Killer

“What is it you’re doing here again?”

Layla Cross had been taken from her already congealing five a.m. breakfast to sit across from this woman who looked pained and drawn, like Layla was doing something to her instead of the other way around.

“I just want to ask you some things. Get to know you a little. It’s part of the process.”

“What process is that?”

“I think I can help you.”

She barked out a laugh. “What are you, a lawyer or something? You’re about ten years too late.”

The woman was blonde and young, seemingly younger than Layla. Though there was a quality, something about the lines under her eyes and by her mouth, like she could have been fifty and just kept herself real well.

“You can call me Jess. At the association, we try not to use last names. We’ve had people try and track us to our homes, you see.”

Corrections Officer DeBlume grunted. He did not see. To be fair, neither did Layla. This ‘association’ sounded like some Secret Service bullshit, yet this Barbie-dreamhouse-looking woman hadn’t come in with a briefcase or sunglasses or even a tape recorder.

***

When Officer DeBlume had led Jess through the doors, out of the light of the relentlessly bright spring day, she’d immediately felt trapped.

There was hurt here, anger, fear - and settling over it all that thick dead-weight she’d only been able to call wrongness. If she’d believed in such things, she would have said evil. Inmates watched her as she passed with eyes hungry or dead or cunning. It was hard not to think she was being enclosed in a tomb of her own making.

Because no one else had told her to go, had they? No, it had been the opposite. Ann shaking her head disapprovingly when she’d pitched the idea, even threatening her with termination.

“She’s a killer. We can’t heal what doesn’t hurt.”

“I know what I felt.”

It was the last thing she’d said to any of them, and now she found herself sitting across from Layla Cross, the youngest serial murderer of their day, looking into her flat, dark eyes and doubting everything but the pain. She couldn’t doubt that, because she could feel it. It flowed off of Layla like the warm air coming up from a vent, pushing ripples through the air between them.

From the day of her birth, Jess had been like this: overwhelmed by large crowds of people, having a hard time just existing in a room with a bunch of strangers, their needs and hurts pounding at the outside of her mind like a battering ram on a flimsy castle door. She’d never known what it was that caused her to be this way, to always feel so much so strongly.

That was before Ann found her, showed her what she really was. What she could do, if she put her mind and energy to it. If she was willing to sacrifice.

***

“Can you give us some privacy?” the blonde woman asked softly.

The big man frowned. “That’s against pol-”

“Please?”

They looked at one another for a while, until the wrinkle slowly disappeared from between his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yes, I can do that.”

Layla raised her eyebrows as he walked out and quietly shut the door. Had she just seen some weird kind of hypnosis at work? Though she didn’t want to admit it, it almost made her like Barbie a little better.

“Now,” Barbie said, smiling that tremulous smile of hers. “I am here to offer you help.”

“I’m on the execution block in two days. The time for that shit is past, and to be honest? I don’t care.”

“The time for my kind of help never expires,” Jess said, steadily holding her eyes with her own clear gray ones.

Layla paused to take this in.

“So what have you got? You gonna give me a new identity? Strip me of my crimes?”

“You killed five innocent women by poisoning.”

“Yes.” Layla held her eyes, challenging. She had long given up explaining the need, the darkness that burned at the core of her.

“Do you not regret them?”

Jess looked almost confused. Layla had to laugh.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I only regret…” she raised her cuffed hands from her lap and shook them, “getting caught.”

She was lying, but not in the way this spooky woman probably thought.

Layla hadn’t regretted the deaths of those women. But getting caught, there had been a feeling almost like relief. That dark burning trapped, with nowhere to go; she no longer had a choice other than to let it eat her insides. They were right to cuff her. If she was to be freed right now, she might forgo the poison and go right for Barbie girl’s throat, just to wipe that knowing look off her face. She was, ironically, the type Layla normally went for. Pretty, college-educated women with their boyfriends and their dogs and their blooming careers. Women the cops showed up for. Good, good girls no one would never point a finger at and say, evil.

Evil girls get only bad things.

“I’m going to put my hands on yours,” Jess said, and before Layla could pull her own back, she had done so. As she did, she shut her eyes. Layla waited, feeling absurd, like she was in the middle of some weird kind of seance. She watched as Jess’s face grew scrunched, her brow creasing. A small whimper escaped the other woman’s lips. Layla felt nothing. She wondered if she was supposed to.

When Jess pulled away, she was paler than she’d been before, and panting slightly. Tears filled her eyes.

“Okay,” she murmured, seemingly to herself. She got up. “Come with me.”

***

When Jess got back to her hotel room, it was nearly midnight. The woman driving the Uber on her way back had kept stealing glances at her in the rearview mirror, and now she knew why.

