This gave the complex the maze-like quality. Every time the creature ate up a life, he lived through it again: he himself was turned into what he destroyed. As Gábor experienced the life of the creature, he also experienced the lives of everyone it ate. The creature seldom remembered, the knowledge of its past rarely extended beyond the last two or maybe three lives. But Gábor was still forced to experience and remember all of them.

He slipped through immeasurable numbers of lifetimes, the first ones from well before the days of the earliest known empires. All of them started the same way: the coldness of the outer world, as the newborn slips out from between the mother’s legs. And all of them ended the same way too: the ancient knife slits the throat, the monster looking deep into the victim’s eyes before opening its terrible mouth for the first bite.

As the complex unfurled, Gábor, with his last conscious thought, made an attempt to dig his fingers down his throat and throw up, but his hand couldn’t find his mouth. He wondered whether he would survive this complex. Then, as Zanó advised, he let go and let the drink take over.

The creature wanted to live through everything, happiness, pain, joy, grief – anything that was real. More real than himself.

Gábor felt a kinship with the creature. He truly did. Maybe that was the way to survive this ordeal.

He had been an emperor, a farmer, a pope, and a foundry worker. He had been a student and an illiterate peasant. He had been a rapist and a rape survivor. In Ancient Rome he ate a crucified person off the cross out of sheer curiosity. He had eaten lunatics who conversed with God in their heads, speechless idiots, beggars, orphans, blind and deaf people, as well as geniuses, athletes, spoiled children, actors, and soldiers. They all provided new points of views, new, unique life experiences he couldn’t have harvested from life itself.

The tissue revealed all secrets, all thoughts, even those that the mind had long forgotten. The victims could preserve no part of themselves in death. Gábor lived a thousand lives and died a thousand deaths in the wine cellar.

Even the most seemingly mundane and trivial of lives became magnificently unique as the creature consumed them, and though all lives were special in their own way, there were outstanding gems among them. The creature had selected these, like a fine winemaker, with great care. There was the poet who, whenever writing a poem, caused a rain that wouldn’t stop until the poem had been destroyed. His life was intertwined in a special way with nature. His senses were different too, he lived in the constant bliss of synesthesia; sight was touch to him, touch was sound, pain was a melody. There was the girl who was raised by a group of owls in the forest. The girl came to resemble an owl herself, both in appearance and behavior. Or the boy who was also six other boys around the world at the same time, sharing one single consciousness. As the creature ate the child, all the rest perished as well; in this way he ate them all. That was quite a feast.