Season of the Witch, collected

And here’s all of Season of the Witch, for those folks who hate serialized stuff.

——-

The Choice

I don’t operate the way you think I do. You think of me the way you’ve been told to think of me. It’s like vampires – there is no Dracula. Oh, yes, there is a guy who impaled Turks way back when, but Dracula – the vampire – is a creation of Bram Stoker, who never left his hotel room in Romania while he was writing his pox-addled trash and got just about every nugget of Vlad’s history wrong. Right down to which castle was which.

But that was no big deal. Stoker was the Dan Brown of his time. An ignored library book after the fad burned off. But then Hollywood put the picture in your mind – Dracula became Bela Lugosi. The cape, the fangs. Fangs are new. So is turning into a bat. Vampire bats had nothing to do with Dracula until about 1920, decades after Stoker’s scribblings. Pure Hollywood. Movie magic. A myth borne out of committee.

Sunlight, holy water, garlic… That’s all Stoker. No basis in actual vampire legends. We’re talking about a myth that’s just over a century old and, yet, you’re led to believe it’s as old as time itself. Bela, with his cape and melodrama, stalked the ancient sands of Egypt, turned into a bat over the burning skies of Pompeii, and saw men and machine clash century after century.

You’re led to believe a lot of things. They become part of your narrow world, an artificial myth designed only to sell movies and books. To part you, the fool, from your money.

I’m no vampire. I’m just using that as an example. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea right out of the gate. Of course, vampires don’t exist. Take it from me – I’d know. Or, at least, I think I would know. That’s the trouble with being both omnipotent and cast out. This dreadful feeling that, just maybe, I don’t really know everything. That, like you, I’m a puppet of some vast propaganda machine, and the victim of legends engineered by soulless publicists.

I don’t look the way you think I look. I suppose it’s my choice, but I realized long ago that the best path to take was the middle of the road. It doesn’t pay to stand out. You can’t work that good old black magic when you’re on the stage. Up there it’s just tricks and sleight of hand. But when you’re in the crowd, you can influence and push the great beast of public opinion any which way you like. Being a nameless face in the crowd is the only way to go. There’s a free tip for you amateurs out there.

From time to time, I even have a wage slave job. A desk, a computer screen making my eyes jump, a few too many tea breaks, and plenty of impressionable co-workers. Sometimes I’m a boss pecking you to death day after day. Sometimes I’m a co-worker back-channeling you every chance I get. Sometimes, even, I’m a lover, a friend, a husband, a wife, and the architect of broken hearts.

I was there walking the sands of ancient Egypt, and I did see Pompeii burn, and I have watched the clash of men and machines. I should get all this out of the way first thing, because you don’t want to sit there guessing. You don’t want to bother with twists and turns and mystery. Not really. You say you do, but I know the truth. You want it all handed to you on a plate. Beginning, middle, and end. You want commercials and intermissions so you can stock up on junk food.

What is it they say? ‘All that is necessary is that good men do nothing,’ right? There are no twists and turns. No cloak and dagger. No seven deadly sins and fire and brimstone. I thrive on your apathy. It’s my highway through this world. Your inability to change, and your fear of that change. Your stagnation, your failures, your anxieties. I grow stronger with each pill you take to correct self-perpetuating emotional disabilities; I am there for each peevish snap at your loved one, and each struggling, caffeine-fueled commute. And the great thing is – none of that is my doing. All I have to do is sit back and wait until you defeat yourself.

And, let me tell you, it does get boring sometimes. It’s one of those things where, if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it a million times. So sometimes I like to play a little loose. See if I can mix things up. The apathy can’t be defeated, you say. It’s because there are no more causes, because the world has become fat and corrupt. Right? What are the arguments again? To tell you the truth, I’ve tuned them all out. There are times I feel just as apathetic. And, of course, I don’t really pay attention to problems and their solutions. That’s not my business. You create the environment, and I simply work with what I’m given.

One way to mix things up is, simply, to grant the power to change that environment. What would you do if you could get away with murder? A world full of laws and you could be lawless, yet still live within your shell. Still have what makes you happy, and never be judged by anyone.

Maybe it wouldn’t be murder. Perhaps that’s too extreme. But could you resist the temptation? If no law applied to you, how long would it be before you just started parking up on the sidewalk, or maybe a little shoplifting? The supermarket’s writing food off all the time, right? Will they really miss a can of soda?

Even so, if that’s the limit of your larcenous thoughts, it’s not you I’m after. So don’t worry. And, no, a stolen can of soda does nothing to further the cause. I learned my lesson a while ago – you need to work with people who are willing to make the choice. Who are open to change. Who, perhaps, need to make a difference.

Come with me now; down to the suburbs. Bird’s eye view: Everything looks the same. The ‘little boxes,’ like the song says. Rows of townhouses, and a chilly night deep into autumn. Focus in on that one there, at the very end of the second row. The one that’s sort of twisting slightly as the cul-de-sac rises up and out to the road. A woman lies dying in her bathroom on the second floor. Haunted by horror, she’s opened her wrists.

Rape. Flashes of memory. We don’t need to bother with the images. Just the faces of the three men who took her. I imagine we’ll be seeing them later, though it’s hard to tell. I’m always willing to be surprised.

They took her in a parking garage on the way home from work. That innocent suburban type of place. You know – the sort of area where such things don’t happen. Or so you think as you cross over the spot where a man was stabbed to death, a bum kicked by kids, a woman raped, a baby abandoned. It was late, she was a bit drunk, and they took their time.

