Darina Grotto - Unlimited

Vic said nothing but kept on siting. She looked at the paralyzed old woman and didn’t understand why it had happened to her. She was thinking over it for a long time but didn’t find any answer. It often happened what happened, no one was insured, no one had delays. It just happened for some reasons and unexpectedly. No one was ready to be ill.

The demon was still in the door looking up at the girl and chewed gum. He had no thoughts. He didn’t know and face such grief. He wasn’t neither a sympathizer nor pitiful. Actually, he didn’t care. Despite his power of passion and lust, love mortification he was thick skin.

Victoria touched her granny’s hand and got pierced like by lightning. The girl felt the same feelings and emotions she had had when something had paralyzed her after she had left the bookshop… Then she realized and drew the parallel between what happened and her own feelings. Of course! She might have known it!

‘Kharon!’ the girl ran up to him and took him by the hand. ‘Let’s go!’

‘Is that all? We’re leaving?’ the demon understood nothing, following the girl with fast steps.

‘I’ve got it!’

‘What?’ he shouted after her. ‘What’ve you got? I wanna get it too! Vic!’

She ran to the coatroom. Vic quickly put on seeing no one around.

‘Hey, hey,’ Kharon had caught the girl before she left. ‘Wait. Stop. I’ve got 2 questions. The first one is where you’re running. The second: what did you get?’

‘I felt the thing happening to my granny! Remember? When we were at the bookshop? Then my mum called. Do you remember? I felt the same what my granny felt! But I didn’t understand then…’

‘What idiotic ideas come into your head, Victoria! Why don’t you believe in coincidence?’

‘Kharon!’ Vic frowned. ‘Why are you so sceptical? You’re the brightest representative of what doesn’t exist for people! How can you know anything about scepticism definition?’

‘It’s not scepticism, love, it’s realism. How did you get it and what made you think like this?’

‘When I touched her hand, I understood it. Everything I was getting through after the bookshop, came back to my mind in the shape of recollections.’

Kharon kept cool-headed apparently. But inside he didn’t know what to do. Vic was obviously suspicious of her secret gift and the task for the demon was to remove all her suspicions.

‘Come with me, I’ll show you something that does exist really.’

‘Where?’

‘Give me your hand.’

‘Where’re we going, Kharon?’

‘You told me once that you trust me… Give me your hand!’ Kharon insisted, embracing her tightly. ‘Come closer. You do know why you have to do it, love?’ the man smiled. ‘Close your eyes.’

The girl was overwhelmed with prelibation and looking for. In his mind Kharon was torn between worlds and illusions, being sure that he would be capable of distracting Vic from her thoughts. And he found that certain place.

‘You can open your eyes.’ He said quiet.

Victoria was in no hurry to obey the man’s asking. She listened to the silence. It was terrible and horrible. That was the silence which followed Lucifer’s appearance. Having been afraid of wicked recollections Vic opened her eyes.

There was no one around but Kharon. It was an unusual place: there were big trees with green leaves, curled into a conical shape. The leaves weren’t just green but superdeep and pulsing. Her eyes liked watching it and very quickly got tired of the colour. The foliage stormed full of life and inspiration. But everything around was paralyzed. There was no wind. The air was heavy, massive but you could get a lungful of fresh air. The sky was coloured with bright red with the tinctures and stripes of yellow, transferring into orange and lilac-velvet lines. It was a sunset as silent as everything was around. There was not a single bird in the sky, no one sang beautiful songs. The ears were hurt absorbing that silence.

Grass was under her feet. Her feet were bared. The grass was soft, green and ideally even, not a grass-blade out of place. Nature couldn’t create such perfection. It was impossible. Everything was too perfect. But it was pleasant to walk over the grass. There was just grass around. It was warm. You could say it was good, but you needed some wind blowing.

Kharon was nearby, cast down his head. He was waiting for something. Most likely for reaction. He wanted to understand what Victoria felt at that unusual place. But she kept silence and looked around.

There was a house behind her. It was grey with brick tincture. Three-storeyed. It was a big, log house… with a roof made of like skin. The huge columns on the porch had carved figures of cernuous creatures. Everything was made of wood. It was unusual. Victoria had never seen anything like that before. Log construction was softly sharpened, covered with lacquer or something like that, but there were no circle lines on it instead they were long and expressional. In whole the house was repulsive. Victoria didn’t want to come in.

Vic turned to Kharon again. At least the grasshoppers had to chirp! But no, it was silence. The girl was wheeled round to find any sounds with no comprehension of herself and her own attitude towards surroundings.

She got the feeling that she was in an incubator… or in an aquarium where artificial life bloomed where life seemed to be on the palm but indeed there was no any.

‘Where’re we?’ Vic asked, getting surprised with her own voice sound.

There was no echo, no habitual sound in her head. Even her own voice was unfamiliar. Every uncomprehensive thing made Vic feel more fear.

There was a part of a planet on the horizon. Even with no being educated as an astronomer, Victoria realized that wasn’t the Moon. It was a huge and too close located luminary. It was so unbelievable like in those films about space or in that Photo-shop-made pictures of universe type.

