The Redeemer

"The fires of Hell burn with the truth of our lies."

H. Calson

~

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

William Shakespeare

Chapter 3 Hell Fires

An interrogation is like boxing. It all depends on your opponent. Sometimes you come out of the corner throwing combinations, raging like a bull. Sometimes you lay back and wait. Each opponent presents a different challenge. Each time you step into the ring, there's a different chess match. Skilled fighters who are too good to get bludgeoned to the mat. Sloppy ones who leave too many openings. Amateurs who never should have stepped into the ring. Chumps who end up sleeping on the canvas before the first round ends.

Extracting answers from an unwilling participant is the same. Sometimes you just have to look mean and make a couple of threats to get what you want. Sometimes you have to hurt them a little before they talk. Sometimes, you can hurt them for hours, you can carve out their hearts and hold the bloody mass beating in front of their eyes, and they still won't do anything more than smile and laugh as they take their dying breath.

The man in front of me is the kind of man you can hurt all you want and never get a word to leave his mouth. He is also a man with a weakness. Physically he is strong. But his arrogance compels him to tell me everything I want to hear. He's dying to confront me with the truth he knows. I can see it in his eyes. But he won't get to that moment when his urge overwhelms him without going through the dance I am currently two-stepping my way through.

I started with his toes and a hammer. I listened to him scream every time the waffled face of the hammer came down. Listened until his screams turned to sobs. Felt my frustration rise when he still didn't answer the questions I asked.

I cut two of his fingers off starting at the first joint with hedge clippers. I snapped each one away until I left bloody stumps at the end of two of his knuckles. When I was done and the fingers were gone I finally had to admit making him feel pain wasn't going to work. I let him sit in his own excrement for days. Denied him food and water until he passed out. Before I started to worry I wasn't going to break him.

It was hard to accept everything I had done so far had been futile. I kept asking myself, why I got nothing from him when I touched his skin. When anyone else would have given up their memories to me with the slightest brush of their skin against mine. I sat with my frustrations brewing inside my head as I studied him. As the minutes passed I kept noticing again and again the way he looked at me. The way his look never changed. I stared into the waves of hate flowing in and out of his eyes like tides from the moon. I studied the storms that brewed in the lines of his forehead. Traced the resolve carved in the stone of his jaw.

I began to understand slowly at first then picking up steam that this man bound to a chair in front of me was a true believer. That his belief, his truth had given him the strength he needed to withstand my rage. I began to grasp, sitting by the fire burning between us that I represented something to him. Behind the turmoil and obvious pain, he wore. I saw a peace swimming below the surface of his skin. A peace that could only come from accepting a fate larger than his own. Realization dawned on me. He knows he's going to die. He knows it's going to hurt and he doesn't care. Whatever belief he has. Whatever I represent to him is stronger than anything I can do to him.

I let my eyes drift up to the branches spreading from the Canyon Live Oaks stretching lazily across the night sky like spiderwebs and watch the purple clouds as they dance in front of the pale yellow moon. His desire to stay silent plays heavily on my mind. A breath slowly makes its way from my lungs before I fill them back up again with cool night air. I meditate on the moment I am in. A mantra comes to me. I was born for this. My whole life I have fought against who I was. I have pretended parts of me didn't exist. I have always done my best to live a normal life. A word floats into my mind. Denial. And that one word represents all that I was before the path I am now on was set into place.

In the seven stages of grief, I am at acceptance. Acceptance that the good life I once had is gone. Acceptance that it's time to let all of the parts of me free. To let the parts I have tried to hold captive out.

Looking at him again another thought itches at the back of my mind. I think he knows truths about me that I don't, not yet. Though, I believe those truths are starting to break across the horizon of my mind. Little hints that dance at the edges of the knowledge that I have always been the monster I am now. The beast has always been waiting inside me. Hibernating in the darkest corners of my body. That my life before was a lie and the hell I am in now was always the truth.

I think he knows about the monster inside me. He knows where it came from and why it's here. He knows what role I am supposed to play in this and what fate I'm supposed to unfold.

Even in his current state, closing in on his death his stare doesn't waiver from mine. I wonder if he will die where we are deep in the Northern California woods without ever telling me his name. He coughs and blood spills down his chin in a fresh display of crimson. He doesn't have much time, I tell myself before I ask the same question I've asked a hundred times.

