Юлия Авилкина – The Syndrome of an Ideal Tomorrow (страница 3)
A violent roar erupted from the hallway.
In Room 312, Madame Laurent screamed: the mailman on her terrace had finally dismounted his bicycle and begun to speak. In 212, the scent of Christmas goose was choked out by the stench of burning—time had been ripped off its hinges, and decades were slamming into one another. Downstairs in the lobby, the hands of the grandfather clock began to spin so fast they blurred into a silver haze.
"Run, Thomas!" Marta cried, her voice sounding as if it were coming from deep underwater. "Run for the exit before your 'today' crumbles into ash with this building!"
Thomas bolted for the door. The hallway was no longer quiet or quaint. The carpets were curling back, exposing a raw void beneath, and doors were slamming open, spilling out the shadows of guests who were suddenly aging decades in a matter of seconds. Mr. Green stumbled out into the hall, shielding his eyes from a light he hadn’t seen in twelve years.
Thomas hurtled toward the stairs, clutching his "ticket to tomorrow" in his fist. He could feel entire worlds collapsing behind him—tons of unlived lives trying to drag him back into the vortex of the past.
At the final landing, he saw Marcus. The manager stood in the middle of the crumbling lobby, his face as gray as cinders.
"You’ve made a mistake, boy!" he rasped, reaching a hand out toward Thomas. "Tomorrow doesn't exist! There is only what we remember!"
But Thomas could already see the light behind the hotel’s front doors—the real, biting light of a March morning.
Thomas lunged forward, tearing himself from Marcus’s grip. The manager’s fingers only brushed the brass buttons of the livery; one popped off with a faint metallic ring and instantly crumbled into dust the second it hit the floor.
"This isn't an exit, Thomas!" the old man screamed after him. "This is the end!"
But Thomas was no longer listening. He saw the massive oak doors ahead, behind which the city should have been—a noisy, gritty, real city with its March slush. He pressed the ticket to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut, and threw his entire weight against the doors.
The doors swung open.
But instead of the roar of traffic and the bite of the wind, he was struck by an absolute, ringing silence. Thomas took a few steps by sheer momentum and froze.
He wasn't standing on a sidewalk. Beneath his feet was neither asphalt nor earth. He was on a boundless, mirror-smooth surface that stretched in every direction to the very horizon. The sky above was neither gray nor blue—it looked like a blank canvas, faintly backlit by a pearlescent glow.
Thomas looked back. The Sierra Nevada was gone. In its place remained only a solitary door frame hanging in the void, through which the wreckage of staircases and swirling memories were still visible. But a moment later, even that dissolved, leaving him alone with this strange world.
He looked at the ticket in his hand. The plastic was no longer shimmering orange; it had turned as clear as pure water. It was then that Thomas noticed something strange: the time on his wristwatch, which he wore for "syncing," had stopped. Yet he didn't feel frozen like the guests at the hotel. On the contrary, he felt a power within him unlike anything he had ever known.
He took a cautious step. Where his sole touched the mirrored expanse, ripples spread across the surface, and from them, contours began to sprout. But these weren't the stagnant shadows of the past.
Thomas thought of warmth—and the air around him instantly grew mild, filling with the scent of blooming almonds. He imagined the sound of the surf—and somewhere in the distance, beyond an invisible boundary, the water began to roar.
This wasn't "yesterday." And it wasn't a "tomorrow" that arrived on its own. This was a space where time obeyed his will. The ticket wasn't a pass into a world; it was the key to creating one.
"You’re a quick learner," a voice said behind him.
Thomas turned. Marta stood a few paces away, her yellow raincoat a solitary splash of color in the boundless white. She no longer held her notebook—she seemed to be a part of this new space herself.
"Welcome to Day One, Thomas," she smiled. "The hotel kept what had already happened. But here... here we decide what is meant to be."
She reached out her hand to him.
"See the horizon? It’s empty. What will your first 'tomorrow' be?"
Thomas looked at the blank canvas of the sky. For the first time in his life, he didn't feel the weight of other people’s stories on his shoulders. He took a deep breath, feeling his lungs fill with air that he had created himself.
