He approached a little table which until now had escaped his attention and found out that it was not simply a table. Half of it was occupied by a built in screen and, maybe, some other devices. Had there been any communication facilities? Now it was already difficult to tell. Everything had been destroyed, broken out, and shattered with a wild frenzy. Only a lonely torn off optical path stuck out from the mess. Suddenly the man leaned forward and peered through the dim light. In the niche which remained from where the screen had been, among the fragments of electronics (photonics, broken out from the emptiness, “electronics” is an outdated term) something lay that did not resemble a circuitry element. He lifted this small object, rounded at one end, and brought it up to his eyes. In an instant he understood with disgust that he was examining a torn off human nail with flesh attached. Could the one who destroyed things here have done it with his own nails? And the intense pain of a nail and flesh being torn off had not stopped him?
The amnesiac hurled away his trophy and gloomily thought that having a weapon could not hurt. However, the harmful subconscious immediately replaced “could not hurt” with “would not help,” but he tried to drive away this thought. At least a chair… after all, shouldn’t there be a chair in this room? But alas, there was none.
Again he went to the corridor sunk in flickering twilight, only now realizing that the corridor was not straight, but smoothly bent, forming a large ring. Which direction to choose — left or right? Whichever direction he chooses, he could not see around the curve of the corridor. He listened. He listened. Neither from the left nor from the right came any sound. Only occasionally the oppressive silence was broken by the electric crackling of flickering lamps. He went to the right. Underfoot there was the same dirty floor—for how many years was there no cleaning done here? However, he no longer regretted that he had to go barefoot, as it allowed him to move almost silently. The blank wall continued on the left and doors similar to those which he had left repeated on the right. Judging by distances between them, not all of the doors hid such small rooms. But he had no desire to enter and to come across… The devil only knows what it is possible to come across here. His goal was to get out of here as soon as possible, so he should go directly to the exit. Shouldn’t there be an exit somewhere here?!
The dim shivering light was distorting his sense of reality, hindering his ability to orient himself, and giving the impression that all this was just a dreadful nightmare in which he would walk eternally in the dirty gloomy corridor that had neither beginning nor end. For a moment he was so assured of it that he began to pinch himself but without the desired result. However, as he remembered it now, actually pinching oneself to wake up is a myth, since painful sensations can be in a dream, too. While in dreams they are usually weaker than in reality but the sleeper does not realize it. A pinch is not very painful anyway. But if he were thinking so logically about a dream, then he probably was not sleeping. However, what if he indeed had already made a full circle through this corridor and had begun a new one? Immediately came more questions. What if the exit were behind one of these identical doors? Or perhaps the exit did not exist at all? No, that’s delirium! But was not all that surrounded him since he came to his senses similar to delirium?
These thoughts entangled him with a sticky cold fear that he tried to expel in vain. Everything here should have a logical explanation. Everything here should have… Yes, certainly. But who guaranteed you that you will like it?
He shook his head. He had to somehow mark the door from which he had emerged and then he would know if he had made a full circle or not. To mark? With what? His own blood?
No way, he calmed himself from the hysterical thought which had rushed to his head. To leave the door open—what could be easier? And maybe he had actually done this? Did he close the door when he left the room? The first time—surely, would be a natural behavior for a person who knew that he was naked. But the second time… He couldn’t remember.
A moment later, however, he was given proof that he had not completed a circle yet. On the next door on the right, all in the same manner, in brown-red with long stains (in blood, recognize it already, in blood), was written: “KILL YOURSELF NOW.”
“Encouraging,” he muttered. It was the first word pronounced by him as far back as he could remember. Usually such a phrase refers to a whole life, but in his case… Goddamn, probably, no more than ten minutes had passed, though it seemed to him that he had wandered in this terrible building not less than an hour. He did not like the sound of his own voice, a hoarse croak. He probably had been silent very long before he spoke.
Or maybe, on the contrary, he had damaged his throat with shouting?
He shrank in belated fright, listening. Perhaps even this flat muttering will attract unknown creatures from a corridor twilight? Or even directly from this door.
But everything still remained silent. Khrrr… click… khrrr… crack! He shuddered from surprise. One of the ceilings fixtures ahead had suddenly gone out and this section of the corridor was engulfed in darkness. Nothing was visible behind this section because of the curvature of the corridor. It was very easy to imagine that…
He waited tensely, peering into the darkness. No, he told himself, the fixture had simply failed. With such voltage, obviously far from standard, it is no wonder. He looked at the door again. The one who leaves such appeals can hardly be a friend. And if an enemy were trying to frighten him, then it would be foolish to take his cue from what the enemy had done. But if a real threat lay behind the door, an enemy would probably not warn him about it, even in such an exotic way. The man pulled the handle. With the door obediently sliding into the wall, he went in.
It was probably some sort of laboratory. That’s it—“was.” The same furious destruction, as with the little table in the first room, only on a larger scale, had been repeated here. The whole floor was covered by the remains of the mauled, smashed devices torn out of racks. It was now difficult to tell what kind of research they had been intended for. Fragments of a turning chair which, probably, the unknown vandal tried to use as a sledge hammer, lay there, but then the chair, made of plastic, proved to be too light and fragile for such a job.
The amnesiac took some cautious steps, being afraid to wound his feet. But, apparently, there were no splinters from test tubes and subject glasses here. That being as much as it was possible to understand in such chaos and with such illumination. So, it was suited probably more for physics, than for biology or chemistry. Though who would know? Maybe only remote control of the equipment in some hermetic chamber was carried out from here. Among fragments of plastic cases and boards some metal plates, cores, coils, windings occurred—but, apparently, there was nothing that could be used as a weapon. And all this demolition was carried out long ago, as fragments had time to grow with dust—the dust which had almost hidden the brown stains on a floor. In a corner a massive metal bed of a certain installation towered, which apparently proved to be too difficult to destroy. And on its side there was the next inscription, made in the same fashion: “DARK IS FASTER THAN LIGHT HA HA HА.” From the last stick of the last letter “A” a stream with a drop on the end led downward. Directly on this drop sat a whitish cockroach. No, it was more likely a fat round spider, as if it had crept out to drink the blood. But actually both the stream and a drop dried up a long time ago.
Gingerly bending down—he liked spiders no more than cockroaches—the man nevertheless approached more closely, wishing to examine the arthropod to discover whether it were a representative of another ugly mutant, or just a normal spider? What is ugliness here: a deviation or the norm?