Season of the Witch, Part Three

Avenging Angel

This is how it works.

Elizabeth knows.

The Black Cat, 11pm, a cold Wednesday night in autumn. The checkerboard, diner-chic floor fairly empty. Nobody has decided to brave the weather to see the trio of unknown bands. But she’s paid fifteen dollars, and she’s perched at one of the bars running along the sides of the dance floor. Slim pickings behind the bar. She drinks Rolling Rock because it’s cheap, even though there’s no need to be frugal. It’s the principle. And it’s what she wants.

The bartender has started sliding her drinks, and she winks each time and throws out a Baltimorean ‘thanks, hun’.

Here’s how it works. She gets a feeling, an image, a need to be somewhere. There are no names, no faces, no flashes, no revelations, no backstories. She just knows when she has to be somewhere, and that she will know her victim when she meets him.

There’s no need to be showy. None of that femme fatale stuff luring criminal-minded men into the shadows. She’s in jeans and a shirt, boots without heels laced tight, her frumpy black jacket she’s had for a decade on the stool beneath her. Her hair spills over her shoulder, and the bartender eyes her constantly. She’s going for unassuming, but she seems to be hitting the right chords with some men. Briefly, she worries about that. The victim was last seen with this stunning blonde, officer.

She smiled weakly and fixed the bartender with her eyes, calculating. And calculating correctly. He lowered his eyes and stopped paying attention.

Of course, there was no chance of getting caught. That much was clear. She could do her thing in a crowded room and walk away calmly, free to see the next day, and the next. But that just didn’t rub right. The dark things had to happen in secret. They always happened in secret. Principle. And what she wants.

The headliner band was up by 11pm. The reason, apparently, for the few people who did show up. She felt bad for the largely-ignored opening bands, wondered how they felt as the crowd – small as it was – rushed the stage cheering for the main band. For her, all three bands were unknown. And lousy. She watched people dance, arms in the air, and tried to make out the lyrics from the avalanche of noise. She asked her cowardly bartender for ear plugs and, gratefully, jammed them in her ears, then stared into her beer and waited.

It starts with a tingling. One of those under-the-skin itches that you can’t get to, like your bones have suddenly started spewing out angry ants. Then it becomes a scorching electric pulse moving up her arms and into her shoulders, along her neck, rolling across her face and back down again into her arms. The two long scars on her forearms pulse angrily. She feels like the world has come together, all around her. Like she finally fits. Was, in fact, an essential piece. This means her victim is near. And she’s learned that, after feeling that electric jolt, all she has to do is look around. It’s here where she hesitates. Who is she to judge?

She turns. The die hards had grouped around the stage, and a second wave had formed between the stage and the sound booth. A quartet of sad-looking, overweight girls danced a white girl dance, and several weird guys with beards tapped to the beat, arms crossed, or holding onto empty bottles. Leaning against the pillar by the bar was her victim. He was tall, had a thick beard, and was standing with a woman in a too-short skirt. She was thin in a way that made her shapeless. Flat ass, small tits. Short hair and a crooked nose made her look half beautiful, if observed from certain angles. He was every part the armchair hippie. The beard, the hat, the jeans and button-down. You could see that he had money, but he came across looking like a wild-eyed child molester. The forever awkward social misfit. Lucky to get a girl, no matter how she looked.

Elizabeth cocked her head and took him in. Watched his hand claw around his girlfriend’s upper arm and yank her close as he hissed into her ear. There was no second sight. She couldn’t hear him, or zero in on the pair in any way. But she did get the flashes. The quick starbursts that told her all she needed to know. This man’s fists, his words, his cock as he raped his girlfriend. Whether it was past or future, she didn’t know. The girl looked downcast, pathetic. Once a victim, always a victim. There were no flashes to tell her story, but it was written clearly on her face, her body language. A woman familiar with abuse. A woman who had surrendered to the harsh villain of human nature.

