The next in a multi-part series by Lance Marwood

Warning: graphic content.

The first thing you need to know about excruciation is the balance of contrasts. Any artist will tell you, there’s no light without shadow, no composition without frame. Even a peeler will tell you, make sure to take a beat from time to time. They won’t leave the room until the subject’s upper torso is hanging on hooks, but they will leave the room. It’s important to let the subject catch their breath. Even that bitch Therese lets the subject catch theirs, even when it’s supposed to be to exterminatus.

Because it’s all about the contrasts.

My mask is down before my hand’s even on the door. The air transforms from fetid carpet and damp drywall to human perspiration and ammonium carbonate.

Most jobs stipulate no faces. In case the information is found, or on the off chance there are irregularities, everyone breathes a little easier knowing anonymity of the torturer is in place. Plus, the patrons get to enjoy the knowledge the subject isn’t fixating on us. In their mind, I bet they’re thinking the subject’s focused entirely on them, the real cause behind all their pain.

Of course, the client’s always right. We’re recruited by the best of the best. The cream of the crop. The gods that walk the earth.

People think I’m being sarcastic when I say that.

I am not being sarcastic when I say that.

Some people are just better than others. Hasn’t all of history taught us that? Haven’t we been learning that lesson over and over and over again for millennia? We don’t study peoples, we study people. Individuals. Those that rise to the top, naturally. Because they were destined for greatness.

Who were the greatest? Who do we constantly look at? Who is history written and dictated by?

Kings. Emperors. Barons, dukes, generals, warriors. Entrepreneurs who faced off against governments and regimes. Businessmen who understood the worth of capital, the true meaning behind currency and cash.

Great men. History is written by great men, lightning rods for greatness who rise to the call of their journey.

This is why the Dynasties keep producing such incredible men. Great men, with great blood flowing through their veins. If I peeled away the skin and flesh, if I took the blade to their veins and showered you with the blood that pumps through them, you would be showered with greatness. It’s in the blood, it’s all in the blood.

The blood that soaks through the ranks of these families, it’s the lifeblood of industry. It’s why we can afford the things we eat, why we live in a world that is as comfortable as it is. Granted, that world is struggling, but that’s because of the governments and gangs, kindred spirits that have buckled so much of this world. It’s thanks to the Dynasties and the control that they’ve finally managed to assume that we’re starting to see order.

But we’re a long ways off. Even now, with each new face that gets peeled away or nails removed one by one in those chairs, these rooms in the hallways, there are still more faces that are going unpunished. This is why I hate the Families, mealy-mouthed whining hypocrites. Backstabbing sycophants. Ungrateful cunts with more needs than a disabled toddler.

At some point, you have to chop off the cyst. The boil. The wart. The pimple, the blackhead, the tumour. Cut if all off, gouge out the remnants until all that’s left is the clean crater of the wound, shining brightly at a world that is now brighter for the hemhorrage of this unsightly stain.

That’s what this face is to me. This snivelling, whimpering shitstain. Look at him, dangling there. Weeping. Pathetic.

We need to cut away the tumour. We need to excise the rot clean away from this earth. And I will be one among the legion that wields the scalpel.

The thing you need to understand about excruciation, it’s all about the logistics.

Blood pressure. Heart rate. ECG. Blood sugar.

Deprivation, immolation, exuviation, submersion, castigation; they all require a deep knowledge of the physics of the human body.

Peelers deal with the largest organ of the body, with the densest vascular network: skin. And they’re taking it off of flesh. So, take too much too fast, or go too deep or too shallow, and you lose the subject to hemorrhage. Lose too much blood, and you risk hypovolemic shock. The entire circulatory system goes tits up on account of a massive drop in blood volume. I mean, sepsis is definitely a risk, sure, but you’ve got way more immediate risks.

Think of your skin like a blanket. Take that away and what do you get?

Cold.

Any meathead peeler worth their salt knows to dial the thermostat up, otherwise risk hypothermia. Get too focused on the knife, miss that they’re not pulling away from you, that they’re actually shivering, or worse, they’ve stiffened up, if you miss all that, you’re going to lose the subject.

Hypothermia is harder to detect when someone has no skin.

Castigation’s another classic example. Beating someone to a pulp is more nuanced than you might think, even if the ones doing it are about as subtle as a peeler. But at least they need to pull their punches, which is why we call them pugilists.

Again, it’s just physics.

Drowners have to watch out for aspiration. Tilt someone back enough times, you’re always increasing the chance of the glottis to relax at the wrong time, and now you’ve got water in the lungs. Now the subject’s going to panic, because they can feel that searing heat from the water in a place it’s just not supposed to be. And so they’re going to go all hypoxic and lose their shit, and now if you don’t cool it you’re going to risk them having a fucking MI. And now you’re down a subject, all because you didn’t notice the blue lips and clammy skin.

Physics.

But you’re right. There’s more to it than that.

I’m a sandman. Psychology, specifically terror. That’s the thing that I work with. That’s the equation I’m constantly calculating.

Of course there are physical risks. After all, the work is often quite physical. But for me, it’s all about setting and sequence.

Even now, as I snap the gloves on, I’m already reading the subject. I make a show of coming over to their IV and heart rate monitor, and I pretend like I’m reviewing everything. I already know their heart rhythm, blood pressure, and ECG, it’s all in my ocular feed. We all use one, it’s the only way to keep comms open to the world out there without disturbing the ambience in there.

It takes a lot to cultivate fear. You don’t get to ruin that with messages or calls.

Not that the subject would be able to hear anything at this particular moment.

