Sins of the Father, Sins of the Flesh

This is a bad place.

You’ve seen it before. Maybe you saw it in a movie and shuddered with delightful fear because you knew it wasn’t real; maybe you saw it in a picture in a book you wish you’d never opened because now you know it is.

Maybe you’ve been there in your nightmares.

It’s a square room fifteen feet on a side, concrete walls, and a cement floor with a very slight slope running down to a drain maybe five inches across. And there’s a chair that looks like a dentist’s chair (but isn’t) in the center of the room.

The room is clean and dry now: the chair that looks like a dentist’s chair (but isn’t) shines in the light from the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The chair is metal, and has what looks to be restraints welded onto the arms and legs.

There’s a workbench along the wall. It’s metal, too. There are things laid out on it in neat rows at which it is best not to look too closely. There are hooks bolted into the walls. There are things hanging from them at which you also do not want to look too closely.

But it’s the 22nd century now. Why keep those old things around, so many simple things with so many sharp edges, things that take on stains from long use and will, no matter how finely made, eventually break?

There is a cabinet on the wall which opens at the proper code. Is its soft electronic chime comforting? There are things from this century in it, after all, things with elaborate circuitry, little black boxes with wires that end in electrodes with sticky pads on them.

But if you take a closer look (and I don’t recommend it), you’ll see that some of those boxes have wires that end in sharply pointed probes instead of sticky pads and that all of the things in the cabinet seem rather forlorn. If they could speak, it would be in sad whispers, because the man who works here keeps that cabinet closed most of the time. He’s a traditionalist. He’s proud of this room, and why shouldn’t he be? It’s got a very distinguished lineage. There’s a room like this, and a man like him, and a job like this to be done, in any age, in every era.

So he keeps to the old tools and the old ways. There’s a place for everything and everything is most certainly in its place; if he takes something out, he puts it back exactly where it was. He has a high-pressure water hose curled neatly in one corner to wash the room down when the work is done.

But some things can’t be washed away. And no matter how well the room is cleaned, kept, and cared for, it stinks. It stinks of fear and old blood, of the bits and the pieces that slip down the drain.

And that’s just how the man who works here likes it. Time goes on, but the room is timeless. The tools may change, but the job never does. That the bodies in the chair aren’t always human now doesn’t matter; they’re all just bodies to him, like they always have been.

The room. The job. The bodies. The smell.

That’s always the same, too.

And even before you see the chair and the drain and the bench and the hooks and the things on the walls, it’s the smell that lets you know:

This is a very, very bad place.