When last we left our intrepid anti-heroes, the days were long and blistering, the nights soothing and redolent of jasmine. Polly Brubaker had just rescued Bob Ferber from gurney bondage in a barren adjunct of St. Stephen's Medical Center (an adjunct, it bears mentioning, that was not the Judy Garland Memorial Coma Ward she was seeking).

As Bob and Polly deposited themselves into the Carmen Miranda Memorial Elevator and exchanged the requisite pleasantries, questions pecked at their hides like ravenous carrion crows with rusty razor beaks:

Who was this mysterious Dr. Wockenfusch, and what sort of rectal intrusions did he have in mind?

What of poor little Louie Nozawa, the bright-eyed bicycling youth who had had an unfortunate tangle with Bob's Ford Enormous earlier that day?

And where the Sam hell was this elevator going?

"Do you feel that?"

"I was just about to ask you the same thing." Bob could plainly feel that the elevator was going up, and not down as he'd digitally requested.

Bob impulsively pressed the "L-is-for-Lobby" button on the elevator panel three times, then three more after that, each time with increasing emphasis (six Ls in all). It called to mind countless occasions when he'd found himself standing on a busy street corner, late for this meeting or that meeting, and drumming on a "walk" button to beat the band.

[In irrational moments, he'd often thought of conducting an empirical study to determine whether the time it takes for the light to change is somehow related to the amount of times one presses the button. He even imagined a directly proportional relationship, which would have been evidence of an unconscionable conspiracy. Of course, once his rational mind regained control, Bob realized the folly of such nonsense, and the nonsense of such folly. After the first push, registered somewhere in the guts of the machine, further use of the button was inconsequential to outcome. This was well known. And Bob knew this: things that were well known offered great comfort.]

And so, as Bob well knew it would, the elevator continued to climb. Polly hummed the first song that came to her mind, which so happened to be the last song she'd heard -- "The Grand Illusion."

"Look," Bob exclaimed, pointing at the floor indicator above. Instead of a series of digits, the indicator's LED display was blinking through a series of letters. Bob sounded off the letters in cadence.

"U...L...L...T...H...E...R...U...G." Then the G disappeared, and the elevator jerked to an abrupt halt.

Bob snorted through the heavy silence. "Ulltherug? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Polly's unflappable optimism was starting to flap about noticeably. "Maybe we're about to find out."

On cue, the elevator doors slid open.

Before them was a plain, cubical room with walls and floors of black graphite that devoured light like some cosmic singularity. One lonely cone of luminescence shone from far above to reveal a chair a desk adorned with a crisp red and black flag. [Apart from explaining that the black part formed the background, and that the red part was an angular vulture's talon reaching out for prey, the author leaves the flag's iconography to the reader's imagination.] And behind the flag and desk, seated erect in a plain black chair, was none other than the familiar Dr. Tumblar Wockenfusch.

"Come in!" Dr. Wockenfusch smiled broadly, revealing lips now cracked with viral infection, teeth now green with decay. The Doctor (whose credentials as a certified physician Bob and Polly had independently begun to doubt) flipped a switch under his desk.

The floor of the elevator in which Bob and Polly stood began to retreat, and the void of the elevator shaft below sucked air from the room with gale force. Bob and Polly leapt instinctively into the room proper, and to fleeting safety. Then all was still.

Polly spun to see that where the elevator had been, only seamless black graphite remained. Bob sniffed, noticing that the air in the room smelled thickly of ozone, metal and oil, like an auto repair joint with an arc welder ablaze.

Dr. Wockenfusch's long fingernails tap-tapped on a clipboard: the hospital guest register. Again, his infectant smile. "You, then, are Polly Brubaker, unless I'm mistaken."

Polly nodded meekly.

"Well, Polly, we know little about you, I'm afraid. Certainly not as much as we know about old Beebo here. But I'm sure we can remedy that situation in short order, eh, what?"

Dr. Wockenfusch bolted to his feet, and both Bob and Polly gasped when they saw that his surgeon's smock was drenched in blood. Great coagulant strings of it danced from the fingertips of his surgical gloves. Bob interrupted in a voice shot through with terror.

"What the fuck's going on here?"

"An explanation! Very well, then!" Dr. Wockenfusch snapped off his gloves and, like blowing his nose, produced a recoilless Heimler & Keck .405-naught-zed semi-automatic nun-killer from the drawer of his desk. Its safety was in the fire position, and a glint off its bold blue gunmetal pierced the dim.

"Sit," he offered warmly.

