The Hummingbird

You're there but not there. You view everything as if from a television, yet everything is there, more real than anything from a lifeless screen. Perhaps you are a ghost. Or perhaps you are another victim, and you have lost your memory along with your life.

A monstrosity of a man, a hulking being of flesh that cannot be described as anything human, stands among bodies. All of them are merely torsos,missing their heads, their arms, and their legs. Some of them are wrapped in bandages; others are naked. One of those torsos, carefully wrapped, hangs from a ceiling by a meat hook. All of them are gray, hideously preserved in this cold, gray room.

The man walks over to a lever and begins to rotate it. The lever is part of a rope mechanism, a crane pulley, ending with another meat hook latched onto the flesh of yet another torso. The pulley lifts it up. It sways back and forth and you hear what is not possible. The torso has no head, just a ripped stump of a neck. Yet it utters low groans, whispered moans of pure agony and desperate terror. It whimpers as the man and his pulley hauls it into the air until it swings a few feet below the cracked and beaten ceiling, hanging beside the wrapped torso that makes no sound.

The man, if indeed he is one, climbs a ladder that is the only firm thing in this room, the only thing that resembles any sane thing you know. He climbs up to stand behind the crying torso, and you realize suddenly that this man wears nothing. He is a creature of sadistic lust, an unquestionable fact as he begins to rape the torso. Blood comes in spurts, in sprays and endless streams. It's so red, a violent wipe of color among the gray background.

You don't need to worry. In your unsure state of existence the man can't touch you, can't harm you. At least, not anymore. Your only regret is, just as he cannot do anything to you, you cannot do anything to him.