Bad Girl Gone

by Temple Mathews

  “Echo…”

  His voice was sympathetic and soft.

  “You were my favorite. My princess.”

  I wanted to throw something at him. The others shifted in their seats. Darby stood up, the veins in her temples throbbing.

  “I gotta tell you, I do not like this SOB. Why don’t we just scare the shit out of him right here, right now?”

  It was tempting. He was alone in his classroom. But I knew the best thing to do was to keep watching and waiting. He shook his head slowly, his eyes looking far away.

  “You shouldn’t have blamed yourself. The only bad choice you made was to try and crush my world.”

  I rose slowly from my desk. He wasn’t talking to me, was he? I got very close to him. He sucked in a breath. But he didn’t reach out to touch me. He was talking to his memory of me—that was all. But still, it was creeping me out.

  He glanced around the room, then ejected the hard drive, put it in his briefcase, and went out to his car. He was clever and skillful. Even now I had the uneasy feeling he was manipulating me. I was terrified he would somehow get away.

  “Get the knife,” I said.

  ZEN

  Zipperhead flew up and pulled the knife from the tree and we followed Hemming to his house. As he parked alongside it, Darby used both hands to sink the deadly knife into his front door.

  “He’s going to shit himself,” said Dougie.

  But he was wrong. When Hemming approached the door, he didn’t even flinch. He stared at the knife, then turned and looked up at the sky where we were. It felt like he saw me, maybe all of us. He didn’t seem afraid, just curious, as though we were a flock of migrating birds or something.

  “He’s pretty calm for someone who just saw his murder weapon stuck in his front door,” said Cameron.

  “Maybe he senses us. Maybe he’s just trying to act cool,” said Dougie.

  “Or maybe he’s some kind of freak who doesn’t get scared,” said Zipperhead.

  “Everyone gets scared,” said Cole. “We just have to find his weak spot.”

  Hemming removed the knife from the door and went in his house. We followed him.

  As we entered through various doors and walls, seeping our way in, the strains of an opera filled the house. It was Mozart’s dark and violent piece, Don Giovanni. I knew it well because my father had, for reasons unbeknownst to me as a child, taken a liking to the piece as he sipped his gin late at night. Me, I hated opera. I’d rather listen to fingers on a chalkboard. Again I passed the good teacher’s few “family” photos on the wall, young Marie smiling on a bicycle, a remembrance of his past life, and I figured that his wife probably dumped him because of his lying, cheating ways.

  Hemming was at his desk, the knife at his side. With one hand he was casually fondling it. His other hand was on his mouse and he was scrolling through pictures on his computer, his eyes intent.

  It was unsettling. Not only was he unfazed by the appearance of the knife—like that happened every day—he had retrieved all his “work” and was looking at pictures of girls he’d photographed, shifting them around, moving his trophy collection to satisfy some kind of internal need for order. Watching him do this, my desire for revenge built like an angry boil. I was ready for the smackdown.

  “Let’s get this started,” I said.

  “All over it,” said Cole.

  Cole used his power to cause the knife to quickly zip up into the air. Then it slammed down and sank into the desk, right next to Hemming’s mouse pad. He leapt up, his breath quickening, and looked around the room. Then he nodded, as though he somehow understood what had happened.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  He pulled the knife from the desk.

  I moved close to him, got right in his face and stared into his eyes. He blinked. Even though he couldn’t see me, we were glaring at each other. Did he know I was there?

  “Leave me alone, Echo.”

  He did!

  “We both know I can’t do that,” I said, echoing his killing words back to him.

  He didn’t react. He hadn’t heard me. These were just mind games. I was determined to win. I decided I would enter him. I took a few steps back, screamed to holy hell, and rushed him, ready to get in his head and try and do some damage.

  But nothing happened. How could I have been so stupid? He wasn’t frightened. He sat back down and kept right on gawking at his trophy pictures.

  “God, he’s such a perv,” said Darby.

