About a certain return

Part 20

A terrible punch on the head knocked me down. I stood up...

– You ugly one, the professor said you're cured. Go away! Go!

From the outside... the noise from the outside lit the inside... "The outside noise lights the inside"! I said, and so it was, but... what was happening to me? I looked up and saw a huge dome. I seemed I could see the inside of my head, slowly spinning...

I received a mantle to cover myself and I was thrown out. The door... slammed, and I turned my front on disaster. Strange people were ruthlessly wiping out one another, using a whole collection of fire launchers and all around me was fire and ruin. I squeezed past, surrounded by blasts... the stones were shrieking nearby and cutting down people more or less implicated. I run, and sneaked, I kept on running... through fire... I was surrounded by fire, amidst the fire, a world of fire, I was burning myself...

I managed to get there with my last powers, I opened the door and got in... A tin shank that escaped, a miracle, the blasts didn't touch it. Three people were now inside... There were two chaps, three with me, one of them was the bar tender or somebody like a barman and the other one was in a police uniform... He was reading. I thought I knew that one. "What are you reading?" "Gramon's Strategy", he said. "Gramon?" I immediately realized the diversion. The chap was most likely a bus driver, on a line that operates right before playing the last post. He had a cap on his head. The bar tender said that there was only a bit left. A bit of what? A bit of that drink he poured into a long shaped glass and that was drinking by itself. "Only a bit and you'll be indebted to me all your life".

"Gramon's Strategy"? I knew Gramon's Strategy. The twelfth commitment: "There is no other strategy but Gramon's". The second commitment: "Do not sneer at and do not allow to be scoffed at Gramon's name". The first commitment confused me: "I am all it is." Was that a commitment or an establishment? Someone else came in, a chap with an apron stained with blood, a butcher, and then I saw another chap coming in a blue and dirty overall, and another one alike... One by one people came in and soon the crowd was so dense that they were pushed against the tin walls and the shank seemed to disintegrate. What a crowd! "The war is calming down and there are hopes of peace", said one at loud voice. When did start the war? And right then I heard a blast nearby that shook the shovel. In the crowd I saw a chap with a beard that I knew... He owed me something, I knew very well what, now I didn't remember too much, but I saw him slinking away, appearing and disappearing, oh, I couldn't see well at all (what did the professor do to me?) I remembered that the lord's name has been taken in vain. "Taken in vain", I do not precisely know what it means. And all of a sudden, I shouted, I couldn't refrain myself! Something of me headed towards him, something that came out of me, my head gained size, my eyes jumped out of my head, my mouth and my fangs was at some yards... My howling pierced the room like a missile, the hand stretched and the grabbed by the neck the chap, jumped up like a spring, hit himself hardly against the ceiling, that against the floor and again against the ceiling. And my hand was like a hook, piercing his flesh... My anger was huge, devastating... And suddenly I calmed down, oh, what took me? They were all looking at me in fear, and respect... I got out exactly when a chap was targeting the shank with a fire launcher and headed towards the monument with a ghostly sight, not too far away. It was Gramon's Post, the statue that supported with its hand the vault... "Look I can even read", I said to myself: "Ibn... of...", well... A man came from a slopping side road stopped in front of the statue and kneeled down. "I must be doing this as well?" Whatever else did I have to do? And I got the revelation in my head. I could know why it was so heavy. I had spot "The Light House that shows the Way". A rumour of pilgrims came from the distance, and a row of people, I called them people, countless people, were coming this way lined. "Gra-mon! Gra-mon!"! I followed them and passed through the narrow streets paved with stones, through houses with the blackened fronts. I got to a large opening, a huge square, right near the pyramid tip of the Temple witch top was seen in the mist. The Gramon's Temple!