She just sees the faces, too. She’s blocked out the pain. She’s blocked out any other sensation except for those faces and, on bad nights, like this one, certain queer little things. Like how their hands felt as they held her arms down. Or the one that slapped her as he came inside her. Their echoing laughter. The worried one who kept saying, man, hurry up, man, there ain’t no cameras is there, man.

No, man, there ain’t.

Some businessman found her. I’ll not focus on the good deeds. When she woke up, she was in a hospital bed. Bandaged, bruised, torn. A nurse sent in a cop, and blah blah blah. No help there. The doctor talked and talked, but she didn’t hear a thing. He reached down and touched her arm and she screamed, then cried, then apologized. He just stared.

One person was missing. Her fiancé. They’d been in choppy waters for a while beforehand, and this was the final nail in the coffin. He didn’t want to come to the hospital. A few days later, she sat sipping wine on her deck, not able to face work or even leave the house, and he came over to apologize. He hates hospitals. Makes him think of when his dad died. She went back to blah blah blah. She didn’t speak and, finally, he left, his shoulders hunched. He left his key on the kitchen counter, and she knew she’d never see him again. She’d never see anyone again.

She called friends and family, said she was feeling better. She called her boss, said that she wanted the rest of the week off. She cancelled the paper, and then she moved through her house, touching everything. She paid off all the big bills and dropped the envelopes in the mailbox at the end of her block. She put out her purse, her wallet, and all of her personal details on the kitchen table. Bank statements, the passbook she hadn’t used in a decade, the title to her car, information about the house, numbers for next of kin. She fanned out her credit cards, her birth certificate, and neatly wrote out all of her passwords on a lined sheet of paper. Then she went upstairs and, with a chilling ease, sliced down the length of each wrist, going all the way up to the forearm. She still couldn’t feel anything. The pain was more like a luxury. A whisper of a past life.

Her eyes fluttered, the cold tiles of the bathroom floor seeped into her bones, and she passed out. Thankfully, the faces of her three attackers did not visit her. So it breaks my heart to send them to her now. To watch her thrash and grind her teeth and suck in breath even though the blood has long since stopped flowing. I take her from the bathroom and sit her down at the kitchen table, a vase of flowers from the hospital sits between us as I fix myself a snack and settle down opposite. There’s some time, now, to take in her life. All these little things. A life of loneliness and nostalgia. Childhood memories gathering dust on the shelves, travel photos that are landscape shots, or building shots, and never feature her, or other people. Wall art from Target, Wal Mart, Ikea. Mass-produced. Hotel chic.

The furniture is a combination of hand-me-down garbage, gifts, and what she’s been able to buy on her stretched salary. Just recently, she’s worked towards matching things, but it’s clear she’s never had to do that in her life.

The living room is really just a half-circle of furniture worshipping at the feet of a large flatscreen TV, now accusingly silent. Hey! Turn me on. The kitchen is a little messy. Nothing horrible. A dish or two in the sink, a stove that needs a proper cleaning. It’s well used. She likes to cook. She cooked for her deadbeat fiancé and, looking back, it was the only joy in their relationship. He watching the TV, out of the way, cut off. She in the kitchen, on her own planet.

I finished my snack and pushed the plate aside as her eyes fluttered. Here we go.

Elizabeth was awake. Awake when she should be dead. First thoughts: The cold. So very cold. And the silence. Late at night, yes, but there was a deeper silence. Something lost. Something failed. She tried to gasp for air, but couldn’t. She panicked. Thought she was suffocating, and as she slowly realized that she was fine, alive.

A childhood memory: Buried in a snow drift by friends, not able to breathe, the all-consuming cold inching through her body. The sensation dominated the joyous laughter afterwards. A blizzard, a storm, no school.

Her eyes focused. She was at the table, in her kitchen, in the dark. The streetlights outside cast a false-moon glow on the man sitting opposite her, and she had no fear. She knew the man. Or, at least, knew what he was. She looked down at her arms. The two gaping, bloodless slashes. Skin laying open like pale chicken breasts, tendons visible on the left. She was out of blood, her heart was still, and she was suffocating beneath the snow. She blinked dry eyes and sneered at the man. He smiled in return.

“Good evening, Elizabeth.”

“What do you want?”

The man spread his arms and his face darkened. “That’s what I’m here to ask you.”

“I want to die.”

“Do you?”

She couldn’t say yes. She couldn’t say no. She set her jaw and stared over his shoulder.

“Ah, well. Maybe you do.” He muttered sadly. “You did a good job. Everything planned out.” She followed his hand as he took in her personal items with a wave. Her purse, her passwords, her credit cards and ID’s all neatly laid out for the neighbors, the police, her family. “You’re very thoughtful.”

“No point in making their lives any harder.” She replied.

“No. I agree.”

“Good. Let me die, then.”

“Oh, okay. First, a question. May I?”

“Is that the question?”

He barked a laugh, “No, no. Here’s the question: What if you could get even?”

“With whom?”

Flash: Brown hair, a missing front tooth, a fat face. She flinched. Slamming her to the concrete in the piss-stink of the stairwell, lifting her skirt, tearing her underwear off, a punch to the eye, her head bouncing, his cock ramming into her and his jackal howl. Cotton button down, khakis, 25-30. Overweight. That shit-stink mixed with spray-on Right Guard. Acidic, chemical, foul.

Flash: Shaved head, 30’s, huge inside of her, hands on her throat, laughter as her arms are held above her head, grinding into the concrete. Screaming as he cums, slapping her repeatedly. Cargo pants, nice shoes, Cardinals hoodie. Had an accent. Baltimore, maybe. Eyes close together.

