Know that the Warp goes where the Warp wills, into man, beast and machine.

"It's about the worst thing I can imagine... losing who you are like that, all the while being twisted into a damned monster."

Once this must have been a humanoid, but now it is utterly distorted by the forces of chaos. Eyes look at you from many places (there's even one on the left thumb!), showing no signs of a mind, only a rage caused by maddening pain and suffering. As you look, the body twists into other unnatural shapes, growing arms and legs spontaneously, the head twisting and disappearing into the back while a grinning mouth bearing needle-thin teeth opens where proper humanoids have a navel. Only death can stop its suffering, and in a mindless rage it flails madly at everything that comes near it.

Joe Slater is the only one left. One by one, his fellows went away, like the deceptively vicious plot of a children's rhyme. Each is a tiny story in the belly of a different gull. And then there was Joe. But he is just barely Joe. Perhaps it was the object, the primordial soup he swam through to get it, that passed on the fish-oil leprosy.

It started with stomach spasms that felt like writhing lamprey nests hatching in his belly. Then, Joe could hear the hag-fish singing in the crushing depths, even when he pretended he could not, even when the Q-tips snapped in half in his bloody ears. Madness bubbled in his brain like the bends. Then pale flesh. Then barnacle sores and wriggling growths and sea cucumber discharges. Now Joe feels the itch and burn as different species of coral battle for primacy of his chest, spitting up their digestive enzymes in time-lapse warfare. Something scuttles out of one body cavity, to be eaten by something hiding in another.

And though the seagulls hear a thousand stories, all Joe can hear is "Draug-draug-draug-draug-draug!"