My AirPods automatically clamped down the full extent they were able, and it’s still a wall of sound I’m walking into. The air ripples with the noise. The room is screaming at 120 decibels. Right in that 4-kilohertz range, the sweet spot where the ear is most sensitive. I’ve left it on a random generation loop, leaving a maximum of 8 seconds of relief between blasts that I capped at 90 secs.

Sound’s a funny thing.

You can close your eyes, breathe through your mouth instead of your nose, refuse food, move away from the feeling.

But there are no eyelids for your ears. Hearing is a constant. It’s also a straight shot to the amygdala.

If I ask you what’s the most sensitive area of the human body, I’ve got 100 bucks says you’re going to go with the balls, right? Or the pussy, if we’re talking chicks. The genitals, whatever.

Maybe you’re a little more clever and you say something like the eyes, or maybe in some misguided bid for attention, you think it’s like under the fingernails or the dermis or whatever.

And you already know you’re wrong.

It’s your ears.

How sensitive is your hearing? Let me put it this way: The quietest sound a typical human can hear at its most sensitive frequency (around 1–5 kHz, where the ear is tuned for speech) is about 20 micropascals (20 µPa) of pressure.

To get a sense of scale: 20 µPa = 0.00002 pascals.

Standard atmospheric pressure is about 101,325 pascals.

That means the faintest audible sound is a pressure fluctuation roughly 10¹² times smaller than the background air pressure around us.

I see you nodding off, you uncultured swine. So let me put it another way.

That 20 µPa of sound pressure moves the eardrum by about 10 picometres.

A hydrogen atom’s about 100 picometres across.

So the eardrum at threshold is shifting by a distance on the order of one-tenth of an atom’s diameter.

In other words, hearing is brushing against the quantum limit of matter’s granularity. The system is picking up atomic-scale vibrations carried in air.

First comes the ringing, then the vertigo, then the nausea. After that, it’s just static in the head until the brain stops telling the difference between noise and pain.

I pause, as if I’m noticing something important and I drink him in.

He’s young. He came to me perfect, minus all the bullshit tattooed all over him. Dark hair, brown skin. Brown irises set in almond eyes. Brown as the piss dribbling down his leg.

Rhabdo, ladies and gentlemen. Rhabdomyolisis. You break down the muscles enough and they start dissolving into your fucking blood. Your muscles start sloughing off all the myoglobin into your vascular system and what do your kidneys do but treat it like anything else and try to get. Rid. Of. It.

At the end of the day, we’re all human.

His chest is thumping. Tachycardic, burning fuel too fast, even while his pressure is up, up, up. I haven’t found any arrhythmias yet, but I’m pushing his heart to its limits. His skin is slick, his muscles sawing. The room stinks of his fear sweat and the other fluids. He’s laughing at shadows one minute, whimpering the next.

“No, she, no she please it’s not, don’t,” he’s saying. His teeth are clicking from the shivering. Then an eerie stillness. I hold my breath. He starts shivering again. He’s cold.

I don’t blame him. Right now I’ve got him hoisted up in the air with his arms behind him, with the rope around his upper arms tied to the ceiling. Picture it this way: imagine I tie your arms and wrists behind your back. Now imagine I tie rope between your arms and then lift you off the ground. That is a stress position, I don’t give a fuck what those cunts at the I.C.E. have to say.

The rope I’ve used is rough, scratchy and coarse enough to make it feel like you ripped open the skin and then poured vinegar all over it. You need that to make it feel more raw. In my experience you just can’t use that velvety shit. For whatever reason, their shoulders break way faster. I don’t know why, I think it’s something about the softness of the fiber that lets the subject ease in better.

I dig a thumb into his ribs. Cap fill’s slow. ‘S truth. Even with 10 cc’s of epinephrine over a 10 minute drip, this motherfucker’s still trying to nod out on me. He’s got that old familiar stupor I’ve grown to know so well.

The droplets of sweat and piss and blood and yes I see now some vomit are all dropping into the floor drown. I’ve got him on enough fluids to prevent any sudden cardio fallout.

He’s in and out, muttering then whispering then wailing, all the while sharing the poetry that comes from a mind and body transformed by our touch: “-she knew then that right love is a disgusting thing and I heard her right the first time I have an apple that dismissed the seed-”. Word salad. The front of his brain is short circuiting.

A thought pops into my head.

“It’s already too late.”

I frown. I don’t know where that came from.

Check him again. Calves are hard as a board, the skin on his feet shiny from more than just the bodily fluids he’s leaking, the oedema and swelling in his muscles telling me he’s well into compartment syndrome.

Squeeze a limb hard enough, long enough, and the blood can’t get in or out. Pressure climbs until the muscle swells like a balloon, hard as stone. Nerves scream, then go dark.

So what does one do? Option one, cut him open like a side of beef. Fasciotomy: that’s the official fix. Split the fascia, watch the blood surge, hope you caught it in time. Option two, leave it, let the pressure climb, the muscle turn to stone, the nerves go silent.

I’m here for option three. Use the pressure. Squeeze pain out of the limb until every nerve is screaming Morse code.

It’s time to rise, sweetheart.

See, that’s the thing about what I do. You push a man far enough and at some point something’s gotta give.

Oh hey! You made it to the end!

Wow. Thank you.

Seriously, thank you so much.

Is this interesting so far? Do you want more of this? Let me know in reply, I read everything.

And hey, don’t be a stranger, I’m always interested in connecting with other writers and creatives, so let me know what you’ve got going on and maybe we could trade our work?

Anyway, that’s it for this week, I’ll be back next week with another fun slice of life from the very progressive, fun-loving Torturer.

I’m actually running a new AMA series that will be going out live this Wednesday. If you’re an artist, author, or creator, come support and ask questions of me and my team.

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