LAUSR

I entered the first space. There wasn’t very much in the first room to speak of. Some Plexiglas display cases with some stuff in them; rubber tubing, glass slides, a stack of carefully printed and laid out scientific articles, inert technical apparatuses that appeared as dead as doornails. The display cases were lit from the top, forming nice looking pools of light around them. This huge room, however, made these four cases seem almost like they weren’t there. I was thinking as I walked around looking at this stuff in the cases that had no labels, ‘what is this?’ (see Image 1.) I then walked through a narrow, dark corridor where there was even less to see – in fact, the passage seemed mainly designed to connect the first room with another space. I moved through this dark, tunnellike space, which seemed to grow darker the longer I walked through it and also somehow more unpleasant, until I came into a second room, smaller than the first. In the centre of the room was a strange, cylindrical shaped column, partly black at the base and then, upon closer inspection, with two semicircular acrylic screens mounted on the top. From a distance, there appeared to be a kind of blurry image with slight movement – a kind of pulsing that was periodic in its tempo – projected onto the surface of this acrylic (see Image 2). As I got closer, however, I saw the shadows were actually some kind of piece of equipment and then, peering in between the crack where the two pieces of acrylic came together, I saw the apparatus: a device composed of glassware with a container filled with reddish liquid and water. Both fluids were being continuously pumped into the glassware which also had something suspended inside it (see Image 3). I observed others also looking at me looking at this strange aberration and then suddenly, something very odd happened. I started to feel something around me, some kind of invisible presence and, with that, a feeling of almost intense anxiety descended, filling my whole body. Not knowing what was happening, I moved back from the cylinder and felt something on my skin – not exactly touch, but something akin to pressure. But there was no one and nothing else near me.