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There was a boot near her face. She could see the black rubber waffling on the sole and a dangling shoelace. She had been seeing this boot off and on for an hour now, registering it for a moment, then forgetting about it as soon as she closed her eyes again.

Vic could not say where she was. She supposed she should get up and find out. She thought there was a good chance that the carefully fitted-together fragments of herself would collapse once more into glittering powder when she tried, but she didn’t see any way around it. She sensed that no one would be coming to check on her anytime soon.

She had been in an accident. On the motorcycle? No. She was in a basement. She could see the stained concrete walls, the surface flaking away to show stone behind. She could make out a faint basement odor as well, partly obscured by other smells: a strong reek of seared metal and a whiff of fecal matter, like an open latrine.

She got her hands under her and pushed herself up to her knees.

It didn’t hurt as bad as she thought it would. She felt aches in her joints, in the small of her back, in her ass, but they were like the aches caused by flu, not like the aches of shattered bones.

When she saw him, it came back to her, all of it, in a single piece. Her escape from Lake Winnipesaukee, the bridge, the ruined church, the man named Bing who had tried to gas her and rape her.

The Gasmask Man was in two pieces, connected by a single fatty string of gut. The top half of him was out in the hall. His legs were just inside the door, his boots close to where Vic had been sprawled.

The metal tank of sevoflurane had shattered, but he still held the pressure regulator that had been attached to the top, and some of the tank was attached to that—a helmet-shaped dome of twisted metal spikes. He was the thing that smelled like the ruptured septic tank, probably because his internal septic tank had in fact ruptured. She could smell his bowels.

The room looked skewed, knocked crooked. Vic felt dizzy taking it all in, as if she had sat up too quickly. The bed had been flipped over, so she could see the underside of it, the springs and legs. The sink had come away from the wall, hung at a forty-five-degree angle above the floor, supported only by a pair of pipes, which had come loose from their braces. Water bubbled from a cracked joint, pooling upon the floor. Vic thought if she had dozed a while longer, there was an excellent chance she could’ve drowned.

It took some doing to get to her feet. Her left leg didn’t want to unbend, and when it did, she felt a stab of pain intense enough to cause her to draw a sharp breath through clenched teeth. The kneecap was bruised in shades of green and blue. She didn’t dare put much weight on it, suspected it would fold under any real pressure.

Vic took a last look around the room, a visitor to a grubby exhibit in some museum of suffering. No, nothing else to see here. Let’s move along, folks. We have some fabulous pieces to examine in the next room.

She stepped between the Gasmask Man’s legs and then over him, being careful not to snag a foot on that low gut-string trip wire. The sight of it was so unreal she couldn’t feel ill.

Vic maneuvered around the top half of his body. She didn’t want to look at his face and kept her eyes averted while she moved past him. But before she had gone two steps back the way she’d come, she couldn’t help herself and glanced over her shoulder.

His head was turned to the side. The clear eyewindows showed staring, shocked eyes. The respirator had been punched backward to fill his open mouth, a gag made of melted black plastic and charred fiber.

She made her way down the hall. It was like crossing the deck of a boat beginning to capsize. She kept drifting to her right and putting a hand against the wall to steady herself. Only there was nothing wrong with the hallway. Vic herself was the boat in danger of rolling over, sinking back down into a churning darkness. She forgot to go easy once and let her weight settle on the left leg. The knee immediately folded, and she threw out an arm, grabbing for something to support her. Her hand closed on the bust of Jesus Christ, his face charred and bubbled on one side. The bust sat atop a bookshelf crammed with pornography. Jesus grinned at her lewdly, and when she drew her hand away, it was streaked with ash. GOD BURNED ALIVE ONLY DEV1LS NOW.

She would not forget about the left leg again. A thought occurred to her, random, not even entirely intelligible: Thank God it’s a British bike.

At the base of the stairs, her feet caught on a mound of garbage bags, a plastic-wrapped weight, and she tipped forward and fell into it—for the second time. She’d landed on this same mass of garbage bags when the Gasmask Man had knocked her down the stairs; they had cushioned her fall and quite likely saved her from shattering her neck or skull.

It was cold and heavy but not entirely stiff. Vic knew what was under the plastic, knew by the sharp raised edge of hip and the flat plane of chest. She did not want to see or know, but her hands tore at the plastic anyhow. The corpse wore a Glad-bag shroud, held tightly shut by duct tape.

The smell that gushed out was not the odor of decay but worse in some ways: the cloying fragrance of gingerbread. The man beneath was slim and had probably been handsome once. He hadn’t decomposed so much as mummified, his skin shriveling and yellowing, the eyes sinking back into his sockets. His lips were parted as if he had died in the middle of uttering a cry, although that might’ve been an effect of his flesh tightening and drawing back from his teeth.

Vic exhaled; it sounded curiously like a sob. She put her hand on the man’s cold face.