Dying throes of a civilisation

My instinctively chosen region was near to South America.

I’d always wanted to visit this reason and felt unbridled excitement in the air of the steaming, sticky streets. I had hit roughly the right spot for my rapid calculations – 33 degrees / 15 but there was a problem. Something was definitely wrong about this place.

The feeling that anything was possible and that I had arrived on a cloud of hot air in the land of the fulfillment of desire was tempered by the creeping suspicion that myself and my companion (for one of the men in the kitchen had taken me up on my impromptu idea of a holiday) might have serious trouble finding a decent place to stay. The place were were in looked very alien and I had a strongly growing feeling that it may have been doomed.

I was surrounded by mounting evidence of the dying throes of a civilization although, being unconscious, I was unable to make rational sense of the situation we were in. Perhaps I had been a bit hasty in coming so far without a plan or guide. Reason, it seemed, had only half-heartedly joined me. She had failed to fully awaken from her state of slumber following the house party and was sitting down aimlessly at any opportunity as if oppressed by the heat, unwilling to offer any input to our situation and clearly wishing she was tucked up safely in a more comfortable place. Hungover, basically.
I looked around lamely. The narrow and uneven street was filled with too much stuff of an indeterminate nature and there were far too many people sitting around in the decaying gardens and yards of cramped shanty houses. I didn’t understand it – this was supposed to have been an astonishingly advanced culture but the houses were a mess and the local people looked vacant, almost as if they were on narcotics.

Everyone was dressed strangely in loose, white cotton garments that looked like nighties and that were embroidered with multi-coloured, symmetrical thread designs, generally blue or green coloured, while most of the women seemed to be meditatively brushing the long, dark hair of their daughters. I looked at one pair sitting to my left. The daughter had a shock of incredibly thick, jet-black hair, that trailed almost to her knees, and I assumed that the mother would be trying to get a brush through it for the next decade. The men all wore wide-brimmed hats and a few were performing odd jobs that didn’t mean much to me. Over to my right were terrace-like levels of apartments and cheap-looking structures that could have been hotels, again, filled with hairy people milling around languidly in the stifling heat.

I had evidently turned up during a long-forgotten century in the poorest quarter of a completely foreign country, somewhere in or around the correct continent, fully in line with my impetuous decision and complete absence of proper planning. I tried to ignore my premonition that the whole place should, by rights, have been buried at around that time, for its demise appeared long overdue. What next, I wondered?

33 Degrees

As he strutted past the row of third-floor flats with his hands in his pockets, confident of another successful evening, a peculiar chill in the mid-summer air made Lucas step up his pace. “Bit parky”, he muttered to himself, with an uncharacteristic shiver.

Lengthening odds and a cool breeze aside, this man’s progress to The George would have proceeded uneventfully and in precisely the same fashion as had occurred on most Saturday nights for the past fifteen years, had he had not fumbled with his keys and dropped them through a gap in the railings onto the second-floor walkway below.

He cursed under his breath and, instead of carrying on to the small private car park outside the flats, Lucas took a right turn at the second floor in the direction of numbers eight to twelve.

The outside lights had broken on this level and there was no visible moon to properly illuminate his way, for at that point of time it was hiding behind the only cloud – a great, dark skudder – in the otherwise crystal-clear sky.

Scanning the floor for his key ring, Lucas soon spotted a steely glimmer close to number ten. Stepping forward and bending down quickly, he scooped up the keys with relief.

That would have been the end of that had he not noticed a very strange light emanating from behind the partly-closed curtains of number eleven.

Lucas was not usually a nosy person, but something about the light seemed to draw him closer, almost against his will; almost as if he were being hypnotised.

For some strange reason, the closer he got to the window, the warmer the atmosphere became. By the time he reached the window-sill of number eleven’s spare bedroom, the temperature would register at a distinctly Egyptian 33 degrees.