Elyas woke up, disappointed, his arms sticking out of his covers, both warm and cold at the same time – the heat was on aggressively, but he felt bone-cold.
With a weary sigh, he lifted himself out of bed, placed his feet perfectly into his slippers, and walked into the toilet with the very familiar, very familiar steps, and every hair of the carpet he trod on was the same as yesterday – same as last time.
I walked the streets of the Dark City aimlessly, hungry and desperate.
I couldn’t see three metres ahead of me; I couldn’t see my trench coat and large hat; I couldn’t see my own fingers as I spread them out in front of me.
How long do I have to live in the Dark City?
The stench drives me to tears.
Everything had changed.
For once, he wasn’t lying in his bed under the bridge, wallowing with hunger and coldness. For once, he wasn’t wasting away from alcohol and weed. For once, his hair wasn’t oily and almost entirely knotted together like a muddied carpet.
He had first come to the lake two years ago.
None lived around the dense forest – not all were lovers of hermetic life. But the popular but mysterious poet Fern Edelweiss was. In 1978 he had fled from London (where there were too many people for his comfort), all the way to a small city, then to a small hamlet, and finally to a small forest that clung halfway up the side of a mountain. The closest hamlet was around a mile away, and the inhabitants called it Dún Mánmhaí. He didn’t know what it meant and unfortunately, the old man who had told him the name did not either. Perhaps it was just a piece of mock Irish.