Mother had always warned him of the dark.
What she had forgotten was to tell him about the light.
There was something about the light in this place that never ceased to unnerve Asgar. It illuminated every recess of his mind, some of which he had realised in the course of his life, are better kept in shadow.
The summer sun too was unforgiving in its stark relentlessness. But at least it was real. The industrial light here was not. It could not be. Because Asgar was deep inside the earth, in a place where not even nature could enter unless it came with a company badge.
Perhaps it was not so much the brightness that made him uneasy but the icy blue detachment of the ambient light, whose cold touch felt like that of a wet cotton shirt on a blustery, winter evening.
He had felt this way only in one other place before. The morgue.
Battered, mangled what-had-once-drawn-breath lying still on cold slabs of aluminium. Hushed whispers of the living trying to make sense of the dead. The stench of formaldehyde, grief and despair.
For the past day or so, Asgar had been unable to shake off the feeling that he was back in a house of corpses. It was irrational, he reasoned, this fear, even more so after all the real horrors he had seen in his fifty-two years in the world above.
He tried to stop thinking.
Turning his attention back to the control panel, Asgar glanced across at the dials as they glowed and flickered in a steady rhythm of their own. He could not slack off, he told himself. All alone in Level 3 Sector 5, a football- field-sized room with two-storey-high ceilings, he was conscious of the cameras that watched his every movement, and of the automated loggers recording each action at the console.
Right now, one of the sensors showed a reading that was 'off' the charts. That meant only one thing – one of the moving parts in Purifying Chamber 6 had come off, with the sensors picking up the resultant vibration. This necessitated, according to Standard Operation Procedure, a shutdown of Chamber 6 and an immediate manual inspection.
Shit. All such fuck-ups just had to happen on his shift.
He looked at the waveform intently. Then he flipped a switch, the one that the engineers called the 'Ear', its purpose being to 'listen-in' to the area where an anomaly has been detected.
'Help ... Please ... no!'
Asgar jerked back as if he had touched a hot stove.
What in the name of heaven was that?
His rational mind knew it was impossible. Yet there was no denying he had heard it. A voice, choked with tears, coming out from Chamber 6.
