Rasool

In the bowels of hell, all creatures were constituents of some order, all except Rasool. He belonged to nobody and to no one. Even the most depraved inhabitants of the netherworld shied away from granting him a place in their midst. So despicable was he. And so, he settled on earth.

The pit was nothing like what most people imagined it to be. There was no separate corner for Christians and Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. It was a singular place. Putrid. And it smelled perpetually of stewed cabbage and damp clothes crusted with black and green spores, which would never see the light of the sun. Here Satan and Lilith, Draugr and Mahaha, Pichacha, and Berchta lived in their little holes, split from each other, but also a part of something extraordinary, strengthened by their design to spread fear. 

There was a sharp order to this world of barren frontiers, inhospitable landscapes, shadowy crevices, and pits of boiling lava. But to the untrained eye, it was nothing but a maddening tangle of hostile landscapes—a place to forget one's mind. A field of jagged rocks through which one traveled for all eternity hunted down by the ghosts of all those they had wronged. To those unlucky enough to be carried into its midst, the void only brought terror.

But even in a world such as this one, where just about any kind of evil had a home, Rasool found himself alone—feared and reviled by his fellow hellions. Each time he slid past them, they shrunk, not just from him, but also from his shadow. It didn't bother Rasool much, for he had found a new dwelling, and so he took his perversions with him and left to settle on earth. 

Rasool loved living amongst humans. At first, he planted himself in some inconspicuous corner of their house from where he could study them. They didn't make much of him, these people. To them, he was a fly on the screen, a spider, a scourge, a shadow of undetermined origin—something they could altogether overlook. A pest, but not troublesome enough to elicit outright horror. He would regard them for days, weeks, months, sometimes years even, until a time came when he knew them better than they knew themselves. 

Rasool loved his preys. It's what set him apart from all the other monsters in hell. They were more than just playthings to him. He was the  puppet master, and they were his marionettes, and he made them dance with his fingers.

At first, they were only a part of his life, but when he took human form and became a manifestation of their deepest desires, he became a part of theirs. No wham, bam, thank you, Mam, for him. No sir! He was a creature of refined taste, one who had elevated terror to an art-form. That final slash of the knife, the coiling of fingers around delicate flesh to take away a life, for Rasool, it was just the icing on the cake, an embellishment. What he reveled in came before it—the slow unraveling of minds and relationships. Of love, at first, turning into hate, and then into something far more acerbic. Once the darkness came, it never left, and neither did Rasool, not until everything had turned into rubble and ash. 

Few knew of Rasool. Most of his marks were dead, and for those who had survived, would you believe the ramblings of a madman? Or a woman? One thing though was common in all their reporting, none of them could describe him in any detail. It left the cops and the doctors often scratching their heads. But these people, the ones still alive, they weren't wrong, for how can you define something with no form? 

There was a bit of Rasool in all of those they loved—their spouses, their children, their friends, their parents, and even some in the people they hated—their bosses, their friends, their neighbors, their spouses, their children. That's what made him so dangerous. He was altogether human. 

Rasool is like the air you breathe, you barely notice it, until there is none of it left, and then all of a sudden, everything about it becomes acute.

There are always stories to be found in the papers, gruesome tales of shootings and mass murders, of people getting hacked to death in their sleep. In such cases, there is so much outpouring of sympathy for the dead. But what about the one or two that get left behind? No one pays any attention to them, not really. They are the real victims. They are the ones who have seen the horror of Dracula and have to live and see another day. That's the tragedy, not the people dying. It's terrible what happened to them, but they are dead. They can no longer feel a thing. For the living, life on earth is far worse than any hell they had imagined. They beg for death, a sweet release, but it doesn't come to them. Rasool makes sure of it, for it is their dread and their disgust that keeps him alive.