“Maybe it’s an answer”, he whispered to the grey shadows trembling on the ceiling. What did that sentence mean? He didn’t know. It always happened to him, when he started to get tired. Most of the times he slipped into unconsciousness without realizing it; but there were times he noticed the small, weird, inappropriate ideas appearing in his head and surprising him with their apparent extraneousness.
How could the hidden diary on which he was lying be an answer? Had he been on the island, on the sun, relaxing, he could have thought of a simple and linear explanation, perfectly understandable and rational. But in there… there, in that huge concrete cylinder full of acid and rotting corpses, where not a single minute passed without it being filled with anguish, suffering and death, with him not even noticing… him, the Keeper of Tank 9, the only sane cell in a world of endless pain. An angel in hell…
He was startled by a sudden twitch of a nerve of his leg and his heart painfully skipped a beat. He was hot. With a brusque movement he pushed the blanket away, annoyed. It was windy outside. A suffused, far, modulated whistle. It should have helped him sleep, and yet… he was still awake. But how much time had passed since he went to bed? He could ask the alarm clock on his bedside table just by pressing a button; the torpor he felt in his arms discouraged him, so he decided to lie on his back, waiting to fall into slumber. It was inevitable. Or maybe it had already happened, he couldn’t say. It wasn't the first time he dreamt of being awake and when it happened he had no way to understand his condition. Sleeping? Awake? What difference could it make?
The diary on which he slept. It was an answer, sure. But to what question? The one that sometimes came back to molest him, like a fly being repeatedly driven away, but always returning. Aren’t you afraid? Yes, sometimes. At night…
He wondered whether his eyes were closed or open, and he decided that particular doubt was of very little importance.
What am I afraid of? Well… there are a lot of things to be afraid of. (But you… you, Giovanni: what are you afraid of? To lose your mind like Keeper before you?)
Maybe. Everything oscillates. Here’s sleep, here comes sleep… and if those papers on which I lie, those sick pages compressed between the frame and the mattress, dripped madness, infecting me, drenching the bed with the crazy ideas infecting it like parasites of ink?
(It’s a nice picture, Giovanni. Parasites made of ink that produce fear… it would be an answer. You have to take that diary, burn it. Even if you didn’t read it all, that taste was enough to envenom your should, haven’t you noticed?)
No, such idiocy! It’s just scrap paper, and in here I can’t burn anything. I could unload it. Good idea. Let’s give those poor souls something to read, just to ass the time…
And among the senseless spires of such thoughts Giovanni fell asleep, leaving his mind open for the most terrifying dream he had ever made.
All of the Tank’s convicts have gotten out. How they did it is irrelevant. They did it and what’s important is their irrepressible thirst for revenge. The Suffering has been torn away and so has the first door of the Shutter. Now tenths, hundreds of men fill the Ring, and many more surface from the black void vomiting them. And not all of them are alive, in the true sense of the word at least. Some have their neck bent in unnatural angles. Others have horrid bites on their necks, faces, or scrapes, bruises, lacerations. Giovanni knows, sees all this, despite being still locked up in his apartment. With his ear on the reinforced door he listens to his own anguished rasping breath mixing with the hoarse groans and the unintelligible words coming from the circular hallway. The neon light work intermittently, their work about to be over. From the shadowy mouth of the Shutter even more bodies, each time less and less intact, less and less human, keep on coming out. The sulphuric acid has damaged them in various manners and in a short amount of times the things coming out of the Tank’s depth haven’t even got a recognizable shape.
in the meanwhile, more and more ferocious fists bang on the door. They didn’t come out to run away. They have come for him. It’s him they want and they will soon have him. Giovanni feels his heart crushed by the fingers of a terror so unbearable that it could even kill him. And it would be a blessing for sure. If those monsters get in, not only would be die a horrible death, but his soul would be lost for eternity.
Screams an laments, out there. A whirl of suffering filling the Ring, rotating without rest. Anger and sorrow spat by throats more or less alive. Voices shouting truncated words; syllables flying like maddened birds in a sky of intermittent electric lights, trying to form his name. Giovanni knows they are calling for him, reclaiming him…
The terror devouring his insides is paroxysmal, and the Keeper understands there are only two ways out there: he can either die, or…
He woke up – in a hot and damp bed, all messed up, a tangle of covers – and he felt like he was going to explode. His heart and brain were screaming in unison inside him. The land of Nod shot him out of its territories with the speed of a cannon ball, sending him back to reality.
But… was he truly awake? He clumsily started moving his arms and hands, touching his sweating body.
Despite recognising the shapes and shadows of his bedroom’s furniture, he could still hear those sounds, those groans, those curses. And a few seconds were enough to convince himself that they weren’t echoes from his subconscious.
“It’s not true!” He said in melodramatic voice, branding everything he was perceiving as surreal. His heart – which since his awakening should have had slowed down a little – kept on drumming in his chest; and Giovanni couldn’t resist the impulse of slapping himself, hoping he would manage to banish those unrelenting voices in the back of his mind.
It was a continuous wave of laments and squeaks, brays and cries; and those wave spread on the floor of a low sizzle, as if they came from another world and could only materialize thanks to an audio device decrypting them.
The answer hit him like a wrecking ball.
Nobody had got out of the Tank. Nobody was laying siege on him.
On shaky legs he staggered out of the room, and, despite being sure enough about what he would find, he welcomed with infinite gratitude the confirmation to his suspicions. The voices were suddenly louder know. And also the underlying crackle. Entering the control, he had to put his hands on his ears.
On the console, a control light was on. The green light of the audio channel. And from a small amplifier hidden in the well the unbearable voice of damnation was pouring onto him.
An unpleasant thought spread his small, sturdy wings inside his head: did he press that button? More than once had he been tempted to do it, that much was true, but his common sense had always suggested to avoid that morbid act, not to hurt himself. What could he possibly gain by such an experience? But maybe, after holding back for so long, his mind had found a way to bypass the obstacle and satisfy his curiosity. Things had to be that way, there were no other explanations. And… when did he do that? In his sleep? The idea of sleepwalking wasn’t alluring, but it was the only one excluding action from other people. And there was nobody there, nobody…