There they are, lying round the walls on soft thick beds. They blink blindly towards the unaccustomed light, dim as it is.

‘What is it?’ asks somebody.

Stig looks into their faces. He cannot distinguish them clearly. They seem featureless. He does not know what to answer: they’re asking what it is!

What are human beings made of? he asks himself, horrified. There they lie in soft comfortable beds, yawning and blinking vacantly at the light. From where Stig is standing their faces are like pale smudges.

‘What is it?’ they ask, without the slightest curiosity.

He stands amongst them in the middle of the room, shocked at how humans can behave.

‘Don’t you know about anything?’ he yells.

‘What?’ they ask, blinking their eyelids indolently, half asleep.

‘Get up!’ roars Stig, beside himself, ready to fly at their throats.

‘No, why should we?’ the question comes back from around the walls.

He looks at how comfortably they are lying, on soft mattresses, along the thick, secure, sound-proof walls.

Stig cannot understand them. But neither does he understand what he is absorbing into his system; something he noticed the minute he entered.

‘Can’t you hear anything?’ he shouts at them. ‘Haven’t you heard that the house is creaking?’

They shake their heads.

‘What?’ they ask, without curiosity.

At the same time he realizes that nothing can be heard in here. No cracking here. It does not reach them. He is speechless. He had not imagined this.

‘This house is creaking!’ he tells them.

‘How so?’ they ask.

One or another of them asks these questions. Several of them have not uttered a word. They just lie sprawling on their comfortable mattresses, waiting patiently for this crazy man in the middle of the room to remove himself. Their indolent expressions convey that at least: that Stig has no business here.

He does not know what to do next. He is seething with impatience and astonishment and anger. But all it amounts to is an agitated attack on people they simply have no respect for. He realizes that he has no power over them. Yet he cannot stop himself.

‘At least you could feel ashamed!’

They regard him calmly.

‘What?’ asks one of them.

‘There’s a life-and-death struggle going on outside and you lie here without even being aware of it!’

‘What?’ they ask.

They stretch themselves and then find a more comfortable position on the mattress. No creaking in these many-layered walls, no suction. No arrows of darkness seething towards them. They have their own secure familiar darkness for which they have bartered the Holy Ghost.

Stig shudders as he looks at them. But not only on account of them. He is aware of something different and dangerous in himself. He seems to have fallen into something head first: he who lives in perpetual anxiety, in the expectation that something may strike him at any moment – he feels that all he need do here is lie down and he will be safe, that the whole of his enervating existence will find rest. Just lie here sleeping or dozing on comfortable cushions and rugs.