The first very unsettling episode happened on January 23rd, in the dead of night, when Giovanni could finally tell he had integrated with the Tank’s routine at a psychological level.
He was woken up by someone knocking at the door.
Since the year had began everything was going according to plan. The white truck with a red tetragram on the sides, the one that brought provisions, punctually came twice a week, on Tuesdays and on Fridays. In the late morning Giovanni would put the grey styrofoam bin full of left-overs and junk in the elevator, then get the one containing fresh food. Of course, he couldn’t choose the menu, but the food and drinks the NMO sent him were reasonably varied and of good quality.
The ironing and laundry service, which conveniently came on the same two days as the provisions, but in the early afternoon, was impeccable too. There was another truck (with a blue tetragram) and, without any need for interpersonal communication, the dirty sheets and clothes were put in a basket and substituted by those withdrawn and cleaned the previous time.
The average number of delivered convicts was between five and seven a day. He watched any possible kind of criminal walk into the Shutter. There were foreigners and fellow countrymen alike: thieves, murderers, crooks, pimps, drug-dealers, robbers, religious integralists, mafia thugs, rapists, pedophiles...beasts only fit for slaughter. Tumors to be removed. He hadn’t met any politicians yet, but there was a very simple reason for that: those who had perpetrated the ruse known as the Fourth Republic were already out of business; many once and for all, having probably inaugurated Tank 1 years earlier. Members of Mafia groups, families and similar historical and social aberrations had grown rare; the army had conducted carried out a great number of incursions in the so called hot zones of organised crime and cleaned them up using strong-arm tactics (which to be fair were the only effective ones).
There were also a lot of foreigners, but in a lower percentage that before. When the NMO substituted the former government, one of its first military-political measures was to gather and deport all clandestine immigrants, from nomads to false refugees; predictably, many had managed to get back in the country, but they had been caught.
There were usually two Escort Guards, but in case of single deliveries one was sufficient. Some days earlier Scar had come to the Tank, but there was no more than an impersonal exchange of formulae between Giovanni and him. The Keeper’s initial distaste in his regards was gone, he felt he had finally managed to fit in the context and could confidently manage both his job and relationships with other people. Each to its place and things would go smoothly.
He also had some bad dreams during the first nights. Nothing major. He kept seeing the Well. Predictable. The psychologist had warned him.
“You could have nightmares, especially during the first few weeks”, he had told him. “Don’t worry, it’s normal. Life in the Tank isn’t easy as it might seem. There’s a lot of people in there, it’s true. But you are alone. Are you aware of that?”
Giovanni had answered with confidence, smiling widely. To tell the truth, he was never one-hundred percent sure of the things he said during the interviews. He wasn’t sure he had been completely honest. He could doubtlessly say - but only yo himself - that he had more than once lied about his character and personality in order to be seen as the ideal candidate. Did it mean he had cheated? Maybe, maybe not. No doubt the others had done the same. The difference was he had succeeded. He felt he had had enough common sense and intuition in order to understand what he was expected to answer during tests; thus he managed to conform. Maybe that guy Alex, the one who came second, was more fit for the job, but he was the one who took it, and that was it.
The reasons why he wanted that job so much were essentially two. The first was ideological. The NMO always fascinated him. He agreed with it on every topic: politics, military, law, social welfare. He remembered that when he was a kid his home had been robbed by gypsies and since then, maybe, a feeling of rebellion towards some social categories had started to grow; a feeling that had grown to include all those people who could be seen as cancers hanging from an otherwise healthy tissue. The second reason was a lot more practical, he had to admit it. At the end of his year of service he would receive an monetary compensation that would allow him to realize one of his dreams: a long vacation somewhere in the Pacific or the Atlantic. An island, for example. He couldn’t say he knew them, but the Bahamas had a good ring to them...it was about the money. He was doing it for that, too.
