D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,117

unfortunate woman. Though there were no clothes on the body, the amnesiac could not immediately recognize its gender. Her skin was almost completely grazed. Only on the lower body did semi-torn off scraps of skin hang down from the scarlet flesh. Maybe the torturer did not have enough time, or something has distracted him. But especially gruesome was the look of the round head, with rolled out balls of lidsless eyes and, grinning in a final shout, lipless jaws. She had no legs, only a medley of blood-stained tatters of flesh, from which yellowish bones stuck out, was left from her hips, and everything below, seemingly, was not even chopped off, but simply broken out from knee joints. The belly of the martyr has been ripped, and entrails, having fallen out through the cut, hung down like an ugly knobby utter. Thin but obviously strong wire dug into her outstretched arms, tearing the wrists almost to the bone, the left arm tied this way to a bracket on which, probably, an observation camera had once been established, and the right arm to ventilating lattice in the opposite wall. (The ventilation was not working here as seemed to be the case for the whole building.)

It was hard to say how long her agony lasted, but now within this tormented and mutilated body life could be found again. The purple-shining peeled flesh was already accreting in places with some spongy rubbish, but more to the point, the whole body was pitted and corroded by small gnawed holes. Numerous creatures similar to a hybrid of a worm and an insect crawled out of these holes, crept on the dead body and disappeared inside again. They had triangular heads, articulated fore-chelas–only one pair–and soft twisted bodies. Their length did not surpass three centimeters, but on the corpse (and the more so, obviously, in it) there were plenty of them, and their swarming made that sound which the amnesiac heard. Unlike ants or termites, they moved slowly and clumsily, quite often slipping from the dead flesh and plopping down to the floor. Under their awful nest, a whole pile of dead creatures had already accumulated. Those still alive were scraping and wriggling among the corpses of their companions.

The corridor was not too narrow to bypass the crucified corpse, still it was hard to imagine a more daunting obstacle to moving further. The amnesiac moved back. Some arthropodic worms fell out of the open mouth of the dead woman and, as if sensing material for a new nest, began crawling towards him as fast as their ugly constitution allowed. This became the final straw, he turned and quickly rushed away. The passionless automatics recognized that the light was no longer necessary and the darkness again hid the horror that was now behind him.

But for an instant before the light had gone out, he had time to see something else. On a lift door–situated just so the crucified woman could have seen it and, quite possibly, written in her own blood–was one more message, a phrase least of all corresponding to all seen in this corridor and in this damned building in general: "NO DEATH."

He regained self-control only when he had almost lost his breath from running so quickly up the staircase. He dropped to his knees and rested his hands against the step before him, panting noisily. His heart pounded so hard it felt as though it would break through his ribs, tear through the skin and plop down on the dirty platform as a wet gob of meat, making the same sound with which the quasi-worms had slipped from a corpse and plopped to the floor.

He tried again to pull out of the sticky whirlpool of panic and to reason logically. Whatever it was that he had just seen, there was one thing quite clear: She had in no way committed suicide. And the one who had killed her–the one who enjoyed killing people IN SUCH A WAY–was, quite probably, still alive and somewhere in this building. And for that matter who is to say that he was only one.

At last, having recovered his breath (and with surprise at having understood that he didn't sweat at all), he raised his head and stumbled across the inscription "DO NOT GO THERE." Aha, here he was already. That meant that he had run again to his initial level. But now this time he was not going to take these inscriptions seriously. Kill yourself now. No death. That