" The Blue Room "

So, a friend of mine told me about this only because she was stoned off her head, and she only heard it from her cousin because he was hammered, but I figure that it's distant enough that no one would get in trouble if I explained it here.



The blue room is in an unmarked house in one of the major cities of the Czech Republic, and that's as specific as I'm going to get, as far as location goes. It's one of the top tourist destinations in the world for people with a lot of money and degenerated emotions, and has been for about thirty years. My friend's cousin told her that some of the people he saw going in there are household names here in the states, but he didn't drop any names himself, at least as far as she told me.

 

Going into the house, you have to walk along a roped-off path, sort of like if you visit Mark Twain's house, or any of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses that they give tours of. There's no tour guide, though, unless a first-time visitor ends up alone, and then they just send someone to walk them to the room.



At the entrance to the blue room, there are always two armed guards who make sure that visitors put special coverings over their shoes and roll up their pants so nothing trails on the ground. In all the time he worked there, my friends cousin said he never saw anything but total cooperation between a visitor and a guard. Most of the visitors begin sobbing within seconds of entering the room, but most people are more likely to vomit, so only a few employees are allowed in. It has nothing to do with how it looks (although that probably doesn't help). You could go in blindfolded and feel it as soon as you go through the door.

 

The ropes they put up only let people walk a few feet into the room, but it's not very big anyway. They call it the blue room because the walls are blue, and there's barely anything else in there, just a small bed and dresser, and most importantly, a big mirror on the opposite wall.

 

In the reflection, the whole room is splattered red. You can't see a single speck unless you're looking at the reflection, but as soon as you look in the mirror, you'll see a dark brownish red, caked over everything up to the ceiling.



Once they've had their fill, one of the guards has to check over the visitors with a handheld mirror to make sure they're not tracking any of the red out on their clothes, and then remove the coating from their shoes. They tell any visitor who asks that they incinerate the coating, but they actually send it down to the basement, where my friend's cousin used to work. They've got some process there to evaporate everything but the remaining specks of red, which they have one of the special employees put back in the room every night.

 

The basement has a special room, too, called the "relicviaj" or something. Czech for "reliquary". It's where they keep the six parts left over from the thing that splattered all over the blue room's reflection. They have half an eye, a fingernail, a chunk of bone and two teeth. They keep all of them in special boxes with reflective walls so they can see every angle at once, which is good, since your hand can pass right through them without feeling a thing if you're not careful. One of the teeth is in a hundred pieces because someone tried to move it a few years before my friend's cousin started working there.

 

The weirdest thing is, for a long time, they thought it all came from a person, but taking a look at the teeth let them know it wasn't a human at all.

 

It was an orangutan.