The blonde woman’s words returned to him. Repairs. Good as new.
Yes. He hadn’t felt this spry in ages.
This hungry, either. He was famished.
He took stock of his surroundings. It was a small, plain room without windows. Almost everything was made of a dull platinum-grey metal. There were no ornaments of any type and no furniture other than the bed, not even a chair or a cupboard. It could have been a single-occupancy hospital ward. Or, equally, a prison cell.
The smell was strong now, and Stuart realised why he couldn’t place it. It was actually no smell at all. The room was entirely odourless, as though nothing that carried any kind of scent was permitted here. Even bacteria were forbidden. He bent and put his nose to the bed mattress, which was made of a grey, form-fitting foam. Nothing came up from it, not even a whiff of his own body, although he had been lying on it for several hours at least.
The room was beyond antiseptic; it was sanitised to the nth degree.
His stomach growled. The hunger was getting bad, but he could see nothing to eat.
He went to the door, only to find it lacked a handle. No opening device of any sort was evident, nor any keyhole.
A cell, then.
He thumped on the door. “Hey! Anyone out there? What’s going on?”
Nothing from the other side.
He thumped harder.
“Hey! Somebody must be able to hear me. I don’t know who the hell you are but you have no right to be keeping me here.”
If his captors were Serpent Warriors, they did in fact have every right. But Stuart wasn’t going to let a small detail like the rule of law bother him.
“Come on! Let me out. You’re making a big mistake. I’m really not the sort of person you want to be holding against his will.”
An impotent threat, but it was all he had.
Still no one came.
He stepped back, took a run-up and barged the door. It didn’t so much as shudder within its frame. He tried again, launching himself as hard as he could across the meagre breadth of the room, rebounding uselessly off the door. A couple more times, but he was left with nothing to show for his efforts except an aching shoulder. The door would not budge.
“Shit,” he hissed. “All right,” he called out. “At least bring me something to eat. I’m bloody starving. You can’t deny a captive a meal. You’re going to torture me later, fair enough, but in the meantime you could show a bit of common decen-”
At that instant, the door vanished. It was as if the metal had turned to thin air.
And standing the other side was a skinless man.
Stuart recoiled in revulsion.
The man was over six feet tall, and every fibre of sinew and muscle could be seen, clear as day, except at his nether regions which were swathed in a loincloth. Eyeballs stared from skull sockets. Flesh flexed wetly. Veins pulsed with blood. Here and there were pallid glimpses of bone.
Stuart wanted to believe this was some ghastly life-imitating statue, an anatomical effigy designed to give prisoners a heart-stopping fright.
Then it spoke.
“Who said anything about torture?”
Stuart may have said something in reply, he wasn’t sure. Right then, his thoughts were skittering in all directions, like panicked rats.
“Oh, wait a moment,” said the skinless man. His voice was a low, sibilant rasp. “I’ve done it again. I’m see-through, aren’t I? Everything on display. Let me opaque myself.”
In the space of a few seconds, skin formed all over his body. It appeared in patches, which spread and merged, until the man was fully covered in his proper sheath of epidermis. The skin hadn’t grown from scratch, Stuart thought. It was more a case of the invisible becoming visible.
“That’s better, eh?” Though the man looked markedly less horrifying now, there was still something disconcerting about his appearance. Possibly it was because he lacked hair of any kind. Right down to the eyebrows, he was baby-smooth and follicle-free. “Don’t know what was going through my head,” he continued. “I usually save that look for when I’m in combat. Scares the living daylights out of the opposition.”
He said it deadpan, but with a hint of disingenuousness. Stuart was in no doubt he had done it on purpose, this “glass skin” trick of his or whatever it was. He liked the effect it had on people. Relished the disgust and helpless horror it evoked.
“So, you could do with a bite to eat, could you? Always the way after one of Toci’s treatments. They take it out of you. You need to replenish the system. Why don’t you come with me to the refectory? I believe everyone’s having lunch.”
He made an ushering gesture. Stuart hesitated, then stepped out through the now doorless doorway. He gave the frame a quick inspection as he exited. The jamb was solid all round and he could see no slot that a door could have retracted into. There’d been a sheet of metal firmly in place, and then not. How was that possible?
He had a different question, however, for his escort. “You said Toci. As in the goddess, yes? The patroness of midwives?”
“None other.”
“But people aren’t named after the gods. It’s not allowed. It’s considered blasphemy.”
“Then it’s a good thing Toci isn’t named after Toci,” said the hairless man. “Just as it’s a good thing I’m not named after Xipe Totec. Mustn’t have blasphemy, must we?”
Stuart couldn’t fully fathom the meaning of the remark. He was, however, beginning to glimpse the shape of something here. Something he couldn’t quite wrap his head around yet, mainly because he was loath to. It was too huge, too extreme. Too insane.
A short corridor led to a terrace that ran round the rim of a vast open area. The terrace made four right-angle turns, describing a square, and there were more such terraces above and below, linked to one another by staircases. Stuart seemed to be inside an inverted ziggurat, its hollow interior forming an immense atrium. The whole was capped with a ceiling which glowed with light, enough to turn the interior into day. You could have stuffed the largest ziggurat on earth, upended, into this space and still had room to spare.
“Where are we?” he asked the hairless man.
“Halfway there.” Stuart’s query had been misconstrued deliberately. “Just a little further along.”
They arrived at a door larger than the one to the room Stuart had been in, but just as devoid of obvious unlocking system. The hairless man simply rested a palm on it and the door was gone in a blink.
“So that’s what you do,” Stuart said, bemused. “Touch it and it’s gone. Why didn’t that happen when I hit the other one?”
“It wasn’t keyed to your bio-data, that’s why. You’re not one of us.”
They entered a dining area complete with tables and chairs that were all wrought from the same dull metal as everything else. There was decoration here, at least. The walls carried designs that were similar to the carved murals on display in any temple or hieratic building: pictograms, hieroglyphs, symbols, all pertaining to the gods, or to sacred animals such as lizards or hummingbirds. The difference was that these were drawn in patterns of bright light, and weren’t static. Colours and imagery shifted constantly, a series of tableaux that flowed one to the next. It was mesmerising to watch and Stuart could have gazed at it for hours were it not for the fact that, seated at one of the tables, was the oddest assortment of human beings he had ever laid eyes on.
They were all tall, like the formerly skinless man. They had that in common, but little else. A couple of them were extraordinarily old, withered to the point of desiccation. Others were young and almost impossibly healthy-looking, vibrant with life. One man was so dark-complexioned he seemed to have been hewn from black marble. Another man was clearly quite physically incapacitated, his twisted frame showing deformities of all sorts, from a club foot to tumorous growths. Next to him was a person who could have been male or female, with sensuous lips and swept-back hair. Loose clothing draped his or her physique, making gender even harder to determine.