INCUBUS

There was someone who lurked in the shadows, perched atop the stony, black wall, watching the rain pour down on the dimly lit street below. Moss of a distasteful shade of green crept surreptitiously up the slimy film of fungus that plagued this particular wall, proliferating every which way before finally culminating in buds that reeked of pungent vitality and dripped an ungodly juice that mixed with the rain as it battered on the pavements below. Indeed, it looked to that someone, that the drops floated down like snowflakes on Christmas Eve, disappeared in the film of ephemeral darkness, only to reappear in the faint light of the lamp-post as they struck the shiny street with deafening silence.

It gave that someone some vague and twisted satisfaction, for he smiled, revealing a row of locked, sharp, decaying teeth. The red gleam of his eyes tore through the night, but seemed diminished in the intermittent flashes of lightning. To him, it made no difference if the streets were empty, because he knew they would fill up the very next day, mobbled with people scurrying wherever they had to go. He knew these people would die. All he had to do was wait. Time was inconsequential, an arbitrary set of numbers given to a timeless element. It did not exist. If it were to be divided into countless minuscule divisions, it was impossible to live in the present as past and future encroached on the tiny strip of space called 'today'. If it were not divided, well it was a matter of opinion when past ended and when future would begin...

These despicable people. Worms, bacteria that fed on the dead remains of their own flesh. Cannibalistic malice that dwelt in their miserable thumping hearts would make them eat each other someday. Anarchy was never the answer. Chaos and turmoil eventually die away. It is inevitable. Power succumbs to gravity, free-falls through a few layers of society and is raised once again by the very same layer of filth that incited the upsurge. Fools. Didn't they realise it would only happen again? And again and again till the past ceased to begin and the future end. Why did it take a clown in a purple jacket to say what they should have realised eons ago - 'Everything burns'?

Someone coughed. Even Gods can be afflicted. Humanity is contagious. He shifted his position and crouched down again with the kind of phlegmatic languor only the eternal can afford. A fork of lightning ripped through the clouds and illuminated something in blood on the wall. He seemed oblivious to it. For him, night was time coloured with a black crayon - a chamelion crayon that turned orange, yellow or blue whenever he wanted it to. And time, he knew did not exist! But the crayon was very much real. It painted beliefs, coloured religions and tinted everyone with a nuance not exactly the same, but not particularly different. It's strange sometimes how the shades at the end of the spectrum never converge, even though black knows it's existence depends on the absence of whiteness and white knows it exists because black exists. People are not responsible for the decisions they take. We exist. We die. Syllogism says we are nothing but programs designed to execute a specific task, however insignificant, and if we're born again, we're executed again, memory being a local variable and our lives being an X in this undeterminable equation. Consciousness is a red-walled tunnel we all must walk through, not knowing if there's light at the end or the familiar brick wall ending.

Someone was beginning to feel uneasy. He trembled, doubled over, the red gleam of his eyes blurred and the tiny nucleii of his fetid brain divided, and then subdivided. Something within him cracked, and then broke, and someone else who dwelt in his mind tore apart, watching him watching her. Someone else lifted a crayon and painted the air blue. She lifted hers and tinted the horizon orange. Cars began to honk in the distance. Lamps were extinguished with a sudden 'pfft'. We were born. We died. Yet, somewhere along the way, within us an unfathomable lust was sewn - a desire to wield the fury of ethereal storms and to stand unscathed with the dying hearts of burning suns.

Someone teetered on the precarious edge of the concrete building for an instant, before thrusting off into the receeding darkness, leaving the wall shimmering where the rain had wet it and unmarked where the moss had infested it. Glass, he knew, sparkled more than diamonds sometimes just because it had more to prove....and sometimes, even fallen angels could fly.