Read Online Crematorium for Phoenixes by Nikola Yanchovichin - Free Book Online

were
walking on the squat covered stones and propped up beams; the
tunnels were branching and crossing each other—looking identical
and confused, they increased exponentially.
    Occasionally checking their green radar
displays, which were spinning like tireless wheels, there was no
doubt that they were in a maze. The drawn diagram reappeared and
disappeared like a living tattoo.
    Everything looks to them as if they were
still in the same dungeon. Darkness hung on the red, rusted chains.
Filth had created a mulch carpet that was lighted here and there by
a torch in an iron candlestick, making their presence more
uterine.
    Occasionally, the shadow of a rat would
stand in front of the fires and be transformed into a werewolf that
was ready to pounce. Sometimes, bats filled the corridors with
sounds that made the company bristle.
    The labyrinth was complex and vast. Although
the men had been walking for a long time, it seemed to them that
they had been moving on diverging paths that were incalculable.
    It was only their technology that showed
them the right zigzagging path that meandered like an underground
river; it rose and sunk around the hill of Kephala.
    Leaning back to back, Sharukin, Tammuz, and
the others were walking on the trail as it narrowed into a funnel.
Loose soil mixed with areas of pressed soil and made the entire
place look like an open grave.
    Their aim, a pear drop on the radar, was
still in front of them. Centered around it were tightened
concentric circles, bandages and gauze encircling something. The
corridors drained into the center.
    They moved further into the cartilage that
was sprinkled with sawdust and scraps, into the area that emitted a
slightly tart and sweet smell. It created in the imagination a
strewn feast for vultures that gradually sunk into the soil.
    Looking at this migratory path, nostalgic
thoughts popped into their heads. They were the banded dreams of
forsaken but familiar places. The slope changed like a water slide;
it was a chute that descended into the fabulous rabbit hole where
nothing good could be waiting.
    Stiff from fear of what was to come, they
approached like a moth to a flame spell. The fear was insistent and
persistent like a black and white horror movie, and they were ready
at any moment to get burned.
    So the men squeezed through slits that were
narrowed from the towering roots. The spaces reminded them of
claustrophobic snake dens, surrounded with stalactites of icy
crumbling structures that flourished like flowers overlooking the
underground rapids, which had dragged along snow-cold water like
frozen blood splashed on the rocks.
    Sometimes in the bonds that were several
inches thick and cast from iron, there were deposits of rust from
the streamlets and enlarged abscesses. The men also noticed that
there were often dried blood spots, as if the bonds had tightly
held something that had now been released.
    But they kept moving, stamping their feet in
the tunnels that were carved and drilled with sanitation. The
darkness intertwined with everything. It thickened and stung the
eyes, barred with filters from which like disgusting periscopes
decomposed carcasses of rodents and rotted vegetables fell.
    The road, as we said, was not long but it
curved at every step, slowing the men that were moving in a fold
between the two hemispheres of the brain dug by geniuses inside the
hill of Kephala.
    So a few minutes’ walk had stretched into
hours of orienteering within the tunnels; carved like bone, they
were spotted like magpie eggs and undulated from the mold and root
systems.
    It in a sense was like a scene from a grave
that had evaporated and thrown phosphorus foliage shading at every
turn, an obvious sign of something sinister but real.
    The group stepped on broken tiles that
creaked and crushed gravel with the caution of young children who
are headed toward something that attracts them even though they are
afraid.
    These tentacles stroked their costumes and
tested their