D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,116
he was, he was, for some reason, quite confident that he was definitely not a physician.
At last he wound the sheet around the handle of the flashlight and picked up the tablet from the floor, then continued to search for the exit.
The flashlight shone dimly. Apparently its accumulator was almost discharged, so he definitely had to hurry. But with at least this light source the warehouse didn't seem something like a haunted dungeon anymore. The containers were not specially placed in order to confuse the person who appeared here, so he quickly enough found the exit back to the staircase. This, however, did not suit him already, and he moved along a wall in search of an exit to the outside. But, to his surprise, having gone around the whole warehouse on its perimeter, he had not found any more doors. For some time he stood there perplexed. Some containers were obviously too large to drag them down the spiral staircase already familiar to him. How could they get here? He looked with doubt at the waning flashlight and nevertheless moved deeper into the warehouse.
The thought which had flashed through his mind proved true and after a while he found them: the big square hatches in the floor–more exactly, not really hatches, but the platforms of lifts by which cargo was hoisted from below. So, this was not yet the bottom level of a vault? There are probably tunnels under the building. Anyhow, he couldn't go there. He had not found any buttons to activate the lifts. Any attempts to open some of the containers had also failed. He had to return to the staircase.
As he had planned to do before, he ascended to the next level and entered the passage leading into the cylinder. Here it was also absolutely dark. But no sooner had he taken a pair of steps than light switched on with a strained click, and brighter than before, so that he shuddered unexpectedly, but understood at the next moment that in some places the automatics still worked. He turned off the flashlight to save the battery charge.
Having rounded the lift shaft, he found himself in a corridor. Here something clicked too, but light did not come on. Perhaps, it will work in the next section, the man thought and made some careful steps forward. There was clearly a reason to move cautiously. The floor underfoot was not simply dirty. It was somehow greasy, in places slippery. It was not blood–neither dried up nor even fresh. It was something different. And the smell. To the general atmosphere of mustiness and desolation something else was added here. Something heavy and unpleasant. Not the odor of decay, no. More likely such an odor came from something alive–something even the most excited fans of nature would not care to have as a pet. More precisely, they would not want to encounter at all.
The man stopped in indecision. Now he also heard sounds–muted sounds, hardly distinguishable, wet, rasping and stirring.
He lifted the flashlight, holding it like a sword hilt. But he didn’t switch it on. He took one more step, knowing (from where did this knowledge come?) that he would enter the radius of a sensor responsible for illuminating the next section. This hope proved true. It clicked, and then light was turned on.
The light illuminated a corridor looking completely different from the other premises of this strange building, while initially, obviously, it had been built and finished in the same manner. But while in other places only dust and rubbish had accumulated, here everything looked much worse. From the ceiling here and there hung some sort of fringe, disheveled rags of something like a dusty web, with stalactites of pale flesh hanged down. On the walls jellylike stains fatly shone and mold blots shagged. On the floor, covered with dead insects in some places, having swelled and broken through an artificial covering, slimy ugly mushrooms, similar to pieces of aborted embryos, puffed up. But this was not the nastiest. Oh no, it was only a background which was almost not borne in the mind of the amnesiac. Because he, paralysed by horror and disgust, stared at what he had nearly nestled against in the dark.
Just a meter from his face, across a corridor, hung a crucified corpse. Certainly, this was not the first dead person he had seen this day, but all the previous, however terrible their end had been, were really lucky compared to this unfortunate person–more precisely,