About a certain return

Part 10

And suddenly I felt myself transported through the underground corridors at a staggering speed, a mad whirlpool, irresistible, sucked in by a magnet... I fell on something soft; I twisted and fell down... I looked around me... I've fallen of a bed!

– Oh, for Great Lady's sake! I heard a woman's voice. What are you doing? I could not sleep and I had such a hard day...! What happened to you?

– Is wandering around again, the sleep walker, and then asks himself how he got those bruises! I heard another woman's voice.

– Mind your step, because it's so untidy in this house...! Switch off the light! Go to bed and let me sleep!

– Yes, yes...

I looked around the room. It was completely different from the one I was sharing with Diana. I looked at the woman in the bed. She was rather old. I didn't know anything about her and couldn't recognize that place full of useless things. Tables, chairs, vases, fabrics... The space was quadrangular, a perfect shape, I passed into a corridor, only right angles, what sort of obsessions these people have?! I got into another room, pushing a small folding screen that opened with a squeaking noise and I saw the other woman, much younger, laying in bed. "Oh, what can that be?!" I was so confused.

– Ah! I made the connection on the spot. There are the two women in my dream.

– Mum, started to shout the young one, take him away from here as he's speaking in his sleep!

– Oh, shouted the old lady in a fit of rage, let me sleep! You had no idea in what trouble I am at work...

– Switch off the light and close the door, ordered the young lady!

What light? I dragged the door without catching my hand and saw later many such fitted doors. I thought they close with the help of a mechanism, and switching some buttons, I managed to open them. One of them, the biggest, didn't open until I switched the keys. I believe that, though unconsciously, the automatisms already started to work.

I walked down the stairs, got into a huge corridor, carved in rock and looked at the street. A continuous noise, without an understandable source, seemed to come out of all the things found there along with a white light from the cylindrical balloons. Now and then a person, as big as I, was passing by. These people's civilization seemed much more advanced by comparison with that of dwarfs. I started to walk without a precise purpose. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, what I must find out about this world which seemed to me as alien as the other one. I got to a junction and saw a bus, and then a private car. If first of all I believed they were animals on their own, later I realized they were guided by people. An intuition about the way all these technical wonders worked started to grow in my head and nothing seemed so strange or beyond my understanding anymore. Needless to say that asking the by passers what was that or that would have seemed suspicious. I got in the bus and took a seat... It was noisy and the interior was almost ravaged, worn out, smeared, turned to pieces... And if it was supposed to be so?

– Hoy, you mug, said to me a chap with an angry face, why to hell did you dress like that? Are you from the circus?

What was that "the circus"?

– I believe so, I said hoping that my approval will please him and he'll live me alone.

But straight away, another one who seemed to be his companion, with a strange cap on his head, said:

– Can't you see he's got a bulb under his bag?

– Ah, that's it! You are from the circus. Ha-ha–ha! And what are you doing there, you mug?