by Peter Hartz
Two of the police officers in the gallery couldn’t look at the light. And the prosecutor turned his face away, closing his eyes tightly, trying to shut out the intense light that seemed to sear straight down inside him all the way to his soul. He shuddered as his fists clenched tight enough for his nails to leave an impression in his palms. Then the light faded somewhat, and everyone seemed to let out the breath they had been holding all at once.
The judge tried once more to gain control of the proceedings. “What evidence do you have that might indicate this person is innocent? How did you get in here anyways? What kind of trick is this?”
Diana stared at him silently for a moment, her eyes leaving Judge Hastings feeling uncomfortable and defensive. Then she turned to the defense table.
“Young Koren Daniel Davis, attend me.” She spoke the words as a command that could not be ignored.
Koren turned and tried to shrug off the hands of the bailiff holding him back, without much success. Another walked quickly to the table to restrain him, but She acted first.
Fists now unclenched, she raised her hands, and the three big, burly uniformed men were lifted up in the air, then as everyone watched in shock, they drifted back away from the table and were dropped by the door as they struggled against the invisible hands that held them easily on their short, moving experience. The act caused more gasps of surprise and fear, this time from everyone including Koren.
Now unrestrained by the guards that no longer seemed interested in doing so, Koren walked over and stood in front of the woman. Her presence seemed to make him seem small and insignificant, but hope still burned inside him that this might turn out ok. He stopped three feet in front of the Goddess, and squared his shoulders, looking her confidently in the eye.
Diana nodded in approval, then she turned to the prosecutor with a sour eye. “Name the victim. I shall call her forth from The House Between Worlds, and she will have her time to speak her truth.”
Donald Collins swallowed as his mind raced. What if she could do this? His whole career was teetering on the brink. She was right earlier when she said that he did in fact know that the defendant was innocent. He knew a lot more than that, actually. And that was the whole problem. He decided to not say anything at all. He tried to glare back at her, but that fell away as he couldn’t meet her eyes for more than a second. But he didn’t dare say a word.
Diana seemed to expect that Collins was going to keep his mouth shut. She turned to the spectators, and said, “Who among you will speak the name of the dead? Who speaks for her?”
An older woman and man stood, obviously struggling with emotion and pain as they held each other’s hand tightly. The man spoke up. “We do. Her name is –“
“STOP! What is this!?! I object!” Collins stood at his table, a look of desperation and fear plainly across his features.
“Worm, I do not give you leave to interrupt me! It is not time for justice to attend to your misdeeds. Sit down, cur, afore my wolves put you in your place, or worse!” He sank back down reluctantly, and started to hyperventilate slightly. This was not going to go well. Not well at all.
Nancy McCrae, the mother of the dead young woman, spoke up this time. “Her name is Belinda Nancy McCrae.” The bravery of a wounded parent carried her through her statement, but the pain of losing her only child overwhelmed her once more, and tears poured out of her tightly closed eyes like raindrops as she turned to bury herself in her husband’s arms, sobbing. It was too much. Why did this happen to her baby? Sobs prevented her from hearing the gasps of the spectators once more, but she felt another hand on her shoulder that didn’t belong to her husband, David. Then she heard a voice that she thought she would never hear again.
“Momma?” It was soft, but it cut through her pain like bright sunshine into shadows. Her breath caught in her throat, and she opened her eyes as she turned towards the source of that single spoken word. Then she reached out to wrap both arms around her daughter, miraculously standing there next to her, clad in a pure white robe that almost seemed to glow, with a warm, incredible smile on her youthful face.
Her father looked at her in astonishment as tears flowed from his eyes. Then as she looked up at him, she smiled, reached out, and pulled him to her in a fierce hug for a few moments. Then letting go and stepping back, she spoke to both of them together.
“I have to go set something straight. Don’t go anywhere.” Then she turned and walked towards the front of the courtroom, the white robe glowing bright enough to illuminate the dark places in the room.
Diana reached her hand out to Belinda, and the young woman took it, allowing herself to be drawn to the center of the open area between the judge’s bench and the prosecution and defense tables.
Diana spoke up in a voice that seemed to contain the wind and the ground all at once.
“Child, do you remember what happened to you that ended your life?” The question was gentle, but stern and implacable all at once.
“Yes, I do.” Resolve hardened her response, and she looked at the Goddess with steel in her eyes.
“Did this young man, Koren Daniel Davis, have anything to do with what happened to you?” A gasp went up from the gallery of spectators, as the question was asked. She turned to look at the young man sitting transfixed at the defense table. His eyes were as wide as saucers as he looked at the young woman he might spend the rest of his life in prison for, standing calmly in the room for all to see. Silence followed for a brief moment, then –
“No, he did not. I have never seen him before in my life. He was not there when I was killed.”
Diana turned to the judge, and spoke up. “You who would sit in judgment of your fellow humans, does this assure you of this young man’s innocence?”