  “Scare him! I need someone to scare him good,” I said.

  “I’ll start by freezing his eyes closed!” said Dougie.

  “Then he couldn’t see shit, dipwad,” said Zipperhead. “I’ll zap the shit out of him!”

  “I think we should take it slowly, ease into it,” said Cameron.

  “Good idea,” said Cole. “Lucy, you want to do the honors?”

  “Purrrfect,” she said.

  Lucy shrank down as she morphed into her cat self but stayed invisible. Cole used his power to turn the music off. Hemming cocked his head and listened. What he heard was purring. Then he looked down at his leg. Lucy was circling his left leg, still invisible, her tail entwined as she purred. Hemming flinched but then closed his eyes and relaxed.

  “Nice kitty,” he said.

  Whoa. I had no idea what to make of this. The “kitty” he was talking to was invisible. Lucy changed tactics and began to yowl and leapt up onto his desk. She made herself visible and hissed in his face and took a swipe at him. He jerked his head back but, again, was strangely unfazed by the sudden appearance of a cat materializing out of thin air.

  “Let me get you some milk…”

  Hemming rose from his desk. We tagged along as he walked into the kitchen and opened his refrigerator. When he did, Dougie created an arctic blast that blew Hemming back on his ass. He had frost on his face and hair. He stared at the contents of his refrigerator. Everything was frozen solid. The contents in glass and plastic containers expanded. Some of the glass bottles exploded.

  I tried rushing him again but struck out.

  “I can’t get in!” I said.

  I backed off. Hemming wasn’t freaking at all. Instead he closed his eyes and concentrated, going to some inner place.

  “What the hell is going on with this guy?” Zipperhead yelled.

  We’d expected Hemming to behave like any rational human. But he clearly wasn’t rational.

  “I’m not sure,” said Cole.

  Zipperhead sent a stream of sparks at Hemming, who jolted as though he’d touched a live wire, and his hair stood out from his head like he’d been touching a Tesla ball. But somehow he managed to remain calm and kept his eyes closed.

  “What the HELL?” shouted Darby.

  Dougie was creating a deep freeze and Cameron was turning on water all over the house. Zipperhead was sparking the place up while Lucy yowled.

  “Everybody calm down,” said Cole.

  Hemming straightened his hair, flattening it against his head with his hands. Then his eyes opened and he looked right at us. Again I wondered: Could he see us? No. But he knew we were there.

  “I can feel you, Echo. And others, too. There’s something you should know,” he said.

  We waited. I was holding my breath.

  “I believe in ghosts,” he said. Calmly. Simply. Matter-of-factly.

  He got up and walked past us into his study to a bookcase. My eyes went to the titles. He had dozens of books about the afterlife. Titles with the words poltergeists, apparitions, phantasms, specters, accounts of hauntings.

  “Let’s see how he likes this,” said Darby, waving her arms, creating a hallucination for him. A thousand cockroaches poured out of every crack and crevice in the room, a horrific sight that would have terrified any normal person. But Hemming was clearly not normal, on several counts. He merely observed the hallucination, seemingly recognizing it for what it was.

  “Screw this!” Cameron shouted. He created
a horrific sideways torrent of rain that made Hemming drop to the floor and cover his head, but the objective, to get him to freak out, wasn’t achieved. In a few seconds, Cameron gave up.

  “Never seen anything like this dude,” he said, raising his arms in anger.

  Hemming collected his dignity as he stood, calmly got a towel from the kitchen, and dried himself off.

  Darby was getting pissed off and she conjured the image of a corpse, which was unmistakably Hemming’s own. The corpse rushed at Hemming and screamed. Hemming was startled and scared this time, falling backward onto his couch.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” Zipperhead cackled.

  He created a flash of sparks that danced around the periphery of the corpse apparition for good measure.

  Hemming was breathing heavily and felt his chest, as though taking his pulse. Then he closed his eyes again and retreated into his meditative safe place.

