Page 41 of If Looks Could Kill

In the dark of night, in the warmth of her bed, Pearl Davenport dreams.

He is here.

He is here. In a dark room. She can’t see him. She smells him.

For four long years, he has haunted her waking moments, and her night terrors.

Of course he must appear tonight. Whenever her life is ripped in two, there he is.

The first time, he stole her body, its privacy, its innocence.

The kind regard in which she had once held it, and herself.

He stole her peace. He all but stole her soul.

The second time is now.

Cold dread and confusion envelop her. Where is she? Why? How has he found her again?

Her heightened senses find his scent immediately.

There he is. Her new tongue, long and supple, can taste the air and pinpoint his location, and describe him in detail.

The stench of his sweat. The foulness of his breath.

The tang of liquor and the aura of mildewed hay that surrounds him just as it does in her memory of that horrible morning when he saw her through a doorway, milking a goat, and bolted the door to her father’s barn.

In the cold air, he radiates a large mammal’s heat. It surrounds him in a dark red cloud.

Not him. Anything but him. She should run.

Instead, her snakes rise up and hiss a warning.

Oh, how she loves them then. They will fight for her. Defend her. Who else ever has?

Murderer, they hiss. Killer. Destroyer.

Metaphorically correct, at least.

“Who’s there?” he says.

The note of terror in his voice throbs with weakness, with vulnerability. Like an artery in the throat, begging to be cut. She inhales his fear. It tastes like nectar. This time, she is not alone.

Sing, she tells her snakes. Sing for me.

Their hisses rise to a buzzing drone.

“Who’s there?” he cries again. “Who is it?”

It cracks. His voice actually cracks in a high-pitched whine. He’s terrified. Petrified. A frightened child. Oh, how the tables do turn.

Again, she tells her darlings. Again.

They sing. They scream. She didn’t know snakes could do it.

Not a human scream, nor even a loud one, but in chorus, the shrieking from so many tiny throats makes the man’s brain forget it’s human and twitch to run, to bolt for cover, to dive into a hole in the ground like a startled rodent.

She can smell the moldy colors of his fear.

These were not the colors when he saw himself as some great stallion claiming whatever filly crossed his path.

Then, though he was pathetic and puny of psyche, he was still powerful enough in body and in cruelty to end a part of her. A young, na?ve, trusting part of her.

Just listen to him whimper now.

Though it’s dark, the hot red glow around him illuminates the space. She can see, just enough. Do her new monstrous eyes give only her this sight, or can he see her too?

He cowers on the ground in the corner of a rough-hewn room. A barn, in fact. The barn. The very barn she once would visit several times a day to see what her father was up to. Until the day she stopped entering the barn, ever, unless there was no way around it. And there he is again.

She pauses. He is different. Older. Paunchier. Hair thinner. Face yellower. Nose blotchier. More real in his faded personhood. Something about him seems bloated—perhaps an illness—yet he is still a large and powerful man.

The sharpness of detail in which she sees him changed by the passage of time is disconcerting. This is a dream, isn’t it? Is it possible, Pearl wonders, that I am really here?

But he is him .

The prior Pearl would run. What she is now creeps closer, closer. He hears her, hears the song of her crown, but still he scans the darkness, turning back and forth, finding nothing.

She is invisible to him. Good. She draws closer still.

Rage bursts in her chest at the nearer sight of his face, the wetness of his lips, the hair in his nostrils, the sinews of his neck. She lives again the scenes of terror his face conjures.

Never again. Not her, not anyone. This ends. She will end it. She will enjoy ending it.

Now.

She curls her fingers before her face and watches them elongate, watches claws unsheathe themselves from where petal-pink fingernails once grew.

She tastes the blood on her lips where fangs erupt from her gums to pierce her own mouth.

She feels her throat toughen and thicken.

Feels a throbbing on her scalp as her snakes swell, stretch, inflate, unhinge their jaws.

She flings out her hands, throws back her head, and drinks in the cold air of night. It tingles with shards of ice. It sparkles on her tongue. It floods her body with drive. She is unstoppable now.

The man in the corner convulses. “Who’s there?”

She takes a loud step forward, then another.

Her power rests upon her like a cloak. Like a thundercloud.

She will exact her own past sufferings upon him. She will infiltrate his mind. Leave him a cringing worm, forever glancing over his shoulder. Dreading dark rooms. Feeling unsafe alone. Never again knowing a night’s restful sleep.

Guilt and shame should already have done this to him. They would, if there were justice.

She is justice now. Her hour of vengeance has come at last.

It won’t do for her to remain invisible. She throws open a pair of wooden shutters to allow in the light of a swollen moon. Then she swoops down till her face is inches from his.

It takes him a second to register, to adjust to the new light and see what’s before him.

“Boo,” she says.

He shrieks and shields his face with a fluttering hand. She cackles with laughter as her snakes weave and lunge at him.

The dark yellow stink of urine meets her nostrils, followed by the fetid stench of feces. His bladder and bowels couldn’t withstand his fright. He has soiled himself.

She laughs all the more. Well done, O manly one.

“Do you remember me?” she whispers.

He is staring at her. Into her eyes, then up to the writhing mass of serpents spilling down over them. His chin disappears into the flesh of his neck as he shakes his head once.

“Because I remember you,” she told him. “So I’d like you to remember me. Like this.”

