About a certain return

Part 11

Or:

"Mean cruelty / Shifting between luck and misfortune"...

Tenths of notices, maybe hundreds... or thousands... Who can have the patience to read all these nonsense? "Feisty by nature, nasty personality, disappointments, insensitivity to his fellow men sufferance, sluggishness..." and like this on all the cells walls, messages that leaked. I rushed to the end of the corridor. An exit, a staircase... I went down. From there I got to another passage. I looked up and down. All I could see were railings... "There's no way out!" I said but I went down on the spiralling staircase until I spotted an exit. And I got into a room, with walls of black basalt and crystal windows. Beams of light were highlighting different areas of the room. The electrical vibration was buzzing louder in their proximity. Suddenly I saw a phantom; a ghost hiding that withdrew immediately once our eyes met. And suddenly, very close by, the howling of pain of a tortured being. The place was haunted, it became very clear to me. I could hardly dare to leave the corner that offered me a vague protection. I needed to leave this place. The same red substance it was slowly running down the walls. I left my hideout and noticed that the ghost had reappeared, as shy as before... It was me, I think, my reflection in one of the windows! Oh! How stupid! To be afraid of my own mug! The howling became utterly stressful. I could hear them coming out of the walls. There were no laud speakers or any other flipping sound equipment... "Are they not loud speakers?" Who built these creepy rooms and which was their purpose? "How, to hell, am I going to get out of here?" I couldn't get through the yellow light beams. I hit myself against them as against a wall. Nothing obvious... only light! Maybe I couldn't see well enough. I pulled a handle, which was a hand lever and waited for me to tumble down. A slit opened, behind the light. "Why don't I start to strike those slabs?" I tilted each square. And suddenly sounded a beastly roar of anger, followed by the despaired cry of the victim. If I were deaf, these signals wouldn't exist in me. Anyway, there was no way for me to escape my destiny. I was about to see the Beast. Was it the Dragon? The Dragon proved himself to be friendly. The yellowish light vanished. I got in front of a well-lit split in the wall. I looked in there and saw a ring large enough for me to put two fingers through. Should I do it or not? I rapidly pulled the ring and a flap door opened. It was a bit high up but I managed to reach it, nearby there was a stone parallelepiped that I could climb on.

I climbed on it but the slab I mounted on started to slope on one side and I slipped inside. I laid on my back in that stone sarcophagus. And then the room, the whole building twisted. The sarcophagus got by the ceiling. Inside there was a man looking at me. What a disturbing change! Nearby I could see an open door, I could see the light from the other room, but the man... a bearded chap, with a familiar face, looked at me silent. No, I didn't know who he was. I was afraid he'll fall down on my head, but he wasn't a body, more likely an image on the ceiling. He would turn a look at me wherever I would go. And I went out. A corridor, a lot of tin containers left there in a mess, all over the place, someone on top of the other and I couldn't see much... Then I saw a man was trying to go past a barrier made of countless beams of light, the little lights pierced his body and the howling that bewildered me until then, resounded again, finally a huge snake coming out of a recess in the wall grabbed him by his jowls and threw him into one of the containers. Another chap tried to overcome the burning barrier but shared the same fate. "Something must be pushing them, or they cannot see the beam network", I was thinking at loud voice. "Is there something or it isn't anything at all?" The only way to find out was to get there, but I was lacking the courage. Something was going on. I was stressed by slumping metallic doors, by the noise made by engines or by steam under pressure... "It's only a dream".

I got to a large hall, where the wall was the screen for that picture...? I tried to get there. When I stepped inside a circle drawn on the floor, I was caught inside a sparkling cylinder. A woman's voice uttered: Unidentified person, two-legged, unauthorized to get in. It's asking for permission to be eliminated...