. For Nick had the terrifying notion that were Nullman ever to do such a thing – to hurl that nauseating R-Complex Salamander’s tail-type monstrosity in Nick’s direction – then he might completely lose the ability to concentrate on any major task of phenomenal importance he was currently engaged in carrying out, potentially threatening not only his own life and those of others in his immediate vicinity, but also the ultimate success of said gargantuan task. A task, say, like some essential endeavour undertaken towards the end of a titanic struggle, to use his own writing analogy again, or the climactic denouement of some stupendous work of horror fiction, say. That kind of thing. And were Nick ever to be involved in a particularly high-stakes pattern of events, like the thrilling, action-packed climax of some stupendous slice of metaphorical grade-A horror fiction, and Nullman threw that beastly reptilian tail in his direction at the worst possible moment, Nick firmly suspected such a deadly act might destroy him utterly, resulting in the total, irrevocable failure of said task’s completion, plus probable, nay guaranteed, destruction of the entire world.

‘No, we’re not going to do that,’ said Nullman, grabbing hold of Nick’s head. ‘You forget, we can read your mind, Mr Steen, and know you’d be prepared for such an eventuality. Instead, we’re going to implant this extracted R-Complex immediately, deep within your own brain.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
‘The Ghost’

As the grandfather clock in the hall chimed a quarter to three, I gathered up the lantern I’d found in the basement, extinguished the candle on my desk and made my way out into the hall. I closed the front door gently behind me, not wanting Gwendolen to know that I was leaving the house in case she’d managed to find some way of springing the bolts on the attic door and was intent on joining me in the dark to maintain the facade of Arabella being real.

Because ultimately, I wanted to believe my daughter. As crazy as it might sound, part of me wasn’t averse to the idea of the supernatural existing. Both Arabella and her father were long dead, after all, and Anton’s published works were therefore technically beyond the legal period of copyright protection. Even if the supernatural spirit of his daughter were to exist, hellbent on avenging itself against the theft of her father’s ancient, unpublished work, all I need do was thrust my copy of The Writer’s Guide to Contractual Rights and Copyright Law in its semi-transparent face and there was nothing the paranormal brat could do about it.

Her father’s books were mine now.

Mine.

And if all went to plan this night, I need never be hungry or poor, or married to Carlotta, or saddled with custody of our daughter, again. Why, there were twenty completed gothic novels in all, weren’t there? All triple-deckers, meaning I could release each volume individually and publish sixty separate instalments if I wished. Publishing twice a year would mean I’d be covered for the next thirty-seven and a half years. And if each was a multi-million best-seller, I’d be rich beyond my wildest imaginings. What’s more, I’d be famous. Hailed as the greatest name in gothic supernatural fiction who’d ever lived. The sheer uncanny power and historical authenticity of each Anton Mathers – excuse me, Nicholas Stein – novel would reinvent gothic horror for the modern reader, by taking them back in time with tales of terror so chillingly convincing that one might think they’d been written in the very period in which they were set. Which they had been, of course. But that was a secret I’d be taking to my grave.

I doubled up suddenly, gripping my stomach with both hands. Then my body arced backward as I reached out, panicked, for my rear cheeks. I’d felt movement there, I was certain of it. Something liquidous, threatening to spill from the dank entrance of my rectal cave, poised to burst suddenly like an exploding dam past the rocky heights of my perineum, down toward the sleeping valley of my trousered thighs.

I turned wildly, catching a glimpse of the author’s portrait still staring at me from the wall of my study. Perhaps the house on the hill was affecting my mind, too? Perhaps the spirit of Anton Mathers himself, sneering distastefully at me from that sombre portrait in my writing room, was somehow haunting me? Perhaps he was inside my brain?

‘Whatever,’ I said, laughing off my fears. I had the man’s books now. My future was assured, and if it turned out that he and his daughter were in cahoots against Gwendolen and me, then I’d simply bring in a priest, or a bulldozer, and do away with them, and this place, once and for all.

Tomorrow I’d load his entire life’s work into the boot of my car and drive them to a secret storage vault somewhere in Stalkford. If those tomes were going to keep me in business for the next thirty-seven and a half years, I had to get them out of Bloater’s Cove and into a sealed unit with the correct level of heat and humidity.

Then, once I’d managed to locate that foul doll again, I’d convince Tate Rellington that its leaking arse was the cause of the deaths in the village, and that the old woman they’d burned in the town square had been the instigator of the entire problem.

Then Gwendolen and I would be safe.

Slipping outside, I made my way past the outer grounds of the house, through the furthest edge of the graveyard, in the direction of Bloater’s Cove.

The outcropping of trees gave way eventually to the coastline beyond, and I was suddenly conscious that my swinging lamp might signal to some distant rowboat offshore that the coast was clear, the revenue men were all in the tavern and a landing could now commence. Then I remembered that I wasn’t an eighteenth-century smuggler, but a nineteenth-century lighthouse operator, far from my post, having strayed on the way home from some game of cards at my local watering hole, and desperately waving my lantern in sweeping gestures in an attempt to ward yonder schooner back, away from the rocky shore. Then I remembered that I wasn’t that, either. I was Nicholas Stein, dammit: gothic suspense novelist. And I was here to meet a ghost to discuss terms regarding the sale of her father’s priceless (not that I’d say that to her) novel collection.

