Exile

The day is grey as I stand and wait at the bus stop. The sky above me is grey. The buildings around me are grey. The pavement beneath me is grey. Even the other bedraggled souls I see this early in the morning are grey. I'm drowning in a sea of grey. I don't even have the will to surface for air. I stand silently at the bus stop, surrounded by a world that feels like it's been chewed and chewed until all the flavour has leaked out.

What am I doing in this dead grey place? There is no life here. Around me cold grey concrete boxes masquerade as homes. Children's toys lie discarded amongst the weeds of scraggly lawns, left abandoned as though their owners were so emptied of love they no longer had a single drop to spare.

Beneath me is the tarmac, the grey grey tarmac that covers everything like a scab. No healing takes place beneath the surface. Only living things heal, and there is nothing alive here, nothing but the grey.

The grey sky, gravid with the promise of rain, finally releases itself in a limp drizzle that dampens my hair and sprays my cheeks. I barely feel it.

A bus pulls up and I step aboard. The driver, a middle-aged woman, doesn't acknowledge my presence as I drop the fare into a slot. Her hair is matt brown and fossilised in a crust of artificial curls. Her face is lined and weathered like a battered piece of leather.

I walk past plain brown seats and dull metal bars. Teenage mothers in cheap tracksuits chatter amongst themselves, pausing only to bark orders at their unruly charges. An old man with stringy white hair stares into space, eyes focused on a world only he can see. I take a seat up near the back and stare out of a window filmed with grime.

Why am I here?

The bus pulls away, passing buildings with metal sheets for windows and faded graffiti for paintwork. A small plot of sickly yellow grass is scarred with burn marks and the sodden remnants of a month-old bonfire. A scrawny black dog roots through an open bag of rubbish. The bus stops briefly outside a house where empty wine bottles stand to attention in ill-disciplined ranks.

Everyone has their own answers.

Mine are hidden, gone. I know they were there once. I can still sense the ghostly echo where memory once resided. There's nothing there now—a grey space in an empty grey world.

It's raining harder now. Trails of water droplets run down the windowpane—the tears of angels after they look down and see what's become of the world beneath them. Through blurry glass I watch ugly blocky buildings with small square windows pass by. The structure is surrounded by bars and gates. It looks like a prison but I know it's a school.

What am I doing here? This is not my place, this dreary grey no-place. I know this, but I don't know why. In my head is another place—a place of fire, passion and colour. Glimpses surface occasionally to intrude on my thoughts. They left them there to remind me.

To torment me.

The bus rolls down a hill into the heart of town. It's a dull grey heart that pumps ever expanding grey along arteries lined with the boarded up remnants of failed businesses. Dreams turned to cancer.

I don't know who They are, but I know They exist. They left me with that even as They gouged out everything else. They left me with the knowledge this is my punishment, but not what I'm being punished for.

They left me a reminder of what I've lost.

If I close my eyes I can see it. Somewhere else. A world of fire and passion. It's there in my memories, a far-off tunnel I walk down until I emerge into a maelstrom of flames and screams. Countless voices soar and swoop in a crescendo of pain and fear. An orchestra of agony, playing the most sublime symphony of suffering, its instruments countless tortured souls.

It is beautiful.

Pure.

Leaping flames twist and sway across the midnight-black sky. They dance like exotic birds with long plumes of brilliant yellow, red and orange. Their partners for the dance are souls pinned on long blackened iron spikes. Ten feet high the flames reach, caressing feet, ankles, hands, sexes with long flickering tongues. The flames' lascivious touch scorches hair, chars skin and melts fat. There are pauses in the dance, when the flames die down to flickering red embers. It's a respite to allow fingers and toes to regrow, molten fat to solidify back into tissue, and skin to creep back over scorched muscle.

The souls scream loudest then.

Looming beyond the fires are the great iron windmills. Powered by great sails of living human skin, black cogs and gears turn ceaselessly, a constant metronome to the unending orchestra of agony. There are people caught in the gears. Caught between the teeth of unyielding metal, their bodies stretch and twist but never tear. The cogs turn and turn, contorting individuals into stretched tubes of skin and meat with a core of splintered bone.

Nothing truly lives here, so death has no dominion. There is only sensation.

Eternal sensation.

I walk down a path paved in mewling babies, their bodies compacted into living blocks. They stare up at me with eyes like glossy marbles and cry through tiny mouths lined with teeth as white as precious pearls. Their wails buoy me up like a feather in a breeze. Up ahead is the palace where she awaits me.

I enter her chambers and walk through into a room where she sits on a throne upholstered in human skin. The still-living heads of the skins' owners are positioned at the end of each armrest. They chatter and gibber nonsensically to each other while she ruffles a hand through each head's hair.

She. My vision of perfection. My avatar of passion.

My succubus.

I drink in the vision of her sitting on the throne, one lithe leg crossed over the other, like a starving vampire in the presence of a virginal beauty.

