Man has devised some very awful ways to torture and kill others. It is, in some ways, the thing we are best at. We break bones, tear limbs, remove fingernails and breasts. We drown, burn, crush and rend those people that we hate or fear, for one reason or another.

I did not create any of these insidious, ingenious torture methods. It was not in my mind that the Strappado, or the Judas Cradle, or the Iron Maiden was born. I could never have dreamed up the Heretic's Fork or the Shin Vice, and I certainly would never have realised how truly terrible such simple things as denying someone rest can be, if kept up long enough. I had to be shown these things, taught how to use them. I learned my lessons well, and my hands have used these tools to wring confession after confession out of the prisoners. Whether they are guilty or not, they confess, in the end.

Somehow, the screams and sighs and sobs ceased to bother me, after a time. I got used to them, I suppose. I even got used to the little gurgling noises people make when they no longer have a tongue. Death rattles, shrieks, broken weeping, I've heard them all, and grown inured. My superiors praised me often, praised my skill and my hardened heart. And then they sent me here, to Neisse, sent me to man the ovens. It was here that I learned that there are still things that can shock and horrify me.

Many of the more gruesome methods of execution were surprisingly easy to get used to. The Wheel, for instance, is such a spectacle that it started to seem unreal. "Surely that writhing, boneless thing is not a man. That blood-soaked mass of flesh that the birds pick at, that cannot ever have been a human being. The crowds could not cheer for such a thing," some part of me thought, and it began to feel no more terrible than watching my wife crack an egg into the frying pan. I can't imagine what the victims broken to the wheel might feel like, you see, any more than I can imagine what the unborn chick that that egg would have become might feel like. That is the real secret to growing accustomed to such cruelty, really -- it is so far outside anything I have ever felt that I cannot really grasp it on a personal level.

The Oven is not like that. The Oven is not exotic, it is not beyond comprehension. The Oven is an infinitely familiar tool, but warped, distorted, turned to foul purposes. I know how it feels to thrust my hand into a fire. I know how it feels to pick up a skillet that has not yet cooled enough. And so, when I manhandle the women, the children, the condemned into the Oven, I can imagine how they must feel. Their screams reach me, because I can imagine myself making such a noise. The horror is very real to me, every day now. Just as it was when I first became an executioner. Worse. Far worse.

I received word this morning that, one hour after I left for work, the local sewing circle was raided, under suspicion of being a front for a coven. All the women were arrested and reside now in our dungeons. They will be tortured, some by me, some by my colleagues, and they will confess.

My wife, who this morning went to the sewing circle for the very first time, joking that it was high time she behaved like a proper wife in at least one thing and learned to embroider, will confess. I can already hear her screams in my mind.