by Mark Parker
“Does it seem reasonable that I'm upset a male student is again expressing dominance over a female student; that a male student expects a female to just surrender her consent while he takes advantage of her? Yes. Does it seem reasonable that you and everyone else thinks that is acceptable? Absolutely not.”
“So you are basing your judgment of a nine-year-old boy on your previous experience with a hormone-driven teenager?”
“Because he has hormones he can't control, it's my—” she corrected herself, “—or Mallory's fault?”
“He's a boy with a puppy crush, not a serial rapist.”
“Not today anyhow.” Her eyes shot left a moment before returning to his face.
“Chris, are you hearing yourself speak?”
“Yes, I think my hearing is fine,” she said. She stood from the chair and took her purse from the floor. “And I think I'm hearing myself say at this very moment, right now, you'll be hearing from my lawyer.”
“Chris, do you really want to put your career at jeopardy over a presumed wrong, not to mention putting this school and its faculty in the spotlight of a media circus?”
“Is it your hearing that's not working? I said you can talk to my lawyer.”
She turned and exited the office, slamming the door behind her. She hadn't made it to the next bend when she heard his office door open.
“Where do you think you're going, Chris?” Mr. Brickman yelled.
“To my class,” she said without stopping. “Is that okay with you?”
“As of this moment you're on administrative leave.”
She turned around. “I'm what?”
“You need to go home. I'll contact you when this whole thing is sorted out.”
She approached him. “What about my field trip?”
“I'm afraid you won't be going on any field trip.”
“But I've been talking this field trip up for a month. It's not fair to the children.”
He sighed. “They'll be going, Chris. You won't.”
Her jaw and shoulders dropped. She stood there in disbelief.
“You know what? Fine. Take everything this school was supposed to stand for and hang it on your wall next to everything else you've killed,” she said, and stomped out of the building.
***
Christina pushed the front door open with the gallon of milk in her left hand.
“I'm home,” she called to her new roommate in hopes of a merry meeting after her horrible day. “Hello?”
She stepped inside and locked the door before turning around to face the disaster left for her.
“No! Not that!” she said, slamming the plastic gallon jug on the kitchen counter.
She laid her purse down on the floor and rushed to the jagged chunks of her broken Diana spread across the floor. “Kitty? What did you do?”
A foolish question.
“Get out here, now!”
There was no response. She searched the bedroom, bathroom and finally the utility room before she found the cat lying on the opened newspaper.
“You know, if it wasn't bad enough I have to deal with some mush-mouth kid's mom and my gun-toting boss holding my job over my head, I go out of my way to buy you real milk some poor, defenseless cow had to get manhandled for, and now I come home to you breaking the one, solitary thing in this world I hold dear?”
The cat looked at its mistress and gave a decidedly mocking, or else ill timed, yawn.
“Excuse me? Did you just yawn while I was talking?”
While the cat remained unaffected, Christina's eyes turned wild, unreasoning. There was a surging of blood in her neck and throbbing of temples, and immediately her face was red with fury.
She took up the cat in both hands and squeezed it until a sound like a smashed, broken accordion came out. When a flurry of swiping claws came tearing at her breast she threw the cat into the kitchen.
“Ow, you bastard! I should have run over you when I had the chance!” she yelled and stomped toward the cat.
It scurried across the tiled kitchen floor and eluded her pounding shoes.
“That's alright. Run away. You know that milk I just bought? Say goodbye!” she shouted.
She took the jug to the sink and removed the cap. When she turned the jug over and poured its contents out, a mass of white clumps plopped into the sink. Her brow furrowed when the spoiled milk began to squirm. She leaned over the sink and stared in disgust at the mass of writhing maggots.
When the stench of sour milk hit her, her stomach convulsed. She placed her hand over her mouth until her stomach settled.
“I just bought this,” she grumbled to herself and reread the jug's eventual expiration date. By that unreasonable and involuntary habit, she put her nose to the lip of the carton and sniffed. “Goddess, that's disgusting.”
She put the cap on the carton and dropped it in the trashcan under the sink. She ran the water and washed the foul mess down the drain. She turned around to find the cat at her feet.
“You did this, didn't you?”
The cat raised its eyes to her and opened its mouth to meow.
“Yes,” its masculine voice spoke.
Utterly horrified, Christina stumbled back into the kitchen counter, her hands fumbling for a flat surface to steady her balance. Her hand came across the wooden rack of kitchen knives. She blindly took hold of the largest blade's handle and removed it from the rack, pointing its tip at the cat with trembling hands.
“What are you?” she asked.
Meow.
She stared at the black shape in confused terror. She heard it speak. Or had she? First she had lost her temper and now she would lose her mind. Maybe it was the start of a psychotic break. She had read about them plenty of times.
A normal or not-quite-normal person who had way too much thrown at them, or the same troubles piled on their plate higher and higher until they snapped—the straw that broke the camel's psyche. Surely she must be going insane.
Meow.
