A brutalist-tower hotel located deep in the woods, deep in the wastelands, beside northern Europe’s seas: here, it’s the Deep North, the True North. Nearby, there’s an accursed city. Here, death’s aperture is opening…
Now I’m aware that there’s a tall and towering figure in my Zoo-Hotel suite with me. I can only deduce that it’s another of death’s overseers, but this time a senior overseer, assigned to dispense with difficult or obstinate cases. If anything, he’s more elegantly darkly-dressed even than the last overseer. He approaches me from the extreme angle of the suite, advances towards me. He looks me in the eyes: ‘You wanted to go back with the living?’ He exposes a scalpel from behind his back, pushes my forehead back against the bed’s surface with a powerful flat hand, holds it there, then uses the other hand, the left hand, to incise a profound near-vertical cut down my throat, from the right-hand side of the jaw, deeply through my skin and flesh, all the way down to the top of the horizontal manubrium bone. All the way, he holds my body tightly, embracing me. Smiling, he then tells me: ‘Let’s see what comes out of that.’
By Stephen Barber
Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak