Season of the Witch, Part Four

Home. Dark and cold and unchanged from the night she killed herself. She just sat these days. Sitting in the dark. Never feeling tired, or in need of coffee in the mornings, or even a drink of water. There were no urges, no cravings, no rumbling bellies. She could eat, drink, sleep, shit, piss. It was all still working. But she felt like she had stepped outside her physical self and hadn’t quite returned. Some severe, deep-down disconnect. The undetectable burnt out bulb on a short-circuited link of hundreds of Christmas lights. She sat by the window and watched the night come, her street quiet down. She waited for the morning people: The beat up station wagon that delivered the papers, the garbage men, the poor souls leaving for work in the deadened, early AM.

Mainly, she just waited, realizing that she wasn’t drawing breath, that she wasn’t hungry, and that her heart was not beating. The illusion of life was gone. She had nothing now but her singular and violent purpose. So she waited for the next electrical charge to bring her out of her chair and drive her to…where ever she was needed.

It came again at 6am. She moved with the morning commuters, entered the flow, allowed herself to be directed by the human current back downtown, onto Capitol Hill, weaving down the side streets into the subdued, 1920’s neighborhoods. Once a slum, now gentrified and surrounded by looming warehouses cum loft apartments and high-priced condos. White faces had replaced the black ones, and crime scenes had long ago washed away. The old neighborhood now cozily hugged the side of Union Station, DC’s massive train station built on the bones of the old 19th Century Irish slum, the neighborhood ridiculously named “Swampoodle.” But the Irish were long gone. First came the train station, then the black ghetto, then New England money bleached the new neighborhood – rechristened, perhaps equally ridiculously, “NoMa.” White makes might.

She was drawn down a side road off of Second Street, the trains rattling above her as she stared at the rows of townhomes. A street reminiscent of Seville – one of those weird pockets in DC that took on the feel of a foreign land, a faux European elegance. She stopped outside of one of the houses, an antique mailbox imported from France was bolted to the wall. She took it as a reflection on the owner. Someone with class. And money. Someone travelled. Or maybe someone seeking a comforting element of their home, their childhood, their roots. The owner wasn’t in the house. This she knew. It was rented, and the man inside was drunk. So early in the morning… Still drunk from last night? Or did he really start out the day with a few hard drinks? Was that Churchill who started on his quart of whiskey a day first thing in the morning? Something like that. Or maybe that was just part of popular legend thanks to Dr. Goebbels.

Flashes of the present. Fly on the wall, behind closed doors… The man, a long-haired hilljack with a dull face full of loathing and bitterness, spun his arm back in a punch, then delivered it solidly to his wife’s kidney. She fell, weeping, bloodied already. She’d been trying to get away from this irrational morning freakout, trying to crawl up the stairs. What started the argument wasn’t in the flash. Didn’t matter. Elizabeth pressed her index finger to the doorbell, listened to the chimes, and then waited patiently on the stoop. She had to ring three more times before the man ripped the door open angrily and glared down at her. But the anger on his face wavered when their eyes met and, wordlessly, he released the door and stepped back, allowing her to walk in. The woman on the stairs, sobbing, clutched at Elizabeth’s heart, but it was only for a passing instant. Elizabeth was on duty. She spread her arms, scars facing the man, and spread her fingers as the door swung shut behind her with a vicious, shuddering slam. Then the power again, the vortex, pictures fluttering against the walls, glasses in the kitchen falling, furniture shivering, windows rattling.

Another one down. And another, later in the day, outside a deli on New York Avenue. That night, it was a man in his car with his niece in a park in Kensington, MD. His hands pushed her head into his lap. 13 years old and forced to suck him off. She fled screaming into the night.

A father who raped his pre-pubescent daughter once a week was flung across his backyard around midnight.

The next day, more came. Again and again, Elizabeth punished the wicked, struck evil men from the face of the world, and spent her down time sitting in her living room, increasingly feeling like she was intruding in someone else’s house.

Yet she had not encountered the three who had taken everything from her. The men from the parking garage. She’d been promised that their day would come, and she felt in her heart that the day was soon. But she also felt a small, twisting doubt. Had she agreed simply to get even with those men? When their day came, would she want to go on? She would have to. She knew that was the deal. She knew there was no escape.

She had to embrace what she was if she wanted her own revenge. She had to give up on her old life, her old dreams, her old plans. She had to embrace what she had become – an avenging angel. A tool.

She left her house one morning to dole out executions and never returned. She took no keepsakes. She left everything. With money she had been taking from her victims, she checked into a hotel. The anonymity of a hotel room soothed her. Everything the same, full of transient memories, just like every other hotel room across the country and through the decades of her memory. She started drinking. It rarely did anything for her though, sometimes, in the early mornings, she would pretend to get drunk. Psychosomatic escape. She started smoking. She was immortal. She could do anything. She could guzzle a bottle of vodka and not get sick, or drunk. She considered turning that into a party trick. But she had no more friends, nor would she ever make new ones. She didn’t have many friends to begin with, anyway.

This was her life. This was who she was. She was ready. And she was happy.

One morning, when she realized that she had become a beautiful, powerful weapon of good, she got the zap again. Flash. And it was the three faces she knew so well. The three men she’d been waiting for. Three different locations. The first in Bethesda, at the old Battery Lane Apartments. The second in White Oak, so close to her old house. The last in upper Silver Spring, up near Layhill. Far out.

Three normal lives. Functional citizens. Members of the community. Husbands, fathers. Rapists. Dead men walking.