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The smell of stale urine mingled with the faint odour of alcohol drifting out from a pub on the corner. He took a final drag on his cigarette, blowing the smoke as far as he could, then dropped it to the floor, leaving it gasping into the wind behind him. A young man with a pierced eyebrow and threadbare, dirty clothes was huddled in the doorway of a deserted shop. An ugly purple bruise leered from the side of his cheek and a thin covering of sandpaper stubble surrounded his features. He looked up at the man in the grey coat and they made eye contact for a tiny period of time. A flicker of hope flashed through the homeless man’s tired eyes.
“Can you spare some change mate? Please? Anything would be great.”
The man in the long coat slowed down momentarily, still holding eye contact, the expression on his face not moving. Then he looked away, and carried on walking, and was out of sight onto another busy street.
The screens are always on when I am awake. I try not to look at them. I try to close my eyes. Not good enough. Nowhere near. The images are burned into the retina of my mind. I can’t escape them, not even in sleep. I dream about them when tiredness becomes too much. Above, on the ceiling, endless rows of soldiers, jittering, marching past the camera. Old pictures, old newsreel, a shaky sepia film. Soldiers all casualties. Hands on the shoulders of the man in front, the blind leading the blind, an endless march of suffering. Below, on the screen that my body covers, blasted remains of houses, charred corpses of buildings. Yawning ruins, scoured black, lifeless and draining just to look at. The walls are worse. Each screen a diorama of pain, human suffering. Scenes I saw in my nightmares a long time ago. Witnessed atrocities. A bulldozer pushing massed ranks of wasted, emaciated corpses into a huge pit in the hard ground. Men falling with eyes open. All soundless. Perfect peaceful silence. A blade looping through the skin on the inside of a bony arm. Sickly green, flashes of white. There are more. I can’t bear to look at any of them.
I stare at the inscription above the door, words inscrutable, taunting. I read them over and over, but they are just as indecipherable now as they were then, as they were the first time I laid eyes on them. Apart from the absence of the screens, there are no distinguishing features on this side. No handles, no keyholes, nothing, no hint nor hope that the door will ever open. Just the inscription.
Below it, on the face of the door itself, a picture. A portrait of a young woman. She is looking straight out at me with eyes so terribly sad I feel a wave of black despair surge over me whenever I look at her. She’s a whisper too thin, her skin pulled a fraction too tight over the gorged bones of her body. Her teeth are just yellowing, mouth a thin bloodless line. Lank, lifeless hair hangs down to her shoulders like the fur of drowned rats.