Pobre Diablo

How long have I been here, in this dark and dreary pit of a place. It must have been since forever, I mean; when God created the heavens and the earth, I was already here, buried and forgotten in the abyss.

I am in the beginning and in the end, always beginning and ending. There is no resolution.

Arsenio is not even his real name. Well, it is, but the entity Eshu – King of The Deep – has taken over. There is not much left of the original Arsenio; just some reflexes like his charming sassy smile, cunningly exploited by Eshu whenever it suits him.

There is no oxygen here, I can barely breathe.

In my mind’s eye I see crimson and purple neon lights glowing, are they lamps or flowers?

His presence is crippling, suffocating.

I feel invisible hands around my throat and I cannot move. The pressure is unbearable, my limbs are numb like rubber and I smell something toxic, yet fleeting.

God, where are you now..

To withdraw from Eshu’s malevolent assault, I look for a safe place deep within, but my mind starts to disintegrate and I have nothing to hold on to; thoughts, ideas, memories and all that, escape me.

My soul is tearing and fragmenting; ragged, damaged pieces of me scatter all over the place, tarnished by the scathing cracklings of entropy. Utter desolation remains; a horror of a magnitude I’ve never experienced before.

I am being poisoned and drained of my life force. This is overkill.

(That is the last coherent thought Inez can muster. She gives up and plunges into nothingness..)

And a little louder:

She perceives those words all jumbled up; strange sensations penetrate her state of nothing-at-all.

When she hears the voice say: ‘Honey’, a hint of familiarity emerges.

The voice keeps stirring up the fire.

She is like a coma patient trying to grasp the waking world after a deep-sleep of many years. In actuality she had only been away for merely half an hour.

Time is an odd phenomenon, as is Space, because Inez is not lying somewhere in a trench on the bottom of the ocean, nor is she tumbling in space or forever lost in a black hole. She is not even lying on the ground at the RapidLine bus station.

She is in her own home.

What happened was that Arsenio-Eshu opened the window to his soul and showed her everything he had in him. He had it carefully planned and the transmission took a meager minute. But when the impressions came through, Inez got lost in his incredible darkness; a timeless nowhere.

…