The Time of the Titans

Chapter 1: The Awakening

The room brought to my mind a hospital. An impersonal, clinical smell. The walls were all white. I was lying on a bed that did not feel mine. My eyes were blurry, and I could not see beyond the general tones of colours and light. Too much light.

I felt immensely weak. Trying to move my hands, I was not sure if even my fingers moved. An attempt to move them seemed to consume all my willpower, and I found no strength in my physical body. My foggy eyes felt tired and wet, as if I was still in the river and watched the scene through a layer of water. I thought my eyes had registered movement, a shape walking in and again out of the room. When I tried to focus, I saw nothing more.

Exhausted by the effort to reach consciousness, I passed out again.

*   *   *

I was not sure if it was an actual memory or a dream, but I woke up for the last time in a hospital. I knew it was a hospital because there were nurses, doctors, hospital machines, and the smell was that of antiseptics.

Two people I knew came to visit me in that hospital. They stood by my bed, facing me, though for a part of the time I felt like I was watching them from the ceiling. One of them was Helena. Thank God, my dear Helena. I also knew the man in her company. He was Benedict Helsinger, Professor Landorf's first deputy. A tall and robust man with a pale face and somehow sinister features, with a perpetual frown. He was a brilliant scientist and Landorf's right hand man, but socially, he was Helena's opposite, as he was known to have no interest in any gender, and little appetite for social life anyway. This fact provided me with some strange consolation on my bed, as at least he wouldn't be a man Helena would have an affair with.

"Can you hear us, Mikael?" Dr. Helsinger asked. Coming from him, the use of my first name sounded unusually friendly, for as long as I could remember, he had addressed me as Meister Corvin. I tried to move my lips to answer him.

My lovely Helena broke in tears, and at first, I could not hear what she was trying to say to me. After a few attempts they managed to tell me that I had lied in coma for weeks after the accident.

What they were explaining remained far from clear for me. I gathered from the fragments I understood that Landorf had mobilized funds from his donors, and I was to be transferred to a very special place, a sort of a private hospital. "To our people", added Helsinger with his habitual gloom.

They tried to explain what would happen to me but I could hardly hear them. Suddenly, an entirely different question preoccupied me. It seemed to emerge from the river; as if I was just fished out of it a moment before. "This guy who tried to save me..." I muttered.

"What guy are you talking about?" asked Helena. "Dear, don't tire yourself now by too much effort."

"The student", I slurred. "The young dude who was at Landorf's place. He jumped into the river after me."

"So, you remember", said Helsinger, sounding surprised. "Interesting. Last time when you talked, you seemed to remember nothing about the accident."

I knew nothing about another time I'd talked. Helena, however, looked annoyed and interrupted the scientist. "That's irrelevant now", she remarked. And to me: "Yes, dear Mikael, a student indeed tried to help you. His name is Massimo Incanto. He was one of those closest to Landorf."

That I remembered. I also remembered he had been at Landorf's villa whenever Helena and I were there. And he had flirted with Helena as if they were old friends. Yet now I saw Helena and Helsinger exchange worried looks, which didn't make me feel good.

"Can I talk to him?" I asked. "I'd just like to thank him."

Helena's blue eyes studied me in melancholy. "I'm so sorry, Mikael", she said. "The river took him too. The rescuers finally managed to get both of you out of the water, but they were too late. He's alive – he's here, in the same place – but he hasn't come back to consciousness. We were luckier with you, dear."

Helena had tears in her eyes. At first, I didn't understand why, but then I realized I was falling back asleep. Falling very quickly, unable to resist the pull of the great black. I was leaving them.

"See you on the Elysian Fields", I uttered in a hardly audible voice, and those, presumably, were my last words.

*   *   *

The next time I woke up, I realized the smell was different. That was it – that's why things had not seemed right. The smell in this room was not that of antiseptics. This was not the same hospital, though there was a feel of a hospital also here. I thought I heard a hum. Distantly, it reminded me of the sound the ocean makes in calm nights.

I struggled to open my eyes. They were still blurry and felt covered by a film of liquid. I still couldn't move my limbs, though I felt the commands travel from my brain along the nerves to my fingers and toes. I tried to tilt my head to see better but could not.

There was nobody else in the room. It could have been a hospital room, but there was something odd about this hospital. The sounds, the smell, those few objects I could barely outline. I suddenly felt I was in a temple rather than in a hospital.

*   *   *

I must have passed out again, as the next time I came to my senses, there was a presence in the room. I tried hard to focus with my eyes on the presence, and I made out two large shapes looking like large men in white coats. The figures were in the direction I assumed the door to be, as that was where I had previously registered movement.

I heard very strange voices, as if whales singing, except it wasn't that. Just like the hum was not that of an ocean.

When one of the white-coats came closer to me, it seemed as if the shape was softly gliding across the room. I saw better now. My heart, to the extent it was pulsating at all, missed several beats.

It was not a large man. It was no human whatsoever.

The creature was about three metres tall. The clothe it wore that had looked like a white coat was a long, white gown. It was made of something very light and ethereal, airily descending over the creature's massive body. The most terrifying thing about the creature was its head. The colour was grey with a bluish tinge. Large, rather rounded and humid, yet fearsome eyes stood in a plump face that somehow reminded me of a gigantic teletubby.

Now this creature was keenly ogling at me and approaching. The paralysis of my body and limbs just added to my terror. I tried to release a cry – the kind that a human, like a rabbit, only makes in the ultimate fear for his life – but I was not sure whether any sound ever actually escaped me.