...Like a Thief in the Night

Cecily Ferguson's fingers sifted through various silk and wool garments until she plucked a luxurious cashmere scarf from the rack and neatly packed it away. She sipped a screwdriver mixed from Tropicana and top-shelf vodka scavenged from the custom-made oak wine cellar.

Her usual encounters with high-quality alcohol occurred whenever her mother's revolving-door boyfriends dropped by the caravan to ply her mom with expensive offerings. Normally she and Phoebe Watkins would smuggle something cheap and sanitizer-flavored from the Quik 'n' EZ to pass amongst themselves.

Inside the adjacent master bathroom, Phoebe sang and stirred thunderously, swinging open cabinets and ripping through drawers, pillaging the contents. Emerging in the doorway, afresh with the conflicting scents of several expensive colognes, she tossed her head back, swallowing whatever she cupped in her palm, and hurled the pill bottle at Cecily's forehead.

"Ow!" she yelped.

"Heads up, Sissy," Phoebe said, nonchalant. "Unfortunately, there's no Vicodin, but this will be a nice change of pace."

Sissy rattled the medication into her hand and knocked them back with a sip of the cocktail. She read the label. Ritalin.

"Must be how these geezers keep themselves entertained between Bingo Tuesdays, right, Pheebs?"

Phoebe's commotion ceased.

"Phoebe?" Sissy rose, approaching a newly-opened entrance she’d assumed led to another closet.

Upon entering, she realized she was wrong.

It was a grand study covered in stories of bookshelves. She spotted Phoebe gawking in the middle of the ornate carpet. However, as expected, it wasn't the literature that marveled her, but a towering wall that held nothing but a vast display of guns.

"Holy crap," Phoebe whispered.

Sissy explored further, approaching the stately desk oriented at the room's center. Pushing back the genuine leather office chair, she clicked her tongue when she found the safe. She pulled out the stethoscope that completed any practiced thief's toolkit. Her father, a locksmith, had actually been the one to teach her how to open safes. It was the one good thing she'd gotten from knowing him.

Within minutes, she cracked the combination. Just as she reached over to the handle, Phoebe shouldered her out of the way, peeling back the metal door herself.

Both girls had stopped breathing, pressed cheek to cheek, eyes unable to take in enough of the sight as they calculated their newfound wealth.

They watched enough TV to know each stack was equivalent to $1000. Nestled in the safe were twenty of them. More money than either of their families possessed at any given point in their lives.

"Imagine paying tuition with nothing but cash," Sissy said.

"Screw community college," Phoebe scoffed. "Just imagine: we could move into our own house with this money, buy a flat-screen, get a puppy, throw ragers whenever we want, no parents around...," she fantasized, shoveling the spoils into her candy-colored backpack. "Besides, they wouldn't accept you anyway."

In all nine years of their friendship, Phoebe always called the shots. Undoubtedly, their findings were hers and hers alone to allocate. Although Sissy was labeled “remarkably gifted” by all her teachers, a title which granted her a purpose Phoebe always envied, even if she did have the funds to buy herself out of their little cesspool of a town, she knew deep down that she'd always remain Phoebe's property through however she’d deem necessary. But she pushed those thoughts away like usual.

Sissy helped Phoebe balance as she pulled the straps of the swollen Jansport over her small shoulders and stood up, but after she was no longer needed, Phoebe strode away.

"Let's blow this place before Old Man Rambo wakes up."

Sissy glanced over to the safe and noticed Phoebe had characteristically ignored a little Moleskine notebook tucked off to the side. The inside front cover of the onyx journal presented an impressive script which read: Property of The Angel of Death. Intrigued, she flicked through the pages.

Unsure if it was the illusion of thumbing the pages, like an animation flipbook, or if the scripture was actually shifting, almost swimming, within the journal, she then remembered how she'd thoughtlessly downed three Ritalin and a screwdriver not half an hour ago.

Despite the illusory movement of the words, the content itself remained enigmatic. While the journal was compact and light, the pages appeared somehow quantitatively infinite. Each page an endless index of highlighted or crossed-out names, corresponding dates, times, and geographic coordinates.

Then she pieced it together. The tactical wall supplied with more weapons than any collector or casual hobbyist should need; the secret stockpile of machine-counted cash; and now finally, the list of marked names accompanied by precise locations and times.

"Jesus Christ---We broke into a hitman's house!"

They had been navigating a hallway that somehow seemed considerably longer than she'd remembered. "I think we should put the money back."

Phoebe hadn't bothered turning around. "We're better off leaving now than going back. Besides, he can't trace it back to us."

"Don't they have your fingerprints on record?" Sissy mentioned, carefully.

"Oh yeah, a professional criminal is gonna invite cops into his house so they can finger dust the place and return what's probably chump change to him," she scoffed with an edge of annoyance. "I'm sure he'll say, 'By the way, Officer, pay no mind to my wall of guns and whatever other suspicious crap you might find!'"

Where one ought to experience remorse or shame, Phoebe's superpower lied in her unwavering boldness. Oftentimes, it was enough to encourage Sissy's own latent delinquency, but not here.

The two followed their chosen path for an indefinite amount of time as the drug's effects intensified. A millisecond stretched to eternity, the distance from the end of the hall seemingly grew despite increasing paces towards it, and their vision began to blur beneath the dimmed lights. Additionally, each corridor's end resulted in an identical unavailing path around the corner, further disorienting them. Neither of them had spoken a word since their disagreement, but the burgeoning dread was tangibly shared between them. After turning another fruitless corner to what seemed like the same passageway they'd been wandering for what felt like hours, Phoebe bashed one of the indistinguishable doors.