My mind was swimming. Evidently, I was traversing some kind of time warp on the cliff’s edge at Bloater’s Cove. Whatever strange and powerful supernatural force was guiding me, I knew that I had now entered Arabella’s psychic domain, and the usual rules of time and space no longer applied.

So was she real then, after all? Was this strange feeling of existing in another time and plane a part of her influence over the lives of Gwendolen and me?

I stood there on the edge of the clifftop, staring out to sea as a powerful wind blew in suddenly from the direction of the ocean. I felt its force buffet me as I strained my eyes towards the shoreline, but there was no sign of anyone below.

Was this how she would come to me, then? On the wind? Would Arabella’s cry call to me from that storm now building above the distant waves?

Then I smelled it. That familiar raw stink of the doll’s insides. It was coming from somewhere below me. I knelt down on the edge of the cliff, shifting some rocks aside in an attempt to locate it. For if Arabella’s ghost wasn’t real, then I’d need the doll in my possession in order to convince Tate Rellington that its toxic vapours were the sole cause of those deaths in the village. I thrust my palm against a pile of stones, glimpsing what looked like a piece of dirty white clothing among them, which had somehow become caught between several of the rocks.

I tore into the mound of fragments with both hands, but as I moved the rocks away, I saw that it was nothing of the sort. Instead, the thing looked and felt, once I was able to touch it, like a scrap of worn paper; the page of an old book, perhaps, long since torn and discarded from its original binding.

I drew it out, freeing it at last from the stones. On the front of it was a face.

My face. Not one that had been scrawled on, or drawn in, or painted upon, but a real human face, somehow embedded within the texture of the parchment itself.

I coughed suddenly, reeling from the fetid stink of whatever substance was suddenly assailing my nostrils. That reek, that pong, coming from the odious parody of my own face. The scent of poison. The stench of death. The stink of ink.

It was the smell of the doll.

I forced my dazed head away towards clearer air. Lurching forward, I heaved heavily again as another violent bout of stomach cramps struck without warning. Then found myself prostrate on the very edge of the cliff, that familiar raw stink of the doll’s insides still lingering in my nostrils. As I leaned forward over the side of the crag to expel my guts, I felt a pair of small hands push me from behind.

And I fell. Downward, straight over the edge of the overhang, plunging towards the coastline far below. I shrieked, and as I shrieked, I heard her shriek, too. The terrifying, bloodcurdling shriek of a child’s unforgiving fury. And as our shrieks blended together in the wind, I felt the back of my garments snag on something jutting out from the edge of the cliff. Immediately I sprang upward again, thankful now that I’d heaved with such violent intensity that I’d literally untucked myself with the force of my muscle-cramping, and the lining of my underpants had caught on the end of a jutting twig. With help from some unknown force, whether it were heavenly intervention or not, I had somehow been spared from death.

Bouncing up and down, suspended by my underpants from the extended branch, I turned my head upward to see who, or what, had pushed me over the cliff’s edge.

And saw her. A little girl, drenched from the rain, dressed in Victorian clothes. She had long, blonde hair and a small, thin face that was strangely beautiful.

Yet angry. Oh, so angry.

It wasn’t Gwendolen, that much I knew.

It was Arabella Mathers.

A ghost, after all.

And she hated me. Oh, how she hated me.

She really, really hated me.

By the time I’d shot back up a third time via the spring in my over-stretched pant-line, she’d gone.

Vanished, into the wind

Then my pant-line finally snapped and I dropped on to the sand.

CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Flushed’

Roz tried in vain to brace herself as she rushed at speed along the tunnel. She suspected from the occasional glimpse of mismatched check and backwater valves that it was in fact a water pipe she was being funnelled along, one that had recently been re-plumbed from an outlet into an inlet duct; an uncanny mirroring of the way in which Randy Streak had died, she considered grimly, as she rushed headlong within the heavy torrent.

God alone knew what awaited her in the room she was currently speeding toward, but one thing was certain. Roz was now part of that murderous septic flow that had once blasted backward into Randy Streak’s workplace, filling the entirety of his lonely khazi block with back-borne spew, drowning the doomed maintenance man in an unholy silt before the sheer pressure of his overflowing cubicle-house caused the roof of the entire toilet block to explode upwards into the air, showering Dankton in a towering torrent of recirculated wastewater.

Before Roz could take in the sheer enormity of that terrifying thought, she was at the mouth of the pipe and bursting into the room amid a flood of frothing chemical spume.

As she came to a halt on the tiled floor, Roz looked around her, half-expecting the Randyman to be waiting right there. But she was alone inside a room that looked very much to her like a ladies’ toilet, only one that was hideously befouled.

Myriad