"Where are the others?" He doesn't answer and I let my frustration spill out in my words. "It must kill you to see me here watching you die. When you thought I was dead. " Anger drips from my voice. "And now you have to sit with the stink of your own failure rising up from your shit." His expression doesn't change as he sits in front of me. I go on trying not to let his lack of response send me further over the edge. "How does it feel to know you didn't kill me that night, that you killed yourselves?" I lean closer before I say the next part. "It's only a matter of time whether you tell me or not, before I find your three friends." I get up and he follows me with his eyes. The fire is still burning with tall orange flames licking the sky. Taking a piece of wood from the fire's heart I go to him. He screams as the embers glow bright against his right eye.

When it's over I throw the wood back into the flames and return to where I was sitting. The blackened socket where his eye was is a mess of boiled flesh. My words are cold when they come. "I woke up in that house after you left me lying in my own blood to a fate worse than death. Julia, that was my wife's name. You remember her, the woman who made my life full. The woman whose throat you slit." It's hard for me not to reach out and wrap my hands around his throat. "When I woke up her dead eyes were staring into mine." I have to stop. My throat feels like it's closing around a spike. I swallow against it and force more of the words I need to say out.

"I couldn't move at first. My body wouldn't respond. All I could do was lay there and look at how death had greyed my wife's ocean-blue eyes." The spike in my throat feels like it's growing larger. I fight to hold back tears. I won't let this man who took so much from me see how badly he's broken my spirit. "I spent an eternity on that floor. Every minute, every second I felt like my soul was being carved out by a spoon."

Standing again I light a cigarette and take a long inhale. I question whether I have the strength to continue before I speak. "When I finally got up from that floor. I forced myself to go down the hall knowing what I would find. I can't describe the feeling of actually seeing them lying in their beds. Everything in me fell in on itself at once. At that moment, standing in their room looking at their bodies I wanted to spontaneously combust and burn until I was a pile of ashes on the floor." I blow out a breath of smoke and watch as the grey lines curl around the marred flesh of his right eye. "I thought about getting the gun from my dresser in the room I shared with Julia and putting the barrel in my mouth. Thought about slitting my wrists with the knives in the kitchen. A truck went by outside and I thought about running out of the front door and stepping in front of it. I thought about wrapping the rope in the garage around my throat." I pause not wanting my voice to break. Looking away from him I take in another inhale of the smoke.

Steeling myself I begin again. "When I was finally able to look away from my dead children in their beds I started to go for the gun or the traffic, I'm not sure which anymore. But then I thought of you. I thought of your three friends, and it stopped me mid-stride. I knew right then I couldn't die. I had to wait. I had to find each one of you. I had to be the one who passed judgment."

"You should hurry." I look at him confused.

"I think I'll take my time." I retort. He lifts his head up from where he's been looking down and speaks in a croaking voice.

"He's already coming. When he takes my body, you will wish you had finished this." With his last words, he lowers his head again, and I stare at the dirt and blood matted in his hair for a long time. Half of me wants to reach out and squeeze his throat until his air leaves him. The other half wants to meet who's coming.

~

Sweltering summer air floated across the parking lot in waves of heat under the cloudless California sky. A bead of sweat made its way down from Lizzy's golden brown hair onto her tanned, a little sunburned skin. California was definitely an adjustment from just outside Rochester where her last out-of-control ability had been living. She looked across the baking asphalt in front of Ray's Highway and Wrecker Service at Officer Tompkins's back as he walked away. She didn't know how he wore a dark blue uniform in this heat. He had to be dying underneath it. Taking her eyes from him, Lizzy looked at the paper in her hands. Her redeemer had a face now.

Everything the department had taught her said that a special ability gone out of bounds was nothing but bad. But she couldn't stop thinking that her Redeemer was the exception that proved the rule. The witness had seen him plain as day. He had looked right at the woman, and he hadn't done anything but drive away. Her fire starter, Abigail, would have burned the woman to a crisp just for being there let alone seeing her face.

Studying the lines that made up the features on his face she tried to picture him as he really was and not just as pencil strokes on a piece of paper. Her Redeemer was handsome. His hair was a deep rich brown. He wore it at a medium length with strands in the front falling just above his dark eyes. Lizzy pictured how that hair would look with the wind blowing through it. She shook her head, pushing the image from her mind, and looked through the chain-link fence to the wrecked explorer. Tracing the edges of the door frame where the driver's side door had been ripped away, she turned her thoughts to the last thing Officer Tompkins had said before he handed her the police artist's sketch.

"I thought you would have already had this. I mean I'm kind of surprised I had to come back out here at all. Don't you feds communicate with each other? I thought after the other guy came, I'd be done with this."

So, Smith had beaten her here. Lizzy had wondered where he'd been. Now at least she knew that speech about just being here to advise her when he first arrived had been bullshit. But she'd known that the moment he had given it. Maybe it was time for her to finally call the number her dad had given her in the park. She didn't want to. She'd been avoiding it since he had shown it to her. Walking to her car she opened the Impala's door and took one last look around the parking lot before she got inside.

Accelerating down the highway Lizzy took in a deep breath and put Alanis Morissette on. She needed a release before she found whatever Smith had waiting for her at the diner. Thinking about the number she'd written down on an old receipt after she'd left the park, Lizzy decided it could wait a little longer as the first lines Head Over Feet began to play.

~

The night sky is dark, and the stars are all gone, hidden behind the purple clouds that have grown bigger than they've ever been before. I sit across from the still-living corpse surrounded by tall trees, and wild animals moving in the shadows beyond the fire's light. They will be the only audience for what I am about to do.

An eerie silence hovers unnaturally for a moment before the grasshoppers decide it's safe to start their chirping again. His screams that erupted when I poured rubbing alcohol into his wounds have subsided. He looks at me with his one remaining eye. A cold, sinister feeling radiates from him. Dried blood on the skin of his cheeks cracks as a broken smile spreads across his battered face.

I've demanded answers from him for hours without hearing another word. A strange wind blows in through the leaves hanging on the trees sending a shiver up my spine. A broken laugh escapes his throat. My muscles stiffen with the ominous sound. A nervousness I push back on begins to rise up inside me. His laughing stops and he angles his head to the right before he speaks to me.

"And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy." I stand feeling that something unknown is coming. His voice calls out like a chorus of demons screaming to me from hell.

"You have no idea of the darkness already spreading into the light. The veil is broken. A fracture born of a breaking long ago has opened to a chasm. You are an abomination, spilled magic. As the master has blinded the Gods of your religions so have the Gods fought back against the Devils that are coming." His voice rises to a shout. "And brought forth this obscenity of light that stands before me." In front of my eyes, the ropes tying him to the chair glow bright with embers and smolder away until they are gone.

"Your time has come child of light." He says as he stands. "We came to you that night. We sacrificed your family to stop you." He moves forward. "Shiatan approaches. You are the prophecy that seeks his end. He will bathe in the blood of your failing" A red glow rises from my skin. The muscles in my arms and chest begin to swell. He moves closer to me, and I move toward him. "The King of Hell has come" He growls as he comes for me.

I light the night with red as we meet. His power, and my power rocket against one another. For a moment I am strong. Then, like a demon hoard, he begins to push me back. My feet slide across the ground, and I know I am losing. The soles of my boots leave the ground just before I fly back through the night. Landing hard against the rocks and soil of the forest floor. Pain erupts from every part of my body. His voice booms through the trees in a language that sounds like Latin. His breath is hot with sulfur. The air hisses with its heat. A fear creeps from the back of my mind, asking if I will die here.

~

Turning into the parking lot off exit 136 in front of Charlie's All-Day Diner Lizzy felt the air deflate from her chest at the sight of his government-issue Tahoe. She had known this moment was coming. It had been coming since their first meeting when Smith first introduced himself. It had been coming all the time he had spent loitering around the edges of her investigation.

It had always been a matter of time before Smith would step right into the middle of what she was doing. Lizzy had hoped she would have a couple more days to get on track before he interrupted her. But those days were gone, from this point on, he would be leading. Nothing as much would be said. Lizzy would be assured she was still in full control, but every decision was going to go through Smith, now.

Stepping from her own department-issued Impala Lizzy held her head high as she prepared herself for the condescending I'm only here to assist bullshit she was about to face. In front of her, the door of the diner opened, and Smith appeared in the vacant doorway wearing a slimy, deceptive grin.

"Nice of you to come along, Elizabeth. We've been waiting for you." His voice sounded as slimy as his smile looked. Stepping forward, Lizzy walked toward Smith, who obligingly stepped back from the doorway when she reached him. She made sure she met his eyes with hers as she passed, but not before putting on her poker face to disguise how much he repulsed her.