***
Yeah, he had had nightmares. Considering what he had to see every single day, there was nothing to be surprised of. He lived surrounded by death, fear and suffering. The Tank itself was drenched in them. They seeped from the walls, saturated the very air he breathed. Moreover, it wouldn’t be long before the first Cleansing of the year. Giovanni thought it would test him further and give his subconscious new tools to have fun creating new, more unpleasant dreams.
But the nightmare he had that night was particularly vivid. And the impression that it wasn’t completely a nightmare wouldn’t leave before a long time.
Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day. Two triple deliveries, the usual formalities, some exercise, a light meal, a documentary on african animals on Tv. He read a few pages from a book by Verne, then he fell asleep. In the dead of night, from the unaccessible caves of his mind, somebody...
...starts crawling from dark depths ridden with corpses and agonizing men. He digs a way up moving limbs, pulling ragged clothes, biting when necessary, and kicking. A constant rattle comes in and out his searing throat, becoming a beastly baying resounding in the curved walls of steel and concrete.
The man keeps on climbing without rest, it is Giovanni and a stranger at the same time. In the dream, sounds and smells are as real as the phosphorescent darkness stagnantly pulsating in the damp gaps between the seemingly endless bodies. Many of them are crawling too, their hands tied behind their backs and their mouths dirty with blood, telling stories of atrocious appetites. The man climbing upwards - Giovanni - uses his teeth too, but not to feed. He does so to make the others get out of his way, let him pass and reach the superficial layer of bodies, fill his lungs with the blessed air above them, see the light.
The weight on him gets less and less oppressing the more he advances, a centimeter at a time. There are groans, screams and cries everywhere. The smell is unbearable. It gets under the skin, closing the pores. Blood, sweat, urine, feces...
And he is finally out! Shaking off the hands trying to grab his legs and clothes to pull him back in that meat vortex, the man starts walking on that shaking, growling mass. He steppes on faces, making black spurts come out of crushed cartilage, breaks bones and joints among creaking sounds and ape-like screams. From a seemingly unreachable height a yellow, dust-particle light pours on him in gashes that have the same rhythm as his heartbeat. Giovanni knows that light comes from from the glass walls of the Shutter, like he knows that is the man’s goal, his goal.
He walks to the closest wall and puts his hands on it. The concrete is cold and rough on his wounded palms. An intense, burning, yet not unpleasant feeling runs through his whole body. It is like an unknown energy invigorating him. He feels reborn. He plunges his nails in the wall, penetrating it like claws, and starts climbing like a monstrous spiders, leaving behind the deadly miasma that still claims him. Until he reaches the Shutter. There he bends at unnatural angles, jumps and grips the Suffering, inserting bony but tough fingers between the shutters...and when they open to let him in, an asthmatic breath comes out of his lungs, slimily echoing on the cabin’s walls. All he has to do is reach out with his arm and push, and with a dark droning the first sliding door welcomes him with a whisper. Come, you have reached the Ring...Giovanni is not that man anymore. He is lying on his bed and when he hears three loud knocks on the flat’s door he springs up. He exits the room, his legs shaking, the sole of his feet snapping on the ice-cold floor. He reaches the door and cautiously puts an ear on the surface of fake wood. He listens and listens...on the other side he can hear a tired, laboured breath. It belongs to somebody who went a long way reach him. And nothing can make him go away.
Giovanni says “Who’s there?”
And a voice - trembling, yet menacing - answers: “I just wanted to throw some fliers.”
***
In that moment Giovanni woke up for real.
His first feeling was to be rolled up in square meters of crawling skin. He had his knees bent against chest in a fetal position, like when he was a kid and had a bad dream. His heart as beating like crazy and drool came out of his mouth as he raised his head. His conscience - at least the part that managed to wake up in his brain - told him to calm down. It was a nightmare, nothing more. And if it wasn’t for the fact that he could still hear the knocking echoing in his ears he probably would. The impression that someone had really knocked, and loudly, stuck to his brain, and he would never be able to go back to sleep without checking first.
He reached out to turn on the screen of the digital alarm clock on the bedside table. He felt he had dreamt for hours, but only eleven minutes after midnight had passed. He reluctantly pulled the sheets aside, sat on his bed and looked for his loafers with his feet (he had woken up just a few minutes earlier, in his dream, and he remembered how cold the floor was).
