I should have intervened, but I couldn’t move. I was so scared that I forgot to breathe, and when I realized that I was holding my breath I gasped so loudly that I thought they would hear me and come for me too. For an instant, it seemed that the woman’s eyeless gaze searched the shadows, resting momentarily where I crouched before moving on. Then her fingers probed at the darkness, reaching for the bloodied man. Her mouthless companion did the same and, when all three of the figures were touching him, they guided him gently toward the stairs and pulled the door closed behind them. After a moment’s pause, I followed them.

The door was unlocked. Behind it were stairs, one flight leading to the upper levels of the warehouse, the other leading down. The furnace in the building shouldn’t have been lit, but it was burning now. I could smell it. I could feel it.

And so I descended until I came to an iron doorway, almost rusted away on its hinges. It stood open, and I could see the light of flames flickering within, casting an orange glow on the walls and floor. I could hear the roar of the fire within. I moved toward it. There was sweat running down my back, and my palms were slick against the gun and the flashlight. I was almost at the doorway when the fire died, and now there was only the flashlight in my hand to guide me. I breathed deep, then slipped quickly into the doorway.

“Who’s…?”

I stopped. The room was empty. Inside, I could see the great furnace, but it was unlit. I walked over to the system and, very gently, reached for it with my hand. I paused before touching it, conscious that if I was mistaken my hand would never be right again.

The furnace was cold to the touch.

I made a quick check of the room, but there was nothing else to be seen. It was uncluttered, with but one way in and out. I kept my back to the wall of the stairs, and my gun pointing toward the furnace room, until I reached the main warehouse, then left so quickly that I raised dust from the floor. I spent the rest of the night in my office, with my gun on the desk before me, my senses so heightened that my ears rang.

I didn’t say anything to anybody about what I thought I had seen. In fact, when I woke up that afternoon and prepared for another night’s work I thought that I might just have imagined it all. Maybe I fell asleep in my chair with one too many nips from the flask under my belt and then just dreamed my way into the warehouse and back to my desk, where I woke up with a memory of mutilated figures taking a small man with a hole in his head down to a furnace room that created heat without burning.

I mean, what other explanation could there be?

Nothing else happened for the rest of that week. I heard no more sounds from the warehouse. I even took the trouble of putting a lock and chain on the door, and checked it twice each night, but it never moved. Still, that smell, the odor of burnt powder, lingered. I could detect it on my uniform and in my hair, and no amount of washing seemed to be able to shake it from me.

Then, one Sunday night, when I was making my usual rounds, I entered the warehouse and found the stairwell doorway gaping. The main door to the building had been closed and locked when I arrived. Nobody had been in or out of there in the past week except me. But now the door was open and, once again, I could see the light of flames dancing on the walls. I drew my gun and called out:

“Hello, anybody there?”

There was no answer.

“Come out now,” I shouted, sounding braver than I felt. “You come out now, or I swear I’ll lock you in here and call the cops.”

There was still no reply, but, in the shadows to my right, a figure moved behind some old crates to the right of the door. I shone the flashlight and caught the edge of something blue as it slipped back into the darkness.

“Dammit, I see you. You come out now, y’hear?”

I swallowed once and the noise of it seemed to echo in my head. Although it was a cold night, there was sweat on my forehead and my upper lip. My shirt was soaked in it. Heat was coming from somewhere; intense, searing heat, as if the whole warehouse were ablaze with some hidden fire.

And I heard the furnace roar.

I kept the gun level with the flashlight as I stepped softly toward the crates. As I drew closer, the light revealed a bare foot, with filthy, twisted toenails and thick, swollen ankles marbled with blue veins. The hem of a dirty blue dress was visible just below the knee. It was a woman, a down-and-out taking shelter in the warehouse. Maybe she had been there all along and I had just never seen her. There must have been another way in and out for her: a busted window or a concealed door. I’d find it, after I rousted her ass.

“Okay, lady,” I said, as I drew almost level with her, “out you-”

But it wasn’t a hobo. Like the old joke goes, it wasn’t even a lady.

It was my wife.

Except I wasn’t laughing.

Her dark hair had grown, obscuring most of her face, and the mottled skin seemed to have tightened on her bones, drawing back her lips and exposing long yellow teeth. Her head was down, her chin almost resting on her chest, and she was looking at the wound in her stomach where the knife had entered, the wound I had made on the night I killed her. Then she raised her head and her eyes were revealed: the blue had faded from them, and they were now almost entirely white. The rictus that was her mouth stretched further, and I knew that she was smiling.

“Hi, honey,” she said. I could hear the dirt moving in her throat. There was more beneath her broken fingernails, left there as she dug herself out of the shallow grave I had made for her far to the south, where dead leaves would cover her resting place and wild animals would scatter her bones. She moved forward in an awkward shuffle and I backed away from her: one step, then two, until my progress was halted by an obstacle behind me.

I turned my back on her and found myself staring into the pale face of the earless man in the black coat.

“You have to go with him,” said my wife, as the man in the black coat laid his hand upon me. I looked up into his face, for he was taller than me by a foot or more. In fact, he might just have been the tallest man I’d ever met.

“Where am I going?” I asked him, before I realized that he couldn’t hear me. I wanted to run, but the pressure of his hand kept me rooted to the spot.

I looked over my shoulder to where my dead wife stood. This had to be a dream, I thought, a bad dream, the all-time worst nightmare I could ever fear to have. But instead of struggling, or crying out, or pinching myself awake, I heard the sound of my own voice speaking calmly.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me where I’m going.”

The dirt in her throat shifted again. “You’re going underground,” she said.

I tried to move then, but all the strength seemed to have left my body. I couldn’t even raise my gun. In the doorway beyond, two figures now stood: the woman without eyes and the man without a mouth. The mouthless figure nodded to the man now holding me, and he began to guide me firmly toward the stairwell, oblivious to my words.

“No,” I said. “This isn’t right.”

But, of course, there was no sound from him, and at last I understood.

Earless, so that he could not hear the pleas of those for whom he came.

Eyeless, so that she could not see those she fed to the flames.

And the mute judge, the repository of sins, unable to speak of what he had seen or heard, merely required to nod his assent to the passing of the sentence.

Three dæmons, each perfect in its mutilation.

My feet were sliding on the dusty floor as I was dragged by the collar toward the waiting flames. I looked to the doorway of the warehouse and saw a man in a gray suit watching me. It was Mr. Rone. I cried out to him, but he merely smiled his dim smile and closed the door. I could hear the sound of his key turning in the lock. I remembered the papers on his desk, old and dusty. I recalled the absence of a secretary, and a man sweeping the floors whose voice, now that I thought of it, might have sounded something like that of Charles Rone himself.