Cylinder, Chapter III

Descending down from the ceiling, nearly weightless. I landed on the hard tile floor. Was it marble? Metal? The pain shot threw my body. Pricked by a thousand needles. 

The clown sat on a stool across from me. His long, sagging, face, droopy with tears, his teeth, pockmarked and pricked by thousands of years of life. Around him, wires, intravenous tubes, sustaining him, for decades. He was skinny, kept alive rhythmically by the pulsating machinery around him. 

Is this the third room?

I got to my feet, assessing the injuries. After taking a long look at him, I knew who this was. This was Dennis. Dennis the menace,as he was known. That moniker echoed back to a world long before this one, with french toast, fresh coffee, warm butter, sunshine that peeked through windows, laughing children, all of that replaced with a cold stainless steel blender of blood and gore and entertainment.

The clown looked away, for hours.

After sometime, maybe he had finally noticed me, the frock of his flowery collar began to creak, ages of dust wafting to the floor with every centimeter of movement in my direction. Had he heard me? Or had he finally decided to look?

After a ten minute paroxysm of bones creaking, the stool shivering underneath the final swing of his legs, the clown looked over at me.

Wrinkles covered in white paint, his red nose, deflated, rotten. Long spindly fingers, black fingernails that nearly scraped the floor. 

The machines around him, life support machines, croaked and whirred, these had been set up for years, decades even.

Dennis.

He opened his mouth.

Dennis?

He closed it.

Reaching in his pocket for something.

What’s he going to grab?

I readied myself, my skin peeling on my arms and knees from the burning and the running and the fall from above.

It was a lighter.

The flames grew fast. The entire black coal of his body fueling the incredible blaze, pieces of pastel and polka dot rising up through the air like Asian lanterns. Weeping, weeping in a distant echo of a memory of a life that once was.

I saw him, I saw the entirety of his existence in one moment. 

He was waiting for someone. Was he placed here for me? Was this the third task? Was there even a task for this room?

This long tiled floor, fluoridated lighting, crushing, unforgiving nasty blue light that stinged to perceive. 

Across from me, an octopus of blackened wire, machines, flesh, and fabric.

The floor gave out from under me, I fell into a dark hole.