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The old men asked me if mortality was curable. I told them yes.

It took eighteen years of loneliness and sleepless nights and emaciation. Eighteen years of foul chemical odous and burns and the actinic glare of arc lamps. Eighteen years with the executioner's axe hanging over my head.

The first machine was a monstrous iron cage, lightning dancing through its conduits. The man who volunteered was lucky. He moaned, delirious as his flesh twisted and consumed itself, but I believe he died painlessly. I begged the old men to turn back before it was too late. They showed me the ledgers, my debts writ clear as day, and so I continued.

The second machine was sleeker, its blasphemous lines more refined. The test subjects lived , their minds vacant, their bodies bent like wax beneath a flame. But they lived. The old men said I was making excellent progress. When I protested, they reminded me of the importance of my daughter's innocence.

The third machine was an obscenity in steel. The test subjects lived, and they were strong. Their limbs were pallid, knotted worms of muscle, reeking of clay and damp earth. Their eyes shone like will-o-wisps. They drank deep of the air and laughed through fat purple lips. They gloried in the rot inside themselves.

The old men hailed me as a hero. Then they used it on my daughter.

She asked me if immortality was curable. I told her yes. 

 I would advise you not to pull back the curtain and look out the window, even when the scratch of the oak branches sounds a little too much like fingernails against glass. That noise is no more than a windy night and a tree in need of trimming.

    I would not advise you to cup your hands against the cool glass and peer out into the dark. It's too dark to see anything, anyway, but it's not so dark in your room. What's outside might see you.

    Some things are better left ignored.

    I would advise you not to investigate the sounds you hear outside your room, easy footsteps making their way down the hall and the soft thud of a door coming to rest in its wooden frame. These sounds are innocuous.

    You would hear them every day, if you didn't live alone.

    When the doorbell rings, I would advise you not to call out an answer, even when it sounds as though the high pitched chime may never cease its incessant cry. It will not stop until you answer and you don't want to do that, do you?

    I would advise you to ignore the dust that's settled throughout your decaying home, climb under the stiff covers, and sleep.

    I know the doorbell still screams, demanding your answer, but I would advise you not to open the door. I do not believe your caller is alive.

    He cut down the old oak before he died. Don't you remember that?

You enter a room and immediately forget what urgent business brought you here.

You enter a room and stop short at its richness. The windows are frames with deep scarlet hangings, their velvet so plush as to absorb the weak light still creeping from outside. Imposing itself is a great brass candelabra in which the candles flicker, causing shadows to dance about the room like wicked children. Distorted but lifelike, the shades catch again and again on the corners of your vision.

You enter a room and there is no one there. Or, patience and a turn: a man waiting for you, paler than the moon and just as silent. He beckons you through yet another doorway, but when you go to follow, you find the portal to be a mirror. In the glass the man is behind you again, but now you know better than to turn around.

You enter a room and the room also enters you.