He had always been the last of the last. Despised, mocked, looked with disgust. Used to crawl in the dark, close to the walls, fearing any space too open or lit. He moved with his head bowed, almost without looking, as if he believed that, ignoring the world over a few steps ahead of him, the world would ignore him too.

What a relief if it was truly like that! Instead, how many cries of disgust and explosions of hatred had to endure! He was called a thief, him who would be satisfied with the waste that nobody wanted. People pushed him away, brandishing sticks with the intent of killing him, throwing stones, setting traps, turning the dogs on him. If it had not been for his extreme caution in every little thing, for his paranoia, for his strong instinct to hold on to that unfortunate life that had fallen to him, he would have died dozens of times.

Sometimes he wondered if that was not his destiny. The whole world tried to reject him. He should have known it since he was born: the smallest and weakest of his whole family, almost incapable of sucking his mother's milk. Overwhelmed by his brothers, more robust and lively. Rejected by the mother herself, for whom he was a source of shame. Evidently, he was but a mistake: nature works on large quantities, it is inevitable that something escapes its perfection. But faulty manufacturing, one knows, do not work. Instead, he had survived against any likely prediction, plunging to the bottom of a niche, rather than carving it with his merits. Never more than a step away from the end, he had nourished himself with scraps, repellent and useless to support for any other living being. For him, however, whose existence was so close to nothing, even these infinitesimal crumbs were enough. Thus, he continued to hold a weak grip on life.

A faint grip that, however, represented a challenge to the cruel justice of nature, or even better, almost an affront! The error wanted to persevere in itself, becoming diabolical! Evidently, he repeated to himself, that is why everyone hates me: I am a mistake that errs twice, pretending not to be correct with the cancellation.

He had fallen ill several times. Feeding on waste and dirty water, sleeping in the sewers, it was quite normal. He had been able to experience, in those moments, how his body reacted to face the threat. The temperature rose, the viscera swelled and contracted, trying to expel the malignant substance from one side or the other. He had noticed above all how the whole operation was uncomfortable and painful. In the same way, therefore, people felt discomfort and agitation towards him, not giving themselves peace until they would be able to destroy him, because his obstinate tendency to remain alive was an insult to the natural course of events, and all living beings of this earth were perhaps trying, instinctively, to restore cosmic justice.

All these things, however, were not well understood by him when it happened. He had had a kind of embryonic consciousness, which had helped him to better analyze the situation later, when his dull mind had finally brightened, but then, for a long time, he had survived without a real intelligence to guide him.

Now, however, everything had changed. Once prey, he had become a hunter, once an object of contempt, he had become a source of terror. He was still hated, still considered a repugnant abomination, not to be seen, of which not to speak, of which even to remove the memory, but it was the relationships of force that were no longer the same. The error had won, had subverted the natural order!
 
The turning point had not occurred in a precise moment, but through a gradual transformation. It had been a period of revivals and discoveries. He happened to look at everything as if it were the first time, to have some light on what was around him and that he had previously seen without seeing for hundreds of times. He also began to think better, to dispel the nebulous unconsciousness that had been hanging on him forever. Over time he had assumed that somehow the alchemist's laboratory had to be involved.

Obviously, at the time of his visit, he had not the faintest idea that it was a laboratory. He did not even know what an alchemist was. He would have deduced that way long afterwards. Them, he was just looking for something to eat, or maybe a place to flee from dogs, or maybe both at the same time.

The room was damp and cold. There was a tiny window, glass encrusted with dirt. The laboratory was in a cellar, so the window had to be just above the cobblestones of the road. The light that came in was very faint, often shadowed by passers-by and carts that stood on the other side. This, together with the fact that the cellar was cluttered with desks, shelves and crates in random order, caused the dark areas to dominate.

It was precisely for this reason that he had ventured inside. The shadow was his friend, he always sought it to remain hidden from the sight of others. So, winning his enormous fear for the unknown, he ran quickly under a heavy wooden counter encumbered with bizarre instruments. While he remained crouched on the icy stone floor, at each breathless inhale, his nostrils were invaded by the strange and offensive smells of that room. He could hardly imagine that his existence was one step away from the turn.

He remembered that he had stayed under that table for a long time, until he had made sure that there was no other living thing besides him. His eyes peered through the shadows, noticing bizarre shapes: dusty and decaying books, stacked in precarious balance; strange translucent containers, of shapes never seen: a succession of curves, swellings, spheres, twisted necks, long tubes; vases that spread the nauseating or sour odors of their unknown contents; tools of all kinds, mostly metallic; and then hundreds of bones of small animals, served for who knows what horrid purposes. If he had been able to think clearly like now, he would have realized that nothing good could be expected from that assortment of objects, but then only fear and hunger moved him, and, temporarily, the former was suppressed, the second became more and more strong.

What idiocy! If he had not followed the impulse of hunger, he would never have become what he was. He would not even have been able to formulate the silly thought of just before, nor, of course, noticing immediately its foolishness. Something good had happened, though scary and painful!

He had carefully reached a series of broken glass vases. He sniffed, almost in despair, trying to distinguish the slightest sign of something edible in the cacophony of unpleasant smells.

Suddenly, there was a noise: a faint thud, followed by a tail of soaked sounds close together. Probably, a rotten bookshelf had yielded under the weight of the volumes stacked on it and these had fallen, rattling off and generating that repellent sound.

The noise had almost made him jump in fear. In an unconscious gesture, he had hit the pots with which he was trafficking, overturning and breaking them. The substances contained within them had shifted violently, raising a whiff of acrid dust that had overwhelmed him; before he could shield himself, he had already inhaled a certain amount. His throat had tightened in a painful grip, which did not allow him to cough or breathe, while a violent dizziness had forced him to collapse unevenly, bumping the vases again and raising more dust. In his field of vision, everything deformed and moved, assuming completely wrong and impossible proportions. No matter how hard he tried to breathe, he could not. He was then caught by the awareness of being about to die.

Instead, at that moment he had heard the voice. It was like a distant moan that gradually, without anyone paying any attention, had approached until it could no longer be ignored. Suddenly, the lethal mixture of alchemical substances he had inhaled had ceased to suffocate him. He no longer felt any pain, only the new sensation of having a mental dialogue without words with someone who could make him sense all things better.

The voice would never leave it alone since then.

***
![the error.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcB15wfNQ5NCrNzqh2WAiRDUrWYpF14Ymw8upZ6ED7Dwc/the%20error.jpg)
[Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/it/canale-fogna-marciapiede-2380008/)
***

They were unknown sounds, yet he gradually learned to understand them. They talked about himself, revealed his own misery, opened his eyes to the reality of the world. Thanks to the voice, he had understood that his conscience had slept a long sleep, full of nightmares, but now it had awakened. With the help of his voice, he would have had all the luck he had missed, because the voice spoke of a total, radical, incontrovertible mutation of reality itself. And he would be the seat of the driving force of this cosmic transformation.

From that day on, a change had followed one another, in a dazzling crescendo of novelty, of mutations, of victorious conquests in the domains of awareness, self-consciousness and wisdom. If he had been the last, he was now climbing all positions, directed by a higher destiny towards the apex of the existential pyramid.

There had always been others who, like him, lived by gimmicks in the sewers. These were also the last ones. Not so last as he had been, but still outcasts. He could have immediately recovered on them, who had humiliated him so many times in that absurd race of wickedness among beggars to grab the garbage, but he had not done so. They had become his first followers, recognizing in him the head, following which they would give the climb to the lush and clean world that they hated and at the same time craved. They had become his stinking legion, sick, weak, but unstoppable and faithful to death.

For this reason, although he could do it, he had not abandoned the sewers. They were the capital of his kingdom. He had not chosen to live there, he had been forcibly chased here by dogs and sticks. Now he would turn the whole world into a fermenting latrine of disease, by retaliation. Let’s they die in the way he had survived!

Even now, as he thought of all this, he crawled along the dripping burrows that he called home. Swarms of deformed rats and insects that had never known the sunlight accompanied him, moving in waves. He proceeded regardless of the vapors laden with germs. They no longer had any effect on him. He moved, great and powerful, beneath those who had been trembling for a long time in the terror of his indefinite presence, still ignoring the direction that he would have given to evolution and that would have forever erased their ridiculous, orderly, clean civilization. They continued to pour their debris into the sewer they had built, because they could not bear the sight of the dirt they produced, and they did not know that the place of removed sins and abandoned waste would throw up their nemesis.

Some of the most cunning had understood, however, and had made the only sensible decision. Once they despised him, and now they feared him, they bowed down to him, crawled in the mud to come to drink his words, carried out his orders trembling at the thought of punishment. They would have let themselves be crushed without resisting in the filthy sewers bottom.

Squeezing his bulging body to pass the narrow passage, he entered the hall with an obscene scrounge. They were all there, feverishly awaiting his coming. Wrapped in lurking cloaks, with deformed and disfigured faces that expressed terror and respect, with hunched and trembling bodies. He had convinced them to trade their health and their humanity in exchange for the promise of a place by his side in the new world that was about to be born. They hated him to death, but they could not do anything about it: they were totally subdued.

He took a moment to bear their ill-concealed horror as he stared at them one by one. He could read them like open books. The faces of men, disfigured by disease until they had a cadaverous appearance, without a nose or lips, were quivering with a repressed emotion. At that moment they were undoubtedly questioning themselves without peace, as always. Why, they were wondering, why not them? Why had not the revelation been made to them, who believed to be superior, who would have never thought that a scrap between scraps, a so small being, would have overtaken them?

Irony of fate! Poor fools, soon they would have been only a breeding ground for worms, and their burning humiliation, dictated by the atavistic arrogance of their species, would have died with them. Their feverish eyes only sent back the mocking image of the one who had overthrown every rank between the so-called dominant species.

There, in front of them, there was the answer, but they still did not accept it: in that huge, bulging, pulsating, hairy body; in that elongated snout, which ended in a damp and quivering nose, surrounded by long whiskers; in those black eyes that had multiplied by the initial number of two, opening in clusters and rows along the whole skull and back; in those clawed paws, which once rummaged, like millions of others, in the waste in search of food and now they moved with wisdom and intelligence, manipulating reagents and biochemical compounds that the so-called superior race had never been able to discover.

The enormous creature that had once been a sewer rat, flexed its new eight spider legs, like alien logs covered with rostrums, and prepared to accept the sacrificial gift that the pathetic humans were offering him.

Leper hands clutched the white arms and legs, so clean and perfect, of the mayor's teenage son, who was writhing in anguish. The first hook of the Supreme Parasite made bloom, almost delicately, a red flower on his abdomen. The excruciating cry was the soundtrack for the dance of the eight arts, which in a paroxysmal crescendo plucked up and tore that perfect body, with a cacophonic background of catarrhal invocations.

***
This is my entry for @dirge's [Halloween Horror Writing Contest](https://steemit.com/contest/@dirge/halloween-horror-writing-contest-writers-win-sbi-ci-platform)

If you want to enter, you have one week left!
***

@dirge: critique!
***


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