Free The Killing Floor Blues by Craig Schaefer

four seconds, exhaled for four seconds. Then again. And again, as my thoughts slipped into the background, taking the noise and the prison along with them. My heartbeat slowed with the clock, seconds squeezing by like drops of molasses through an hourglass.
    It was dark behind my eyes, but I saw a light in the distance. A silver pinprick. I walked toward it.
    A chant reverberated through my skull, half in my voice, half in a stranger’s. A litany of ancient names. A warning in a language I didn’t speak. Now I walked along a winding ribbon of tarnished pewter, inlaid with swirling Hebraic script reading
Malkhut, Yesod, Hod, Gevurah, Da’ath
.
    The ribbon rose and twisted, taking me along with it. Plunging into worlds of shadow that billowed like black smoke. I wasn’t in my cell. I wasn’t not in my cell. I was in between.
    The shadow in-between
, I thought as the ribbon became a road.
    In the darkness, looming up before me, was a throne. A throne eighty feet tall, a mountain of crumbling black basalt. The king who sat slumped upon that throne, a giant in moldering robes with a rusted crown upon his skeletal brow, had been dead since time began.
    “I come as a pilgrim,” I said, “with hands empty and cold.”
    My gifts are free
, rasped the King of Worms in a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere.
    “Decay is the fate of all life.” I clasped my hands before me, giving the ritual response.
    And madness is the fate of all sanity
.
    “I seek to spread your wisdom upon the flesh of the world once more.”
    This would please me. Come. Receive your sacrament
.
    Figures emerged from the shadows at the foot of the throne. Two of them shuffling toward me in spasmodic convulsions, walking with muscles gone stiff from rigor mortis. They were women, perhaps, wearing the habits of nuns but their garb adorned with crimson symbols from no earthly order. Empty eye sockets turned my way.
    I stood my ground and counted my breaths. Four seconds in. Hold. Four seconds out.
    The king’s servants converged upon me. One shambled in a slow, painful circle, neck bones crackling as she kept her eyeless face trained upon mine. The other reached for me with one slender, rotting hand. Her flesh, what little remained of it, was a hive of maggots. No, some alien species
like
a maggot, with skin glistening, jet-black, and reflecting the pinprick light from distant stars.
    The nun stroked my cheek, gentle, like a lover.
    I didn’t flinch.
    The other nun laid her rotted hand upon my scalp and yanked my head back with ferocious strength as she pushed downward, forcing me to my knees with my face upturned.
    The one before me reached up to her throat and plucked a single, squirming maggot-thing from her rotten skin. It twisted and writhed, pinned between thumb and forefinger, as she held it above my face. Panic welled up and I fought to keep my fear in check, holding very, very still as her hand came down.
    I smelled mildew, and decay, and sweet rose water. Just before she dropped the maggot into my left nostril.
    I lurched forward, eyes wide open, the vision torn away and the stench and sounds of the prison hammering my senses. Suddenly free and suddenly entombed. I clutched the thin blanket, pressing my face to the foot of my bunk, clenching my jaw until it ached. I could feel it, the alien
thing
inside my body, crawling up my sinuses and spreading a rash of pain like I’d just snorted chili powder. I felt the maggot squirm across the back of my eyeball, my vision blurring as it left a burning trail on its way to my brain. I wanted to claw at my skin, rip out my eye, anything to get the damned thing
out
. All I could do was count my breaths and hold very still, clutching the blanket, waiting for the feeling to end.
    But it didn’t. The insect curled up on the skin of my brain—against all logic, against everything I knew about the human body, I could feel it there—and went to sleep. An unscratchable itch beneath my skull. A parasite