– Out! Get out of here! – half beast half man was roaring. His corpulent silhouette was looming in thick crimson-black darkness. He was just a hand’s reach away. You could sense his heavy, swishing breath mixed with the smell of grease, sweat and rage.

– Out! Or I will… – he was panting in low voice, vibrating and boiling with primal fury. The sound broke, like a violent wave, into all chambers. Then bounced back from the bricks of barrel vaults, semicircular niches, radial pattern of walls to finally disappeared softly resonating in its journey along semicircular naked wall.

The wall seemed to live. It was sweating with poignant, deadly cold. It was repulsive. It warned. Induced chills and fear. Absolute fear – atavistic scream that paralyzes. The wall was from another world, from the border between the human and nonhuman. He was standing there like a three-headed Cerberus. He stood confident, grinning his bloody fangs of bricks.

– I will kill all of you! – stocky hominid in a dun suit fired again into the space. – Kill! – he thumped. His stiff leg was rhythmically shuffling, closer and closer. He knew the place and the place knew him. It accepted him. He and those walls, thrust into this cold soil, were a gloomy unity.

In a tunnel of concrete, under brick red ceiling from which a steel, rusted hook was hanging, there lay three skinny motionless bodies. One upon another. Thin bruised knees, scratched calves, gasoline-soaked rags, short pants, screws, caps, hammers and dirty fingernails were mingled in a way that is imaginable only in the worst of nightmares. Only the white of their eyes visible in the darkness. But a muscular figure in sweaty working clothes was sensing something instinctively. Suddenly the man howled like a predator. In a split of a second he darted like a hound that scented trail. He jumped up to wooden door, kicked it with all the force he had. Sharp sunlight tore the gloomy walls. The boys wanted to run. They couldn’t. The sunlight blinded them. Feared paralyzed.

– Out of here! Out! – it rumbled like a in a well, but further and further away, finally disappearing in a lightsome space. They could here nothing more. They could only see the light.

– I’m gonna be Juliet! And you’ll be Romeo’s, okay? – a petite blonde screeched, running up to a balcony that wasn’t there… The lack of it did not bother her at all. She stood on the balcony, dashed her hair to the back. She was looking out for Romeo. And he, as if out of spite, was not coming.

– Romeo, Romeo! – she was calling with a cute pout.

There he is! He loomed from behind a green riverbank. Julia was burning. But certainly not with love. Romeo had a crumpled flannel shirt, mussed up hair, shabby jeans and sneakers. He was walking calmly, pulling one leg after another.

There was a city and a river behind him. A city of unfinished projects, mutilated tenement houses and naked squares. A city of axis brutally torn by history. One of them was empaling straight into Romeo’s back. But Romeo didn’t care. He had no idea the Royal Route, at this very moment, ends exactly on his favorite shirt. He looked ahead.

He was standing in front of a semicircular building which reminded him of something. He seemed to have known it. Old brick walls, full of scars, were shining with deep purple broken by twinkling, rusty reflexes. In some places the scars had been healed with new bricks. The wall was pulsating. There was life in it.  A couple of gates of glass jauntily winked, they kept opening and closing. All the time, someone was crossing the border guarded by this arched wall.

Heavy sandstone mantlepieces were above him – they shone vibrantly in full sunlight. Gold-like stone matched the scarlet bricks perfectly, but also smoothly blended with unadorned concrete, which completed the building. The texture of new material was almost perfectly smooth, satiny, and in a daylight it seemed to become one with the sky. From where Romeo was standing, he could only see sharp shadows of embrasured little windows, chaotically scattered in this form of reinforced concrete. Their shape reminded of riflemen’s wholes that you see in castles and bunkers, but they were asymmetrical. They came from a different dictionary – one close to dreams and daydreams.

Suddenly Romeo got it… Boundless imagination was exploding from this very place!

– Leszek, come here! – Juliet called.

He came around. Interesting… He reacted to the name Leszek, as well. They entered the building. A lot was happening in there. Someone was sitting, someone was wandering along those old, brick arches. Someone dancing, singing, someone nervously biting nails. All sounds turned into one hum. But it wasn’t a noise, it was a melody. It had rhythm, timbre, from piano it unexpectedly went into forte, from legato to staccato.

