He sits alone in a dirty chair. No other furniture in the room. Murky windows, dirty floor, grime on the walls. Dust covers all. He sits in his dirty chair and hears no sounds, only the smallest sensations as unseen things touch him with light hands
Fine threads of a spider’s web connect him to the ceiling. He’s been there forever and a day more. He sees it all because he can’t escape it. At least not completely. Like a television in his brain, his eyes see not only the empty room but his other life too, the one where he can touch and speak – if he wants.
All of the suffering, all of the hate, all of the people he’s murdered, all of the lives he’s changed. Living in his head doesn’t help. Nothing helps. Nothing can change the past and he wouldn’t want to try. Here, he is King. Here, he is the All Seeing Eye.
Memories or ghosts? He can’t tell what the flimsy apparitions might be. They don’t scare him, they’re just reminders. They serve him. Maybe they feed on the pain he’s caused. Maybe they feed on the emotions he once had. Now he’s an empty shell and there’s nothing for them to feed on so he has to make sacrifices. Treat them sometimes.
Even when the lights come on, he’s never quite there. His soul stays put while his body drifts from place to place, doing whatever it can to fill the emptiness that keeps exploding into something bigger. He sees every movement but he never manages to feel it. Not the old women crying before him, not the hysterical girls, not the weeping men, not the children who can’t understand why. He has no problem doing the deeds of a devil because it doesn’t exist. Not really.
Reality is reversed. But he sees it all and sometimes it’s hard to tell which life is real.
In his head, the room is real. The dirt, dust and spiders are real. Everything else is the hallucination. The drugs take him there but he could explain that if he tried. Here is he a God. He can change the room with a thought. But he doesn’t. Because he’s comfortable in the dark. He is the spider. The rest of the world are the flies. One day he will catch enough and be sated – the apparitions will drink their fill. One day.
The light flickers off and on and he feels himself slipping. His soul being sucked back into his body. Time enough to see the blood and smell the fear. Then it’s over and he slips his payment onto his tongue. The sacrifice feeds the apparitions who carry him back into his room and kneel at his feet in the darkness. A dark God. One who inflicts pain and takes tiny blue and white pills to stay in his Kingdom.
When the world is dead and gone, he will be safe in his dark room, surrounded by his soulless guardians.