A pale ray of yellow and grey light came into the room through the window - which was never dark, not even at night - filtering from behind milky white clouds that foreshadowed snowing, and the floodlights of the Camp’s sentinels. Being on the north-western side of the building, the bedroom was never flooded with too much sunlight and the morning sun came as a discreet, pink halo.
But the dawn was still far away. And so was sleep. His eyes had already adapted to the dim light and trying not to make any noise - even if there was nobody there - he got out of his room, whose door he usually left open, and for a few moments he remained still in front of the reinforced entrance.
His eyes were fixed on the tips his loafers, but his ears tried to scan the almost complete silence where the low, continuos buzzing of the fridge was the only thing he could hear.
He thought about asking: “Who’s there?” But he didn’t know how he would react if the same answer he heard in his dream would come from the other side.
He still had to go out and check. It was his duty. Even if he wouldn’t probably report that episode. It was something personal after all. He had a nightmare and the acoustic illusion had continued once awake.
Everything in the Control was calm and still, apart from the resell larvae in the Well. There, inside the big screen, day and night had no meaning. Time didn’t exist for the Tank’s convicts. Dawn, midday, dusk, midnight...a quick look was enough to confirm that everything was ok. What was he expecting, to find the Tank empty? And maybe that all those who had swarmed the Ring were waiting for him to come out? The mere thought made him smile, but he felt hundreds of tiny pinheads in the back of his head.
Without turning the big neon lamp on - he could very well see in the mould-colored light coming from the screen - he grabbed the 9 mm gun from the third drawer and went back to the entrance door.
The key, and the whole set, was in the lock, like every other night. Giovanni hesitated for a few more seconds, realizing he was rhythmically folding and extending his toes. He happened to unawarely do so every time he was in a stressful situation. He remembered noticing himself doing it more than once during the tests. He stopped immediately, irritated by the thought of being distressed by a stupid dream.
He turned the key with intentional vigor, causing a sudden clatter that would surely scare whoever was out there to ambush him.
Ambush me? Night and solitude really stress nerves out...
He opened the door aiming his gun in front of him, rapidly checking both ways. His pupils shrunk immediately, hit by the constant light of the long, circular corridor. It was a cold light, like those in hospitals.
Nobody was there, of course.
Neither on the left, nor on the right. Nobody. The elevator was silent. So was the Shutter’s door. Something in his chest told him he could speak without being afraid of any surprises.
“Is there anybody there?”
His words flew along the ring, split up and probably met on the other side, on the dark side of the moon. It was obvious that if someone had been actually there, he would never answer. It was a truth known by any sentinel: if it doesn’t answer, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. He did the only think left to do.
He decided to go right, keeping to the Ring’s longest wall. The rubber soles of his loafers whistled weakly against the linoleum floor. He didn’t try to be more stealthy; he made clear he was there. The neon’s light came down intermittently, with a darker cone every two steps between one lamp and the other. He stubbornly blocked himself from thinking, knowing that letting his fantasy run would be a big mistake. The whole thing whose more emotionally challenging that he had imagined. Maybe he did have to report the episode. All in all, the fact of hearing or believing to have heard a noise in the dead of night and reacting as expecting from him would do him honour. He wouldn’t mention the dream.
He finally reached the Escape (he immediately verified if it was locked) and the Porthole, diametrically opposite to his flat. As soon as he realized it, a slimy shadow crawling up his spinal cord made him shiver. The thought penetrated his brain like a corkscrew.
The flat...he had left it wide open.
He didn’t need to panic, though. He kept on walking along the Ring, now walking faster, his weapon aiming forward should he see the intruder beyond the turn, in the heart of the Dark Side.
He reached the lift, then the reinforced door. It was open, of course. He cursed himself through his teeth for being so clumsy, deciding that would he really report the episode - and he wasn’t so sure about that anymore - he would also leave that detail out.