She seethed.

"Let's turn back." Sissy resigned. Beneath her immediate fear, she also felt a brewing frustration toward Phoebe for leading them through a labyrinth of doom.

Without executive approval, she headed in the opposite direction.

"Sissy, where are you going?" Phoebe demanded, her voice fading with each distancing step.

Cecily felt glee blossoming on her face, thrilled by her own display of volition until she realized her feet were no longer touching the floor.

Her arms were pinned defenselessly against her sides as Phoebe encaged her from behind, mimicking the one-side way she liked roughhousing.

She always let Phoebe subjugate her until she exhausted herself, but this time, Phoebe opened one of the hallway doors that lead into oblivion. This was another cruel game she liked to play.

Cecily began hyperventilating as the darkness enveloped her sight. She struggled futilely, knowing that she could neither outmatch Phoebe by virtue of strength nor appeal to her friend’s nonexistent empathy. Phoebe allowed Cecily to wrestle free from her grasp as she had already positioned herself on the other side of the exit. Cecily scrambled toward the sliver of light as it waned into nothing with a tiny click, sucking all the air from the room along with it.

The door was anchored shut by Phoebe’s superior strength. She giggled as Cecily uselessly thrashed against it.

It was as if her diaphragm compressed to release every sob into one wretched bellow but no sound emitted from her mouth. Each shallow inhale was followed by another silent scream into the vacuum. She repeated the process uncontrollably over and over again until she collapsed.

The black book had fallen to the ground during her capture and was now face-up on the floor at her feet. Through her muddling tears and inebriated haze, Cecily's periphery caught sight of the self-luminous text.

Ferguson, John Scott

05/29/1972, 03:29 - 11/22/1999, 15:46

It was the name of her father. He had died several years ago after the throes of alcoholism took hold of his liver. There certainly wasn't a hit ordered on a bitter freeloader like him, and even if there was, she was present as those final hate-filled breaths sputtered from her father's lips. He created his own undoing and nothing more. What interest would a hired gun have in such a pedestrian death?

The phosphorescent pages contained innumerable records of faceless names and deaths dating millenniums ago and more perplexingly, foretelling deaths that have yet to occur including:

Watkins, Phoebe Ann

10/28/1990, 20:02 - 06/04/2041, 18:53

Being a member of the Florida Southern Baptist Church obscured her knowledge of most Jewish traditions; however, it was enough to recognize this as The Angel of Death's Register of All Mankind---a list of lives that previously, presently, or will ever exist.

"Sissysissysisssyyy!” Phoebe sang, jeeringly. “Promise me you’ll be good!”

With a trembling hand, Cecily retrieved a pen from her bag and prayed for her plan's success.

"I know why you're doing this, Phoebe." She struggled to keep her voice from quivering. "You're terrified 'cause one day I'll escape this trash hole and leave you behind. Because I have a chance at a future and you don't.”

Phoebe’s terrible song halted.

"You have no skills, no talents, you got your record, you suck at basic math, even your dad doesn't want you around..." The sentiment had been building for years. At this point, Sissy couldn't keep it from cascading from her mouth. "The only thing you can control is me."

Phoebe began sobbing on the other side of the wall.

"Sissy, please don't leave me," she wept, pitifully.

"The best you could do for anyone is to just disappear!"

Cecily crossed out the final timestamp of Phoebe's life and replaced it with the present.

And then...silence.

Suddenly, a faint rustling roused from the other side of the threshold. Cecily’s stomach clenched as the knob gently rotated and the opening expanded.

There stood Phoebe, her earlobe gripped by a disgruntled elderly man in loafers. Swiftly, he yanked Cecily forward by the cartilage of her ear.

"You must be the ones who keep stealing my mail," he croaked.

Both girls tried unsuccessfully to shake their heads.

"No sir, we're just lost," Phoebe sniffled.

"Lost, huh?" He plucked the register from Cecily's hand. "Then what are you doing with my book?" Upon closer inspection, he observed, "There've been some alterations made to it. So, Ms. Missy, found it a bright idea to interfere with the foreordination of fate?"

"No, I-I have no idea...I didn't know what it----”

Then to her surprise, he released her reddened ear.

"Good thing for you, I'm an agent of death, not an agent of rules."

His hand plunged into Phoebe's chest, extracting a ball of blinding energy, and nonchalantly placed it into his pocket.

Once the last of the light trailed from her sternum, Phoebe's lifeless body collapsed.

"You'd think being in semi-retirement would mean less paperwork, but I've been up to my neck with this bureaucratic bullcrap! All these impatient clients wanting their parents' inheritance sooner," he muttered. "All I want is to relax on the beach or see Disney World. Can you imagine? A primordial being and for the gods' sake, I still have yet to get a photo with Snow White!"

He assessed Cecily who had been speechless with shock.

"Perhaps I could use a bookkeeper since you're so darn interested in this thing..." He tossed the book back into her arms. "Good news, kid, you got the job!"

He peeled the backpack from Phoebe's corpse and flippantly threw it in her direction as well.

"Start by putting this back where you found it."

And just like that, Sissy Ferguson began her everlasting career as Infernal Secretary.