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.