No virgin is my succubus. No trace of innocence clouds her eyes. They burn with lust and passion, fires to turn all her human prey into moths eager to cast their pitiful mortal forms into the burning sun of her desire. I feel that black-hole attraction and she mine.

More than simple hunger burns in her eyes as she uncrosses her legs and stands up on obsidian black hooves. A moist tongue dabs around exquisite full lips. I take her hand and together we exit her throne chamber.

Her bed is covered in the still-living skins of a hundred virgin women. Their owners sigh and moan, and the bed undulates as they thrust their sexes at me, begging me to fill them with my prick. I ignore them. Only one sex interests me.

I throw my succubus onto the shifting bed and get on top of her. There is no need for delay or patient build-up. Our passion is a conflagration needing no spark to ignite. The close presence of our bodies is enough. Her legs wrap around me, hooves crossing behind my back as I drive my prick into her boiling sex.

Her tight cunt stretches to receive me and wraps my member in bands of magma. Deeper, deeper, I go, pushing into her molten heat while she trembles and writhes beneath me. Head tossed back, she bites her fulsome lips hard enough to draw blood. Her claws rake across my back. I growl my appreciation as blood wells up from my cuts.

The sighing bed sways and undulates with the violence of our thrusting bodies as we drive against each other in frenzied lust. Wet dew drops of arousal seep from each envious vaginal slit. My succubus uses nimble fingers to attend to some of the weeping orifices. I ignore them. Only one vagina matters to me.

She is no weak-willed slattern, my succubus. She rolls me onto my back and fires burn in her haughty eyes as she straddles me. The delicious swell of her tits sways back and forth as she rocks her hips up and down the firm staff of my erection.

Her cunt contracts around my prick, drawing me deeper inside to where her secret lips reside. These plush lips she uses to suck out the lives and souls of willing fools. I lie back and let her play. Such a delicious, deadly trap. A mantrap slathered in the sweetest, thickest honey. Flesh as sticky as molasses and as wicked as sin wriggles up my shaft in teasing waves. Plump lips squeeze and suckle on my engorged glans. I give a soft growl, relishing the same pleasures that have caused countless men to give everything to her before expiring in her arms with a smile beneath their glassy eyes.

I am not her prey.

I roll her over and now I am on top. Blood ignites in my veins. I pin her shoulders to the bed and break the cloying suction of her cunt. The bed lurches and shudders as I drive into her slick sex with heavy thrusts. The souls beneath us moan their frustrations through the lips of their deprived sexes.

I care not. Up and down my hips move as I slide my full length back and forth into her wet vagina. She thrashes and growls beneath me, teeth snapping like a she-tiger in heat. The froth of her arousal bubbles up and pours from her sex as I fill her again and again. I feel the silken walls of her sex stretch around me as she takes me in.

She is not my prey.

She takes her turn on top. There is no sly seduction on her face now, only primal passion and burning lust. She rides me, each lithe bounce of her hips almost high enough to leave my manhood behind entirely. Faster and faster her sex slides up and down my shaft. The luscious mounds of her breasts, nipples sharp like thorns, sway with the motions of her body. Her fingers score lines in my shoulders.

Then a great thrust that plunges me all the way inside her, deep enough even for those soft inner lips to engulf the whole of the swollen tip of my manhood. Her sex clenches and I'm gripped with a suction powerful enough to tear a mortal man inside out and leave him weeping with joy even as his soul is torn to shreds.

With me it's just playing.

I clasp hands against the smooth flesh of her buttocks and sit upright, rolling her onto her back. Deeper still into her honey-lined well I plunge, exploring every secret fold and crevice.

On and on we fuck. Our lust rages like wildfire, burning hotter even than the flames raging outside. And at last when we both attain our peaks, our cries of release are louder even than the shrieks and howls from the chorus of eternally damned. Her head falls back on the bed. Her legs fold around my back, hooking me closer. Every fibre in my being shivers as I pour my seed into the maelstrom shudder of her orgasming sex.

We finish as one. Equals.

We lie together. The skins beneath us are lacerated and marred with livid bruises. Their voices are quiescent, satisfied.

She smiles at me as she caresses my horns. My hand slides over the smooth skin of her ass.

She is mine. I am hers.

My hell-born harlot.

My succubus.

My love.

The images fade and I'm once more staring out of the rain-dashed window. The bus stops with a squeak of brakes. This is my stop. I get off and stand on a grey curb. Grey rain falls out of the grey sky and runs down my cheeks.

This is my punishment.

I'm surrounded by edifices of glass and concrete. They stare out at nothing with blank mirror eyes. Dead eyes. Dead eyes staring out at a dead world. Behind one of those windows is my office where I'll sit and perform non-tasks for grey little men until the hands of the clock sweep around to five. Then I'll go home and sleep until I wake up the next morning and have to repeat it all over again.

What was my crime? What could I have done that was so heinous, so atrocious, that the only fitting punishment was to send me here, to this grey non-place?

Whatever it was, I'm sorry.

This is not my world. I don't belong here.

I want to go home.

Please let me go home.