He was in a flat that had been trashed, furniture overturned and ripped up, grey light filtering through the ravaged curtains. He moved through the rooms: the hallway, the kitchen, into the lounge. A miasma of dust hung in the air, making him cough. A television lay shattered in the corner, crushed by a human-sized picture frame. The picture was an old-fashioned portrait in oil paints: a dark-haired and emerald-eyed young man, entirely naked, a resplendent indigo and obsidian anaconda draped around his shoulders. Alex blinked. The portrait shimmered. The surface was not the textured swirls of oil, as he had first thought, but the glassy sheen of a mirror. He shifted, and the man in the glass shifted too. His body felt heavy. He looked down. His pale skin was covered not by clothes but by the weighty meat of ringed coils. A wet tongue, forked at the end, ran in and out of his ear. He sat straight up in bed, blinking. He was drenched in sweat. It took him several seconds to realize he was not alone.