  “That which you resist, persists,” he repeated, four times in a row.

  “What the heck’s that supposed to mean?” said Darby. “Why’s he talking in stupid riddles?”

  “He’s controlling his thoughts, which control his emotions,” Cole said. “He’s a smart guy. Sick, but smart.”

  Hemming kept meditating. We watched him, impotent. Seconds ticked by, then a minute or two. Hemming slowly opened his eyes and searched the room. He was looking for me. Of course I didn’t appear. If I could have, I would have. But I was powerless against his will. All my fear and disgust swept through me like an icy wind.

  “I hate you!” I screamed.

  Hemming flashed a sad smile and went and sat at his desk.

  “You have to move on,” he said. And kept repeating the phrase until it began to rattle around in my brain like a spiked marble. I turned to Cole. He looked very, very sad.

  “I got nothing.”

  Hemming spoke to the room, his eyes wandering around, searching, wanting to make sure that he connected with me, with us. He used his teacher voice.

  “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live. And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.’”

  “What is he talking about?” Lucy asked.

  “Shhh … he’s not done,” said Cole.

  “The people were plagued by poisonous snakes, and Moses used an image of those snakes, the very thing that had struck fear into their hearts, to give them courage. The Christians did the same thing. For one hundred and fifty years after Christ was crucified, the cross was used as a means of terror, to cause fear. But you know what? The Christians took the cross and made it their own. They embraced their fear! And that’s what I’m doing. You cannot frighten me, Echo, for I embrace you! I welcome you into my arms!”

  I rushed at him. And bounced right off. He was laughing. I tried again and again. But I couldn’t enter him.

  “What are we going to do?” I shrieked.

  “I … I don’t know,” said Cole. His calm bravado shaken, he sounded nervous and uncertain. I looked to the others. They could only shrug. They’d given it their best shot and zip. Nada.

  Moments crept by painfully, each second like poison in my veins.

  “I guess not everybody has a vulnerable spot,” said Dougie.

  We all glared at him.

  “I’m just sayin’…”

  “We can’t just give up! We have to do something!” I pleaded.

  Nobody had an answer. Zipperhead shot a few sparks. Darby conjured a corpse. Hemming was unfazed.

  We were beaten. My shoulders sagged. Darby made an angry low noise in her throat. Dougie shuffled his feet, agitated. Cole winced. We left defeated, our tails between our sorry legs. A fine lot of ghosts we’d turned out to be. I’d never taken failure well in my life, and in my afterlife it wasn’t any easier.

  * * *

  Knowing who my killer was and not being able to do anything about it, not being able to bring the monster to justice, was a feeling worse than any I’d ever had. I felt powerless, like my entire life and death had been meaningless. We flew slowly past a park where humans did what humans do: walk and talk and play and live. I missed doing stuff like that. Especially with my parents. I wished I hadn’t been such a typical moody, stick-in-the-mud teenage girl. But I was who I was, even though the more I learned about myself when I was alive, the less sparkling my self-image appeared to be. I saw a father pushing his daughter on a swing. Her giddy laughter lifted like musical notes into the air.

  And then I had an idea. It was dark. Loathsome. But maybe you fought evil with evil. Maybe Hemming had a weak spot, after all. Could his Achilles’ heel be what I thought it might? There was only one way to tell. It made me sick to think about it, but I could almost hear the universe calling to me, Do it—there’s no other way.

  “Darby, how specific can you be when you conjure things? I mean, images?”

  “What do you mean? As specific as you would want me to be, I guess. All I have to do is picture something in my mind and I can make it appear.”

  “So if I showed you a picture, you could conjure that?”

  “Hell yeah, easy-peasy.”

  “And … if I showed you a face, could you put that face on another body?”

  “No sweat. That’s me, a regular walking, talking Photoshop.”

  “Super. We’re not done with this yet,” I said.

  I felt a glimmer of hope. I dropped straight to the ground. The others followed and formed a circle around me.

  “What’s up, Echo?” Cole asked.

  “I have an idea…”

  Their eyes widened expectantly. I smiled at my new friends. Maybe Hemming wasn’t so invincible after all.

  CRACK

  When we got back to Hemming’s house, he was meditating on the couch in his study. He looked so serene, a finger pressed to his smiling lips. Smiling! If my plan worked, we were going to wipe that smile off his smug face. He would be anything but serene. I took Darby into the hallway and planted her in front of a picture of a girl, a girl not that much younger than me, maybe by a couple of years. Marie. Hemming’s daughter. I had no idea about his divorce or if he even had custody of her on weekends or anything. But my plan counted on one thing. I was hoping that somewhere within his twisted psyche, he had a sliver of human decency. That he loved his daughter. Darby continued staring at the picture.

  “You got it?” I asked.

  “Locked, loaded, and ready,” she said.

  Darby and I went back into the study and joined the others. They were staring at Hemming and looked skeptical. I hoped against all hope that my plan would work.

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Zipperhead.

  “I think Darby and I have it covered. You can just kick back and watch,” I said.

  I went to Hemming’s computer. It was easy to load up the last thing Hemming had been looking at, his gallery of victims. They began to appear. Hemming opened his eyes and looked over at the screen. He was only mildly interested. Until something happened that made the hairs on his neck rise.

  “My god…” he said.

  He jumped off the couch and ran to his computer and gaped. Darby was doing just what I’d asked her to. Superimposing the face of Hemming’s daughter, Marie, upon the girls he’d manipulated and abused. More and more images popped up on the screen, each a variation of the same thing, as though Hemming had turned his own daughter into something he could never imagine. He began to unravel.

  “No!”

  He tried to shut off his computer but Zipperhead sparked him every time he reached for it. When Hemming tried to run from the room, Cole used his telekinesis and forced him back in front of the screen, even going all Clockwork Orange on him and forcing his eyelids open. Hemming had no choice but to bear witness, each image like a knife in his gut. Now it was his turn to be stabbe
d.

  “Oh god … oh god…”

  He writhed and screamed like he was being burned at the stake.

  “Nooooo! Echo, stop it! For god’s sake, stop it! Please! I’m begging you! Make it go away!”

  Hemming’s whole body was shaking now and he began to weep. I rushed at him and entered easily. The twisted but very effective images Darby had conjured were smashing around through his brain. He was feeling shame and regret on a major scale, a tsunami of pain. And then other images appeared. It was me, being killed by him—the images all too familiar to us both—but this time instead of my face in agony as the knife plunged in, he saw his daughter Marie’s.

  “Marie! No! Nooo!”

  He screamed until his throat was raw. And then everything bled into a deep, dark-red nothingness.

  I found myself lying on the floor next to Hemming’s body. He was alive but in shock. Cole helped me to my feet.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. But he’s not.”

  “Echo, you’re brilliant!” said Cameron.

  “You smoked his ass, babe!” said Zipperhead.

  “That was wicked. I mean, I thought I was badass, but you are amazing,” said Darby.

  I wanted to say thanks, but what I’d done was sadistic and terrible and I felt awful. I knew he deserved it, but I still felt regret.

  We watched as Hemming had some kind of rag-doll seizure, his body jerking violently for a full minute. Finally, he stopped.

  “Is he dead?” said Zipperhead.

  “No, look—he’s still breathing,” Cameron answered.

  Dougie blew a breath and an icy-cold wind blasted Hemming. He opened his eyes and immediately started fisting them, rubbing them harder and harder, as though he could somehow erase the images that we’d planted in his brain. When he opened his eyes, they were so bloodshot they looked like two skinned beets.

  He clawed at his neck like an animal, then regained his bearings and sat up.

  “I didn’t mean … I wasn’t … Oh god…” he said.