Excerpt from Latest Novel (italics and formatting are lost, sorry)--A Dream

Chapter Five
1
The Torturer approached in a white cassock, wearing a large crucifix. Jane struggled against the leather straps that bound her wrists and ankles, to no avail. “Who’s callin’ me a witch?!” she demanded. The Torturer said nothing. Soon he was standing directly over her.
Meanwhile someone who appeared to be the Torturer’s assistant had taken a seat on a stool directly behind where Jane was seated in the wooden torture chair. Like the Torturer himself, the assistant wore a mask. Jane looked up and met the Torturer’s assistant face-to-face, eye-to-eye, upside down. The malevolence in that masked countenance was no less frightful than in that of the Torturer himself. Jane shuddered and closed her eyes.
“So, what do you have to say?” the Torturer said, gently stroking Jane’s jaw with his soft, gloved hand. Jane didn’t answer. A moment later he grabbed her forcefully by the chin. “You’d best confess now,” he said, slipping his thumb into Jane’s mouth, “while you can still talk!”
Jane bit down on his finger.
“Yow!” the Torturer said, instantly withdrawing his thumb. “I can see this is not going to be easy. Darla, would you please pass me the crackers—the Tooth Crackers, that is.”
“Darla?!” Jane thought, quizzically looking back up at the masked assistant.
“Well, now will you confess?” the Torturer said. “Just say, ‘I’m a witch.’”
“And get burnt alive?” Jane said. “You think I’m nuts?!”
Darla meanwhile passed the Tooth Crackers to the Torturer.
“This is your last chance,” said the Torturer, dangling the ghastly-looking device before Jane’s terrified eyes.
“All right,” she blurted out, “I’m a w-w-w-bitch!”
“Witch!” the torturer repeated.
“But I ain’t no witch!” Jane protested.
“Then may God have mercy on your soul!”
Yet before proceeding with the Tooth Crackers, the Torturer produced an electric drill, conjuring it right out of thin air.
# # #
Jane clutched her pillow tightly and squinched her eyes. As bad as the dream was, she sensed—even in her slumber—that it could be a whole lot worse. For as grisly, as gruesome, as harrowing as the bloody ordeal was—and she could see her own blood spattered across the Torturer’s mask, as well as taste it on her tongue—she was feeling no pain. Some form of divine intervention, Jane reckoned, a miracle. Maybe she wouldn’t feel a thing after all when at last they burned her alive at the stake, but she still wasn’t about to confess.
# # #
“Darla, pass the forceps, please,” the Torturer said.
“Lord, give me strength,” Jane was thinking. She only hoped this go-round wouldn’t be as ghastly as the electric drill and the Tooth Crackers, but she clamped her eyes shut and braced herself for the worst.
“Jane, this is your very last chance,” the Torturer said. “Now say it, ‘I am a witch.’ Come on, it’s really not that hard.”
At that point, Jane couldn’t have said it even if she’d wanted to. And just what were the ramifications of that, she wondered.
“And if I don’t get an answer,” the Torturer continued, “it’s on to the Grand Inquisitor with you. And rest assured, you won’t like that one bit!”
Well, that pretty much answered her question, Jane was thinking.
“Tell me,” the Torturer said, gently tracing the circle of Jane’s lips with the cold forceps, “have you ever heard of something called ‘The Iron Maiden’?”
With that, Jane struggled mightily to elicit something intelligible in reply. “Ah ainh ngo huich!”
# # #
Jane clutched her other pillow now and smiled, her eyelids fluttering. She knew—even in her slumber—that this bad dream was coming to an end.
# # #
“Congratulations. You made it through!”
Jane opened her eyes. The “Torturer” had removed his mask. It was Dr. Zahn, her oral surgeon.
“You behaved like a saint,” he said, smiling as he proudly held up the bloody wisdom teeth he’d just extracted.
Jane still couldn’t talk. She just sat back, smiling in relief. . . .