She gasped. Only it was just a meow now. Not words. If she was going insane shouldn't the cat still be talking? Or did madness come and go like a diseased organ or broken bone that sends its painful throbs throughout the body in waves?
She laid the knife on the counter.
“Oh, Goddess,” she said and went to the bathroom and locked herself inside.
She stared at her own red eyes in the mirror. She ran cool water over her face, and looked into her eyes again. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. When she was satisfied she had returned to her senses, she exited the bathroom and called the cat.
“Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.”
Meow.
It came running.
She picked the cat up.
“I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. I'll never do it again,” she promised and held him to her bleeding breast. “Oh Goddess, I hope you forgive me.”
Meow.
She almost expected it to answer, “Yes, I forgive you,” but it didn't. She wished it had, not because it would mean she was mad—it might just mean she was gifted in the craft of magic that she had devoted her life to thus far in vain.
***
She lay in her bed, a novel opened facedown over her waist. Above her, the crescent moon face carved in her headboard look down while she rest.
She heard soft snoring; she presumed it was the cat's. When she looked at the foot of her bed she saw a solid black figure of pure shadow, darker than the darkness of the room itself. It stood six feet tall.
Her heart raced. She held her breath to avoid telegraphing her fear. Her hands fumbled around the bed and nightstand for anything that could constitute a weapon. The thing's head turned, its unseen eyes surely fixed upon her movement.
Her hands recoiled, and doing so discovered the book on her belly. She threw the novel at the thing, but it passed through the shape as if a dark cloud, hitting the dresser behind it.
An unseen object on her dresser top fell to the floor with a thud and crack of glass.
She flinched at the sound, but the thing moved not a muscle. Whatever intruder stood in her room she was completely vulnerable to.
The lamp!
She reached for the touch lamp and pulled it to her chest, forgetting the light would activate the moment her skin came in contact. Her eyes dilated too fast, rendering her momentarily blind. Instead of taking the potential projectile she covered her closed eyes from the harsh light.
When her eyes adjusted she saw the thing, still standing there, unmoved, at the foot of her bed.
It looked like a man, mostly. It was black and gangly, but not without muscle. Its eyes were yellow, luminescent, absorbing and reflecting the light of the lamp. A transparent, sagging sack clung to its neck where a chin should be.
Like a toad's vocal sack, the loose folds of flesh swelled and shrank while it hummed each measure of a mostly monotone tune. The depth of its vocalizations vibrated within her nerves.
The thing placed its palms flat beside Christina's feet, then scaled the length of the bed over her until the two lay eye to eye.
She swallowed hard. “Who are you?” her voice trembled. “How did you get in here?”
“Barter for the magic owed,” it said in a voice so deeply soothing she was lulled to a sleep within sleep—the deepest place of human consciousness. She felt its arms, its body, all descend down the bed a short distance, then its bony hand pulled at the collar of her purple nightshirt and exposed her flesh to the cool night air.
When she opened her eyes she saw only the bald crown bowed over her breast. Its pursed lips pulled and pressed, pulled and pressed, at first painful, then pleasure, until she felt a welling surge from within her bosom. Her heart fluttered, now weakened while some strange, warm essence rushed from her body into the thing's sucking, swallowing mouth. Her head flung from side to side in ecstasy while it drank.
When she felt the thing stop, she heard it exhale a satiated breath. She raised her head and found it gazing at her with black ellipses on yellow irises.
She awoke. She stared at the crescent moon face that watched guardian above, for there was no man-thing hanging over her, staring into her face. It had been a dream, but still, she felt a weight upon her chest, and her nightshirt grew damp over her breast.
She raised her head and stared into the piercing yellow eyes of the cat, lying on top of her. It licked the gray-white droplet from its lip. She lowered her eyes to see the wet spot over her heart, right where the cat then laid its head.
Fear seized her. What did she bring into her home?
The cat's eyes opened halfway.
“Was that you?” she dared to ask.
There was silence while the cat examined her, as if she was speaking a foreign language, or with the voice of an unknown animal. She sighed, chalking it up as another experience due to her overactive, or else disintegrating, imagination.
“I'm tired,” said the cat, in the same throbbing voice the man-thing had, and closed his eyes.
“No, wait!” she said, sitting up so fast the cat leaped off the bed in fear.
“I'm sorry,” she said and searched the dim room with squinted eyes. “Come back, please.”
“It's rude to wake someone so abruptly,” the voice came from somewhere.
She turned quickly to find the cat peeking over the side of the bed, standing on his hind legs. She patted the empty spot on the bed beside her.
“Come here,” she said.
He leaped with just enough strength to make it onto the bed, then crawled slowly beside her and lay down.
“You can talk?” she asked.
He didn't answer.
“That goes without saying,” she corrected herself. “What else can you do?”
He yawned and stretched to wake up for their conversation.
“With the proper ritual in the proper mind, whatever you will,” he said.
“Can you come to me again in my dreams, like you did before?”