– Piotr, your cheeks are burning, and so is my heart! – a brunette in a hooded blouse cried with suicide-like desperation and threw herself against a cool wall which voraciously wolfed her fiery affection. Old vaultings looked at that scene somehow puzzled. A hook, once lonely and hostile, has now obtained a new surrounding. Intriguing mechanisms were hanging down from the ceilings. Some reels, cogs, metal parts from a black ratchet, ropes. All connected, seemingly tangled up, like in a theatre.

Something scrunched – it’s Romeo again! He pulled a chain, making the machinery work – he started the time machine. Flapping its wide sleeves a bat-like black coat flew down. Romeo caught it and ran ahead. He jerked a heavy, graphite door. One after another. He found himself in a different space and a different time.

Romeo stopped. Sudden thrill pierced his body. He felt a cool breath of centuries-old bricks on his back. Gentle smell of soft velvet stroke his face. He ran down those rhythmically set low stairs which turned each of his leaps into a blunt sound.

Right in front of him, in the spotlights, there lay three skinny motionless bodies. One upon another. Thin bruised knees, scratched calves… Romeo stepped onto the black boards of a semicircular stage and threw his coat. And then those three boys couldn’t hold it anymore. Almost simultaneously they all burst out laughing. They were chortling and shaking like jellies.

– Wonderful, just great… – snorted someone from the audience seat, who took the role of a director. – Now, with that we can certainly do something great – he went on with his irony. He was sitting in the middle of those quilted rows of chairs that followed the omnipresent rule imposed by the semicircular wall topped out with a lightly constructed balcony.

Yes. Juliet has found her balcony. She was standing there in front of light reinforced concrete, looking down on the stage, she called Romeo again.

– Leszek, Leszek!… – the sound wave was piercing trough the space. – The room next to the library is free! Hallo!? – she insisted. Romeo jumped on the steps and was upstairs in a moment. Following the velvet arch of concrete they both disappeared in one of those mysterious passages. Black door, sluice, the next door was white. It foreshadowed evident changes.

For a moment they saw nothing. Their sight needed to adjust to the bright space. The room was high. Lightsome interior was a monolith. Concrete wall bent into the wall which followed the basic form. Its vertical part was short. The wall quickly bent inwards and went up five, maybe even six meters at the top. Having reached the top its shaped turned to up-side-down stairs, then rapidly went straight down, meeting the floor again. Sharp sunlight hit the interior through the army of tiny windows. Romeo looked up.

Now what? – Julia said tentatively to Romeo.

Now… Now it’s time for… a good ending.

Beautiful sun! – she fired.

Post scriptum

That’s right. The sky over Warsaw that day was of such a shade of blue that one could easily call it kitschy. The sky, the sun, the green – cliché. Lazy river Wisla down there. The silhouette of the Old Town in the perspective. Further away, surprisingly unobtrusive draft of younger quarters, usually noisy and slightly dull. All that as if taken straight from a cheap postcard with greetings from the capitol city.

But Warsaw has not always been like that. In the beginning of 18th century tsar Alexander decided to turn this town into a fortress. He built two rings of forts and in the center of them, on a riverbank close to the Old Town – a citadel which was supposed to leash the inhabitants of occupied city. Cannon outposts were guarding the cruel citadel. Those places focused evil. For many years it glared not only with cannon balls, but also with something utterly evil, ghostly.

Today there are only two semicircular ruins left, one of which is placed exactly on the top of the Royal Route. It’s not a coincidence. That’s why this fable is happening here. Against everything: the history, the ruins, the evil spirits. It’s a story about the battle between the good and the evil, a story with a happy ending and a moral…

That’s right! Those old walls of cannon outpost will welcome a theatre for young people. A magical place of education and re-education through art. This theatre will have immense power of positive glare; a working name of which is cultural cannon outpost.

That’s right! This place with fire with culture!

Optimism flamethrower.

Cultural cannon.

Catalyst of goodness.

Things are going to happen here!