"Animals don't do this."
— Kenneth Eade
THIRTY SIX
NICHOLAS GLANCED ALL AROUND HIM, and all he could see was the colour red. His hands were stained, his shirt was a tie-dye of blood and guts, and the kitchen counters were maroon from the force of the splatter. The end of the gun remained smoking from the heat of the bullet. He couldn't hear much above the ringing in his ears, just the faded echo of the blast and the sickening thump! of a body against hard wood. His heart was beating hard against his rib cage, so hard that he knew if he lifted his shirt, he would see the outline of it against his bony chest. He could hardly breathe, not from fear, but the initial shock of ones' first kill.
He hadn't expected the scene before him to be this gruesome. He hadn't expected to see literal parts of her body rip from themselves and scatter round the room. He certainly hadn't expected to see pieces of her in the soup pot she had been stirring. He thought guns were like those in the movies, a single hole through ones chest. Not the gaping hole he had ripped through her floral sundress that took with it, a chunk of her insides.
He should've been gagging. He should've been disgusted. It really was disgusting. He hadn't even spent a lot of thought on the decision to kill her. It had happened so fast. He had stolen the shotgun from the man at the bodega, walked home with his head down, ripped open the front door and pointed the shotgun at her chest. Boom. She was dead.
For someone who had lived such a long and intense life, her death was so sudden and useless. Wasteful. Nicholas was beginning to understand what people meant when they said they lived like they had already died. Because fuck, life was so fickle.
Of course, he would miss her. Agonisingly so, because she had played an integral part in his life and had made him into the boy he was. But when he realised that he would no longer hear her voice, see her face, or have her share the world with him, he was overcome with an incomprehensible feeling. The feeling he could only describe as a tug of war between sadness and elation.
And just as the haze that had fogged his thoughts began to clear, a rush of adrenaline, dopamine and ecstasy engulfed him. Despite the fact that he had never had an orgasm before, he was certain that this was it.
Nicholas walked up to the corpse and spat in his mother's face. He smiled, then he frowned, then his lips were in a pout. It was extremely overwhelming. It felt akin to a tornado blowing through his chest cavity, destroying everything in its path, rerouting his entire thought process.
He blinked a couple of times and when he lifted a trembling hand to touch his bruised face, he couldn't tell if his tears came from the despair or the joy.
Either way, he was content.
___
MY WORDS WERE spilling out of me like a faucet that had broken off its hinges. "Mirabel, you've got it all wrong." I emphasised. "You don't understand what hap—"
"There she is. The beauty and the brains." Mirabel announced, cutting me off as though I had been speaking a language she could not comprehend. She stood up, arms open in a faux embrace.
The silence that greeted her was what made me spin around.
And there she was, the mirror image of everything I thought I had loved about myself. I gasped, in pain. I had known she played a huge part in my demise but God, it hurt to see it with my own eyes. No one could take it. Not even Lucifer felt this betrayed when he was tossed out of Paradise for asking too much. Lucifer had been greedy. I, on the other hand, had asked for nothing from Diana.
I had done nothing to deserve this.
Imagine you were tossed in an incinerator, left to burn to an inkling of your life, and just as the flame began to dwindle, the only person you love, re-lit the flame. That's how it felt watching her stand in front of the mahogany door of Mirabels office. If God himself had sauntered in in her place, I would be better equipped to handle it.
She had yet to look at me and so I made myself known. "Diana?"
On hearing my voice, she froze in an alarming way. Slowly, she looked up and her eyes widened for a fraction of a second. A whirlwind of emotions blinded her from seeing anything other than the consequences of her actions. She resembled our father, in many hideous ways.
"Aria..." She gasped.
Her eyes then flew from Mirabel to me but all she could do was heave a deep, heavy sigh. The kind of sigh that took things with it as it left; a borrowed laugh, a smile, a memory. The kind of sigh that could start a hurricane.
"I didn't want her to find out this way, M." Diana muttered, her voice sounded like it were trying to hide from me. She looked uncomfortable as she crossed the gap between her and the futon in front of me. "Not like this."
Mirabel chuckled, a sound I had become allergic to. "I know." She gestured to the chair. "Sit down, Diana. We have a lot to talk about."
"I don't—"
Mirabel lifted a hand to stop whatever words were about to leave her lips. In a sharp turn of events, she pulled open her desk drawer and dropped a stack of papers on the table. The letters. "After that little stunt you pulled, coming here and bringing these? You better sit the fuck down."