The judge didn’t hear what was said at first, as his attention was entirely on the face of the young woman in front of him clad only in white from her neck to her bare feet. It was a face he was certain he would never forget, even before her visitation to his courtroom. Then he realized that the goddess had addressed him, and he turned to her once again.
He was struck, suddenly, by the deep green of her eyes. In some ways, she looked young and wild, but in other, more subtle ways, her gaze was as old as the deepest forests anywhere in the world. Then he cleared his throat, and said, “I beg your pardon. Could you please repeat that?”
“I ask you again, does this assure you of this young man’s innocence?” The question was clear, but the tone of voice made the words into a statement, and he frowned.
“Well, if he didn’t kill her, then who did?”
Diana turned to Belinda standing beside her, and inclined her head towards the mortal, who looked back at her with sudden anger in her eyes. “Speak, my child. I will not allow any harm to come to you or your family. On this you can trust.”
She nodded, and then turned to the judge. What she said next rocked the court room and everyone in it to their souls.
“Well, for one thing, he is white, not African American. He is, or was, my boyfriend, my fiancé. His father is a police officer. We were having an argument in our apartment, and he got upset. He wanted me to stop hanging out with my friends; he called them whores and dykes. He slapped me when I refused, so I hit him back, as hard as I could. It knocked him down. When he got up, he picked up a kitchen chair and hit me with it as hard as he could. He killed me. I don’t know that it was intentional. I left my body as I died, and heard and saw him swearing in fear and frustration.”
The judge nodded slightly, and then spoke up. “Do you see the person in this courtroom?”
Belinda turned and looked over everyone in the room, then shook her head.
“Nope, I don’t see him here, Your Honor. But I do see his father.” Her eyes narrowed as she stared hard at one of the two police officers that couldn’t look at the light of the Goddess earlier.
Officer Paul Smith wrenched his eyes away from the impossible sight of his son’s dead girlfriend that had suddenly appeared in t
he courtroom, and became aware that every eye in the room was looking right at him.
His son Tristan had called him late one night and told him that a bad accident had happened, and Belinda wasn’t breathing. He’d raced over to Tristan’s apartment in his squad car, only to find out that the girl he’d thought of as a future daughter was dead. He had called his sergeant, which had set a huge series of events in motion. The sergeant had said that this was not going to be a problem, because the prosecutor “owed him one”.
The cover-up began with another officer being told that the perpetrator was a young black man. One young man matching the description had been conveniently found waiting at the bus stop near the apartment building that night, and had been arrested on the spot.
It had all snowballed from there. An innocent young man, and from all accounts an outstanding student with a bright future in front of him, had been convicted largely on very thin circumstantial evidence. The middle-aged, experienced prosecuting attorney had known all the tricks, as if he was a seasoned veteran decades older.
The small group of officers who knew about the cover-up had simply sat back and watched, making all the right noises at all the right times. Those who didn’t know about it seemed to think that the young African-American man was guilty, simply because he couldn’t account for where he was. His claims that he had been with a white girlfriend had only served to further his guilt when the supposed girlfriend couldn’t be found.
Unknown to most of the people in the room, an officer, one Officer Paul Smith, actually, had gotten to her and convinced her that she should disappear for some time. Given that she had a minor drug arrest in the past, she had needed very little convincing.
“Or else you will find yourself on trial with him…”
It had been enough to send her out of state to live with an aunt and uncle for quite a while. She had been so terrified that she refused to come back, and her parents had covered up where she was to the investigator the public defender had assigned to look for her.
Which all led up to now. What was supposed to be a neatly wrapped up case seemed to be coming apart faster than anyone could even take a breath. They were so close! Now, a ‘Goddess’ (which, given how she had arrived and what she had done in the short time since, probably actually was) had turned everything upside down, and the, whatever she was, was staring right at him, her eyes hot with hatred and barely suppressed rage. Then she moved.
“I loved your son! I would have married him! We had been together so long, since junior high! You were even family to me! But then he started using meth, and everything went to hell. He became violent. I told you he was having problems, but you and your wife just looked at me like I was crazy. Well, who’s crazy now? HUH?!?”
It all came out in a rush as she stalked over to Paul and got right in his face, screaming at the top of her lungs as he flinched back from her in fear, anger, and self-loathing. But she wasn’t nearly finished.
“Where did you find this poor young man? What did he do to you or anyone else to ever deserve this?” The volume of her voice overrode everything else in the court room, except, strangely enough, the sobbing of Belinda’s parents and Koren’s mother and sister. Everyone else in the room was too shocked at what was happening, and seemed to be frozen in their seats.
Belinda reached out with both hands, and easily hefted the much larger police officer off his feet by his body-armor vest. Then she turned and threw him over the rows of spectator’s benches to land hard and very painfully on the floor in front of the Goddess, sliding the last few feet to stop right in front of the wolves. The ones with the very bright eyes, and very big teeth. The ones that were now only inches from his face. A chorus of snarls washed away all rational thought as the huge animals just stared into his eyes, snarling, as he gasped in pain from the hard landing that he had just taken. Something trickled out of the corner of his mouth, and he wiped at it, only to see his own blood on the back of his hand.
Gasps, and more than a few screams, had escaped every mouth in that courtroom as the otherworldly strength of the dead girl registered, and people scrambled to get out of her way as she walked slowly back towards the front of the court room.
The Goddess Diana looked down at the police officer with a mix of loathing and disgust, and with a seemingly negligent wave of her hand, sent a wave of green light flashing over him. In an instant his pain was gone, but the fear remained, and he realized when he could breathe again that he had both soiled and wet himself.
Diana turned to her wolves, and spoke in a language no one recognized, which prompted two of them to suddenly disappear.
“Now we wait as my children hunt the one whose actions have brought us to this place today.” The words seemed to echo differently in the suddenly silent room.
No more than five minutes had passed before something happened again, and during that time, Paul was certain that every eye in the room was looking at him. He didn’t know if the pained, disgusted looks the spectators in the gallery were casting his way were the result of the grotesque smells that were coming from him or from what he had been accused of, but he decided it didn’t matter, whatever the reason.
With a shimmer and a rush of air, the wolves returned, but with someone that Paul, Belinda, and Belinda’s parents recognized very well.
A terrified Tristan was in half crouched, with his arms up, his face turned away, his eyes squeezed shut, and a scream was coming from his mouth. Then, when he had run out of air and nothing happened to him, he opened his eye, only to see his father laying on the floor, with three more of the huge wolves that had suddenly appeared at his job standing over him.
Then he heard a sound behind him and turned towards it. All the color drained from his face as he saw who was there. “Oh, no! Belinda!”
The sight of her drove him to his knees, and he scrubbed at his face, hoping that what he was seeing would go away when he opened them again, but also wishing with all his might that the vision of his dead fiancé would still be there.
Tears coursed down from his eyes as he looked at the face of the only girl he had ever loved, that he had so carelessly killed in a meth-fueled rage nearly a year ago. His shoulders hunched over, and he sobbed loudly, his pain like a lance through the heart to those that watched.
Belinda looked at him, astonished. She could see that he was completely clean and sober, and was clean shaven and dressed rather nicely, two things that had been missing in their final months before that last moment they had shared together. Then tears started to course down her face as she felt his pain, the emptiness, the utter desolation and lack of joy anywhere inside his mind or soul. He regretted everything so completely, she realized. He must have gotten sober, gotten off the meth after that night.
Belinda’s time in The House Between Worlds had been difficult, as she tried to come to terms with what she had lost, and at whose hands she had lost it all. She would have been able to go to one of the window rooms to look in on the friends and family she had left behind, but it had not been all that long ago in relative terms, and she wasn’t ready.
She had not forgiven Tristan, convinced that he was unrepentant, and she was resentful that he had been allowed to go on with living, even if he had, as she believed, been arrested for her murder.
But when Diana’s presence had come to her, and told her that an innocent young man had been arrested, tried, and convicted of her murder, her rage at Tristan had grown. She believed all along that Tristan had not been remorseful even the tiniest bit, and had gladly gone along with the conspiracy that had allowed him to get away with ending her mortal life.
She had let some of that rage out earlier when she had found the supernatural strength inside her that let her throw Tristan’s father some fifteen feet through the air as easily as if he was a paper airplane.
Now, as she looked at the only boy, the only man, she had ever loved, she realized that he was in enormous pain inside. He looked like he hadn’t slept well in a long time, with ba
gs under his eyes and a gaunt look on his face from weight loss she hadn’t noticed before. He was a tortured soul, twisted and wracked with pain that he had been barely holding inside.
For Tristan, the sight of the one person in his entire life, more than ever, that he had loved more than life itself, had ripped open the wounds that had never really healed, and he broke apart mentally and emotionally, sobbing on the floor while repeating her name over and over. His mind, already suffering from the enormous pressures put on it since Belinda’s death at his hands, snapped. His last vestiges of intelligence that he had been barely holding on to with the last of his mental strength suddenly slipped between his fingers like water, and rushed away into the dark corners of his mind, taking with it all rational thought.
Diana looked down at the remorseful mortal, gauging his suffering. She looked into his soul, and saw that he was dying deep inside. There were memories of the time after Belinda had died at his hand, where entire days had passed while he waited to be arrested and sent to prison, a fate he longed for, ached for. He couldn’t go on with his life anymore, she could see. He was barely eating enough to stay functional. The old life he’d known, full of things she didn’t understand from this strange plane, had ceased to have any meaning to him when the realization of what he had done had hit him hard enough to cause physical pain.
Belinda reached Tristan’s side, and knelt down where he was curled up, rocking back and forth in the fetal position on the floor, his hands clenched into fists that were held tightly over his eyes. She had never seen him like this before, and it shocked her. She reached out, and grasped his wrists, trying to pull his hands away from his eyes, calling his name softly.