“Why do in a dream what we can do now?” said the black shape as it changed form and took her form into its arms.
***
In the morning she awoke. She looked to her side. There was no demon lover. She looked to her feet, where the cat lay at the end of the bed.
“Kitty?” she called.
His eyes opened slowly.
“You don't have to call me that anymore,” the large voice came from the tiny mouth.
“What would you like me to call you?”
“You will think of a name shortly, and I will take it as my own,” he said with a long yawn then began to stretch.
“How about Jim?”
“I said shortly, not the first thing that comes to mind. When the time is right you will know and I will take that name.”
She swung her legs out of bed and placed them on the floor by her black lace underwear and frog-faced slippers—being green, they were the most cheerfully-colored things she owned.
“So, you're like my familiar?” she asked, pulling the underwear up her legs beneath her nightshirt.
“Precisely. And I will be the medium between you and my kind. Whatever belongs to my realm will be at your disposal. I will even transmute your will into substance, as I did with the old man.”
“What happened to him?” she asked, placing her feet into her slippers.
“Didn't you listen to the television?”
Her shoulders dropped. “I mean—after,” she said. “Is there, you know, a heaven and a hell?”
“He was not long for this world, and has been prime for the reaping for quite some time. What my brethren are doing to him right now pales to your worst nightmares.”
“So…there is a hell.”
“You have said so.”
She looked at the floor as she approached her dresser. She was sure she had thrown her book at her lover the night before, but when she turned and saw it closed and bookmarked on her nightstand she wondered what all had been a dream and what, reality.
She found the antique family heirloom not broken on the floor but whole, still on the dresser beside the analog TV. She had been asleep during their first encounter—a dream within a dream. She took the oval mirror brush and ran it through her black, barely shoulder-length hair several times.
“And God?” she asked.
“Mother, daughter, sister, lover…do not speak of Him. You are now servant to that forsaken legion who abandoned their former estate long, long ago. Those who dwell in darkness and rule the heavens above.”
“But if there's a God—”
“You turned your back on that One as a child, and that day you were betrothed to Evil. Your soul was the dowry and now you have consummated the union. We are one—mother, daughter, sister, lover—and ever shall be.”
“You're not going to keep calling me that, are you? It's so wordy,” she said.
“Do you prefer Tina?”
“I prefer Chris or Christina.”
“On the contrary, a simple Tina will suffice, for hopefully obvious reasons.”
“Tina it is. So, I don't have to sell my soul to Satan or something?”
“Do you believe as the Christians do? That there is some androgynous fellow named Lucifer? Heaven's high priest of worship? Satan is not one. He is Legion. All who oppose the Holy One are Satan. I, you, Simon Bar Jonah at his worst, Iscariot at his best, the world.”
“I see,” she said, her gaze fixed on her slippered feet. She looked up. “You're saying it's my destiny to be evil? Do I have a choice?”
“Do you want a choice?”
She was silent.
“Tina, you were not made to serve the institutions of men. You are to exert authority over them, and not as a teacher of children. You are a witch—not in that small, earthy religion you've observed your whole life. You are a black witch in the blackest of all Crafts. And before you think otherwise, know that I don't enter this world to serve foolish women in cloaks that please themselves with brooms as they summon fairy folk. I come for one purpose. Havoc. Total destruct
ion. Pain to all who oppose. Do you understand?”
“You mentioned a ritual. What kind of ritual?”
“The kind you wish to perform.”
“I don't know what I want to perform.”
He laughed. “It's been on your mind since that boy first laid hands on you.”
“That was a long time before I met you.”
“I know all about you, Tina.”
She turned the mirror brush over and stared at her own image.
“Principal Brickhead said I was transferring my anger to Landon Larson,” she said. “I can't help they were both perverts. I'd clip all their balls off if I could. The principal included.”
“Very good. You're not holding back. Revenge is a good place to start, but it's still far beneath your full potential.”
“Why's that?” she asked, placing the mirror brush glass down on the dresser-top.
“You're a bride of Evil, Tina…not human nature.”
There was anger in his voice. It terrified her. Not his anger, but her desire to please him.
“The desire for revenge is a natural one. But you're no longer of the natural order. You must dig deep into the kingdom of Hell within you,” he said.
“All of them…” she said with a trembling voice.
“All what?”
“Dead.”
“Who, Tina?”
“The whole school.”
“Now, that’s more like it. But small steps first, my dear.”
“My whole class, then.”
“Why?” he asked, not because he didn't know.
She thought for a moment. “Because children are a waste of space. They're a waste of time and attention. They have nothing to offer the world but crying and begging and taking everything they can. Then they complain that it's not enough; they always want more. They bankrupt entire societies. They force us to be examples of moral perfection, and when we fail to live up to their expectations, we chastise one another. Who are they to tell us what to do with our time, our money—or our lives? They…”
“That's quite enough. In fact it's perfect. You possess the proper mind. Now all that is required is the ritual. The day has dawned. Prepare yourself. This is a good day to do something wicked.”