Horrible.

Looking at the big ball on the horizon her heart sank. The planet seemed to be rushing straight to the place which everyone used to call home. One minute or two and then apocalyptic collision was going to happen, the blast wave of which would pull all to quantum particles.

Formidable beauty that was it when Victoria realized not new oxymoron. The eyes want to look, they were interested but the body stopped breathing because of fear.

‘This is my home, Victoria,’ Kharon looked at her.

‘Your home?’ her voice sounded so quiet that you could hardly hear it, but the high notes tried to get out anyway. ‘Am I in hell?’

Vic was scared. The fright fettered her body even worse than when the hellish moon had appeared in the silent sky.

‘It’s just my home…’

Kharon finally started feeling the girl. Being in his territory her own strengths were leaving her. Again, he perfectly heard her thought as he used to, all her panic and anxiety screaming in her head, demanding for returning to the earth. He felt her genuine feelings. He knew that the girl was totally confused. She knew nothing, understood nothing, everything was wild and terrible for her. She had neither strength nor desire to deal with that impossible excessive emotions.

Kharon understood that the girl was sceptical of the place where the demon had lived not the first thousand years.

‘Are we in hell?’ Victoria asked again having turned to the man.

‘If you’re easier then yes, we are.’

‘Why?’ there were tears again. ‘Why are we here?’

‘Why are you crying?’

‘Because I wanna go home! To the earth!’ the girl cried. ‘Are we able to come back home, Kharon? Tell that we can, please! I don’t wanna stay here! I’m scared and I don’t understand why I’m here!’

Kharon had to embrace Victoria as she cried more and more, and she was getting more scared.

‘We’re here for no reason. I just wanted to show my home…’ Kharon felt dejectedly.

‘So, you’re not gonna burn me on a frying-pan?’

‘What?’ no limits were for the demon’s surprised. ‘Burn on a frying-pan?’

‘Stick pitchfork into me and torture my body eternally…?’ Vic added, shacking with only one thought of her being in hell.

‘Come,’ Kharon took her hand and went his home.

He missed so much his home ground, the smell he could never feel on the earth. The thing like home existed not only on the earth. Everyone had habit and love for surroundings.

He ran his hand over the marble walls. The black colour of the stone was as nasty as you could ever imagine, and it delighted the demon eyes.

Coolness and inanimate reflected from the black marble walls, nice essences for Kharon and scared Victoria.

In the hall of the incubus’s house Vic felt like in a tomb. She was scared a bit but the smell she felt was so pleasant and sweet that it and the house couldn’t be identified.

The hall was long. The wall outside of log, inside of stone, seemed to be in size of infinity. There was nothing else in the desolate place. There were no pictures and photos. There were just bare walls. Empty. There was nothing but black, repulsive colour. That design wasn’t for the faint of heart.

Kharon let the girl go first. Fearing everything in the world, Victoria took a step forward. Her hand instinctively touched the cold stone wall. Vic immediately withdrew her hand: she had never felt such scorching cold in her life. It was like the fingertips immersed in liquid nitrogen for unhappy millisecond and that was enough.

‘Cold…’ Vic said turning to the demon.

‘For a human – yes, they are.’

‘How do you feel these walls?’ she asked.

‘Like a warmth of my home.’

‘Warmth of your home?’ the girl shifted the gaze at the walls, but she didn’t want to touch them again. She slowly went ahead suddenly understanding that the entrance door was closing by its own, hiding the particles of artificial light behind.

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed stood in the full darkness. ‘Kharon!’ her voice shook, the heart fluttered. The darkness in that oppressive house seemed to be more unbearable and blacker. ‘Give me your hand… I’m begging you, my love,’ Victoria whispered stretching out her hand into the black vacuum.

There were seconds of terrible and paralyzed silence and then the strong hand, full of habitual warmth squeezed her fingers shacking with fear.

‘How much you’re frightened, child,’ the voice sounded in her ear.

Vic gave a shrug, screwing up her eyes to try to see Kharon.

A small luminary appeared somewhere above them in shape of usual galaxy. That was as unusual light unfamiliar for people. It was alive, moveable like if somewhere tongues of fire were connected, carefully burning something dry away. But the light was dim and there was no its source seen. It seemed that a clot of charged energy, that produced the light, appeared under the ceiling. Victoria had no doubts the luminary was alive absolutely. They were walking through the hall and the light was slowly following them under their heads.

Slight and sudden move of Kharon stopped the girl in the middle of the infinite hall. Then the black marble wall began to move apart.

A huge living room with high ceiling was showed. There was the most complex architecture under its vaults outside of human control. The room was in the form of strict square. It was furnished flawless and in good taste. There were tables with carvings on its legs and chairs and its legs took root in the floor and almost on the floor already swollen buds were about to bloom.

Windows that finally appeared showed a picturesque view of the nearby forest. It was thick and dark with unknown species of trees, the leaves of which were so different in shapes but had nothing in common with the trees on the earth where Vic used to live.