Elizabeth waited. Bided her time. She spun on her stool and sat with her back against the bar, legs crossed and feet touching the pillar, sipping her beer and watching the crowd. The awkward dancers, the stiff couples, the crazies, the kids, the slightly-too-old to be standing alone amidst the youths. Her target. The bearded man. Tall, thin, weak looking. Balding, red-headed, that nervous second-guessing behind his eyes. Self confidence built out of pure arrogance and a vast array of defensive psychological mechanisms. A sad story himself. A product of abuse and fear and loathing. Another time, another place, and her duty as a fellow human, a fellow victim, would be to pity. To understand and forgive. But she was dead. She was nobody. She was as good as a ghost and she had a mission. So many murderers and rapists and hateful people were a product of their environment, were created by bad people and worse situations. That didn’t change the taint of their sins. It wasn’t a reason to forgive them. Evil begets evil. The evil-doer may simply be a victim themselves, but they will produce more evil. They will pass their hatred along. They will perpetuate the racism, sexism, and ignorance of the beliefs that have been ingrained upon their twisted souls.

And they are weak. If unable to transcend beyond what haunted their souls, then they didn’t deserve to breathe. Simple enough.

Right?

She sipped her beer. She let her gaze drift. She let the music blaring through the earplugs carry her for a moment. She allowed herself to think. And then movement caught her eye, and an electric spark jangled her nerves, and she looked up to see the red-headed asshole stride back towards the rear of the dance floor, to the bathrooms. She set her beer on the bar, half finished, atop a mound of bills she had been dutifully piling up despite the bartender politely refusing them, then she slid off of the barstool and followed the red-head to the bathrooms.

He moved with a hunched intensity, as if expecting blows from the people around him, or as if he were bewildered by the sparse crowd. He stepped into the hallway and turned left into the men’s room while Elizabeth, directly behind him, put her hand on the women’s door. She glanced over her shoulder, saw that the men’s room was empty, and then stepped in behind him as he went into the stall.

He turned, jumped, and the door swung closed behind her. There was no effort expended on her part, but she knew that there would be nobody else coming to use the bathroom in the next few minutes and, even if something went against the plan, she knew that the door wouldn’t swing open for them. No lock, no handle, but it would be as fixed as if it had become a part of the wall. This was how it worked.

She didn’t waste time with a lecture. Why bother? There was no option for them to redeem themselves. No second chance. And she was sending them into the arms of someone who didn’t care even if they did want to repent. They knew what they did was wrong. This she sensed every time. The evil-doers never felt justified. They were always fully aware of their actions. They felt forced to do it. They felt trapped. They felt threatened. Why bother lecturing the paranoid? Why try and make things clear for the ignorant?

She fixed him with her gaze and, slowly, let her arms rise up slightly from her waist, as if showing that her pockets were empty. She turned her wrists out, splayed her fingers, and smiled.

“What the fuck,” her victim hissed, backing into the stall.

Her grin grew wider, and she shivered slightly as she felt a searing heat spread down the length of each white scar on her forearms. It seemed as if the air around her was being sucked inward, ready to implode into a bright singular point. The bathroom hummed with energy. The stall dividers started to rattle, the mirror thrummed against the wall, the plumbing emitted a high-pitched rattling hum, and small tendrils of dust trailed down from the ceiling. She took it all in, concentrated it along the length of her self-made wounds, and then she tilted her head back. The red-headed man flew back and against the wall with enough force to crack the cinder-blocks and shatter every bone in his body. Blood exploded from his mouth, nose, and ears. He didn’t have time to cry blood tears as he crumpled to the floor, staring lifelessly from eyes darkened by ruptured blood vessels. It was over in a second. Merciful for him. And she regretted that mercy. She wanted them to suffer. They needed to suffer.

She turned, the swirling vortex of energy around her returning to normal, and pushed her way out of the bathroom, down the hall, around and down the stairs and outside onto 14th Street into the autumn night. Crowds milled past, heading for the Metro. Taxis hovered, drivers honked their way to wherever they were going. The bouncers eyed her ass as she headed up towards U Street, and down to the Metro station, and back home.