by N. P. Martin
From there, Margot's story was pretty typical. She was taken into care and ended up being dragged through the system, going from foster home to foster home until she was old enough to be on her own. Again, details of her upbringing in these foster homes were sparse, but from what I gathered, Margot didn't have a good time of it.
Her real story began when she was waitressing in a bar in the city one night. She was eighteen years old and trying to establish some sort of life for herself after coming out of the foster system. Her only interest at the time was literature apparently. She loved books and read everything she could get her hands on, which is how she survived her time in numerous foster homes. Now that she was free, she applied for a local college, intending to study English Literature and make good on her dream of writing her own book one day. The waitressing job was intended to help her pay for that.
The night her life changed forever, Margot met a man named Derek Myers while she was working in the bar. "He seemed like a decent guy," Margot told me. "Good looking, about a year older than me. He played football at Blackham University, had a scholarship there. He seemed smart too. He knew his classics, and he sat at the bar most of the night talking to me about his favorite books. I had little experience of men back then, and I found myself smitten by his charms." She stopped and shook her head. "I don't know why I didn't see it..."
"See what?" I asked.
Margot just shook her head again as she went on to explain what happened.
Derek invited her back to his parent's house, who were apparently out of town for the next few days. He told Margot she could come back with him and they could talk all night about books while drinking Derek's parent's alcohol. It sounded good to Margot, who was just glad someone was treating her like a normal person for once.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked her.
"I was withdrawn growing up. I dyed my hair black and dressed like a Goth all the time. I had no friends because no one wanted to hang around with a foster kid. So all the other kids teated me like I was some weirdo outcast, which I was, I suppose. Even when I left high school, I still felt the same way. And then I meet Derek, and he treats me like a normal girl. He even tells me he finds me attractive, which no one had ever told me before." She closed her eyes as if the memories were still painful. When she opened them again, there was a hardness to her stare as she continued.
She went with Derek to his parent's house in Bankhurst. Derek drove them in his brand new convertible. On the way there, Margot thought her life was finally changing. That she was becoming a normal member of society at long last. Which is all she ever wanted. To fit in. To not be treated like a freak and a doormat.
Derek was from a rich family. When they reached his parent's house, Margot couldn't believe that she was about to enter such a grand house. It made every house she had ever been in before then look like a dog kennel. Once inside, Derek showed her around for a bit, glamouring her with the wealth on display. They sat in the huge living room for a while, drinking expensive whiskey and vodka from crystal glasses. Margot felt totally out of place in such lavish surroundings, but Derek made her feel comfortable as he showed her various first edition copies of classic books that she fell immediately in love with.
Then at some point, after Margot had drunk three full glasses of vodka and was feeling more than a little tipsy, Derek kissed her. It was the first time she had ever been kissed by anyone outside of her own fantasies. The drink helped with her nerves, but she still felt herself shuttering when her lips touched his for the first time. She became so breathless that she had to pull away after just a few seconds, then she started apologizing and saying she didn't know what was wrong with her and that she had no business being there with him in that huge house. But Derek had calmed her down by telling her how beautiful she was, how refreshingly different she was compared to all the other girls he knew.
And Margot lapped it all up. Every word. How could she not? Derek was devilishly handsome, like a character from one of her Jane Austen books, and just as charming. More than that, he actually liked her for who she was. As the kissing became more passionate, Margot caught herself thinking that things were finally changing for her. That she was no longer to be the outcast that no one even wanted to talk to never mind be with.
That was probably why she didn't protest when Derek put his hand on one of her breasts and began to squeeze, or when he dropped his other hand down between her legs and did something utterly frightening but wonderful to her with his fingers. When he suggested they go to his room so they could be more comfortable, she barely gave it a second thought and allowed him to lead her by the hand towards what took her a moment to realize was the basement.
"I get more privacy down there than upstairs," he said easily as he opened the door, turned the light on and ushered her down the steps while he pulled the door closed behind them and then locked it. She thought it a little odd at the time that he would lock the door since there was no one else in the house, but she was so caught up with the thought of finally losing her virginity (and to a hunk like Derek!) that she thought nothing of it.
The basement was massive and filled with all kinds of stuff that was boxed up or stacked in piles. When Margot spotted the large bed at the back of the basement, her stomach fluttered with anticipation.
And fear.
"I turned around," she told me. "And Derek was standing near the stairs, but he was different. His smile was different, and his eyes had changed from warm to cold, and he was just standing there staring at me...like a wolf eyeing up its prey."
Confused by Derek's sudden shift in attitude, Margot asked him what was wrong, thinking that she had done something to upset him. "And then I thought to myself, he doesn't want me anymore, that he was just being nice before, and now he was going to kick me out some back entrance and tell me he never wanted to see me again. I actually looked around for another exit, ready to go, and as I did..."