The face staring back at her from the bathroom mirror was grey, almost ashen, the lips giving off a weird pallor even underneath the minimal makeup she’d put on that morning. She gave herself a wry smile and went to the mini-fridge, taking out an immaculate piece of chocolate cake. The nice thing about being where she was, Jess thought, was that she didn’t worry about stupid things like the nutritional no-no of having her favorite dessert in place of dinner whenever she wanted. Not anymore.

Jess removed the cellophane wrapping and sat on the edge of the bed digging a finger into the creamy frosting, licking it off and closing her eyes. She knew what she had done today was probably selfish; but maybe selfishness wasn’t always the villain they all made it out to be.

The Empathic Science Commission disapproved of the word ‘magic.’ But there was no denying its members had a very unique gift. They had started their organization merely as a way to study their own talents in a safe environment, though over the years they had begun to lend their services out, mostly in schools and therapeutic offices.

You isolate the catalyst in the brain, and you tweak it, Ann said in her mind, and she shut her eyes, lying exhausted on the bed, letting the memory wash over her.

You get inside, as only you can, and you fix what is broken.

What if, she’d said one day, we took this to the prisons? What if we could turn someone around even if they were a killer? On death row even?

No, Jess, Ann said, A failure on your part would be a threat to society. There’s quite a difference between a child with a moldable brain and a full-grown sociopath. And even if it all went well… it would take so much from you. It could…

Jess knew what it could do. She was feeling it right now. To conduct the sort of ritual she’d just undertaken took sacrifice, and that was the tragedy of empaths. They didn’t know how to help without eating away at themselves in the process.

But there were things Ann didn’t know.

She couldn’t know how when Jess was only twelve, her own eighteen-year-old brother had been put to death, how the imagery of his smiling face warred constantly with the angry boy she knew for seconds at a time, as he blew in and out of the house he no longer called home.

Ann probably didn’t know just how ambitious Jess had become, how deeply idealistic she was, even in the hotbed of idealists where she worked. What good was their talent if they weren’t exercising it to its max capacity?

And Ann did not know about the mass in Jess’s uterus, the thing that had grown rapidly over the past six months, the thing that might not even allow her six more, even if she weren’t to take extraordinary risks.

She felt herself start to drift off, the bathroom light still buzzing pleasantly in the background.

Your move, Layla.

***

Creak, creak, creak.

Leah watched from above as a man entered the room, casting his dark shadow over the young girl shivering in her bed.

She was pretending to be asleep, but she couldn’t for long.

I need to help, Leah thought, as the sounds of the girl’s muffled crying reached her ears. I need to make it stop.

But she found she couldn’t move, paralyzed by fear…no, something stronger.

It’s a dream.

The man straightened up to his full height again from where he’d been leaning over the other girl’s bed.

His tight whisper was like a growl as he said, “You be quiet. Evil girls get only bad things. If you were good, this wouldn’t have to happen.”

If it’s a dream, I can wake up.

The man who was really a monster was already at the door, his voice soft and almost soulful in its mock sadness. “The things you drive me to, Layla,” he said.

***

“I think I had a sister,” she says.

Her mandated therapist- a woman who introduced herself as Ann - raises her eyebrows.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Leah Cousins says. “In some kind of foster home. Her father…our father? Abused her. He did terrible things.”

Ann blinks at her, her pen still poised above her pad. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “I keep having a dream, but it’s not a dream. It’s a memory.”

Ann swallows, nodding. “What happened to her? Your sister?”

She thinks.

“I think she died,” she says finally, and is surprised to find it feels very true. A dark rage, a bitter sadness rise in her chest. “She didn’t make it out.”

It’s silent for a moment. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“I don’t,” Leah says. “But I think she did. Blame herself, I mean. I think she let it fester inside and it killed her. She didn’t understand, it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. Her. Fault.”

***

Leah Cousins- formerly Layla Cross- walks out on the street, already lighting the cigarette she’s shaken into her hand. A crowd of girls from the prep school across the way moves past her, talking and laughing, tossing their pretty sun-bleached hair. A sea of emotions- not hers, theirs, she realizes- hits her like a brick wall and she stops, choking, almost nauseous.

In all of them, even those who look nothing like the dark-haired little girl in the bed, she sees her lost sister. There’s a swelling in her chest that twines with the darkness. She can move now, regardless of how many months she spent in her coma. She will do for them what the system will not.

She will protect them all.

{Thanks for reading! If you liked, please drop a heart below. Tips appreciated but of course not necessary! xx Raist}

My entry for the SFS challenge 1 (Old Barn) can be found here: