Kolkata, India

The end of the line...

I awoke with a start.  The train shuddered into the station, coming to a squealing stop and finally arresting with a jolt.  I checked my watch - only the 6 hours late.

The carriage had emptied throughout the journey and thus I gave no thought to the empty berths I passed as I made my way along the carriage and out onto the platform.  Stepping once more onto terra firma I stood bleary eyed after only fitful sleep and was greeted by air so humid as to obscure sight and render all that was once dry now soaked through.  The air dense with moisture cast a pallor over the station.  Colours were muted, senses dulled.  Taking time to adjust I noticed not a single other passenger disembarking.  Odd, I considered, given this was the terminus.

Further, no driver nor guard saw I.  As I made my way along the platform the station seemed desolate, deserted and utterly devoid of life.  Walking with softly echoing steps I made my way to the station concourse - with each step the ghostly quiet of the scene gradually revealed itself to me.  But wait - forms began to appear, one after the other, from the fog - becoming clearer now I could see body after body laying strewn.  Prone and prostate their unmoving forms threatened to conceal the floor from view.  Stepping lightly I sought the gaps between bodies keen to escape the post-apocalyptic horror of my current situation.

Both within the station and without the former vessels of human life lay as far as the eye could discern in each and every direction.  Rendered impotent and unneeded through what madness I knew not they lay as memories of lives once led.  What insanity is this I thought.  Into what nightmare have I stepped.

Leaving the station with some speed I cast tired eyes at the map.  My selected lodgings for the evening lay but a 5 minute walk away I surmised with some hope.  Passing from light to dark, dark to light I made my way along empty streets my hunched form alternatively framed and hidden by the sickly jaundice glow cast by the streetlamps.

Knock, knock. Knock, knock.

No response did the acoustic imploring of my fist on the door gain.  Peering through the adjacent gates of the hotel I spied further bodies strewn in the manner of bodies robbed of life.  From hammock to chair, they lay slumped and still.  Pushing the gates they opened reluctantly, creaking and groaning with cliched anguish.  Walking through the lobby I seemed to step back in time.  The glory of the hotel was faded some years prior and now stood but days from dereliction.

The reception desk stood manned but by no living creature.  Unhooking a key from the board I made my way with some trepidation to the room that the fate of my choice had decreed would provide my resting place this eerie evening.  The light in the room flickered off more than on revealing grotesque shadows of cockroaches rendered preternaturally large in the light and leaving only their memory in the dark.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

The clock on the wall drummed out the seconds of my stay with mocking reticence.  The pervasive and seemingly perpetual stillness amplifying the beat of each and every second to deafening levels.  In a bid to find some solace, some escape I pulled the covers over me and welcomed the army of bed bugs I knew would be my companions for the evening.  Feeling myself drifting slowly...so...very...slowly...to sleep my eyelids became lead and my heartbeat slowed.  Fighting the fatigue my mind ran wild with visions of becoming the next victim of the deathly pall cast over this town and its inhabitants.  But yet I drifted...deeper and deeper...as I fell downwards sleep came rushing up to meet me in her warm embrace.  

Reality became fantasy.  Bodies filled the room, forms floated over, under and through my head and slowly my body lifted from its resting place to hover over my squalid crib. I viewed myself from above as the demons swam into my dreams.  Sleep, in my last waking thoughts, I hoped, was all that was taking over me.

Sleep, gentle and friendly.  Sleep, soft, silent and soothing. Sleep...sleep...sleep.

Until morning I prayed...