Part Three: The Mutilator...and Jetzu

Pain. Wires. Probing, searching wires. Blood...the heavy, salty, metallic smell of blood. Chemicals. Medicine. A hospital smell.

Darkness...solid darkness...except for the single harsh white light glaring down on me. Glass. Thick glass. Unbreakable glass, all around me. Enclosing me. No air. Imprisonment. Suffocation.

Potions. Dark, ominous, swirling potions in mysteriously shaped bottles, lining shelves all around me.

Horror. Despair. This place is wrong...wrong. Things happen here that should never, ever happen. Unspeakably repulsive things. What goes on here, what occurs here, is unheard of in the civilized world. Barbaric. Sick and twisted. Evil.

I apologize, especially if I have frightened you. I know that I sound...incoherent. I may, at times...when telling you of...that place. The memories of it are so...vivid. Horribly vivid.

I remember Marina, and the Pound, well enough, but my memories of them are more like dreams. As if they could never truly have been part of my life...although they were. But as for the place I describe to you now...it is still so real. So nauseatingly real. Even my own family...HauntedMoon, Isadora, and Twlight...don't know that I still have nightmares that leave me screaming on the floor...nightmares about that place.

The light. The smell. So intense. Overwhelming. The glass, so confining. I am smothering. I cannot breathe. I am in pain. So much pain. Too starved and sick and weak to move.

This is not like the Pound...so much worse...far, far worse. Far worse than filth and starvation and germs and hostility and even death.

That first day in the Pound, I thought I was afraid. Afraid? Now the word "afraid" seemed weak and senseless. A baby word. The fear I felt now was so intense, so incredibly overwhelming, like a glacier of ice in which I was imprisoned, with the walls pressing in closer...and closer. I was literally sick, sick with uncontrollable, throbbing panic. Pure, animal terror.

Then I saw her.

You must remember that I had not had much social experience in my life, not much interaction with other NeoPets. Those few I had associated with had all either lived in Marina's poor neighborhood or been residents of the Pound. Therefore, obviously, the majority of these pets had not been painted. That was why, when I set eyes on that Cloud Gelert, I thought she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen....and, by far, the saddest.

Her coat had clearly once been a shimmering, silky sky-blue, speckled with misty white wisps and swirls of cloud. But now it was dull and faded, and covered with bruises, open sores, and bald patches, just like mine. While I could easily conjure up a picture of her as a plump and healthy pup with shining, starry blue eyes, she was now almost a mirror image of me, thin as a rail and transparent as a mirror.

Her eyes, however, were different from mine. They too were filled with starvation, pain, and suffering, but with something else too...something deep and cold and empty and awful. It was not so much something in her eyes as it was a lack of something: hope. Utter hopelessness was in that Gelert's eyes. Despair. She had given up on everything...had lost her will to live. Yet, oh, she was terrified...I could smell her fear through the unbreakable glass of my tiny prison and hers. Like me, she was connected to a tangle of wires and tubes. Her eyes stared straight ahead, unseeing, but when I mouthed a question to her, she blinked and answered.

I moved my lips to silently form the words, What is this place?

"The Laboratory of the Living Dead."

Her voice was slow, carefully measured. Each syllable was neatly separated from the previous and following syllables, and each one fell heavily, like a rock.

"What?" I whispered, my voice just barely audible. It a razor-sharp splinter that pierced the silent, foul-stenched air. It quavered uncontrollably with repulsion and panic. My throat felt as if it was packed thick with dust and pierced with needles. The word came out as two jerky syllables, without the "w" sound. It was the first word I had uttered in days; I hadn't known I could still speak at all. I would have gladly died for one drink of water.

Somehow, the beautiful, sad Cloud Gelert understood me.

"The home of the Necromage," she continued in the same deadpan voice.

I moved my lips, unable to speak again. Who? I mouthed.

"A Mutilator."

Slowly, deliberately, she cocked her head to one side. "You didn't wake up, did you?"

I stared at her.

"In the Pound. You didn't wake up?"

I shook my head.

"Neither did I. That's why he brought me here. That Techo. No. That monster. Not really a NeoPet at all. A monster. He brought me here in that truck...just as he brought you. Just as he brings all pets who don't wake up."

I shuddered.

"Are you wondering why I can still speak? Why I'm not dead by now? But I am, of course. There is no life here. There is no possibility, no suggestion, no hint of life. This is only living death. But I have not passed on to the world of the dead because of the chemicals. In the tubes and wires. Some of them are to sustain you. To keep you here, imprison you here. In the world of the living dead. They won't let your heart stop. They won't let you claim eternal peace. Instead..." she waved her paw around, "...this."

I squirmed, revolted. Suddenly, I thought of one more question to ask. The chemicals in those wires and tubes had been doing their job. I found myself able to speak, though just in a whisper.

"What's your name?"

The Gelert's eyes filled with tears. "Jetzu."

I nodded. "I'm Galleymyst."

Just then....footsteps!

Immediately, every remaining hint of color drained from Jetzu's face. I had never seen such a frightened creature in my life. It was contagious. I felt my heart stop for several seconds as I sat there, trapped, paralyzed, helpless.

"Who is it?" I whispered, although I knew the answer.

"The Necromage."

"What..." my voice shook uncontrollably, "...what do you think...he'll...do with us?"

Jetzu looked surprised at the question. "Why...the same thing he did with all the others. That's what Mutilators do."

I felt my heart hammering painfully against my chest. I was nearly blind with terror now, as the footsteps grew closer...closer.

"Others?" I managed to choke out. "What others?"

Jetzu's mouth fell open, and mutely, she pointed a paw behind the glass case that imprisoned me. I turned my head...and the vision swam before my eyes, shattered into a thousand pieces, as my throat forgot that it was so dry and dehydrated that it was nearly mute, and I pierced the air with a deafening scream.

The image I saw there will haunt me to my dying day.

There were NeoPets. Dozens of them. Staring with eyes as blank and sightless as those of the yellow Skeith in my compound back at the Pound. But these NeoPets were not NeoPets at all. They were...monsters. Everything about them was wrong. Twisted limbs. Bulging eyes. Hair and scales where they did not belong. Extra body parts. Glittering fangs. Horrible frozen expressions of bloodlust...hunger...evil. These silent, motionless, mutilated freaks were beyond hideous, beyond gruesome, beyond words with which they could be accurately described. They were creatures that should never, ever have existed. Mutants.

At that moment, the last footstep struck the floor. A shadow fell over my glass case. A hand as cold, as waxy, as white as a corpse's hand reached out and selected one of the potions from the shelf...and lifted it above one of the tubes that was attached to me, ready to pour it into the tube. I knew where that tube led...straight into my bloodstream.

Until that moment, I had not realized that I was still screaming, my scream growing louder and louder, shriller and shriller, climbing the scale to undefinable heights. Jetzu was curled up inside her glass case, her face twisted in pain, her paws clapped firmly over her ears. The mutants, and this "Necromage," this Mutilator, seemed unaffected by the sound. But at that moment, something truly amazing and remarkable happened. My scream reached a volume that could not be contained, not by anything. The glass that imprisoned me shattered.

My veins shot with adrenaline, I tore myself free from the tangle of tubes and wires. I leapt at Jetzu's case, ready to smash the unbreakable glass, for I was hardly in my right mind. But Jetzu turned her pain-filled, hopeless eyes to me and shook her head.

"It's too late for me," she whispered. "Save yourself. Find HauntedMoon!"

And then the Necromage snatched me from the air in those clammy, waxy hands, and finally I did the first sensible thing I'd done that day. I bit down on that hand with all my might. Its grip relaxed, only slightly, but I managed to twist free...and I ran.

I ran blindly, ran like the wind, like a streak of lightning, like a bullet shot at full speed from a gun. I couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't even think; all I knew was that I must run and run and run, and never ever stop.

When you think about it, I had only one place to run to.

When I finally came to my senses, I found myself collapsed, shaking with weakness, very near the point of death, inside a compound of the Pound.

But this time, it was not to be for long.