She saw them all standing behind her. Four of Derek's friends. His teammates, including the star quarterback, whom she knew from the news when he was featured for something or other to do with football.
"Everyone of them had the same look on their faces," she said, sounding like she had to drag the words out of herself. "And I knew right away what was happening. Everything clicked, and I knew Derek had been setting me up all along."
She turned around and pleaded with him not to hurt her, but the more she protested, the more she begged, the more Derek's look of predatory pleasure increased as he walked slowly towards her.
Margot was repeatedly raped, beaten and tortured by Derek and his friends for hours, although to Margot it felt like she was in that basement for days as she fell in and out of consciousness. Derek's friends all had their way with her, multiple times, forcing her to do unspeakable things, all the while laughing at her pain.
Then Derek took over. He took his time with her as he raped her, and then tortured her with a live electrical wire, leaving burn marks all over her body. The pain was so intense she blacked out numerous times. Derek used smelling salts to bring her round each time, and then he would go to work with some new tool, like a knife or a pair of pliers. Even his four friends were disgusted by what he was doing, saying they were going to leave, but whatever look Derek gave them forced them all to stay. Margot was half dead by the time he had finished with her.
While she was unconscious for the last time, Derek and his friends took Margot to the edge of town, dragged her lifeless body up an alley and tossed her into a dumpster. It was unclear whether they all thought she was dead. Even if she wasn't, they probably didn't care much. No matter if she was alive or dead, Derek was arrogant enough that nothing could come back on him, and even if it did, it would be nothing the expensive family lawyer couldn't sort out.
"Some homeless guy found me the next day while searching for scraps in the dumpster I was in," Margot said. "I was technically dead by the time I was taken to a hospital. They managed to bring me round, though. Somet
imes I wish they hadn't..."
I said nothing as I looked at her with nothing but empathy and concern. It was a horrific experience she had went through which undoubtedly traumatized her forever more. But what do you say? There's nothing you can say. So I let her sit in silence for a while until she felt able to continue.
When she had recovered from her injuries enough to give a statement, she told the cops what had happened, giving them Derek's name and the name of the quarterback, the only other name she could remember. "The two detectives glanced at each other when I mentioned the names," she said. "And I knew right then that Derek and his buddies would get away with it. I just knew. And sure enough..."
They did.
The case didn't even get to court. Margot found herself railroaded by an army of lawyers into signing a statement that said the five boys she initially accused had nothing to do with what happened her and that actually, she didn't know who had assaulted her.
"And that was that. Case dismissed. Now off you go you poor, dirty girl and don't bother the nice rich people again."
Not long after, Margot tried to kill herself by taking a load of prescription pills she bought from some dealer on the street. She swallowed the pills right there and then, washing them down with a full bottle of vodka.
Then she curled up next a dumpster and waited to die.
"As far as I was concerned, death was the only thing left for me," she said, somewhat more in control of her emotions by that stage in her recounting of events past.
"But you obviously didn't die," I pointed out.
"I almost did. Again. But outside the dumpster this time." She threw me a glance as if to make sure I was getting the cruel irony of the situation.
A witch found her lying there. Apparently, the witch had been passing by when she sensed someone was in danger and walked up the alley to find the young Margot lying there, unconscious with an empty bottle of vodka beside her, on the brink of death. The witch used her magick right there and then to bring Margot back to full consciousness and also neutralize the drugs in her system.
"I was mad at first," Margot said. "I really did want to die. But the witch, she somehow sensed my pain and pointed out to me that my desire for revenge beamed stronger than my desire to die, and I knew straight away she was right. The thought of revenge had crossed my mind of course, but I paid it no heed because I knew there was no way I could get back at Derek and those other boys. They were all from powerful families, and there was no way I could get near them. So instead of revenge, I chose death."
But the witch explained to Margot that she could enable her to exact her revenge on the people who hurt her. All Margot had to do was go with the witch to her Sanctum, and the witch would show her how. Margot knew the witch was telling the truth. She could sense the woman's power, plus the witch had brought her back from death's door using nothing but magick. Suddenly, Margot was overcome with the notion of getting her revenge on Derek and the others. But unlike before, when revenge was just a silly pipe-dream, the possibility was now very real. And she didn't care what she had to do to exact that revenge. She would sell her soul if she had to.
And as it turned out, that's exactly what Margot had to do.
"Witch's get their power by selling their soul to a demon," she said, which I already knew.
"My mother was a witch," I informed her. "She managed to break her contract, with my father's help. She got free of it."
Margot almost laughed as she shook her head at me. "There is no getting free of it. Believe me, I know. Whatever you were told, it wasn't true. When you trade your soul, there is no getting it back unless you destroy the demon you traded it to. Even when you die, the demon will still own your soul, and you still have to obey it at all times."
