There are some who, as you approach them walking down the street, or anywhere else for that matter, one will avoid at all costs. No eye contact. No accidental brushing up against. Nothing of the sort. Only complete avoidance will do. The sidewalks aren’t quite wide enough to give berth to such, and much effort is made to sidestep them as quickly and as obviously as humanly possible. No effort is made to hide or disguise the deviation and disgust of an encounter with such a person.
Filthy. Smelly. Ugly. Sewer trash. They haunt the alleyways and sewage systems. Their homes are abandoned and condemned buildings, dumpsters, cardboard boxes. More than homeless. These are something beyond homeless. These even the transients and vagabonds avoid. They are unclean amongst lepers, a walking disease of bile and excrement. While human, they have lost touch with their own humanity. They live like animals hiding in shadows, more creatures than anything else. The man amongst the tombs of the Gerasenes was such as these.
And so was Sarkis Ekran. Though perhaps not outwardly so, but in the mind and in the heart he was vile to the core. Where a conscience should have been there was only darkness. Sarkis lived for one thing and one thing alone: to satisfy his cravings – whatever they happened to be at any given time, and whatever the cost, though the cost was usually at someone else’s expense. The only law he followed was the law of selfish nature. Sarkis took without giving except for pain, misery, and sorrow. He killed without remorse and destroyed whatever he laid his hands on.
On most days Sarkis lurked in the shadows seeking out his next victim. Today, however, he was cowering in darkness in a room with no windows.
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