NO CHANCE (SHORT STORY)

2

Crude. Complete darkness. Some voices were heard near me, but I could not make out the meaning. I didn't want to, honestly. The air was saturated with some stench. Disgusting. Lousy. I slowly opened my eyes. After a few minutes of waiting, my irritated eyes were accustomed to the environment, and I could distinguish the figures. I began to look at the scenery that my vision drew for me.

Small-sized room, with absolutely bare walls, soaked in dampness. A damp wooden floor with boards already rotting. In one corner of the room, which was not in the shape of a square, but somewhat similar, through a small glass doorway (something like a window, only for some strange reason made parallel to the floor and at a distance of ten centimeters above), oozed dim light. The reason for such poor lighting could also serve as the state of the window itself—dirty, stained with fingerprints of human fingers, and covered with flies. From the furniture to the room, there was nothing. The door of the room was open. Now, because of some thoughts that were ahead of my brain, I immediately switched the focus to the people in the room. When I opened my eyes, they all stopped talking; maybe that's why I decided to look around the room first. Carefully considering people, I realized that I saw them for the first time in my life and that they were total strangers to me, but an inner sense literally shouted to me, "Hey, you do know all of them!" It's like I had amnesia, and someone's already informed me about it. All people at the same time never ceased to gaze at me. Now I can not remember the exact number of people in the room at that time, but five people were there for sure.

The paradox was that there were two young men who later spoke to me as if we were old friends of mine, yet I had no idea who they were. In the room, the rest were ladies. Their eyes were frightened and tear-stained. But there could be no mistake—we were not familiar. Suddenly someone, a woman, hoarse from a long sob, addressed me by name and said that we could not get out of here and that we would all die. I spoke to all these people as if I'd known them all my life. No one (myself included) looked surprised. I must have really lost my memory.

- Why would we die? What are you talking about? - I asked in surprise.

- We will all die! Die! - muttered the girl through tears.

- What are you talking about?

- We're all going to be killed!

- Who would kill us? - I guessed I was in the walls of a madhouse. Clearly, by mistake.

- That guard who's watching us!

- ???

All the company crawled up to the dirty window and beckoned me, pointing fingers somewhere. Only now I noticed that they were all placed on a dirty, damp mattress, which abruptly began to emit an unpleasant smell of urine and excrements. I crawled to the window and looked in the direction indicated by the lads. It became obvious that we were on the second floor of a building, because at the bottom, next to the stairs going down, a black bald man was sitting on a chair in front of a small table, reading a newspaper, drinking hot tea (or maybe it was coffee—how could I know), and it could be assumed that the stairs leading even lower, just did not exist. So we had either the second floor or the first, and Mr. Guard was in the basement.

- So we can't escape through the open door, - the young man pointed to the door. - See?

Ah, an open door is a kind of bait, I realized plainly, to punish the ones trying to escape. So, we're being held captive by a maniac?