When I turned to face my sister, her eyes were screwed shut in what might have been pain, but I knew was guilt. She sat down. "This is sick, Mirabel, even for you."
Mirabel grinned, manicured fingers twirling her dainty gold necklace between fingertips. "Darling, if I'm sick, then you are absolutely depraved because you and I know why you're here."
Hurriedly, Diana whispered a plea. "Don't."
There were many reasons why I wasn't screaming and crying and telling Diana all the vile things I thought about her. It was because I could see it then. They were all so alike. My dad, Hugh, Mirabel and Diana. They had all taken something beautiful within their palms, shook it up like dice, and spilled it everywhere like poison. My realisation that the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree at all was setting my thoughts ablaze.
There was no rose-coloured lens blurring my vision anymore. "I'm going to be sick."
Mirabel leaned forward and picked up the first letter from the pile and slowly fingered it open. "This was the first one." She toyed with the piece of paper and lifted her eyes to lock with mine. "Read it."
"Mirabel, don't make her do this." Diana interjected.
Venom sprayed like gas throughout the room when I shot a glance at her. "You don't get to sympathise with me now. The time for reckoning was over the moment you wrote your first letter."
Even Hank, from the other side of the office, felt the ice in my words and cleared his throat.
I glanced down at the letter.
Dear Mirabel,
I can't pretend that I'm okay anymore.
Like someone had spilled ice all over me, a shiver racked my body and I let go of the letter.
It was actually Diana who had written the first letter. For the first time since seeing her, I was afraid. Her hatred for me had been so intense and vicious that she had wished for this from the beginning. What terrified me more was the fact that the date on the letter was dated a mere month after the incident.
I felt heat flush my nose and eyes as I searched Diana's eyes desperately. "It has been years since you and Mirabel began talking?"
Diana stood up, avoiding my confrontation. "This can't be legal." Her fingers shook as she toyed with her necklace.
What a fucking pussy.
"Legal?" Mirabel sounded incredulous. "You're not the one to talk about legality, Diana. Nothing you've done in the last five years has been legal." She shot a wary glance at me. "Besides, murder isn't legal either. Yet, it seems like we're all getting away with it."
It was the way she said 'we're all getting away with it' that made me panic because all included her. "What did you do to Frank?"
Hank spoke this time. In a way that resembled a man who had won the lottery. "Do you really want to know what you've done to him?" His eyes were in slits, and a smirk teetered against his stubbled jaw. "Cause it might break your heart."
Jesus. If I had tried to sound adamant, I was failing because I sounded exactly like I felt. Terrified. "Frank didn't do anything to anyone. Please, leave him out of this—!"
No one else needed to get hurt.
"Frank was necessary for this to work, darling. It was a little sacrifice that went a really long way." Mirabel shrugged. She was speaking in riddles to someone who didn't understand the concept. "I'm only doing my part of the ultimatum."
Diana had the nerve to sound confused. "Ultimatum?"
Mirabel rolled her eyes. She leaned back on her table, exposing more skin as she crossed her legs. She pulled out a cigarette again and placed it between her red lips. "Mm. Don't act so surprised. You know I had to pull some strings to get someone to want to do this Project."
Her voice had garnered a combination of fear and worry. "What strings?"
She waved her hands about as she spoke, as though what she was saying wasn't the most depraved and inhumane thing I had ever heard her say. "I and Nicholas needed something, and Frank was the common denominator. Honest to G-d, it wasn't easy finding him and convincing him that he needed to do this but eventually, I did."
My hands had begun to tremble so hard that I had to ball my hands into fists from shaking alongside it. "W-What are you saying?"
"I'm saying Frank was killing two birds with one stone."
Diana looked like she did the night I shot my mother in the chest. She too had heard what I had heard and was reacting in a much more aggressive manner than I. "We didn't agree on—"
Mirabel cut her off in a jagged slice. "Oh, please. Diana, I was depressed and desperate." She paused for emphasis. "Does it look like I could've given a fuck what we agreed on?"
"You told me Frank wasn't a part of this."
"Shit happens." Hank said, impatiently.
"What are you talking about?" I hissed, finally finding the courage to interject. My brain was acting on its own accord, zoning in and out in an attempt to remain calm. It was a wonder how I hadn't passed out from shock or fear of what was coming.