Flash: Skinny, sweating profusely. Smells like stale milk. Hunched, bony. Dirty blonde. Nervous the whole time. Numb by then, he was fast. Long fingers. Came on her stomach and cheered himself weakly. Spit in her mouth. Giggled. Pullover, Calvin Klein. Jeans. Work boots.

She was shivering. Not cold now, but unable to stop. She planted her hands on the table, unable to be sick. She blinked her dry eyes, she pressed against the table so hard the wounds in her wrists opened wider, but there was no more pain anywhere. There was no sensation at all.

How beautiful.

Nothing.

She was free of life’s endless torment. Free of cracking knees and the bunion on her foot, free of the pain of what they did…what they did…

“What they did…”

The man nodded sadly. “Elizabeth, I know you know who and what I am. But I don’t operate the way you think I do. You know only myth and not how things really are. I can give you the power to avenge yourself, and all those women like you.”

He stood, walked around the table to stand behind her, hands on her shoulders, and she flinched.

“How many silently hold in their pain? How many innocents are also dying on their bathroom floors tonight? How many girls are going to get off the bus tomorrow and never be seen again?”

She somehow found the strength to speak. “No deals. I want nothing to do with you.”

“The deal is in your favor. I give you a second chance. Simple as that. Your only requirement is that you get even. Not just with the men who raped you, but with all men who rape, who abuse, and who prey upon women. No need for underhanded deeds, no need to sabotage the good and the faithful. I don’t care. I have no need to undermine goodness in the world. My war was fought and lost long ago. My purpose now is simply to help maintain the status quo. I want Mankind’s evildoers.” He moved close to her ear, “I want the bad men. They’re coming to me anyway, so there’s no harm if you speed things up.”

“I have no power,” she muttered, wishing for tears that couldn’t come.

“I will give you power, and you will operate with no consequence. You can use the power as you see fit. You can be an agent of good, and that will be fine by me. You can save countless thousands.”

“No tricks?”

“None. I heal you tonight and, tomorrow, you become an avenging angel. But you must use the power. You must carry through and send the evil back to me. That’s all. Pick the worst of the worst, those who do not deserve to continue, and destroy them.”

She was staring at her belongings, no longer feeling his hands on her shoulders. She liked her purse. Found it in a thrift shop for ten bucks. Little secret hidey-places. Another out of place childhood memory crept into her mind. Her hiding place behind the old riverstones that made up the arch to the Henryton tunnel. She worked one free when she was 13, stuck in all of her prized possessions – stupid little trinkets and gim-cracks. Hiding it from her father.

And there was the worst of the childhood memories. The one she always avoided. Her father searching her room, tossing her mattress, Jim Beam rage slapping her so hard she flew like a doll against the far wall. Other nights when his hand would move up her leg, or cup her budding breasts, drunken weeping in her ear. So beautiful…my beautiful Lizzy. My beautiful little girl.

“I want to cry.” She whispered.

“Sorry?”

“Please let me cry…”

“Choice made?”

“I’ll do it.”

His hands moved down to her upper arms, clutched her biceps, and she felt a wave of heat spread through her body. Her heart starting up like an old car, choking to life, the engine grinding. Her eyes teared up like she’d been in a sandstorm and started to flow, her body electric-shocked and jerked from muscle to muscle, foot to leg, finger to hand, her neck straightening and her face tilting up to see him upside down as she sucked in breath with a gasping, rattling relief. She cried into her hairline, her head tilted back, as she looked into his soft blue eyes.

Then she felt a prickling along her forearms and looked down, turning her hands palm up. The wound down the length of her left arm started to close, leaving a faded, puckered scar. A memory of suicide from years and years and years ago. Her right arm followed, sealing up and forming a long, razor-straight, seemingly old scar.

She cried. She put her face in her hands and let it all go. He kneeled and held her, his body warming hers. Time had no meaning as the pain flowed back into her body and out through her eyes, her running nose, her choking sobs. He picked her up and took her to bed. He tucked her in. He shushed her and put a hand on her forehead. He placed a glass of water and a box of Kleenex on the nightstand. Then he was gone. And he hadn’t touched her, he hadn’t raped her, he hadn’t betrayed her or lied to her or cheated on her. He hadn’t made a move, or stared at her tits. Her hadn’t watched her ass, or threatened her, or closed up and locked her out.

The first man to treat her right was no man at all. So she slept. The new life coming with dawn, and the sun’s healing light radiating against the pink curtains of her bedroom windows.

—-

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.

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.

—

Ignorance

She’d taken to studying herself in the mirror. It wasn’t vanity. She didn’t really care about her looks. No more so than a normal person. Certainly not now, in her undead after-life. What did it matter? She maintained her hygiene, brushed her hair and studied her body. She kept herself looking good. Her looks were a tool, now. Part of her arsenal. Some women may say the same when playing the dating game, but Elizabeth’s game was far more serious. Her weapons needed to be far more deadly. Making a man pause and drop his defenses was all the difference in the world. More than once, she’d ended up chasing victims down alleys, through houses, and even once into traffic where a dump truck stole her kill.

She felt ill after that. Her failure to strike down yet another monster. This one beating and raping his daughter since she was nine. Now the girl was 16 and a bruised, fragile flower. Someone who would never recover from her father’s cruelty. A lanky, clumsy girl who cut herself and was doomed to a short life, ended by her own hands.

Elizabeth saw this. She rarely had flashes about the women, but every once in a while she put the story together through her own empathic assumptions and the assistance of her second sight to fill in the back story.

She wanted to kill that young girl’s tormentor and came so close. But he cut and run, unexpectedly elusive. When he was crushed by the truck, she felt like she’d been hit, too.

The message was clear. She had to do the killing. Ending lives indirectly, simply being complicit in the death of an evil soul, wasn’t good enough. She was addicted to the kill. She had to burn with that power.

She looked into the mirror, the morning sun clawing through thick hotel curtains, the generic room lighting around her. Over the bed, one of many identical pictures in the hotel, dogs and mounted Brits were forever preparing for a fox hunt.

She didn’t like being controlled. She didn’t enjoy the sense that she was a slave. But, then again, she had ended her life. She had made a choice. For her sins, she became a god.

A knock on the door. She didn’t jump. She barely reacted. The days of being scared were over. There were no threats. The most fearsome killer wouldn’t make it ten paces before she turned him inside out with a flick of her wrists, a twist of her lips.

She turned and stared. Then, realizing it had been some time since she spoke, she said, “Come in.”

The buzz of the keycard, then the door opened inward and the maid smiled in at her.

“Sorry.” The maid said. A white woman with a strong accent. Tall, lanky. Weird supermodel wraparound glasses like you saw on women in the 80’s, though sleeker and stylish. She had that distinctive Eastern European look about her. A trained eye might even be able to say which country, but Elizabeth didn’t have that talent.

“Not at all.” Elizabeth forced a smile, realized how cold and distant she must look and let it die on her lips. “I need towels.”

The maid nodded, then set to work. Efficient, fast. Towels, a quick cleaning of the bathroom, the bed, moving behind Elizabeth as she continued to stare into the mirror. Elizabeth had the location of the three in her mind, but other flashes had come since them. If she waited, then she would soon have a distraction.

Though why did she need the distraction? Why was she putting off her revenge?

“Excuse?” The maid, working on the bed, looked up. Elizabeth watched her in the mirror.

“What?”

The maid shook her head. “Thought you spoke. Very sorry.”

Was she thinking out loud? “I might have. I’ve been…alone.”

The maid stood, a pillow held out as if a gift, and watched Elizabeth watch her in the mirror.

“Forgive, but you are very beautiful. You need not be alone.”

Elizabeth didn’t flinch, but the maid acted as if she had. She shook her head, tutted at herself, and then placed the pillow back on the bed. With a mumbled apology, she glided past Elizabeth and out into the hall.

Elizabeth remembered to thank her, but only after the door closed. Then the flash came.

Georgetown. The park on the DC side of the Key Bridge. A rape in 13 hours. A chance to change the course of one woman’s history for the better, and to end the fucking river of time for yet another predatory monster.

She arrived on time, sat on a bench in the dark, looked up at the city-lit night sky. Only a handful of stars visible here. Not like when she was a child in Ohio. But, beyond the solitude, she didn’t pine for the country life. She didn’t miss the stars. She only missed what they represented. Openness, emptiness. The drive to explore, expand, philosophize. The muse of unimaginable vastness, and a father’s hand pointing out constellations, patterns, significance.

The city roared behind her. The Key Bridge taking traffic into and out of the city, joggers and bikers hugging the edges, pleasure craft on the Potomac below, and lively Georgetown all around her. Horns and cars, voices. The park wasn’t isolated, it wasn’t a hideaway. Amazing that a rape was about to happen here amidst all these people, all these sights and sounds. How would it have played out? Ignored screams? Countless natives and tourists turning blind eyes? Another nameless victim?

He arrived first. Lurking in the shadows. Elizabeth could move before the victim arrived. No need to wait. No need to be a watcher. The crime was not yet done, but it was going to happen. Her job wasn’t to steer people in the right direction, or defuse situations, it was to destroy evildoers. Even if they met their fate before the evil had been done.

Why was he lurking? Did he have a set rendezvous? Did he know his victim? Probably. A plan weeks, months, years in the making. An obsession given license, consciously or on a primal level. It didn’t matter. His eyes were full of dark intent. He saw her and turned to leave, but paused when Elizabeth stood, smiled, and walked towards him. His eyes followed the curve of her breasts, her body, her legs. Then to her face, framed in gold. She raised her arms slightly from her sides, turned her wrists outward, and his expression changed as her scars turned white hot, as the world seemed to swirl around them as if they stood in the center of a vortex, and then the pressure burst from behind his eyes, blood pouring from them, and his ears, and his mouth and nose as he was lifted into the air and flung down the rolling hill to the rocky riverside below.

Elizabeth exhaled, shook her head, and turned to leave the park. She hailed a taxi on M Street and returned to the hotel in Silver Spring, fleabag rattrap chic, and resumed staring into the mirror.

Another life down. Life was becoming cheap. The evildoers made it cheap.

There was no sleep. Instead she stared at herself through the night. With morning, though, she broke away and crossed to the window, pulling aside the curtains to stare at the grey dawn, the parking garage across the street, the ugly façade of post-industrial gentrified condos. A knock on the door. The maid came in without an invitation.

“Sorry,” she muttered, stepping back to leave.

Elizabeth kept looking at the window, “No, it’s okay.”

The maid said nothing, just threw herself into her work. Elizabeth tuned out, followed the sunrise even though her window faced west. Saw the sun rising in her mind over a prairie, a forest, a cliffside seacoast. Saw the beauty in the world.

“A beauty, perhaps, you are starting to forget?” the maid asked, fluffing pillows, never looking up, her voice a low mumble.

Elizabeth turned and stared at her, “What did you say?”

A brief, grim smile flashed on the maid’s lips, then vanished to a habitual frown that was already drawing lines on her young face. She shook her head once, “Not my place. Sorry.”

“Who are you?” Elizabeth rose, stepped towards the maid, came within inches of her. She was several inches taller than the dour Eastern European, she felt a force rise in her, knew that she could crush the maid into the floor.

The maid, however, kept her ground. She didn’t look up, and didn’t react at all, except to stand solidly in place.

“Who are you?” Elizabeth screamed again.

The maid looked up, locked eyes with Elizabeth, then her smile grew wide, ominous, intimidating. Elizabeth stepped back, turning her wrists, suddenly unsure of her power.

“You dream of a youth in the – what is it? Valley? Ohio.”

Elizabeth sucked air through her teeth, her scars began to burn.

“You cannot hurt me.” The maid told her, “And I am not here to threaten you.”

Elizabeth repeated her question, grating out the words, “Who are you.”

“You know who he is, yes?”

The man who gave her a second chance. The man who gave her this power, and who demanded a price in blood. “Yes.”

“Then you know who I am.”

She shook her head, relaxing. “I…don’t.”

The maid shrugged, went back to making the bed, dusted the nightstand, and stepped past Elizabeth towards the door. Elizabeth let her go, watching. One hand on the doorknob, the maid half turned and said, “The longer you delay your revenge, the deeper you will fall. You must decide. Do you stop now, or do you continue what you were reborn to do?”

The three men who raped her. Who pushed her towards death. Who brought down a dark spirit to save her and propel her into this half-life of revenge.

The vision from several nights ago. The first in Bethesda, closest to her Silver Spring hotel. The first to go.

A tall, lean man. Hunched over, poor hygiene. A grease-monkey. A man who loved cars. A man who compensated for a lifetime of teasing, of troubled friendships. A man who lived now with a girl he started fucking when she was 15 and he was 26. Now ten years later. The woman, herself insecure, glad to stay in place and lose herself while this man twisted and burned up inside, the foul stench of self-loathing surrounding him as he snuck liquor at night and in the mornings. Three shots of Jager before the morning commute to relax him, three shots in the evening to put him to sleep. A man who carried wounds with him, and who forever burned with envy for those more fortunate.

She closed her eyes as the cab took her down East West Highway, onto Old Georgetown Road, and turned onto Battery Lane in Bethesda. She saw him, through the flashes in her mind, sitting alone in front of the computer. A day off while his stolen child bride worked. He was watching porn, his face inches from the monitor. A habit of his younger days that had never vanished. She glided onto the elevator, down the long, grim hallway, and to his door. She knocked three times, then stood back smiling towards the peephole. It darkened, and he answered the door a second later. No recognition. A shame. She wanted surprise, drama. She wanted to see realization and horror spread across his ugly little face. Instead, she was instantly in command. This weak, sad man simply stared blankly at her, backing up as she approached, stumbling over a table and couch as she entered his apartment and swung the door shut behind her. She wanted to say something, to pad the moment like a clichéd finale in a TV show. But this was far from the finale. This felt like a beginning. And there was no need to explain the beginning of a show to the audience. It simply begins with a murder.

She stretched her arms out, turned her wrists, the scars white hot. A show begins with action. Her power picked him up and flung him against a wall dividing the living room from the kitchen. It begins with excitement. She skidded him along the hardwood floor, his head slamming into a tri-level table with a TV perched on it. The television fell, crashing on his back as he cried out in agony.

Then she flicked her left hand and he was gone. Everything inside of him boiling and bursting. Scrambling organs and tearing his heart. Blood poured through nose and mouth as if she’d turned on a faucet and, unwilling to look on him a moment longer, she turned before his body had finished twitching.

She was soon back in the hotel, hugging herself, shivering on the bed. One down. Her decision made. Still the avenging angel.

She hung the do not disturb sign on the outside of her door and locked the security bolt. No more maid service. She was free. She was alive. And she was doing good. Saving the less fortunate. Protecting victims. Destroying criminals.

She pretended to sleep. To get back in touch with her life before she ended up bleeding on the bathroom floor. She closed her eyes and listened to her body, and to the hotel and street sounds all around her. She tried to regulate her breathing, to see if she could lull herself into an actual sleep, and then realized that she didn’t need to breathe at all, and that her body made no sounds. No heartbeat, no background sounds of life.

Her eyes popped open and she sat up, hissing, wanting to cry tears that couldn’t be produced.

The second one. A house up in White Oak, near her old home. A big man, unkempt curly auburn hair, a doughy face. A quiet follower, weak-willed, empty. A man who always did as he was told and followed the flow, even if it disgusted him. A man prone to insular meandering, private breakdowns, and troubled nights. These men who had taken her world from her were such losers. It was almost insulting to exact her revenge on such little people, such broken souls. Even more insulting that she had fallen prey to them. She saw that in all of her victims. These people she sent into the arms of her benefactor were small, evil creatures. People who would never achieve their fullest potential (perhaps thankfully), and who would never be of any merit to humanity. The vast, soft underbelly of idiots and scum who live today only because Mankind has defeated all of its enemies. Wars are fought by the poor, diseases are chased down by scientists, machines and medications prolong life, and money heals all wounds. The stalking killer in the dark forest is now mounted on walls, the clash of battle is now heard only on CNN. Multiple generations now exist full of men and women who have not been asked to grow up, or be responsible, or mature in any way.

With morning, there came no knock on the door. The maid left towels and toiletries piled neatly outside. Elizabeth threw them on her bed, removed the do not disturb sign, and took a cab up to White Oak. A Saturday morning, and her second rapist was sleeping in. Enjoying a break from the routine. A normal Saturday in the suburbs.

He lived alone. Easy prey. It was always easy, though. That was part of the deal. Free from fear, free from want. She was above the law, outside of the rules, beyond humanity.

A knock brought him to the door, cautious and timorous. Weak without a leader. He might have recognized her, but she didn’t care. Revenge was empty, meaningless. There was no reasoning with these people, and no need to speak to them. She flung his body against walls and through bookcases, over couches and into the kitchen, and left him as a bloody pulp next to the stove. The fragility of the human body made it all too easy. She felt like a stranger to the planet, an immortal beast designed to kill. No, to correct. Her first thought when she was offered her choice was to kill those who had indirectly killed her. Now, it didn’t matter. She had moved past the barriers and expectations of her old life. She saw how empty and sad she, too, had been. Trudging through a commute, to a job that paid pennies, managed by weak men who expected her to be grateful for her employment. Trying to make herself pretty, acceptable. Worrying about her aging flesh, the trappings of mortality. Avoiding dark alleys and stairwells and the permanent dangers of the unknown all to be raped in an affluent suburb, a victim to a random act perpetuated by weak, evil men.

What about that world – that life – was worth avenging? These three men had done her a favor. Through her death she had been saved. She had become perfect.

She returned to the hotel room. One left. Following the logical course, the obvious path. The last one was the leader. The larger voice, and the hands that first held her down. Another dirty hilljack, long thin hair, baseball cap, fat. An import from her own stomping ground in Ohio. Servicing computers had bought him a house in Layhill – far upper Silver Spring. She rented a car for this one. A hit on a dead woman’s credit card. If anybody cared enough to try and find her, that is. But there were no questions. There never would be. The police would be compelled to close the book on the murders and her own disappearance as if they didn’t happen, cabbies and clerks would never remember what they were doing, there were never any witnesses. Elizabeth was invisible. Impervious.

She strode down the hall when she left her room, the maid standing behind her cart, watching, but not speaking. She felt the maid’s eyes burn into her back, an unblinking, unwavering gaze until she turned a corner into the stairwell and escaped.

Jack. She had a name to go with her third rapist. He worked from home. He had a wife and a kid. A normal life. A happy life. And she wasn’t the only woman he had raped. For him, it was a hobby. Some sort of sociopathic impulse. But he wouldn’t hurt anyone ever again. She would send him into the arms of her dark angel. She would avenge that hazy, distant past life that she ended with a razor blade. She would keep going, and save the world from itself. Save Humanity from its dark inclinations and shadowy fantasies.

—-

Devil’s Due

Dirty long hair and a baseball cap. Hillbilly chic. But too old for long hair. Up against the line some men reach in their 30’s where hair to their shoulders is simply ridiculous, embarrassing.

At first, she just watched him. She couldn’t bring herself to stride right in and do him the way she had done the others…the way he had so calmly done her. A part of her was curious. What made this monster tick? How could he keep a life together – a job, a degree, wife and kids. How could he have all this and, yet, be so cruel.

His house was an old rancher. Post-war upper Silver Spring, MD. Farmland converted into acre lots, weaving down into neighborhoods that were comfortably laid out hideaways from the highways and the hustle and bustle. In his neighborhood, quiet streets without sidewalks were all named after Robin Hood characters. Sherwood Forest Road ended at Locksley Lane, twisted onto Gisbourne. Drumelda Hills, the map said. A forgotten rural community long overtaken by DC’s out of control suburban sprawl. Fields and pasture had been replaced by strip malls, condos, and wide roads. She parked on a gravel pull-off, the forest wall of the Northwest Branch Park to her left as she watched his house. An acre lot, maybe more. The neighbors three doors down had horses. Some arcane pocket in her mind knew that the county code for livestock was an acre and a half.

The house sat halfway back on the lot, shielded by birch, crabapple, and maple trees.

Three cars. Two adults and a kid. The third car was a project. A vintage International Harvester truck. It looked like it crawled out of some jungle war in the 1960’s.

How comfortable a life. A paradise in DC, a castle to call one’s own whilst victims like her wallow in condos and apartments and dead-end lives.

The child was away. She watched him leave, picked up by her biological father. In her head, she had histories, images, memories, flashes of lives. She could, now, control it. She could avoid it. She could see as much or as little of her victim’s lives as she wished. But now she peered deep into this man’s life. This Jack and his happy family. A part of her still screamed: Why me? What did I do wrong? But it wasn’t her fault. Wrong time, wrong place. Falling prey to a predator. These things are out of Human control… And now she is the predator. And now this is the wrong time and the wrong place for Jack.

She left her rental car and crossed the expansive front lawn, weaving past a cluster of trees to the long side porch. The door was open – no fear in this posh neighborhood – and a thin strip of evergreens shielded her from the neighbor’s view. She stood there as dusk deepened and watched the door, got her bearings. Jack was in the sunken front room, watching TV. The wife was in the kitchen baking and also watching a small TV mounted above the counter. The layout of the house fell together in her head and became as familiar as if it were her childhood home. She stepped forward onto the porch and through the open door. To her left, the living room. Outdated 70’s furniture. The strong smell of closed-in heat and cat piss. The TV blaring. Up two wide steps and to her right was the kitchen, harsh fluorescent lights glaring down. She turned toward Jack, his ratty ballcap just visible above the headrest of his easy chair. Silence. She needed silence. The TV jarred her, rattled her nerves. With a glance, she turned it off. He sat up as she stepped in front of him.

