Judd felt something, like a flash, then a drop wetting his arm, and another one on his lips. In a few instants, the drops multiplied to tenths, hundreds, thousands, until they were millions.

Judd opened his eyes.

Drops of moisture poured out of the ceiling in a rhythmic and slow rain. A few oil lamps rested on the old furniture, hardly lighting the haze. A vague smell of mold reached Judd's nose and made him suddenly wide-awake. He tried to get up, but felt something holding him back. He glanced towards his feet: he was lying under soaked sheets that stuck to his body. He tried to get up again, but the soaked sheets stretched, creaking like leather. Judd felt dazed. There was something wrong--the sheets were too heavy, they were... His mind started to work faster, more lucidly. He listened to his body to know if his debility was due to narcotics. He knew that shortly before he was in the Red Room. Neither inside him, nor outside, he found any answer. Judd looked around frantically, and finally saw an old man, dressed like a peasant standing at the end of the bed, his clothes dirty with mud. The man was leaning on a shovel freshly soiled with earth, gazing at him.

Drops of rain falling on Judd's face misted his sight. He could not make up the face of the stranger. He squeezed his eyes and suddenly recognized the man: in front of him there stood the High Priest his Grandfather!

The rain kept on pouring, silent and heavy. The mud strained slowly from the shovel.

Judd glimpsed a shifting of dark shades inside the thick fog at the end of the room. Someone moved forward unsteadily. Judd could hardly recognize a human figure that seemed to hold an umbrella in her hand. The dark clothed figure approached and stared at Judd with a cryptic expression. Why, wondered Judd, why his grandmother was standing there, looking at him in that way?

Then Judd saw the jut bag, foul with mire and blood, under the old woman's arm. A sudden reminiscence struck him: beyond those walls there stretched an entire cemetery. He had played as a boy among those gravestones and, at times, had seen his grandfather draw out a thing from those purulent graves. The jut bag quivered slightly. A wave of utter horror struck Judd. His muscles contracted convulsively. He pushed with all his forces against the soaked sheets that groaned like a door forced on its hinges. Judd's teeth creaked, grinded under the effort, but desperation wasn't enough and Judd fell on his back, helpless. "Set me free!" he shouted frantically. "Are you crazy? Let me go!"

The High Priest turned towards his wife as if he did not hear him. He took the jut bag in his callous hands and laid it on the bed.

"Away! Keep that THING away from me!" cried Judd.

The bundle unfolded, slowly, like the petals of a flesh blossom. The last jute strip fell limply on the soaked sheets and unveiled an enormous worm swollen with dark blood. The deformed blasphemy squirmed its sickening body, searching the space around. That loathing creature was a corpse worm, a being that fed on the humors of the dead.

Judd could smell the stench of death exhaling from that round and tumid mouth, encircled by a myriad of tiny eyes. "Don't do that to me! I completed the Work, I perfected Bahamut. Is this the prize for my genius!?"

The enormous worm slithered slowly on Judd's chest. It watched him through the myriad of tiny eyeballs. Its jaws gaped, ejecting small threadlike tentacles that prowled forth like blind larvae.

Judd clenched his mouth, but the tentacles worked their way through his lips, slipped in, one at a time. Judd felt two of them slide in, then three, ten, fifty, until his mouth was wide open. Tears of pain furrowed his cheeks, while that huge bunch of slimy and viscous matter probed his throat without uttering a sound. Suddenly the tentacles throbbed and unbearable spasms overwhelmed Judd's body. His limbs writhed and his skin started to exude blood. His veins shrank rapidly. The hue of life faded away from his face.

A pool of blood flowed down the bed like a crimson waterfall. It drenched the shoes of Judd's ancestors, who turned round and left the room.

The worm perched on Judd's chest, like an incubus. Judd felt it, anchored to his skin through hundreds of little suckers, miniature-sucking mouths biting his flesh with tiny teeth. Judd lay still; even the pallor of death abandoned his face. Every single drop of blood had oozed out of his body, yet he was not dead. Why? he thought. From the frontlet of the loathsome being, an appendage extended slowly. Like a snail's eye it stretched above Judd's face, it felt his forehead. It's searching! Judd realized. The antenna felt the scar of the Initiation Ordeal. With a hollow snap, it slipped in, piercing deeply.

Judd lay still, wide-awake, eyes opened. The appendage trembled feebly above his face. The worm lay still, as if dormant.

They lingered that way for a long time.

Then the creature twisted its stomach. The dark blood flowed into strange organs inside its translucent body. In subsequent retches, the dark fluid transfused through the full length of the tentacles, and sank into Judd's wide-open mouth. Judd's veins swelled, stretched as if filled by a stream in full spate. The vital flow went into him like a slap and a flash of pain. The worm dragged itself forth swallowing its own tentacles. It pulled itself onto Judd's lips and, writhing horribly, disappeared into his mouth. Judd felt the enormous foreign body dragging itself along the internal walls of his throat. He felt it descending into his chest, and crouching down like a hellhound in its den. Then a violent contraction struck Judd's lungs. His throat was suddenly free.