There is something dark and evil that visits me in the dead of night and whispers secrets to me. It has one rule: it never lies. But the truth is a strange and inconsistent beast. The thing is canny. It is certainly capable of knowing everything, but it also knows when not to look. It cannot lie about what it doesn't know and it cannot know what it cannot see.
It tells me to do things and it cannot lie so I stain my hands with the blood it craves. I trust it. Perhaps I should not, but I do. I cannot fail for as long as it guides me. It sees through people, sees their hearts. It knows them. It knows the right angle for the knife to par flesh from bone and it tells me how to adjust as I hack away. It teaches me the best ways to strengthen my arm, to sharpen the blade, to spill their guts.
Violence is cleansing, it says. It will fix me. The pain I inflict upon others will, someday, take away my own.
There is something bright and sweet that visits me in the heat and stink of the day. Every day it is a little darker, a little more faded. It shines less. It tells me lies. That is its sole mission. The world outside is unkind to it. It does not belong here. I tell it this. I tell it to leave, and then, when it does not, I motivate it to.
The hallway has been getting longer. It used to take me seconds to leave the house. Now it takes minutes. Soon it will take hours. The light flickers off as I pass by. My roommates, huddled in the kitchen, hush and glance at me. I whisper things to them and they all scatter back to the desolate corners from whence they came. Someday the thing in the darkness will ask me to take them. This, I know. This, they know. They fear me. They are right to.
We start our unholy work with those who will not be missed. That is many, as it turns out. More than I can take with the tools at my disposal. But the work must be done, and so I take my grisly weapons and carve a meaty gash through the edges of society. Nights fade into nights as I take, time passing by in a flow of eons.
Perhaps it is shown in my face that I have been marked as an agent of death. Passers on the street shy away from me, or at least, they did until I stopped going out during the day. They sense me at night, crossing streets to avoid me. I stalk through alleys and rooftops, unknown but felt, the darkest truth. They blot me from sight but they hear the light touch of my footfalls, my gentle hand on their backs. I kiss them with my blade.
The thing in the darkness knows all. It knows the code for the front door and the one to disable the security system. It knows which room to start in and who will fight back and which room to end in. It tells me this and I follow it, because it cannot lie to me and it knows that the work must be done. We carve our way through, a bloody trail. It knows where I will get caught and how. It knows when to wear gloves, when to change clothes, when to laugh openly and proudly as I walk away red handed.
They look for me and they never find me because they look in the light. I watch them from dark places. I am a thing of the dark. I tell no lies and I see things of the light protesting their weaknesses. I tell them this as I work. I tell them that I am aiding them, that their pain is a cure, that death is better than life. There is no purpose to their reality, but there is a purpose to mine. I am superior.
The dark thing decides who lives and who dies, and such is its right. Were it otherwise, it would not have been able to decide who I should take. It tells no lies and it tells me this to prove that it is worthy of deciding. It is the judge. It knows all. I am but a weapon, the axe of the executioner. I am violence. I am bent for a purpose. It treats me well. It keeps me sharp and fed and rested. Someday it will break me. But I stand tall for now.
The sun burns me. I do not miss it. It burned me when I was alive and pale and it burns me still, now I am what I have become. I do not use fire. It is too easy, too powerful, too dangerous. It has no discernment, no limits, no restrictions. It takes all that it touches, wasting the bountiful organs and bile into useless ash and coal. The thing in the dark does not like fire. Sometimes they use fire against me, to ward me off. A narrow circle of torches to guard against my mocking circles, my mocking laughter. Will the bonfire keep you safe? Will the pillar of light reflect my jabbing assaults?
I snuff it out with a touch, a mocking laugh, a gentle whisper. What hope do you have? What more could you do?
I curl up during the days, the heavy weight of the oppressive sky banished by layers of heavy curtains. My bed, my sheets crimson stained, my palace of depravity. I am mad, certainly. I see the way my walls shift and buck, curving under the weight of my presence. I am only here during the day to rest, to recover, to feast. I wait patiently for the night to return so I can once again take the long walk, the kilometres of passage guarding my apartment from the innocence of the surface.
I dig through the places where tragedy stuck. Perhaps I was the tragedy, the cracks in the stone that spit and spread and drove weight through human bodies tossed in oceans of pebbles. Amid the rubble, I find evidence of lives long passed. Perhaps my friend knows who they were and where they've been. It does not speak if so.
Strangers fade into each other. None are around long enough to be worth separate spaces in my mind. If they are important, the voice would tell me so. It never does, so none of them are important. They collapse, falling together, until I see them as a meaningless blur. All are slated for our touch, our justice. Only their actions distinguish them. Some turn and walk or run away. Some watch, eyes burning into me. And some who just stand still as I gift them my artistry.
The thing in the darkness hates one thing most of all and it is the light creature that visited each and every day. I have not seen it for a long time. It has not been day for a long time. The moon is always silent now, hanging high and perpetual. I wonder what that signifies. I wonder who killed the sun. I wonder what is written in the stars, why they weep blood, why the gashes in the sky gather. The great fires burn in the cosmos and I ache to snuff them.
Flesh wavers from the bone. Blood marks a thousand graves, all fresh. I am something dark and evil and of the night. I am no longer human. I haven't heard my friend speak for a very long time. I haven't needed to. I can tell now. I see as it did, the truths in the hearts of humans. I see their fears, their pride, their hate. I see them as they are. I take them as they are. I kill them as they are. I leave bodies in the street now. I do not bother with covering my actions. I stalk from alley to alley, any who are brave enough to step out falling at my touch.
They don't look for me anymore. They huddle in doorways under rotting wood, in kitchens around candles lit, in hospitals dormant and sickly. They weep as I approach but make no move against. I move quickly now. None deserve my time. None are worthy of me. There are always more, always blind and dumb, small and weak.
The girl came to visit me. She knocked at the front door of our lonely house, the only house on the street. My sole remaining roommate, pale and gaunt, let her in and showed her to the corridor. He was already dead, of course, a skeleton with a hand on hers. The corridor from that front door to my own stretched into infinity, dark and cavernous. You could get lost in a tunnel like this. But the girl did not get lost. She strode proudly through it and found my bedroom and found me.
I was waiting there because I had sensed her. She cracked the door open and saw the cathedral to my work, the grisly temple I carved. I stood on the altar and watched her. She faced me and told me to stop. She begged me. She wove tales and stories, told me of those I had taken. She said that there was nothing more for me. That it was already over. That I could never get what I wanted, that I could never be free. I think I might have laughed at her.
I touched her, the way I touch all strangers, all humans, and then she was a stranger no more because now she was a friend and now she wasn't a person. She was a thing, an object, a disjointed mess of flesh and nerves, bundled and angry. I took in that fragmented mess of a person and wondered who she was. Perhaps for the first time, I saw her corpse as not just another brick in the endings we were crafting but a distinct entity associated with a specific person. I saw her as she was, desperate and needy, and determined for my crimes to end. I saw her fear and her pain. I saw her judgement. I saw that it may have been in error.
My friend spoke then. It told me that she had loved me. It told me that she was the only person that had ever loved me. It laughed at me. How come I hadn't known the truth? I was supposed to know what was in the hearts of all humans and yet I hadn't known what was in hers? I was supposed to be smart? I don't understand why it laughed. I don't understand what she represented.
I don't understand why it was laughing still as I stalked outwards, past the desiccated corpses of my roommates in the shadowy halls.
I don't understand why it was laughing still as I stood on that lonely street, surrounded by collapsed rubbles and melting bodies.
I don't understand why it was laughing still as the night finally broke and the rising sun consumed us both, red skies over a dead world.