Five Murders That Day – Dream Inspired Stories la 1st

Gianrico Agresta’s Aquarium Inspires The Idea of Observing Life.

It was my first time at the Sodin Aquarium – an old building in the locality. It had stood the test of time, for years enough for our people to not remember its age.

Everything about it reminded me of how old and dilapidated it was. The men working at the ticket office carried withered looks on their faces and the old, fat fishes and snakes stuck in those transparent cages looked back at me, from behind the hazy glass, with bored and listless eyes. In the dark, inaccessibly high corners of the hallway that hosted this morose array of fish, old dusty cobwebs hung down like some sad variety of air borne algae, drifting in the stale air of the gallery in utter display of boredom and indifference. The glass tanks too, like the rest of the place, carried forth their solemn and infinite vigil with a death like silence and Dirt At Their Corners. Everybody in that place was doing just enough to call it a business, as if they knew it was not the upkeep that was important or even necessary. As if they knew that, the crowds had been drawing in for something else. That knowledge was true.  

The old aquarium had been revamped lately and a new security system had been installed in the main hallway. The fuss was about, the new fish – a fat little, black Rohu that, those who knew Arabic claimed, had the word “Divine” in Arabic; what could be called; printed on one of its sides, in white scales. The local newspaper had run a story the previous week about how very old the fish was and how it had been secretly brought to the aquarium because the unnamed owner could no longer keep it. Aamna had told me that the owner had left the fish to die because it’s death was destined to be evil. I was not sure about what Aamna had said and thought. Aamna was not the kind of person I really took seriously or even listened to, but her talks often gave me the creeps and in my lonely existence in that tiny hill town that I lived in, it was one of my few sources of a morbid sort of entertainment, I sometimes enjoyed.

It was impossible for me to know that afternoon, how this little adventure into Aamna’s land of magic and superstition was going to land me into a palace of nightmares. That I would end up murdering that day three different men and a dog to satisfy someone’s idea of a sinister joke.

It all started while I was standing in the far corner of the gallery looking at a final pair of uninspiring piranhas before I left. The security system, suddenly went down. Before I could blink, some sort of solid iron cage fell with a loud clack around me, enclosing me in pitched darkness. Outside, there was the blaring sound of sirens, piercing the heavy air. Red shafts of light dashed across my feet escaping in and out through the tiny vents near the legs. I could hear the sound of shuffling feet and whisperers, everybody was escaping, I thought. Then there was silence. I started getting anxious. The contraption was too heavy for me to move, I was trapped. It is hard for me to remember how long it was before I could move out but it appeared to have happened very quickly. While I was still figuring out what to do in my mind, the contraption broke itself open and I stood there in that empty, deserted hallway staring at a still closed iron contraption at the other end of the room. It was beeping. The siren above it silently flashed a dull red light. The celebrity fish like everyone else was gone, shards of glass from its tank lay glistening in a now red, now black pool of water.

To be continued…