A Mind For Malice

Her mind is host to many manners of evil. A darkness so intangibly vile. An enigma with such a profound twistedness. Since taking root so many decades ago, has grown impressively. It keeps growing. Every day, spreading like a bloodstain on ancient parchment. It swells at such a rate she has lost track.

There are lucid days, days when His grip is lax. When she can feel residue of herself dancing in her subconsciousness like a somber specter.

She knows these days by the questions they bring. The uncertainties.

The fear.

Such humanizing fear.

And if to be human is to be afraid then she doesn’t want humanity at all. She closes her eyes, tips her head back, and exhales a thin plume of smoke. And that is just it isn’t it. That is what she has sacrificed to never feel afraid again. To never walk again amid the downtrodden and helpless.

She lets her body sink into the bathwater.

Muddy. Bloody. Bathwater.

Today, the thoughts refuse to be cast out. The doubts resist banishment with more fury than a late-autumn gale. Today is a lucid day. By the wing, she hates lucid days. She cups her hands and brings a splash of water to her face. She tastes the blood on her tongue and for a moment she thinks that, that will be enough. That the coppery tang will be enough to arouse the festering blot on her soul. To send the darkness within writhing with delight.

Instead her stomach churns. She hunches over the side of the bathtub and her stomach heaves. There is nothing for her to empty. Nothing but a gentle  gush of bloody, muddy, path water. It dribbles out of the corners of her mouth and down her cheeks.

And she remembers.

She remembers their faces.

From first to last she remembers.

Their eyes are desperate and pleading, mostly. Some are bolder, more furious, more vengeful. More like her. Others are impassive and uncaring or simply too far gone or far too young to understand what is about to happen. Others still are vexingly accepting. They smile in the face of fate and thank their God, whichever one that might be, for a life unfinished.

And then she steals the light from their eyes and she does it in His name.

She doesn’t regret it.

She doesn’t.

She swears that she doesn’t.

She laughs and splashes her face again. Her stomach reels again. It is worse this time. So much worse. Her fingers fumble for the drain. But one bathtub and one pulled stopper can’t drain the wickedness from her.

For the first time in decades she can’t feel Him at all. His influence is beyond her reach and she wonders if he is punishing her for something? Because in his absence there is regret. There is pain. There is sorrow. There is vulnerability, meekness,weakness.

There is fear.

She shivers in the empty bathtub.

She draws her knees up to her chest.

The light above her audibly flickers.

There is so much fear.

And then there is relief.

Freedom.

But in freedom she is not free. Not from… she looks at her hand; the bathwater hasn’t taken all of the red out of them. It is still under her fingernails, in the little cracks on her palms. She leans against the porcelain. She inhales and exhales and inhales and exhales and inhales and…

Just as she gets the sense to leave the bathtub, to make her way to Alexandre and his light a familiar sensation tingles at the back of her mind. It lingers there for a moment, with its sinister tendrils licking and lapping at the very fringes of her consciousness. And then it moves forward. She closes her eyes and slides back down to the floor of the bathtub.

She has had her doubts.

But she doubts her doubts.

He is back. She hasn’t a thing to fear. She smiles. Smiles and wonders how it is that she almost traded power for a nagging sense of terror. The darkness is back and it is tantalizing. She absently draws spirals in the slick red. Rubs her cheek against it.

He is still trying to find his hold. And she knows it. She knows it because it slips back in. One final thought from the ghost of Vachiro.

It settles, a dismal resignation.

No matter how close she comes.

No matter how potent and savory the taste, the light is not for her. She has turned from it long ago.

For a moment as the fracture in her mind mends, she yearns for the fear.