At the end of some time spent between sleep and wakefulness, I looked around. Everyone was scattered about like dark silhouettes. I felt as if I had fallen into a field full of black roses. As I lightly pressed my hand over my stomach to suppress my hunger and thirst, I was surprised at how I had managed to sleep here. The splinters of that robotic voice speaking to me from the mechanism had been stripped from the skin of a fish and were seemingly rubbing against my flesh. Right to my left—yes, right there—I saw the blonde woman. Then I remembered. She had told me her name. Hülya.
When she realized I had woken up, she just glanced at me and turned her eyes toward the fissure that covered the entire length of the opposite wall. I didn't know if this place had been damaged in an earthquake or what that fissure represented. But at that moment, aware of each other, we both let our minds wander elsewhere.
"Four hundred," I murmured.
Hülya immediately turned her head toward me.
"You slept a lot..."
"Really? The time." I felt a bit embarrassed. "It's terrible not to have any sense of time."
"It is," Hülya said, adding: "Did sleeping do you any good?" She raised her eyebrows. "When you took that gun, I thought there would be an accident."
And yet, no human could kill someone by accident.
"Is everything okay here?" I raised my head in fear.
"It's not," she said with a sincere tone in her voice. "Nothing is ever okay here. Look at that..." She turned her eyes toward someone leaning against the other rampart wall. The moment I saw that silhouette, my stomach began to churn again. An uncanny expression and a sense of indifference appearing on Sis's bruised and battered face. He had stretched his legs forward comfortably.
I thought about how disappointed I was regarding Sis.
When he first came here, I thought I could solve the mystery of everything with him.
"Food and water?" I asked. "Are we going down into the tunnel to look for something?"
"There's no guarantee we'll find food in the tunnel," Hülya said, lightly shrugging her shoulders.
The people here had already turned into husks, likely from hunger and thirst.
"Have you been spending all this time on a mere possibility?"
"Hunger doesn't kill a person; it makes them suffer. It resembles living in that sense," she whispered.
"I'm going to the bathroom," I said and stood up.
There was a distance ahead of me that could be considered far.
As I stood up, I felt Sis's misty gaze, leaning against the opposite wall, wandering over me. Hülya stood up with me. "I'll come too," she spoke and straightened her clothes. I was stunned by this gesture.
We started walking side by side. Sis's muffled gaze would not leave me.
I felt the trembling in my legs again. Hunger and thirst had left me with no strength.
Just as I was passing right in front of him, he looked at both of us without pulling back his legs.
I didn't see a frightening sense of revenge in his eyes. Instead, they were the steady, devious eyes of a lying lawyer who believed he had obtained what he wanted through legal means. I thought of that letter. According to the mechanism, that letter had been left for me. Then what did it have to do with Sis? What kind of letter could it be that concerned us both? If Hülya had waited for me, I would have stopped and thought right then, but I didn't.
The moment I turned my back on him, I felt a pain as if I were being stabbed in the back. I was tasting the world—of not trusting, of not being trusted.
While the dry ground made my thirst even more prominent, we walked with Hülya without speaking at all. Both of us couldn't utter a single word, as if we wanted to reinforce our silence. "Four hundred," I said, throwing a whip at the wall of silence. It was as if ice was cracking. Hülya's gaze shifted to me. Then it dropped to the floor; she counted the floorboards.
"I don't know what this means..." I said, as if I had given up on everything. "I can't make sense of all this. But I..." At that exact moment, the lamp man in the tunnel came to mind. As if wanting to hide the rest of my thoughts, I sealed my lips and continued to walk. By the time our legs were tired, we had reached the front of the bathroom. I waited for Hülya to come out at the door. Meanwhile, I was busy looking up from where I stood.
Under the thick, damp air of the rampart walls, the thing crushing me hung from my shoulders like a barbell again.
The horizontal version of that longitudinal fissure on the wall was also here. It was a faint, very thin line. With a moment of curiosity, I ran my index finger over the line. It was impossible to reach behind the hard, thick texture. Only slight grains of sand filtered through my fingers. I closed my eyes. Touching something, being full of it, smiling... these were things I had forgotten.
A bit more sand poured out of the fissure.
The wind was driving dust particles from one place to another. But it was as if even the wind did not want to enter this mechanism where life had been withdrawn—this house of torture, cruelty, and death. I clapped my hands as if wanting to get rid of the sand grains stuck under my nails. At that very moment, I saw something textured protruding from the back of the fissure. It looked like a thin leaf.
With the shock of seeing something I never expected, I started pulling the thing whose tip was sticking out. As I pulled, another piece followed.
I was scared then. What could this be? A plastic bag, a rope, a leaf?
Hülya hadn't come out yet. So, I focused on my task, checking the door. My hands were trembling violently as the grains of sand continued to scatter. I realized the tip of this textured thing was a burnt piece of paper. Ash particles began to fall onto the sand from the base of the yellowed edges. I pulled the paper with all my strength and, as soon as I noticed the door opening, I quickly tucked it into my clothes.
"You can go now," Hülya said, without really looking at my startled face.
If I could have seen the color of my face, I would have certainly sworn it was white.
I passed through the spot she showed me and pulled the handle behind the bathroom door. My heart was beating so fast that I thought for a moment I would collapse and faint. But that didn't happen. My breath was filling and emptying my lungs rapidly. Starting from the yellowed corners of the paper in my hand, I slid my fingers down. The paper kept trembling. What was written on this paper... was just like the handwriting in the other letter. It was obvious in every way that it came from the same pen; and that letter was already with me anyway. I hastily took it out and compared the letters.
They were perfectly the same.
I read the words and sentences as if swallowing them:
"You will find this when I die. When your father hosts you in the most beautiful way in his mansion. Remember, you will always remain a guest. You were a human, now you are a murderer.
To my son"
I saw a black and white photograph in the folded bottom part of the paper. This was... a familiar face. Behind the arrogance and ambition overflowing from the eyes, there was mercy covered with innocent veils. I read the words "To my son" dozens of times within seconds. So this letter... was it written to Sis?
The mechanism was lying about the letter being left for me.
I began to shake all over as if I had a fever.
I folded the letters quickly and silently and tucked them inside. Who was the woman who wrote these letters?
I forgot my hunger and my thirst.
I had no intention of dying until I found out.