Both of them froze, turning to give me looks. One was of caution, and the other was full of malicious thrill. The thrill seeker spoke first. "I almost forgot how oblivious you are in this."
Mirabel beckoned to Hank. "Give her the file."
I had come to realise that whatever Mirabel said, Hank did with so much eagerness. I wondered what kind of hold she had on him. She was probably manipulating him too. She was the unsuspecting psychopath after all.
Hank walked briskly, opening a cabinet close to the door and pulling out the same manilla envelope I had seen a few days earlier. The memory came to me so easily that I remembered that I had only been in SSCD for a week or so. How could I have been so easily beaten down in a few days? I winced at my weak sense of self.
Even Zimbardo's experiment had taken a little longer to convince teenagers that they were prisoners.
When Hank thrust the paper in my face, my hands didn't leave my beating heart. I wasn't sure I wanted to see it after all.
"Page 3." Mirabel muttered. Diana sat silently, her eyes glued to the top of her feet. "Show it to her."
Hank opened the file and dropped it on the table, revealing to me the long list of victims that Banshee had accumulated in a short period of time. Unwillingly, my eyes scanned the lengthy list which was longer than I remembered. Immediately, I was deeply disgusted by the fact that I had trusted a man who could take the life of dozens.
Without an inkling of remorse.
And then, I saw it.
- The death of Maximilian T. Fisher, aged 22.
- The death of Camilla Rose T. Fisher, aged 26.
- The death of Winston Lewis T. Fisher, aged 9.
- The death of Amarni Hope T. Fisher, aged 4.
And I physically had to hold on to the seat to keep from fleeing. I wanted to vomit. The bile in my throat rose up to the my mouth and I pushed away from my chair to heave into a potted plant close to Hank.
Sweet Frank. He had done nothing to deserve this. Banshee had killed his entire family. His little girl. I now understood his motivation, his drive and his hatred for Banshee. His sadness on hearing that I trusted Banshee more than him must have been devastating. I did this to him.
It was Hank who had to pull me away from the potted plant that I sobbed into. I watched as Mirabel remained indifferent to my despair and stubbed her cigarette on the wood of her table.
Realisation had dawned on me. "The ultimatum." I felt an overwhelming amount of grief for the man who had been nothing but nice to me all this time. "Frank was his ultimatum."
"So you are smarter than I thought."
It was fairly easy to connect the dots considering Frank was the only one of his family who had survived the brutal murder. But was Banshee really so sadistic that he would do all this to kill Frank too? I felt so, so, so angry for letting myself fall into his trap.
Their trap.
My anger had become a living thing and it was taking up a lot of space in the room. The tears in my eyes overflowed, like a tsunami with a death toll and I focused my flood on one person. "This is your doing."
"Ari—"
"You knew." The words were tight in my throat. "When I was crying myself to sleep because I couldn't get over their deaths. When I cut myself because therapy couldn't work for me. When I told you about my nightmares. When I showed you the advert you had probably planted in my bag. When I gushed over Dante. When you told me you loved me. When I cried on the fucking phone with you. When you came to see me, Diana. When you slept in my room...Jesus Christ...I—" I clutched at the sharp pain that twisted in my chest. "I don't know what to say to you."
Diana couldn't look at me if she tried. The room suddenly felt as though a dark cloak had landed over it. The only thing one could hear was my erratic breaths.
Silent seconds passed.
Then, in a tight voice, she managed to say— "I've spent years wishing you had died that night."
The knife she had put in my heart twisted deeper.
"We would've been fine if you'd just shut your fucking mouth."
I gasped in shock. She was delusional. It was sickening to see the way their deaths still affected her even after years had ran by. It revealed to me how much emphasis she laid on holding on to the pain of her past. That pain had morphed into something that might have physically altered her brain.
"We would've been fine if you hadn't killed them all."
The lie had left her lips so easily that I could've believed her if I didn't know my truth. This was worse than anything Hugh had ever done. At least, Hugh was real.
"Why are you lying like this?" I sobbed.
She leaned forward, as though we were the only two in the room. Her eyes were no longer sad. Not at all. Her eyes looked as though she were rewatching that night over and over again whenever she blinked. She looked at me like she hated me.
I was her Lucifer, as she was mine.
She whispered. "If it wasn't for you, Aria, they'd all be alive. That is not a lie."
___
AN: Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah!