David did not stop. He did not take in the women around him. He plunged deeper.

He turned a corner into a row of lower, meaner houses. In the windows here were unsubtle hints as to the nature of the wares within. Whips. Cuffs. A girl of seven or eight in a baby’s crib, squalling and snotty.

David tracked on and on. The crowds thinned further, although David was never alone. The night air teemed with faint noises. Rooms full of conversation. Music, played well. Laughter. Cries of pain and the barks or howls of animals.

There was a tumbledown cul-de-sac near the heart of the sector, a little still place in the maze. David turned onto its cobbles with a faint shudder. There were men at the doors of these establishments. They stood, heavy and surly in cheap suits, vetting the miserable men that came to them.

David shuffled up to one of the doors. The massive bouncer stopped him, one hand impassive on his chest.

“Mrs. Tollmeck sent me,” muttered David. The man let him pass.

Inside, the lampshades were thick and dirty brown. The hall seemed glutinous with shit-coloured light. Behind a desk sat a severe, middle-aged woman in a drab floral dress that matched the lampshades. She looked up at David through half-moon spectacles.

“Are you new to our establishment?” she asked. “Have you an appointment?”

“I’m due in room seventeen at nine o’clock. The name is Orrel,” said David. The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows very slightly and inclined her head. She glanced down at a book before her.

“I see. Well, you’re…” she glanced at the wall-clock. “You’re ten minutes early, but you might as well go up. You know the way? Sally’s waiting for you.” She looked up at him and-horrendously, monstrously-gave him a complicitous little wink and smirk. David felt sick.

He turned from her quickly and headed up the stairs.

His heart was going very quickly as he climbed, as he emerged in the long corridor at the top of the house. He remembered when first he came here. At the end of the walkway was room seventeen.

David began to walk towards it.

He hated this floor. He hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.

The door to room seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house rule.

David walked slowly along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar, muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing, hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than fifteen. She crouched on all fours…her arms and legs were hairy and pawed…dog’s legs.

His eyes lingered on her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, an unpracticed quadruped, looked over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed out her arse and pudenda.

David’s mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.

This was where he shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.

The city crawled with Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving. But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the most sophisticated manner.

Most Remade tarts had been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers. There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams. It was a profitable sideline run by the biothaumaturges of the state.

Time was stretched out and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.

It was like a nightmare garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture.

David paced past naked bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.

There was a thump inside David’s head. He felt groggy with exhausted horror.

Room seventeen was before him. David did not turn back. He imagined the eyes of the Remade behind him, on him, staring from their prisons of blood and bone and sex.

He knocked on the door. After a moment, he heard the chain being lifted from within and the door opened a little. David entered, his gorge rising, leaving that shameful corridor into his own private corruption. The door was closed.

A suited man sat waiting on a dirty bed, smoothing down his tie. Another man, who had opened and closed the door, stood behind David with folded arms. David glanced at him briefly and turned all his attention to the seated man.

The man indicated a chair at the foot of the bed, bade David pull it up in front of him.

David sat.

“Hello ‘Sally,’ ” he said quietly.

“Serachin,” said the man. He was thin and middle-aged. His eyes were calculating and intelligent. He looked wildly out of place in this crumbling room, this vile house, and yet his face was quite composed. He had waited as patient and comfortable among the Remade whores as he would in the corridors of Parliament.

“You asked to see me,” said the man. “It’s been quite a time since we’ve heard from you. We had designated you a sleeper.”

“Well…” said David uneasily. “Not much to report. Till now.” The man nodded judiciously and waited.

David licked his lips. He found it hard to speak. The man looked at him oddly, frowned.

“The rate is still the same, you know,” the man said. “A little more, even.”

“No, gods, I…” David stuttered. “I’m just…You know…Out of practice.” The man nodded again.

Very out of practice, thought David helplessly. Been six years since the last time and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Got myself out of it. You got bored of blackmail and I didn’t need the money…

The very first time, fifteen years ago, they had entered this very room as David spent himself in one of the mouths of some ruined, cadaverous Remade girl. The suited men had shown him their camera. They had told him they would send their pictures to the newspapers and the journals and the university. They had offered him a choice. They paid well.

He had informed. Freelance only; once, maybe twice a year. And then he had stopped for a long time. Until now. Because now he was frightened.

David breathed in deeply and began.

“Something big’s going on. Oh, Jabber, I don’t know where to start. You know the disease that’s going round? The mindlessness thing? Well, I know where it started. I thought we could just get on with things, I thought it’d all be…containable…but Devil’s Tail! It just gets bigger and bigger and…and I think we need help.” (Somewhere deep inside his guts some small part of him spat disgust at this, this cowardice, this self-delusion, but David spoke quickly, kept talking.) “It’s all down to Isaac.”