He entered with a dash, turning all the lights on. There was nobody in the Control. Nor in the kitchen and the bedroom. He looked in the toilet too, to be sure. After finishing that quick inspection he realized he was holding his breath since the moment he came in, so he let out an ominous sigh that flew in the silence. He felt quite ridiculous now. Where had all his cockiness gone? The tough-guy act he put on to be selected? If Stevanich could see him, he would probably call him to his office for another face-to-face. And a lot less pleasant than the previous one.
So, he told himself, you might as well go all the way: look under the bed. It is the favorite hiding place of any nocturnal threat, isn’t it?
He knelt with a grin and, using his Beretta to move away the sheets, which almost touched the floor, he went on one elbow and lowered his head...
The sudden buzz of the Spy almost made him scream.
Teeth clenched, his heart pounding against his rips, he ran towards the still open door (over which the red light shone) and almost fell. One of his loafers slipped away from his foot and and into the air, but he didn’t care. The noise of the lift’s mechanism stopped with the metallic thud that signalled the cabin’s arrival to the ground floor. But...how could he not hear any noises earlier? There had to be some. Had an intruder come up while he was sleeping. the acoustic signal of the Spy should have woken him up. Or maybe not...
A scarlet flash lightened up a dark corner of his memory. There had been a moment in his nightmare...yes, when the Shutter’s door had opened to let that...that thing...reach the Ring. It did so with a deep, loud buzzing sound. Yes, he remembered now. It was the sound made by the Spy!
He rushed to the bedroom again, barely noticing the difference in temperature being bare-footed. He opened the window and leant his head into the chill of the night. The vertigo’s icy fingers caressed his forehead, but he meant to endure it, hoping to catch a glimpse of movement somewhere.
It was all useless. Down there, everything was coated in darkness. The moon, which was on the back side of the Tank, projected a vast lead-coloured shadow on the front, hiding the lift’s entrance from view. Anyone who exited it could easily see him at the window and cunningly crawl along the building’s circumference to disappear unseen.
He retreated and closed the window, cutting out the cold bite of the night’s wind. There some lights in the distance, where all the activities of Camp 9 were organised and directed. Maybe in that same moment somebody was already preparing the faxes he would receive the following day. Or - why not? - he was looking towards the Tank, asking himself why was the Keeper still keeping the lights on...
There also had to be many prisoners, convicts who were soon to be delivered, locked up in some cell. He could bet they had it way, way worse than him. The night before entering hell was a terrible one.
He locked the reinforced door, drank the orange juice left in the fridge, then turned off the apartment lights one by one.
Without even giving one last glance to the Well he sat on the edge of his bed, his head between his hands. Maybe he would manage to think about the whole episode with a clearer mind the following day. He knew how the human mind could glue together the pieces of a particular event, however problematic or lacking, in order to make it seamlessly fit in the ordinary. Did he really hear someone knocking at the door or did he just catch the echoes of a dream upon waking up? And if he chose to believe he had heard something, was it the knocking or the clang of the lift reaching the floor? That last hypothesis had to be discarded as it created more than one complication. He could just convince himself that what he had heard was not the sound of the descending car. Between the emotional stress and the blood pumping in his head, even a voltage drop of the fridge or the kitchen could be mistaken for...
“Oh, damn it all!”
He laid on the bed, hands crossed under his head. The ceiling was a dark and magical gulf where his dreams, which were born on the center of his forehead to drip through his brain and be absorbed, already forgotten, on the pillow, took form. Only one detail ruined that enchanted landscape: an indistinct shadow on the corners of his mind. The impression he missed something, like a splinter from a shattered mirror. Something he saw, maybe? That he had register somewhere in his brain, but then was buried in the depth of his head...
But he had time to think it over. (A splinter). If someone had really been there, he was gone now. (Splinters everywhere. For how many you may pick up, one is always missing. A triangle.) And if he had just made everything up, all the better. (Under a piece of furniture. A white triangle. Under the bed.) It was time to stop thinking. (Under the bed). He had to worry about the sun...
He fell asleep after three minutes and nothing more happened that night.