Chapter 2: The First Spark and the Gray Stains
The world of "Day One" resembled a blank sheet of expensive watercolor paper—it was ready to receive any color, but it demanded absolute honesty. Thomas quickly realized that he couldn’t simply "order" an object into existence. He had to summon the feeling that the object embodied.
He closed his eyes and recalled the sensation of a home’s comfort—something he had never truly known in the dusty corridors of the hotel. He imagined the warmth of fired clay, the scent of aged wood, and the quiet crackle of a fire. When he opened his eyes, a small cottage with a tiled roof stood upon the mirrored expanse, looking very much like the ones he had seen on old postcards of Sintra.
"Not bad for a start," Marta remarked. She was sitting on the doorstep, her legs tucked under her. "But remember: everything we create here is nourished by our emotions. If you build something out of fear, it will bite."
Thomas sat down beside her. He felt something soft and warm brush against his leg. He flinched, but looking down, he saw a graceful, jet-black cat with piercing eyes as blue as sapphires. She wasn't a ghost; she was vibrant and real, her flanks rising and falling in steady breaths, a low, vibrating purr resonating in her throat.
"I didn't consciously create her," Thomas whispered, reaching out to touch her cool ears. "She just... appeared."
"Your subconscious works faster than your thoughts," Marta replied. "Cats have always been guides between worlds. Apparently, you needed someone who knows how to see in the dark."
But just as Thomas began to relax, the sky above them clouded over with a murky film. A gray stain appeared on the perfect, pearlescent horizon. It didn't look like a cloud—it was more like an inkblot of indelible ink, slowly bleeding across the clean canvas.
From within this blot, sounds began to emerge that made Thomas’s chest feel heavy: the muffled sobs of Madame Laurent and the sharp, rattling bell of that same mailman’s bicycle.
"They're leaking through," Marta said, standing up abruptly, her face pale. "The hotel is destroyed, but the stories it housed haven't vanished. They remain 'unfinished.' They have no ending, Thomas. And in this space, anything without an end becomes a parasite."
The gray stain took on a shape. It wasn't Madame Laurent herself, but her Shadow—a grotesque, distorted manifestation of her eternal waiting. The Shadow was immense, woven from fragments of letters and the bitter scent of wormwood. It moved slowly toward their new home, leaving a trail of gray ash that corroded the mirrored surface of the floor.
"She’s looking for her 'yesterday'," Thomas said, feeling the cat beside him arch her back and hiss threateningly. "But there is no yesterday here. If she touches our home, it will turn into another cell for her grief."
The Shadow spoke—hundreds of voices at once, rustling like dry leaves:
Thomas understood: he couldn't simply drive her away. A Shadow was a psychological knot that needed to be untied, not severed.
He took a step toward the gray mass. His heart was pounding, but his mind remained cold and clear. He felt that the Shadow wasn’t an enemy, but a tangled thought stripped of its footing.
The black cat he had just created didn’t run. She sat directly in front of the encroaching mist, wrapping her tail around her paws. Her sapphire-blue eyes glowed in the gloom like two signal fires.
"Samantha knows you're here," Thomas said quietly, not even understanding how the gray mass was supposed to know he was talking about the cat. "And I know, too."
The Shadow froze. The rustle of a hundred voices turned into a barely audible sigh. From the gray inkblot, the contours of a woman’s face began to emerge—thin lips frozen in eternal waiting, and eyes where October 1964 had remained trapped.
"You are no longer in Room 312, Madame Laurent," Thomas spoke calmly, straining to keep his voice from trembling. "That hallway is gone. And that letter you’ve been waiting for is gone, too. It’s buried in the ruins of the hotel, under the wreckage of the time we finally tore off its hinges."
"You won't vanish," Thomas said, extending his hand, palm open. "You will simply stop being a hostage to a finale that never arrived. In the Sierra Nevada, you wore the mask of the eternal victim so you wouldn't have to feel the cold of the present. But here, there is no need to pretend."