It was agony to remember it all. His sensitive nose twitched at the familiar hateful smells. The harsh odor of human waste warming in the sun, the tang of sweat and urine, the thick reek of corruption. The sights, the smells, even the sounds. They built up about him, surrounding him like a vast sea of mud.
He moved through Downwind like a great black shark, swimming through the slime and seaweed of an ocean floor. About him were the remains of a thousand dark meals, bits of flesh and bone, floating in the silt-filled waters. Occasionally he bumped into a half-eaten corpse. And all around him were the unvoiced cries of the damned.
Finally he came to the end of his nightmare, to where it all began. He stood before a broken wall, four feet high. It outlined the remains of a building, the mud bricks cracked and decaying in the sun. This had been his home, so long ago. The home he still dreamed about at night, in the dark, alone. This pathetic shell was all that was left of the passion and terror of his childhood.
He walked through what had once been the doorway, though there had never been a door, just a ragged piece of blanket. Standing in the middle of the room he was surprised to see how small it was. The house had been a single room, a shack. But it had seemed larger somehow.
There had been no windows; the heat of the summer had been a living thing, latching on to him, drawing his strength out in a shuddering gasp. The winters were cold. He remembered choking from the smoke that never seemed to find its way out of the hole cut in the canvas roof. What monster conceived this? What had man ever done to earn such a pay- ment? How could there be any being alive that enjoyed such perverse cruelty! Was there no one he could make pay for this? Nothing, no one he could attack? Must this sickening non-life be reenacted for eternity?