closed his eyes but this time he took in the noise; the cars honking, tires screeching in the distance, a bird sang nearby and people talked and hollered and whispered and sang and cried, they screamed and they laughed. He could hear a plane flying thousands of feet above him and thought he even caught the slightest hint of the sound of someone making love.
Breathing deeply, taking in the scents of the world in all its vile, putrid rottenness and its wonderful perfumes, he retched, overwhelmed with it all. His sense of touch was suddenly extraordinarily acute and he felt the oil in the air as it stuck to him, the grit on the handle held tightly beneath his hand was obvious and fine. He opened his eyes and looked at the walls of the building before him and the clarity struck him dumb. Each pore in the skin of the concrete, every crack and blemish, every smudge of dirt stood out as individual scars across the wall. He could actually see the filth climbing to the Heavens and it moved and breathed as a living beast and rose and rose and rose. All around him he witnessed the voracious appetite of this demon as it infiltrated everything and everyone around him. It seeped into their lungs, slid upon their skin and pushed its way into their mouths and noses. It was a dark shadow moving across the world and he was ready to be done with it.
He opened the door.
There before him was the package he had delivered only moments before. It sat alone on the floor where he had placed it but the room scorched into his mind with it brilliant purity and absolute silence, had been stolen.
The room had vanished and in its place was left a nightmare come to life. It was the antithesis of his perfect room. The walls were grey and gritty with the ever expanding filth from outside. The floors were no longer glistening white, rather they were broken and stained and dull. A cockroach skittered away from him under a desk which now stood where before there had been nothing. Behind the desk sat a very unpleasant woman who stared at him with utter contempt as though he were the filthy one. Her bloated sagging skin sweated in the heat and her upper lip glistened with perspiration. Her skin was dirty and smudged, she appeared to him as the living embodiment of the grotesquery of the outside world. The entity had taken form here before him. He nearly screamed in horror.
The desk was covered in stacks of yellowed papers and folders, each with its own set of inked fingerprints displayed randomly over them. Cobwebs hung from each of the corners of the room and The Entity sat smugly looking at him as a spider inspects its prey caught in its web. Behind her on the wall was a torn poster with the slogan, “Mistakes are a learning experience...and I’ve got a PhD.”
He must have entered the wrong door! His holy realm was next door, or the door after that. This could not be his salvation! But he knew better. The package was all the proof his brain needed to close that argument. He felt his knees buckle and he collapsed onto the filth ridden floor and breathed in great rasping breaths. The world turned in on itself and then went black. The heat had been turned up and somewhere, far off in the distance, he heard an odd gravely voice. It was the woman behind the desk calling someone and it said, “Hey Joe, we’ve got another one down. Can you come up and help me?”
He opened his eyes and she was standing above him, staring through him. A moment later a man, Joe he assumed, joined her. He wore blue overalls with a name tag which clearly stated his name was Kermit. “Hey Joe, help me with this guy will you. He came in a few minutes ago and looked around the way Alice would have looked at Wonderland and then left without a word. A few minutes later he comes bursting through the door and stops dead and then collapsed. Just like the other guy. It’s weird.” She winked at Joe/Kermit with a sly sort of smile and Joe grinned back and winked his reply.
“What should we do with him Flo? Same as before?”
“Yep, he’s seen too much. Toss him in.”
They hefted him up and pulled his limp body to a metal door in the wall. When they opened it heat plumed out and struck him across his face.
“Sorry sir, rules is rules and all that.” Joe/Kermit said. “You’ve seen something you shouldn’t have seen. We have to do this. Can’t have you running around telling everyone about your moment as the Emperor of Silence now can we.”
The hefted him up even higher and tilted him so that he could see into the shaft and what he saw awaiting him would normally have wrung him dry with fear. Flames licked the chute, climbing ever closer to him and he smiled again. He knew the silence was waiting for him just the other side of this wall of fire before him.
With a slight tip from Joe/Kermit, he slipped easily into the hole in the wall and slid quietly to the bottom where the flames engulfed him with a ‘Whoomphf!’ Joe closed the door.
Here it was that he did indeed find his beautiful room again. The perfect white room without noise, without odour, without the rottenness of the world seeping in at every corner. Was this death? The question vanished almost as quickly as it had entered his mind. Quiet solitude met him and he fell into it without argument, without question and without fear.
The Emperor of Silence sat upon his throne and listened intently at the nothingness.
The End
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