“Recognize me?” She asked.

His eyes darkened, then a slow smile spread across his lips.

She nodded, raised her arms slightly, wrists out. He didn’t react to the movement. He locked eyes with hers.

“Didn’t get enough the first time around?” he asked.

It stopped her. Cold. She blinked, at first unsure of what he said, then horrified. Stunned. All power forgotten, she broke down. She screamed and lunged at him, clawing at his face, and he easily spun her to the ground and kicked her in the belly.

The wife came rushing down the stairs, shouting, and Jack raised his hand, palm out. She stopped as if he had raised a gun, cowered back.

Elizabeth curled into a fetal position, full of those tears that wouldn’t come. Then she realized that she wasn’t in pain, she wasn’t winded. She stood, straightened her blouse, and rose her face to meet his eyes. She let him throw a punch, cracking against her cheekbone and sending her stumbling. Then, bloodless, unblemished, she straightened again and stared at him silently. Two more punches, again knocking her down, and again she rose to meet him.

Jack started to sense something at that point. It started to hit him that this wasn’t a normal encounter.

Elizabeth, seeing that realization – hearing it, living it through his eyes in a flash – now smiled. “You’re awake now, you drooling savage. You see now what you have created. You begin to understand what’s next, yes?” She raised her arms again, wrists out, the scars down her forearms white-hot. But just before she released the energy swirling around her, the wife screamed and leapt in front of Jack. Elizabeth let loose and the power surged forward and into the spinning body of the wife. She lurched, jerked backward, then slammed into Jack and they both tumbled to the ground.

Elizabeth gasped, dropping her arms and releasing the last of the power. The wife’s broken body lay atop her struggling husband, her face smashed in as if someone had taken a hammer to an orange, blood pouring out of her. Jack rolled free and struggled to his feet, unnoticed by Elizabeth as she watched blood come from between the wife’s legs.

He came at her at a run, and she snapped out of it as they tumbled to the floor. He was dead in an instant. As he straddled her, arm raised and fist ready to rain down, everything inside of him boiled and burned. His eyes blackened, his mouth creaked open as if made of leather, and the smell of scorched flesh filled the room. There was no blood. What poured out of his mouth and nose as he tumbled to the ground was ash.

Elizabeth didn’t move. The vortex of power around her calmed, the scars on her arms cooled. She became aware of the world again as her strength receded, and the background hum of her nearly silent, unnatural body. She heard the sounds of the house around her, the wind outside, the lonely street as a single car passed by.

She sat up and looked again at the wife. She shook her head, “Oh, you fool. Why?”

Why defend this beast? Why sacrifice your life for a man who takes lives? Why throw everything away for a big, fat nothing?

She looked down at the scars on her arms. Her choice. Her first choice. Death. Her second choice was this life beyond life, but she had become more than an avenging angel. She had become an angel of death, and this would become her life forevermore. She had accepted what she had become. She had embraced her choice.

She moved weakly back to her rental car, climbed in and stared at the house of death for a few minutes. Then she returned to her hotel room, sat in the dark, a shadow in the mirror, a silhouette against the eternal background glow of the city that tried to blast through the heavy, dusty curtains. The lights and sounds of life forever trying to claw through the darkness, to absorb everyone, to erase the individual and add to the rat race, forever twist and corrupt and destroy, striving to create a world where predators escaped the law and women’s screams went ignored.

Morning came. And the maid. Elizabeth continued staring into the mirror, and the maid stood behind her, their eyes meeting.

“I made a mistake.” Elizabeth whispered.

The maid nodded.

“This is what I have become.”

“It is not who you are.” The maid replied.

Elizabeth closed her eyes. She wished the maid away but, when she looked again, the woman hadn’t moved.

“Who am I, then?”

The maid smiled, said nothing.

“I used to believe.” Elizabeth started, her voice catching. She turned her head, as if listening for something. Then she took a breath she did not need and sighed, finding comfort in the action. “I used to believe… I used to go to church…pray… I thought I was blessed. Everything seemed so good. Once upon a time… Then they took it from me. Every good thing. Every scrap. They made me.”

“It was an unfortunate event. You were raped. Some people are hit by lightning. Some die in cars. Life is chance. Life is also what we make of it.”

Elizabeth gritted her teeth, clenched her fists. “They made me.”

“You were given a choice, were you not?”

“A choice? Who would have said no? It was a trap.”

“A temptation.”

“If he exists, then so must God.” Elizabeth turned to face the maid, who seemed surprised by the action and took two steps back. “Should I pray again? Now? After all this?”

The maid shook her head. “Those who truly walk in God’s light do not need to pray to hear the voice. I know who I am, I see the blessings I have received, and I do not need the simple words of men, or the rigors of religions so often brutal and cruel, to know that there is a design. There is something more, and someone to watch over me.”

“I’ve never felt that way.”

“It’s not so easy in a life so hard, a world so unforgiving.”

“Could I still feel that way? I mean, if…?” Elizabeth half turned away.

“Yes.”

“What do I do?”

“You must do what should be natural to all of our souls.”

Elizabeth turned back to the mirror, her eyes moving from the maid to her own impassive face. “And what is that?”

Elizabeth’s eyes flicked back to the maid as she stepped up close behind her. The maid’s breath tickled her throat, “Deny your master.”

***

She knew where to find him. Of course. He was her master. Her creator. And he was everywhere. You had simply to choose to meet him. She chose a wedding at an old house where she had worked as a teenager. A 40 acre nature preserve, lorded over by a historic mansion that lent itself out to parties every weekend. Hundreds of strangers drinking, dancing, meeting. She dressed up and fit right in, stepping out of woodland shadows to the outdoor bar on the portico, abandoned while the crowd gathered inside to watch the first dance. The bartender, bored, glanced at her body, but otherwise ignored her. Poured her a glass of wine at her request, then resumed texting someone on his phone. She retreated to the edge of the portico and waited for her master to come out. Five minutes, the first dance concluded, and the wedding guests poured back out to hit the bar. The bartender snapped into action, filling drink orders at a dizzying rate, and then two women parted and he emerged from between them, tall, blonde, in a snappy suit that screamed money. Yet no one even glanced his way. He took her arm and they stepped down off the portico onto the grass of the manicured lawns, dipping away into the night-shielded meadow and forest.

“Friends of mine,” he said, nodding back towards the crowd, indicating the bride and groom just visible inside, surrounded by a knot of friends and well-wishers. “Choices made, deals struck. Even on a Saturday night. And how can I help you, Elizabeth?”

“I killed a woman last night.”

“Yes. Unfortunate.”

“I want out.”

He laughed, “Because of one little mistake? She threw herself in front of you, Elizabeth. Again, a life of choice. She decided her fate. She made the life of a rapist more important than her own.”

“She was confused. She was abused. She didn’t know there could be another life.”

“You knew what you were getting into. You went out there, into this second life, as a killer. As an avenger. Did you think you could avoid the occasional collateral damage?”

“Yes. You gave me ultimate power. You gave me immortality. I should have known…I…”

“Should have known what?”

She looked at the party, the portico just a few feet from her, yet it all seemed a world away. “I should have known that it was wrong.”

“And how is wrong and right defined? By mortal, human law? Except for this unfortunate, have any of your victims been right? They had no one to judge them but you. You decided wrong and right for them without flinching. Now you say you were mistaken? Would you have me restore their lives?”

“Can you do that?”

He smiled and raised a finger, “Ah! No. Sorry. Death is death when dealt by you.”

“So I decide, now, that it is wrong. I want to stop. I’ve had my revenge.”

“You wanted to free the world of these men. You have only begun.”

“You are nothing but lies.”

He smiled, “Then I counter with an old question. One that has long plagued us all: What is truth?”

“Truth is what is right.”

“And what is right?”

“What I am doing is wrong. All of it.”

“I find no guilt in you. You don’t really mean this. You’re shaken. You’re confused. You’re realizing what you are, what you’ve become, and you’re simply afraid to release your last hold on your past life. You don’t want to cut the apron strings. You were free in your old life. Free to rot and die. Free to be consumed by paranoia and neuroses. Free to be a slave. To trudge through the motions, live paycheck to paycheck, struggle beneath the burning tide of debt and fear. Free to be preyed upon and destroyed by evil men while good men stood by and did nothing. It was easy. Part of the pack. Running with the herd. Free from thought and the cruel realities of independence and responsibility.

“Now you are a god among men. You must realize that you are no longer in that herd. You are…” He smiled, touched his nose with his index finger, “a shepherd.”

She shook her head, made to move away but his hand gently pulled her back.

“Your flock needs culling. I do not deny who I am, or what you believe I represent. But you benefit here, as well. If you are wrong, it changes nothing. There is much evil in people’s souls. You can cull the truly evil. Create utopia. And, when all evil is gone, then we can talk about your retirement. Deal?”

“Evil will never vanish.” She hissed. “Aren’t you seeding it? Isn’t it your business?”

He grinned, then pulled her up onto the portico and spun her around, laughing. People cleared the way, also laughing.

“My dear Elizabeth, you must think of me simply as a civil servant. I work for the people. I don’t have to try to make them evil.” He pointed at smiling faces, men and women, and she saw their crimes in flashes, shocks, screaming tornados in her brain. “All I have to do is be there, and your brothers and sisters do the rest. Tribes, clans, nations, greed, lust, fear, prejudice. Instinct. Deeply flawed creatures from the moment of creation. I am but a tool designed to be wielded against sloppy workmanship. And I, and my own tools, are here to correct things. To improve them. Who do you really think is the God and the Devil in this situation? The one who made it possible for this evil to exist, or the one who uses it to try and do good?” He put his hand to her chest, just above her heart. “My methods may be wrong, as you define them, but I assure you, you’ll improve at what you do. You’ll learn. You’ll not make mistakes like you did last night. The innocent need not die. I don’t care who you send to me. In my eyes, all men and all women are equal.”

She stepped away. “I still want out. I take back my decision. I don’t believe anything you say.”

Her arms itched, burned. She looked down and the scars down the length of each forearm opened, blood pouring out. She gasped and doubled over, but no one in the crowd reacted. Then he stepped forward and took her blood-slicked hands. He smiled sadly and dragged her into the house, and onto the dance floor – a swirling vortex of light and music, of beautiful couples laughing from behind Victorian masks. They all seemed turned to her, and then he spun her around as well, joining the fluid, surreal motion. Blood poured out of her wounds and covered the hardwood floor, her dress. She turned and tried to scream, but there was no sound over the music. There was nothing but the floor, and she knew that her life had been decided, that she had become a fixed point, that there were no more decisions to be made.

The party closed around them. The house absorbed them.

* * *

Somewhere out there a woman lies dying on the bathroom floor. Flashes of memory, of rape, as her life seeps across the tiles. Somewhere out there a woman screams and no one dares to look up. Somewhere out there a husband abuses a wife, a father his children.

Somewhere out there, she walks with us. Our avenging angel.