The end of dreams

12

Then the most horrible night of her whole life came, at least unprecedented till that point.

As soon as she entered her flat she was so tired that she could not even open the shutters and sprawl on her adored terrace to watch the planes in admiration; she went to her bed directly, without turning the light on nor making any noise.

She stripped off before she stretched herself out on the bed and rested her eyes; she hoped that would be a good way to relax, calm down and rest her mind for a few hours at least.

But she happened to begin having visions as soon as she closed her eyes before she fell asleep or fainted. Those visions were parts of a dream, or rather of a nightmare, considering the enormous restlessness they were causing her.

From time to time she tried to wake up, endeavouring to open her eyes with all her might and when she made it she found herself in a sweat, stunned, and her heart throbbed like crazy. During those brief intervals of full awareness she realized she was in a totally confused state of mind, so she swore to herself she'd never close those damned eyes again, but since she lacked the force to withstand sleep it was inevitable for her to close them again and get plunged into her previous condition, while she wondered if she had really woken up or if she had only dreamed of it.

Her nightmares, or rather her only main recurrent nightmare, used to consist of one repeated scene representing Silvia while she was in an unknown hospital situated in the suburbia; she was leaning upon her back against the door of a ward whose activities she was quite aware of and she was staring at a narrow corridor from which numberless doors opened into numberless rooms.

Then she would go straight ahead along the corridor while she endeavoured to avoid getting a glimpse of those rooms on both sides of the corridor; she was curious, though: actually the doors were open but she lacked the courage to cross those thresholds. That point of the nightmare used to remind her of when she was a child and she was in the car with her parents along the highway; cars had been slowly lining up for hours because of a car accident and as the car was approaching the accident scene her mother used to tell her not to watch. So she put her little hands over her eyes but she tried, however, to distinguish at least some details of that disaster out of the corner of her eye.

She would have loved to see the whole scene but she had never had the guts to do it, moreover the comments her mother would make on such occasions operated definitely to her dissuasion.

«Zeno, look, there's a dead person on the ground!»

«No, that person has just fainted» was her father's reply, trying to reassure Silvia, who was sitting on the rear seat of the car.

«I'm telling you he's dead! Dead! Don't you see? The siren of the ambulance is not wailing! And you there on the back-seat don't watch! Oh my God, how horrible... Silvia I told you to keep your eyes shut!»

In the nightmare there was no Diamond telling her to close her eyes, but the echo of those remote memories was still vivid; she now kept walking along that corridor, which smelt of disease and death, while nausea increased as she got closer to the bottom of the corridor on the right-hand side. She was supposed to go right there, she had no doubts about it, even without any plausible motives. She knew she would not find anything good in that room, yet she had no escape from there.

In one of her other nightmares she had even succumbed to the temptation to enter one of the other rooms as long as she could abstain from reaching this last door.

The room was midway along the corridor, it was situated on the right side too. Silvia turned round slowly, in a cold sweat; instantly she realized it was just a normal hospital room, seemingly empty, so she relaxed a little bit. She entered it with much determination and she observed it more attentively: it was, indeed, an insignificant room; there was a metal cabinet, a little table and a small chair by an empty bed.