That was Victor, the man who unexpectedly fell into the cells. He was not guilty. Not at all. It was good they gave him a separate cell. Usually not self-dependent men fell there. They weren't ordinary, either. But they scratched on the walls the most.
     One day Major Warder, who was the chief of the cells, ordered the walls to be plastered.
     It was a joke of Fortune that Victor found himself in the cell before the plastering. And thank God, because otherwise he wouldn't have read those twenty stanzas.
     The plaster they used in the cell was radioactive, by chance, and the cells were abandoned. After years, many creatures began to appear near that place. They were difficult to describe, still less to be seen.

Kaloyan Il is a 25-year-old Bulgarian author who currently works as a sales representative in a small private fuel company. His first novel Thrilled Life published by Nauka in Bulgaria in 1998 awaits translation from the Cyrillic. In 1997 and 1998 he won first awards for fiction in the annual student contest at Shoumen University. A previous version of "Victor & the Fortune" as well as two other stories of his can be found at www.stickyourneckout.com. He can be contacted at kalojan_il@hotmail.com.

 Kaloyan

 Iliev