The package was the size of a baby. It lay on his coffee table, Wrapped in brown paper and bound with twine. It had been post marked in a dozen different countries but it was impossible to tell from which it had originated or for how long it had been traveling. Phillip LeMarchand knew only that it had arrived at his door addressed to "resident."

Having left the architectural profession years before, he had come here, to New York, to starve in the name of art and "more loftier pursuits than the mundane and oppressive tedium of a drafting table." He was a sculptor who preferred the geometric precision of metal to the other typical mediums. Recently though, his art had become a torture, a private hell, as he tried to force the steel towards his latest vision only to be frustrated by repeated failure. In tears he would fall to his knees and pray for the answer.

He had heard of a material, a substance of such perfect order that it could serve perfectly as the medium through which he might create his most perfect work. What dreams he might create from such a substance! Now, peeling back the last of the brown wrapping, staring at what he mistook for a cut of stone, a black stone that was forever cold to the touch, he did not consider what god it was that had answered his prayers. Staring into his own reflection, at his own smile, he did not care.

A scroll, included with the stone, detailed the almost alchemical process necessary to transmute the element to a usable state. The process changed more than the stone. LeMarchand did not hesitate when it demanded that the element be steeped for 24 hours in a vat of boiling human fat.

Stephen, his loving assistant, was as thin and sinewy as he was. But he was also convenient, as was the chisel that LeMarchand drove through the sleeping man's skull.

Fat, still fresh, is a liquid and Phillip's inexperience lost much of it to the floor. However, using a meat baster, he was able to suck enough from lesions made in the buttocks and inner thighs for a small experiment.

After several similar ordeals, he was overjoyed when he learned that fat solidifies in refrigeration, enabling him to tear it free in large white hunks with relative ease.

One year later, Phillip LeMarchand finished his first important work, guaranteeing a meteoric rise to fame and fortune. His first working model was a simple music box. A small puzzle, based on a geometric series he called The Lament Configuration. It was a key that became the embodiment of desire that led others, as it had led himself, on a black and bloody path, where all forks lead to hell, to Leviathan, and to their own eternal damnation. By his 88th year, Phillip LeMarchand had gone far beyond that first small puzzle. He had become one of hell's most prolific prodigies, eventually returning to his architectural education to design entire buildings that were puzzles in themselves.