She slides her tongue across her fangs, tasting blood, and smiles. Perhaps it’s the devil’s own smile when freshly damned souls reach hell. Her snakes shoot toward him, poker-straight. Cocked and loaded weapons. Chained dogs straining at the leash.

He whimpers as her claws slowly graze his face. She has no need to leave a mark.

And there it is. A dawn of recognition. He knows what she is now—she sees the word “Medusa” form upon his lips—and he recognizes, too, beyond the gruesome mask, a trace of the confused and frightened girl she once was, years ago.

Your sins catch up to you on Judgment Day.

His eyes roll back in his head. His body falls slack, slumped against the wall, his neck at a harsh angle. Unconscious with fear.

And Pearl is conscious once more. Alone in that stiflingly warm room at that woman’s house, on that strange, secluded street. Hundreds of miles from her father’s barn. Awake, alone, and disappointed that she can’t complete her retribution upon that sack of pig manure.

Boo?

Some terrifying monster she is. She laughs softly to herself. Boo.

Outside, alley cats yowl. They bring her back to this place, this night, and what happened earlier today. Is it only today? She reaches a hand up and pats her head. Hair. Just hair.

If it weren’t for this musty bed in this haunted mansion, she’d say it had all been a dream.

Perhaps the part with him was. She’s unsure. But she feels the sense of a man nearby. Not, perplexingly, the one from her past. Another man. Nearer. The one who did this to her.

The one who turned her into this. A Medusa.

A man did this?

She can feel it. Sense him like the wind rattling a house one hides in.

Broad shoulders. Thick whiskers. A nauseating arrogance. A slouch hat. He could be any man in this city, yet he is one particular man. She turns instinctively. Uptown. North of here.

The undertow grabs Pearl once more. It yanks her navel downward, and she sinks back into the bed.

The thrill submerges her. Sweet relief from her chattering brain; only body, body, body.

She is back in the barn. Back in the presence of her former tormentor.

The lust to make the disgusting man pay is overwhelming.

He could never pay enough; he has already taken what was beyond price.

Any amount of suffering she can inflict will be too good for him. She isn’t done.

She can kill him where he cowers. Like the snake women of legend. She can petrify him.

And the vision closes once more. She’s back in the bedroom. Back in New York City.

She will find him. Not in night visions, but in actual fact. She will find him and finish it. Before Tabitha wakes, she will commence her hunt. She will leave this city and go.

Her past life rears its serpent-free head. Until now, her prayer had been to never lay eyes upon him again. Now she wants to find him? Now she willingly seeks him?

Her head swims. Who is she? What has she become?

A monster in far more than outward appearance.

Alone in the dark, Pearl Davenport begins to tremble.

Once, sweet salvation had been the gift she prized above all else.

God had regarded her there, that day, helpless and bruised, and had poured affection over her.

He had raised her up and made her new. Able to stand.

For her, salvation was no abstract notion for some sweet by-and-by.

Salvation was in each breath she took, in the support she felt from the earth beneath her feet.

Her soul had been pulled safe from the rubble of what he had done to her.

Her life had been suffused with light. In her amazed gratitude, she vowed she would never take that grace for granted.

She would follow God’s word to the letter.

Though all other hearts might fail, hers would stay true.

And now, by some perversion of fate, she’s been turned into one of Satan’s demons, and what’s worse, if anything could be worse, is learning how much she prefers the darkness.

What caused her body to betray her and to mutate itself in this repulsive fashion?

How has she gone from a girl to a grotesque?

She doesn’t dare ask. Whom could she ask anyhow?

God? God, I thought you loved me, but if you loved me, how could you abandon me to this godless form?

How could you allow my body to betray me so?

No. No. It can’t be that. It can’t be God.

Nature makes its aberrations, she reasons. See the Bowery’s dime museums with their bizarre and macabre proof. But the monster inside ? This is the true terror. The one ready to maim and slay her enemies. To hunt them instead of forgiving them or leading them to Christ.

What was that story? Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

She didn’t read such vulgar things. There was a play, but she did not attend the theater.

But she knew some potion, or spell, or something transformed a man into a monster.

When its effects faded, back he went to his human self.

When he drank the draft once more, he became the beast. Maybe—who knows?

—maybe she has consumed something that did this to her.

When its potency fades, maybe she will return to the form she’s always known. Please, God, let it be so.

In her own soul, the hooks and tendrils of the monster brain begin to loosen. She is Pearl again. Pearl Davenport. A soldier for Christ. A warrior in his cause. One who feasts daily upon the living Word.

She parts the curtains of her bed and fumbles at the bedside table until she finds a candle and matches. From the pocket of her coat, draped over a chair, she pulls out the little red New Testament that her mother gave her when she left home. This will offer the comfort nothing else can.

She opens to the first few chapters. Matthew’s gospel. The Beatitudes.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Immediately, a familiar warmth unravels her pain. She is poor in spirit. She is gripped by mourning. And see? Blessings are promised, even to her.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

The volume falls into her lap. Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you.

She has never been able to love the man in the barn, but at least she thought she had turned his fate over to his Maker. If she could not bless him, at least, if she didn’t think about him, there was little cause to curse him.

The heave of a mighty sob overwhelms her. She chokes down wave after wave of crying as her tears begin to flow.

What have I become? Her own heart assails her. A vengeful monster. A fiend. The very devil himself.

Pearl’s gaze falls once more upon the book in her lap. Try again, she tells herself. Find some other message. She thumbs her way forward and lands by chance upon the twenty-third chapter of Matthew:

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?