A suitable word had escaped from the dark depths of amnesia: mummy. And specification: from old horror films. The figure was, almost from head to foot, in some sort of dirty bandages. Here and there they had been torn and bloody. There were no other clothes, or footwear. From under bandages on the head in several places long ugly strands of black hair rose up.
The amnesiac involuntarily recoiled.
“Who are you?” he hoarsely exhaled, throwing up again the useless flashlight, as if it were a sword.
The figure, which had found balance, sharply turned toward him. It seemed to be as frightened as he was.
“And you?” she asked. The voice was female. And the body outlines, actually, also female.
“I would like to know it myself,” he muttered and then had a subsequent thought that, probably, he had better pretend to be more informed—or at least try to stay in control of the order of questions and answers.
“You don’t remember anything?” she understood, her voice disappointedly going down. “Me too. For how long are you here?”
“Thirty, forty minutes,” he shrugged his shoulders, “or maybe hours. I am not sure that I correctly perceive time here. And that’s from the moment when I came to my senses. But before…” he again shrugged his shoulders.
“Like me. I regained consciousness in a closed room, in bandages. For some time I waited for someone to come and explain. Then I began to shout and call out. Then I understood that nobody would come. I began to bang on the door. That’s all. And you? You were outside, weren’t you?”
“My door was open.”
“But what is there? I mean, around?”
“Nothing good.” He grew dark. “I don’t know where the exit is, if you speak about it.”
“It is after all not a hospital?”
“Yes, in hell there might be such hospitals.”
“But also not a prison? I mean…” She looked around. “It is too dirty here, even for a prison. And I have beaten out a cell door. Where are the jailers? Where is the alarm? It looks like there was no one alive for many years here.”
“We are.”
“Yes. Listen, we have to name each other somehow.”
“Just ‘Hey!’ won’t be enough?”
“Personally I don’t want to be called just ‘Hey!’ And then, maybe we will find someone else.”
Or it will find us, the man gloomy thought, but answered aloud : “Well, considering circumstances, you can call me Adam,” and adjusted his only clothing.
“Then I am Eve,” she easily agreed, “considering circumstances.” Apparently she only now recognized that she did not even such clothing. However, she also did not look naked under all those bandages. Whether she was confused, under bandages, also remained unclear.
He remembered about the piece of paper which he still held in his hand.
“Listen, does a surname ‘Poplavska’ tell you anything? Professor Poplavska. Think.”
“No.” She shook her head. “And who is it?”
“Then, maybe Lebrun? Hart? Or lastly, Kovaleva?” (“No, this place is absolutely not similar to a monastery,” he added to himself.)
“You, after all, know something? Who are all these people?”
Without a word he gave her the sheet. For some time she studied the list.
“You think we are some of these scientists?” She returned the paper.
“Or victims of their experiments. I do not know. I know nothing.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Eve, in your bath… by chance… was there a dead body?” he asked instead of answering her.
“Dead body? In a bath?” She wonderingly stared from under her bandages, then got it: “You mean there was one in yours?”
He silently nodded.
“And are there a lot of them here?”
“I’ve seen five yet. But I have not visited everywhere.”
“And all in baths?”
“No.”
“And how have they died?”
“A way we had better not,” Adam muttered. Before his eyes a vision of the crucified woman appeared again, and he shuddered. However, Eve, apparently, had encountered a lot of trouble, too. “Painful?” he asked compassionately, nodding toward her blood-stained bandages.
“A little. I was probably wounded when I rammed the door. Oh no, I just noticed!”
“And old wounds?”
“No, probably, all healed. I even tried to remove the bandages, but…”
“They don’t come off,” Adam nodded. “The same story.”
“I am so afraid about my face,” she admitted. “There’s no pain, but what if under the bandage I’m deformed.”
“We should not think about beauty now,” he grumbled, thinking to himself: “Women!”
“All right, let’s think about how to get out of here. What do you know so far?”
He briefly told her what he had had time to see, not going into details about the description of the corpses. However, Eve shivered. She probably had a vivid imagination.
“Hyperion,” she said. “Something terrible whiffs from this word.”
“I think, not from the word, but from something hidden behind it. Something we cannot remember.”
“We cannot or don’t want to.”
He had to recognize that she was right. Each time when he tried to remember, fear rose from the bottom of his soul like disturbed silt.
“All right,” he said aloud. “Let’s go upward. At this level there is certainly no exit.”
“But you haven’t explored it completely, right? There can be other survivors—as both of us have recovered ourselves here.”
“I do not want to stay here anymore.” Yet recently he was not so sure, but now, having found a partner, he decided to let well enough alone. “If we don’t find an exit, we can always return. And if we find—we’ll send rescuers or whatever.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” agreed Eve. “I get the jitters from this place. And I wouldn’t like to look at corpses at all.”
“I’m afraid,” Adam thought to himself, “you will see them not only on this level,” but he kept silent.
They reached the staircase and, having stepped over the bloody warning, began to ascend.
The route upward occurred to be much shorter, than downwards—only two levels. After entering the top one, they found themselves between the lift and some other sliding doors. There weren’t any corridor here. Sometime these doors were closed, obviously, but someone had taken them apart, hammering them, as judged by crumpled edges, a certain rough wedge between halves, and then widing a gap by means of a lever. At the first Adam was delighted that he did not have to do the same work (especially taking into account that the stormer has carried away his tools), but then he understood that if their predecessor had gotten out to freedom this way, the rescuers or whoever from the external world must have come here already. Judging by a dust lying everywhere, the break in had to have occurred a very long time ago.
It was dark inside, but not completely. Some sparks were shining in a gloom. Could it be stars? Was it night outside? Adam switched on the flashlight and resolutely stepped forward. Eve followed him.
But it was not the night outdoors, not even a window to it. Shining points indeed suggested stars, but with stars seen through a window there usually are no inscriptions. Obviously, it was an image on a screen—more precisely, as revealed by the slipped beam of the flashlight, on a wall which simultaneously played the role of a screen. Below, the beam picked out of the darkness an instrument console stretching along a wall opposite to the entrance, and before it there were two high armchairs with headrests.
Having pointed the beam to the left armchair, Adam saw a hand which motionlessly overhung from the armrest. He expected to see something like this.