099- The Red Mark

Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

Tonight, we escape to the prison island of New Caledonia and to the murderous conflict between one of the prisoners and the monstrous Mysheur de Nue, official executioner, as John Russell tells it in his terrifying story, the Red Mark.

We breathe in, breathe out, inhale and exhale, and we are therefore considered officially as living. Privately however and always with a snarl deep in our throats we call ourselves the living dead. We sleep without resting, wake without desire, read without pleasure, and work without hope.

Some of us work in the mind, some in the cupra sheds. I am myself I'm a barber, but all of us wear the same straw sandals in the same rough canvas jackets. And we are never allowed to forget that this is the penal colony of New Caledonia.

And we are convicts, and that France is on the other side of the world. Hello, do you mind? What? I'll be sure you startled me. I didn't hear you come in. You were daydreaming. Ah, you know how it is.

I know how it is for you. But do you mind for me the dreams are at an end? My life is a convict is at an end. You have your ticket home? Of course I have my ticket.

I've only ate more days to go. Ah, eight days. Three weeks on the ship and then France. Freedom wine, music, the theater. Shut up. Oh, sorry, do you mind? You are my friend, my very good friend.