MEMMORIA | ONC 2020

008: The Job

The long penumbra didn't hide much from sight, only a Victorian styled couch which colours were imprecise and a silent fireplace with a lion figurine that once seemed to be porcelain, for now, it was just a porous shape with deformed limbs.

It felt so weird being there, and it was also so hard to breathe, not because there was no oxygen, but because the house per se had a terribly grievous atmosphere, that was indeed chocking.

"Come on, she is upstairs."

Agatha didn't argue even all she wanted to do was to leave that place alone and followed Pippo through the creaky stairwells that hadn't been dusted off for an eternity.

They walked through A large hall barely enlightened by a few pale sparks that crossed the screen at the bottom, revealing a shattered wallpaper that must've been florid at some point.

Her heart clenched like pierced by some agony dagger when her eyes fell over a dark stain at a dusty carpet. It was clearly blood, only its colour had faded through the many years it had been there, and no one ever tried to clean it up. She didn't know why, but her eyes could see a different shade of the melancholic colours of that place, like it once could've been filled with nice people living a normal life, like her childhood home once was. A portrait hanging on the left wall was the memory of the ones who must've lived in there a long time ago -a happy couple with two joyful kids-, and who knows if that bloodstain belonged to one of them. In that instant, her head wandered through all the possible ways they must've died in there, alone and forgotten, probably secluded to their tiny house in the middle of the war between colonies, or even sooner, the days where humanity became almost extinct and one could die just from breathing.

Pippo turned the rusty knob of the second door and disappeared in what seemed to be an empty bedchamber. But the sound of a whisper of foreign words snapped Agatha away from her thoughts, bringing her back to reality.

She did as her friend and walked inside the bedroom, finding buried under a thick duvet and a million of pillows, the shell of a seemingly dying person. The room started to look less dark as her eyes adjusted to the dimness, now finding fragments of broken glass scattered over a brownish carpet near the nightstand, and the leftovers of dead flowers.

"Come, dear", spoke the husky voice of an old lady, the one lying beneath the sheets.

Agatha did as told, getting more and more nauseous to the terribly disgusting smell that emitted the woman, who was clearly on her last days.

"Ahh...", she sighed like relieved after seeing Agatha's unaltered expression. "You look just like your father", she coughed and the girl startled.

What was about all of these people who knew her father?

"I'm glad you came...", she said with something close to a faint smile. Her eyes shined in silver sparkles, her lips chapped and framed by two long deep carved lined that appeared to be cut by a knife.

The old lady coughed again, this time louder, and the helmets of the suits grew around their heads, announcing of an increment of toxic substances in the air. Agatha didn't react. Her eyes were fixed in the gaunt appearance of Mrs Davis.

"I'm sorry, I wish I wasn't so ill", she said with that self-deprecating tone in her voice. "Is not contagious, is only cancer", she bitterly grinned.

Agatha thought she would never hear someone using that word from a deathbed. Cancer was now easy to heal, at least it was in Sulis.

"Why are you here and not in town where they can heal you?",  she asked intrigued, but already suspecting the answer.

The woman shrugged as she turned on her right side with effort, closing her lids for a while and then opening them again as if to her would only have passed seconds. She seemed to move in slow motion.