In any case this open space lies in a dazzling glare from the long arrows that start gliding as soon as you look at them. This is the final stage before the darkness swallows you up, and it reflects the horror of it. High up above arches the weighty dark roof that ought to be sky. The arrows stream towards this place. The eye on the wall blinks and the van comes slithering across the open space with a still living burden. The wall opens and it continues inwards without pausing.

The moment it glides past the sentry, and the sentry has done his duty, he has earned a golden coin.

That is the agreement. And no one knows about it.

The sentry is nailed to this spot as if a gilded arrow had passed through him vertically, pinning him to the slab. Alarm signals will wail if he should take one step away from it and his replacement has not come. And now he has earned yet another valuable gold coin. He is rewarded every time he lets in the van with its cargo of doomed persons – but he stopped thinking about that long ago. He has no desire to keep a record of it. He tries to minimize the figure when it accidentally occurs to him. I don’t think it really is so high, he tells himself.

He knows it is carefully recorded somewhere. Every blink of the lamp is read and entered in the books, and when the month is over he goes to a window when he is off duty and collects all the gold coins. He tries to pretend that there are not many of them. There are fewer of them every day, he tries to imagine as he leaves with the heavy bag.

The lamp blinks repeatedly in the wall and the van slithers past. He plays on the switches. It is appallingly empty around him. Only this van, that paralyses with shock wherever it appears. The sentry does not see it; he has no wish to do so. All he sees is the lamp that records its journeys. But something blinks inside him, too, as the silent van glides past, as if it is being noted there as well, and as carefully recorded.

That is why he searches the eyes of the other, in that second of anguish when the two guilty ones meet. A sense of extreme danger oppresses him at that second – because he sees that the other is no better off – as if lights are blinking and being noted everywhere out in the oppressed house, every time they serve the van, and that they all add up to a judgement.

It is better in the guardroom: a little security. No lamp in the wall to hypnotize one here, only the electric bell that buzzes when it is time to go on watch. But that merely represents the calmness of routine, in a way. The other bell here is the alarm bell: to give warning if for any reason the guard outside should step off the slab and leave his post. But it never gives a real warning. It is tested now and again to see if it is working. Then it shrills blindly, as if shrieking that the guard out there is dead and swallowed up, as has long been intended – but it is only a test, it has never rung for a purpose. The guard strains to keep his eyes averted from it. He is supposed to rest in there.