After a few moments of mental groping he understood that his hands and feet were bound above the pole and he was hanging down from it like a pig ready for roasting. His vision was blurry, but he blinked and looked around. At every glance, what he saw grew more improbable. To his left, another person was hogtied as he was, except that it wasn’t exactly a person. It looked like the love child of one of the beasts from Where the Wild Things Are and Conan the Barbarian. One of its arms seemed to be made out of some sort of metal. Two very short men held on their shoulders the pole from which this monster hung, and they labored forward under its oppressive weight, grunting and sweating and cursing with every herculean step. He saw two more little men hauling, with equal effort, the pole he was tied to and he felt his backside dragging against the dark, powdery earth. As they trudged forward, a nightmare menagerie of strange, deformed creatures surrounded them, seeming to watch their passage, and occasionally emitting mocking howls of glee.