I felt my face drop as she said that. Could it be true that my mother was still in service to some demon the whole time I knew her? "But she appeared to me recently," I said. "Her soul is in some other dimension. Not the Underworld."
"She may have found a way to hide. Or she may be still doing the demon's bidding from wherever she is now."
Jesus, I thought shaking my head. The skeletons just keep coming from my families closet.
It made sense what Margot was saying, especially when I thought about and realized there were numerous times when my mother was gone for long stretches, sometimes days at a time. My father told us our mother was off visiting friends or family, or that she was away sourcing spell ingredients somewhere. We we're kids, so we never questioned it. Could it be that my mother was actually away all those times doing the bidding of some demon? And if so, what the hell did she do?
I decided then it would be best if I thought about all that another time. There were more pressing matters at hand. I prompted Margot to finish her story so we could come up with a plan that would save everyone from Baal. A tall order, I know. But I was nothing if not optimistic.
"I gave my soul to Baal," Margot said with heavy regret. "I wish now I had died by the side of that dumpster. If I thought killing myself now would help, I would. But that would just make it easier for Baal to get to me."
Clearly, Margot thought she somehow deserved to die anyway, though I wasn't quite sure why at that point, not until she told me the rest of her story.
"Baal gave me the power I sought to get my revenge," she said. "Power that I didn't think was possible."
"Magick."
"Dark magick. Exactly the kind of magick I needed right then."
Margot got her revenge soon after. She picked off Derek's four friends first, one by one, and used her newfound powers to inflict horrific pain and do unspeakable things to each of them. She left each one in a dumpster, exactly as they had done to her. Only every one of them was dead by the time they were discarded in the dumpster. Of course, after she killed the first boy, the police came looking for her, tracking her down to the roach infested apartment she still lived in. But the cops could prove nothing, and given the state of the boy's injuries, they concluded there was no way a girl of Margot's size and strength could have done such things. The cops still thought she was involved somehow, though, and they kept a tail on her. Or tried to. With her new powers, Margot easily evaded the cops and was able to kill the rest of the boys without being caught, no matter how much security they had around them. "If anyone got in my way, I either scrambled their brains so they wouldn't remember a thing or...I killed them."
She looked at me then, as if expecting judgment from me, but I said nothing. Not because I condoned the killing of innocents, but because there was nothing to be done about it now. "What about Derek?" I asked.
A slight sneer appeared on her face. "He carried on with his life while his friends were being killed. He acted like he wasn't afraid. Which he wasn't, not until the end. I stopped the car he was being driven home in one night after he had left some club. He had two bodyguards with him. They tried to shoot me, so I killed them. Snapped their necks in an instant. Even then, Derek was calling me all the vicious cunts of the day, saying he was going to rape me until I was dead, and then he was going to fuck my dead body afterward."
"Nice guy."
"The best."
Margot used her powers to force Derek into the trunk of the car. Then she drove the car to an abandoned warehouse near the docks. "I tortured him for days," she said. "I can still hear his screams even now. He was begging for death by the end, but I wouldn't give it to him."
"So what did you do?"
Her face hardened as the memories flooded her mind. "First I dismembered him. Then I made him deaf, dumb and blind. And before I did that, I made sure the last thing he saw was my face. He's probably still lying somewhere, trapped in his own darkness, only my magick keeping him alive."
"Jesus Christ," I said, genuinely appalled. "Remind me never to piss you off."
"He deserved what he got."
As horrified as I was, I couldn't argue with her on that either. Predators like Derek and his buddies had no business walking the Earth. "So you g
ot your revenge. Then what?"
She smiled humorlessly. "Then I went to work for Baal. Reaping souls."
I shook my head. "Bloodthirsty much?"
"It wasn't like I had a choice," she said, flashing me a look. "Baal wanted souls. I had to get them for him, or else it was unspeakable torment in the Underworld." She paused for a moment. "But you're right. A bloodlust, if you want to call it that, was awakened in me after killing those boys. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the power I had over them, and the satisfaction of knowing once I killed them that they would never be able to hurt anyone again. It felt like I was reborn. Which I guess I was."
"So how many souls did you reap?"
"Too many to count," she said. "And Baal loved me for it."
"Loved?" It looked like my instincts were right. This was personal for Baal.
Margot let out a long sigh. "A demon can't feel love. Not exactly. At first, Baal was just pleased with my work, and for good reason. Once I was given a name, I didn't stop until I had that person's soul. Many of those names were hard to get to. Some of them were also supernatural. But I still got to them, no matter how much blood I had to spill in the process. Nothing or no one stood in my way. As earners go, I was the best Baal had. I was top of the leaderboard. And he rewarded me with more and more power. You could say he developed a sort of affection towards me. After a while, he took on a mentoring role, teaching me things and telling me things that he really shouldn't have been. Underworld secrets. The weaknesses of certain demons. The locations of hidden portals around the world."