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I stepped on the splatter of crusted filth where dried vomit from days prior had hardened. I advanced as if pushing through a bramble while dozens of pins pricked my face, digging through the wool of my cap and gloves.

The emperor owl puffed out the feathers of his neck and shrank back. He stared at me as if needing to speak but finding no words.

In my vision, white holes widened. The pins had pierced through my sweater, t-shirt, and pants, breaking the skin of my torso and legs. They perforated my eyeballs.

“I don’t know if I can,” said the emperor owl, as though pleading for help.

I spoke through the icy thorns boring into my vocal cords.

“Do your best. It’s enough for me.”

“It will torture you.”

“I’ve grown used to it.”

I took another step. My ears rang as if my eardrums had shredded, while hundreds of points across my body screamed in pain. I’d been thrust into an iron maiden, and someone was pushing the door shut. When I parted my lips, a groan seeped from my mouth, like an animal wailing from my gut.

“No one should live like this, hiding, bracing for the next time they’ll harm her.”

The emperor owl’s outstretched wings trembled, the feathers on his face bristled.

“You force me to participate.”

“It’ll be magnificent,” I murmured. “You and I, a carriage with velvet curtains, a throne room tall as a cathedral.”

“Give me time.”

Air escaped my throat in whimpers as the frozen tips of the pins tore through my molecules.

“If at any point you would have let me escape, tonight will be the night. Come tomorrow I will cease to exist. If you care for me, if you believe I deserve salvation, you will take me with you.”

The emperor owl shuddered. He furrowed his eyelids and stretched his left wing toward me.

I yanked off my gloves and extended my right arm toward the wing as my frayed vision bleached to eggshell white. I limped forward, hunched, sinking deeper the hundreds of pins skewering my flesh.

I cleaved through an unctuous membrane—a cascade of petroleum—and emerged into a pitch-black vault as tall as a house, its arched ceiling gleaming chrome-like. The air reeked of dozens of corpses rotting in a sealed chamber. At the center loomed a mass of tangled black muscles and tendons, its folds oozing oily sludge. Across its surface, lumps slid like air bubbles. It stared at me without eyes.

The left flank of the mass was extruding an appendage of dangling fibers. A stentorian voice struck me like a battering ram of air.

“Touch me.”

I strained forward, stretching my fingers toward the slimy appendage, but a hurricane-force wind shoved against me, threatening to rip me away if my legs faltered. The gale scraped my edges, pelted me with microscopic pellets. I hauled myself forward, bending at a forty-five-degree angle, inching my legs forward centimeter by centimeter.

The hurricane roared. My skin and flesh rippled, slackened, peeled from my bones, and tangled across my skeleton like a dress snagged on a tree. As the wind scoured my corneas, the black, dripping fibrous appendage filled my vision. When my sight whited out, my fingertips brushed a greasy callus.

I sank into a blackout. The lingering sensation of hundreds of pins piercing me submerged into my memory. I lost all awareness of having arms or legs, of how to send signals to move them. My consciousness floated in a silence devoid of the murmur of blood coursing through me, the whirring of my inner mechanisms. Though I tried to count the seconds, they slipped away. Thoughts undulated in my mind like fluorescent eels.

In the abyss, white, yellow, red, and blue flickers ignited one by one, clustering in nests of a brumous purple substance. They spun silken filaments between themselves. The flickers and their nests multiplied until they veiled my vision in a glistening web of vaporous light that trapped the millions of white, yellow, red, and blue gleams like mosquitoes.

There was no room for worry or fear. Nothing could harm me. I would hang in the void and watch as the flickers caught in the web shone forever.

I was hurled back into my body as if sucked through a straw. An avalanche of pain overwhelmed me. I inhabited a rotting body, a colony of decaying atoms and molecules. Noises throbbed in my ears. When I located my arms and legs and staggered backward, the icy pain of hundreds of pins grazed my viscera and flesh until the pins slid free of my body.

At the end of my outstretched right arm, I splayed the fingers of that hand like a sea star. The fingers and their nails, from tip to first joint, were stained a burnished black, and along the edges of those stains, nerves crackled with pain.

Among the beech trees rose the heap of black, greasy muscles and tendons. Buboes slithered across its surface. It concealed the ring of withered grass, as though someone had traced it around the base of the heap.

It unleashed a reverberating lament—a bear’s guttural bellow—that shook the tangle of muscle and sinew. The mass recoiled in a fluid undulation. Its sides swelled and braced against the trunks of the beech trees, causing the entire heap to quiver like gelatin. Cords of muscle and tendon swayed, dripping with greasy residue.

“I thought this time would be different.”

On my right hand, stains of burnished black encroached millimeter by millimeter toward the second joint, seeping into the pores.

The heap slithered between the beeches and suddenly wrenched backward, dilating the circle of withered grass to the heap’s base, as though smudged by a finger. Where the creature had pressed against the beech trunks, the bark had puckered into ash-gray ovals—rotten bruises like those on spoiled fruit. The clump of muscle and sinew retreated in jerks, keening as it dissolved into the night.

I limped forward on rubbery legs, following the trail of flattened, wilted grass that snaked between the beeches—the wake of a gargantuan snail. The taut skin of my blackened fingers twitched. I tried to scream for my friend, but my vocal cords had fused shut. A storm of agony flooded me; even the primal command for my legs to hold me up barely pierced through.

The two-meter silhouette of the mound of muscle and tendon detached itself from the night. Whimpering, it murmured that it had believed this time would be—then vanished before finishing.

I stumbled along the path of blackened grass. On my right hand, the dark stains now crept toward my knuckles. I halted where the creature had disappeared. The trail of flattened, charred vegetation ended abruptly in a semicircle.

No one watched.

My legs trembled. I clutched my right wrist. At the border of the stains, now merged and cresting over my knuckles, nerves sparked and short-circuited.

“I was there,” I croaked. “Thank you.”

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies.