The Harbingers

Matthew can see the beings that other people cannot

Matthew stared as the man in the blue shirt got onto the bus. The man walked in small steps, wincing every time he took a breath. His movement was labored and his body frail. His pale skin seemed to be the only thing left of his flesh and it hang loosely from his long arms. Matthew could only imagine what the rest of the man’s body looked like. His face was worse. The frail man’s cheeks were hollow and his brown eyes were sunken deep inside their pockets. The real shame was that he did not look very old, not a day over fifty, but the current state of his body told a whole other tale. The man was dying and everybody could see that. With every breath he took, he edged closer to his demise. Whether it was timely or untimely, Matthew could not tell. One of the teenagers at the front of the bus stood up and offered the frail man his seat, but his kind gesture was ignored. Instead, the sickly man walked to the rear and took a seat in the corner. With the same labored movement he had shown while moving, the pale man set his brown bag on the seat next to him. By then, most of the people in the bus had stopped staring at him. A few of them stole glances every now and then but for the most part, they kept their eyes on other things. Matthew could not tell whether they left the man alone because of their etiquette or apathy. Not that it mattered; it did not look like there was anything to do for the man anyway. With a cough and a splutter, the bus started moving again. In a few moments, everybody would forget that the ailing man was inside it. Everybody except Matthew.

The ailing man had gotten Matthew’s attention even before he got on the bus. But Matthew was not really staring at the man. His gaze was fixed upon something else, dark and sinister entities that seemed to be stalking the sickly man. The entities had filled the air in the bus as soon as the man had gotten in board. They wanted the old man and badly too. Invisible to the rest of the people on the bus, the skeletal butterflies darted around the air as silently as death itself. Their black wings left behind trails of a substance that looked like black smoke. A few of them clustered around the man that they were after, but they never moved to within a foot of him. It seemed to be some sort of rule that the ethereal beings had, not to touch the people before their time actually came. Before soon, the bus came to a stop. The sickly man walked slowly along the aisle, clutching his bag tightly in his left hand and unknowingly followed by his ghoulish and unsightly companions. The bus was already leaving when Matthew saw it happen. As the weak man was walking along the pavement, the ghoulish butterflies broke their barrier and swooped down on him. The spirit-like creatures flew right through the man, leaving him with a darkness that only Matthew could see. The grip on his bag loosened and it fell on the pavement spilling the bottles of pills inside it. As the butterflies flew out of the man’s body, they seemed to draw out a silky, silvery substance that floated through the air with them. By the time the last butterfly flew through him, the man was dead. His soul was departed leaving his empty body behind. Just like that, the harbingers of death were gone.