The Wait

  Lace and ribbon, blood and sinew.

  The distance between him and the cockroach was only metres but it may have been light-years in length as far as he was concerned. Concentrating his id on the ringed head of the tiny creature, he tried enforcing his Magik upon its will, but the mind of the insect was vastly different. He gave up, slumping back into his cocoon.
  The walls about him pulsed where veins ran in geometric patterns through solid flesh. Often, he would stroke the arteries with trembling fingers whilst watching the grey blood race about him in perpetuity, day after day. This was his womb and he was transforming.
  When he could pace the length and breadth of his space, he would pause at the entrance and explore the rigid strata of the portal with his tongue. A time was coming when he would be born again. It was this thought that inspired his original creations. It elevated him up to great heights of ecstasy, a plateau where he could look down upon himself. He could see his pallid, ill-formed body twisted into a foetal question-mark and longed for the sad clay to finish its endless firing in the kiln where he existed.
  The cockroach scuttled in a foot from the portal and stopped. He tried again to control it. It refused to move.
  He often had visitors in his womb. They came in all manner of shapes and sizes; short, round things with triangular heads, tall sticks with enormous black eyes, wide beasts with rainbow colours and yellow incisors. The form was different, their manner variable, the reasons fickle, but they were always accompanied by them. The shadow people.
  But there was also a visitor who came whose company he cherished. A soul similar to his own but infinitely greater in its power and prestige. When Mr Colours came to see him then he knew the world was right.
  The cockroach crawled halfway across the womb and stopped to regard him with nervous eyes, the tiny form twitching in the presence of the terrible embryo.
  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he informed the insect, ‘I won’t bite you. I merely want to talk.’
  The roach swivelled its head as if testing invisible ears to confirm it had heard correctly. Incredulous, it darted within the boundary of his webbing and stopped before his eyes, eager to be near one so glorious. He noticed, however, it kept a healthy distance. Devotion to a god is reinforced by brutal behaviour on the part of the deity. The cockroach did not want to be another sacrifice.
  'You are not as magnificent as I have heard,' the insect stated in a warbling voice. 'Can it be that you are not the one of whom the elements have sung so many ballads?'
  ‘I am the one,’ he corrected. ‘The elements are fickle in their description. I am a phoenix in the making. My body is not yet complete.’
  The cockroach nodded.
  'So be it.'
  A movement at the portal caused him to look up and cringe. It was a shadow person. Startled, the cockroach darted forward to hide amongst the thick strands of his hair.
  Comprising of nothing but a blurred insubstantiality, it leered at him in his ill-formed body and moaned a string of indistinct syllables before disappearing again. A wisp of shadow trailed behind it and lingered before finally dissipating, reminding him of the exhaust from an old truck. It was the Magik that flowed from these loathsome creatures. It belched from their very pores.
  Once it became obvious that the shadow person wasn’t coming back, the cockroach scurried out from his greasy locks and re-positioned itself before him, grooming its head with a sweep of a foreleg.
  ‘You fear them more than I do,’ he told it. ‘I don’t blame you. They are without remorse.’
  'Remorse? What do you know of remorse?' the cockroach replied. 'You’ve shown very little yourself. You are more like them than they are.'
  ‘That’s blasphemy!’ he spat at the insolent creature. ‘Take back that filth or I will have you torn apart.’
  Realising that he had overstepped the boundaries of his familiarity, the cockroach bowed, shuffling back in reverence.
  'Forgive me, Father of Rage. I know not my place.'
  ‘He’s right, though,’ a voice whispered from close by. ‘You are without remorse or compassion.’
  Looking up from his womb, the demi-god recognised the intruder with ecstatic joy. It was Mr Colours.
  ‘Your worship!’ he cried, trying to roll over into a kneeling position. The placenta that surrounded him chose to tangle his hands and feet, pinning the demi-god to the floor.
  ‘Compassion is a weak state of existence a god cannot linger within. You need to be more brutal than they. Increase your strength or they will crush you. In time, they will understand that your brutality is only an expression of your love. In return, they will suckle you for strength and comfort.’
  Mr Colours moved his ill-proportioned form closer to him. The filtered light played on his twisted face, glittering off his glazed eyes and lips. The mouth gaped in a rough-cut grin of stained and cracked grey teeth, but the eyes never smiled. There was no denying the depths of Mr Colours’ true insanity.
  ‘They will know,’ he said, yanking on his bindings until he finally knelt before his master. ‘I will make sure they all know.’
  The mad face loomed closer until it was all he could see.
  ‘The touch of hair, soft flesh, fresh sweat,’ Mr Colours said, his breath a swirling sewer. ‘We crave these things. And you will have your time. But be patient. In time you will become. Until then wait. We will enjoy the parting of sweet meat.’
  A black tongue oozed across dead teeth. The reek of decay was thick, Mr Colour’s breath a choking assault.
  ‘I will be patient, my master. I cannot stay in my womb forever.’
  'They know you are insane,' the cockroach warned.
  Mr Colours lowered a finger to the insect and the cockroach scuttled up the harlequin hewed limb of rotting, stitched flesh to his face. It lifted an eyelid and crawled beneath becoming a lump that slipped behind a crazed eyeball.
  ‘They know you are insane, indeed,’ his master whispered. ‘Remember that and learn. We endure.’
  With that, Mr Colours withdrew until he disappeared through the portal with a final fetid wave that broke over the room in a roiling of carrion death.
  Pinned to the floor on his knees in the dirty sunlight that crept through the Perspex window, he stared at the bright metal and tanned leather that bound his hands together. In his mind, he could see time eating them away. Another shadow person appeared at the door and muttered a string of unintelligible letters. He looked up at his enemy, a black shape in a dark mist.
  They know you are insane.

  Ribbons and hair, young sweet flesh.

  He twisted his face into a broad smile, carefully expressing it in his eyes as well. Not too big though. Just right. Magik flowed up from within.

  Young flesh skewered. Meat and blood.

  ‘Lovely morning, wouldn’t you say?’