The Infernal Machine

A Short Story by Alexander Tomov - Junior

He noticed the infernal machine by accident. In fact it had been there for years. It was like a treasure, deeply hidden from human eyes …It was cheap and was sold legally everywhere and no one paid any attention to it. Absolutely every person used it every day but not as an infernal machine. It’s almost always locked. To find the key to it, you have to make an impossible flight through happiness, hatred and death, a flight he was going to perform without knowing it.
The infernal machine consisted of smooth surface and a bottom, which changed in various ways, depending on the inner and outer movement. Like a chameleon in time and space. Behind the bottom is the darkness where the key is hidden. But no one so far had passed through the darkness. Deeply inside he felt that if he managed somehow, the world would suddenly become clear and acquire a form that helps you control it. The endless burden of conscience will remain for ever buried in the changing bottom.
He was fully convinced in his last thought, and he smiled.
Outside, the high marble columns were waiting darkly. Crowds’ gazes were excited and attacked the high walls like a storm.
That strange feeling began to rise slowly inside him. This time it was stronger than ever.
What was the key? And did he have enough strength to reach it? He was on the verge of the happy abyss but he didn’t know it yet. The terrible nightmares that overwhelmed him night after night and the confused and morbid visions from the future were going to kill him if he didn’t find the key immediately. He was as sure of it as he was sure he was alive. They were coming unbearably close to him – to the fatal end and to the rise. And then they were taking him back. That was his hell.
A hell in which every cell in his body agonized a second after second. The only possible way out was the locked infernal machine.
He was really very ill. He was not going to survive through one more night if he didn’t fly out of the window. He heard vague sounds. Unbearable fatigue was closing his eyes. He was all by himself in the huge bedroom. He had already warned that whoever entered would die on the spot. Suddenly the visions overwhelmed it. They were rocking him without a way or a direction. The locked window was moving away. He was crying silently, crawling in the middle of the bedroom. He now couldn’t see anything. He felt he was sinking. Then, suddenly, he grabbed something. It was a blade which cut him.
First he felt the slight pain. Then the blood dripping from his hand, which was soon going to turn into a river, and then the hot ice of the steel.
The coldness let the bright darkness in. And he lost consciousness.
He woke up in the middle of the bedroom with a very strange and incomprehensible feeling. He felt a surge of strength and rose up. The blood on his hand had congealed. The pain and the illness were gone.
And then suddenly he had an insight. It was an overwhelming light. His whole being sensed the untouchable nature of immortality.
The fatal mistake you are going to make and then go on because it is death that makes you immortal. He smiled again. He was completely cured.
Then he realized clearly that the flight through the infernal machine is absolutely impossible. And suddenly flew out of the window.
It was killingly beautiful, regardless of the price.
Suddenly he felt this endless power. The infernal machine opposite him was unlocked. Then for the first time in hours he turned his head away from the mirror. And then some invisible hands mixed fire and darkness together.
Half an hour later on the floor of his bedroom a lame wretch was wriggling, with his eyes bent down for ever.
“Don’t you see anything?” Caligula asked him with half-closed eyes.


Translated from the Bulgarian by Margarita Dogramadzhyan