The Servant had many antlers jutting out from his body, like so many branches of a tree. Its dozen eyes gazed at the pensioners. Its long, muscular tentacles traced signs in the air. In the wake of its footsteps the smell of decay filled the air. As it approached it blocked out the sky.

A boy and a girl hung naked by their ankles from its horns like ripe fruits. They were in their late teens, beautiful and healthy. They wriggled, trying to free themselves from the Servant, but of course it was all useless. The boy howled in fear, while the girl alternately begged and cursed the Servant in a Slavic language I assumed to be Serbian.

The Servant took a rather practical approach to the task at hand. He grabbed the two pensioners and pushed his tentacles down their throats. The woman’s dentures flew out of her mouth, the man’s remained broken inside his. The Servant was searching for something within the old people’s bodies, and when he found it, he ripped it out of them. It was their soul, their essence, a black mess of slimy matter wriggling in the Servant’s grip.

The useless carcasses fell to the ground; the worms threw themselves at the meat hungrily.

The human couple hanging from the horns were screaming and crying now incoherently, as all human language is reduced to wordless whining in the last moments of life. The Servant took the young bodies off its horns, forced their legs open and inserted the pensioners’ essence into the young flesh through the anus. The bodies shook painfully as a fight took place within for control, but after a little agony the former owners were discharged in the form of black vomit, only to become fodder for the worms as well.

‘The cruel beauty of reincarnation,’ Jufus sighed behind my back, but when I turned, he was already gone.

The Servant placed the bodies on the ground. The young couple stood up and examined each other. They spoke German, their accent the same as before.

‘But my dear, you became a man!’ said the girl in awe.

The couple looked at their own bodies, then started laughing as if at a burlesque joke.

‘We were put in the wrong bodies,’ said the girl. The boy laughed.

‘Now you’ll know what it feels like to have it stuck in you,’ said the boy, then they both launched into a scream-like laughter, but despite the laughs, there was a promise of violence in the air. Then the boy threw himself at the girl.