Emil Günther
Physical state: Sick
Mental state: Puzzled and apprehensive
Mr Colombo. Remember the name. Pigeon-like. 1492. When he sailed the cresting blue waves to the west. ”In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Remember the name. Emil nodded to the doctor Gabrowski, silent to hide his accent from the eastern neighbour. Under the cover of his illness, he turned his head away from the personnel and the professors, concealed his mouth with his hands, and coughed, shying a glance at the man dragged away, disappearing in the white shirts of his captors.
That hallway. He found the medicine-charged odor of the asylum almost as stirring as his unexpected conduct during the past 24 hours: He'd found himself having courage to stick his head into business that promised nothing but trouble, he committed a crime of intrusion and damaging of personal property, he lied and sneaked around like a rat; and now again he caught himself planning in secrecy his next move in the quest for something or someone he didn't dare imagine. He did not know what he expected to find, but it drew him in, and he felt mesmerised by things that also appalled him and, once he's faced them, were surely to make his soul scream in stupefaction at the impossibility of their existence. And yet, the contradictory feeling of desire to push forward in spite of obvious horrors did not subside, but instead burned hotter with each little disturbing encounter with a possible clue. He felt it like he did adrenaline. Once the group has covered a few hallways, or maybe a wing, he would return to his thinking and self-soothing of a hunter-gatherer desperate to preserve his well-being, trying to persuade himself to stay away from the jeopardy, and he will believe it the best course of action; but then another envelope will appear in the mailbox of life, another set of initials carved into the fiber of chance will brand his retina, another bedlamite will bump into him, and he will again start chasing the uncatchable, one corner he takes leading to curiosity and the other to nervousness and unrest.
He apologised for his cough fit in a non-verbal way, using his face to form a picture that would deliver the message in his mouth's stead. Fixing his scarf and pants, he took a place in the group he'd stood in before the incident with the poor lunatic.
Guardian angels watching from the walls over these heresiarchs in shapes of doctors. Messengers of God. They dropped down a letter for me, too. F.D. By mistake, surely. A celestial postman intercepted by his fallen brother looking to hinder Father's plans. Fought in the sky, and the envelope fell right in front of my feet, ripe for picking. And now this madman sends me a warning, a reminder. The next message is from the court. Winged jury of seraphim will judge me. Or the Pandemonium.The crowed moved and Emil with them. The journey through the Asylum had begun.