Bob was just about to inquire as to where they might sit when Dr. Wockenfusch pressed a second button and two graphite chairs flipped up from the floor, locking into place behind Bob and Polly. They regarded at the chairs, then each other, then the grinning, blood-soaked enigma behind the desk. Dr. Wockenfusch racked the slide on his .405-naught-zed nun-killer, and Bob and Polly took seats with due haste.

"There you are. Comfortable. Comfort facilitates learning, I'm told. Clamato?"

With his free hand, Dr. Wockenfusch produced a bottled beverage. Polly and Bob shook their heads. "Suit yourself," shrugged Wockenfusch, setting down his weapon, cracking the safety seal on the bottle, and indulging himself in a great draught of the clam and tomato juice beverage. He belched.

"This is about the boy, isn't it?" inquired Polly. "Louie Nozawa?"

The Doctor barked. "Intuition is a trap, young lady; a perilous path and a shoddy substitute for analysis. You would do well to leave the guesswork to shamans and airline pilots."

"So...this isn't about the boy?" Bob asked.

"Of course it's about the boy, you ignorant rube!" snapped Dr. Wockenfusch. The old man's index finger tightened against the trigger, and Bob thought better of asking any more questions.

Wockenfusch's scabby lip curled in contempt for some unseen foe as his mind wandered. "It's always about the boy. Or the girl, or the kindly old man, or the nurse, or the soup kitchen volunteer, or the school teacher, or the ghost in the machine, or whatever cursed, wretched form it chooses to take. Always one step ahead of us, leaping from host to host, always just out of our grasp. Oh, but not this time. Bob, my friend, whether you know it or not, you have done a great, great service to The Party. Rest assured that if we find the boy before the lawless slime of The Underground, you'll be hailed as a martyr for generations. Provided you cooperate, of course."

As Clamato gathered in tiny pools at the corners of Wockenfusch's chapped mouth, Bob felt his stomach turn. "But don't you have to be dead to be a martyr?" Bob realized immediately that he'd broken his self-imposed code of silence.

"As a general rule, yes," Wockenfusch admitted with a conciliatory nod. "But I can promise that your death will be nearly painless. At least after the initial agony."

Bob's testicles receded. "Why do you have to kill me?"

"Because you've been infected, of course. You see, it's the same every time. Once a man sees the light, everything changes in the most sickening ways. It gestates inside him like a germ, and radiates outward like a windswept brushfire. We've managed to contain the blazes until now, but you, Bob -- you've brought the healing rain."

Polly swallowed hard, her optimism now in full flap. "What about me?"

"Well, it's tough titties for you, too. But we'll whip up something marginally merciful, since you only happened on old Beebo here by providence." Polly began to cry. To comfort himself as much as to comfort her, Bob clutched Polly's near hand.

"Now, Bob," queried Wockenfusch, leaning across the desk, "tell me what you saw just before the light."

Bob didn't need to ask what Dr. Wockenfusch had meant by "the light." He remembered it well. It had enveloped his field of vision as soon as his foot hit the ground at Twelfth and Sycamore, and then had enveloped his universe, his everything. It was the brightest light he'd ever seen or imagined, but it wasn't painful or intrusive. It was warm and soft.

He tried to replay the moment in his mind, or rather to rewind the moment to find the piece of information that could make the difference between a quick death and endless, excrutiating torture. But the only memory he could conjure was of the fog, and a cool red glow just beyond. A word? He wasn't certain. And the more he tried to see it, the more it slipped away.

"I really can't answer that question," Bob confessed. "I just don't remember. I'm...sorry.

Dr. Wockenfusch smiled, baring his diseased gums. "Just as well. I do love an excuse to break out the machines." He stood, turned, and walked back into the dark, until he could be seen no more. Soon, the shrill whine of a high-frequency motor shredded the still air.

As visions of unspeakable torture seized Bob in panic, Polly looked down and saw a small fringe protruding from beneath the desk. She looked closer, and identified it. A rug.

"Pull the rug!" she whispered.

"What?!"

"Pull the rug! That's what the elevator said! We must not have seen the P!"

Bob looked down and saw it too. But when he looked up again, the rug was forgotten.

Dr. Wockenfusch stood at the controls of a tentacled contraption of metal and rubber. Its eight independent arms terminated in various devices -- blades, bits, augurs, hoses, probes and the like -- that rotated alternately at great speed. Oil oozed and dripped from its joints, and a occasional bolts of stray amperage erupted from frayed wires. As Bob clenched his sphincter to avoid unintentional elimination, Wockenfusch swung a seat into place in the center of the awful machine. A seat meant for Bob Ferber.

"Now, Bob," hissed the old man, "let's see if we can jog your memory."