“That must have been it,” he thought. “Bad writing makes some people crazy. I’ve been abducted by a person who’s read enough Engrish penned by native speakers, and they’ve simply gone over the edge.”

Disoriented, One slowly became aware that he was laying prone on a hard surface. His first instinct, to shake his fist at the Grammatical Gods who had brought his pathetic character to brief literary life, was defeated abruptly when his limbs refused to move. With difficulty, he turned his aching head to find his left hand and arm tied firmly down to the heavy wooden table at his back. His body was immobilized.

One returned his gaze to the ceiling, wincing at the pain in his head and neck. He silently cursed the pronoun confusion that had resulted in the only proper name he’d ever had.

Tears suddenly welled in his eyes, surprising him with their heat and urgency. Since his abrupt inception at the beginning of this tale, he’d only briefly appreciated the beauty of his world, before the crude interruption of present- and past-tense confusion that had rendered him unable to defend himself against the subsequent attack. Sentence after unintelligible sentence pulled his tiny life into a plotless, absurd cliche, and now here he was, without a proper name, strapped to a table in a darkened room, left to wonder at his impending fate.

His eyes eventually cleared, and he peered uncomprehending at the dully glinting steel suspended above him. The realization suddenly dawned, pulling with it a vivid memory of his sixth-grade literature class. He recognized this scene. He’d somehow been transported into a much more frightening story. The darkened room, the cruel table, the sinister sliver of steel hanging from the black ceiling, the man alone with his mind, going slowly mad against his mechanical foe…. A portrait of Poe appeared in his mind’s eye, on the cover of a short book: “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

As unseen gears moaned into motion above, urging the heavy blade into its first, slow swing, One came to two conclusions. First, no one had written anything scary for the last 150 years, and second, he was about to learn the meaning of “horrific.”