Page 5 of If Looks Could Kill

In a narrow room, in a grimy lodging house, a young woman sits on the edge of her bed.

Through a smudgy bit of window, glimmers of morning pierce the gloom of high roofs and city smoke.

She sets aside her hat, unlaces her boots, then unpins her hair.

At least the room is hers alone today, and she can undress without fear. Small luxuries.

She remembers his scent. The blotchy, pocked skin of his face. The higher tenor note of his voice. Hardly what you’d choose if you were to cast an actor for the part. If this were a play. If life were but a stage.

Run if you like, but we’re coming.

When all else fails, only words remain.

Surely her threat is real. Surely others will pick up the task she’s left undone.

She drapes her blouse over a chair, then rubs her bare arms and hugs them tight.

She’d found him, though another poor woman had to die in order for her to be sure. If only she’d passed by him sooner. The scent of evil is hard to miss, but in the spiritual stench of East London, she was lucky to have found him at all.

But why…? How…? He had looked into her eyes. She had poured into them all her wrath, her outrage for his victims, the poor lambs. She’d held him in her sway, without a doubt. And after a stupefied pause, he had blinked at her and walked away . As if nothing had happened.

Not that she had ever tried this before. She’s not a murderer. Justice demanded this.

Didn’t it?

Was he, somehow, immune?

Maybe it was her fault. Her weakness. Maybe some part of her had held back. Some squeamish, childish, be-a-good-girl part that couldn’t quite commit. Even if she’d long ago left “good girl” behind.

And now he still lived to prowl the streets and strike again.

So she’s taken a bad business and made it worse.

Is it true? Having survived her attempt, he will become a maker of others like her? To spread the contagion of her curse?

That’s part of what makes her mysterious and lonely existence so hard: the not knowing. No rule book exists. No ancient text of sanctioned wisdom. Only nightmare whispers.

And yet, she does know. She feels it as she feels her own being. How darkly fitting. Justice of a brutal sort, wielding a check to her power. What she cannot kill, she strengthens.

Instead of ridding the world of a threat to womankind, she has unleashed another. Armed it. Added a new weapon to his arsenal. One he won’t even know he carries. At first.

But what else in her life has she not bungled and ruined with her touch?

She folds into bed. Thick red hair spreads across her pillow as her eyelids flutter shut.

“Forgive me, sisters,” she tells the room, “for what I’ve done to you.”