Adept
By Shawn James
I just adore that old Spanish proverb. That’s why I came to Pleasant Acres tonight--to revel in the thawing of a dish that time had transformed into a glacier of forgetfulness. Tonight she’ll look into my icy blue eyes and her memory will awaken like a ravenous bear after a long winter’s sleep. She’s forgotten the pain she caused, but I can’t and won’t. Not ever.
Her name was Suzanne, and in my youth I adored her. She was my first love and my last. We were to be wed, have children, grow old in each other’s arms; until my twenty-first birthday, when she told me that she loved another, a rich, handsome bastard named Greg Masters, who had promised her a big house in the city, a jaguar in the driveway, and three weeks in Cuba every February. She spit my love back in my face like rotten meat and swallowed his gold-plated hook in a single gulp. Before I had crawled into my third bottle of Jack Daniels she had eloped and was living in a half-million-dollar condo with her new husband.
I was too full of rage to just lie back and let the booze wash the pain away. My anger exploded outward, as anger so often does when a wounded heart is the catalyst. I hated everything: my parents for giving me life, this world for placing love at the apex of existence, even God for daring to teach me that life was also pain. Eventually, though, I narrowed all that lovely malevolence down to a single beam of intense hatred--Mrs. Suzanne Masters, the source of my interminable agony, the fount of my night and my damnation.
I fantasized about manipulating the financial downfall of Greg Masters, and a penniless and desperate Suzanne crawling to me for help, or destroying her entire family with a well-placed car bomb, while leaving her alive to suffer the agony of loneliness. I even toyed with the idea of a series of killings, targeting women that looked like her, petite, small-breasted blonds with tiny, up-turned noses, but that seemed a little too sociopathic for my liking. Besides, killing Suzanne look-alikes would not hurt Suzanne, and hurting Suzanne became paramount, the sole constant in all my fantasies of vengeance. The only option I never seriously considered was killing her. Not that I wouldn’t love to see her heart in my fist, but death was too mundane, too . . . final for Suzanne Masters, you see. I wanted her to suffer unending pain, as I suffered, not pain that fizzled out with the snap of a neck or a bullet through the brain. And so I watched unseen and unfelt from the shadows while Suzanne’s life blossomed with wealth and love and happiness, until I found the answer in the words of advice my mother had once given me: “Go back to school; an education can get you anything.”
The old bitch was right: I can hear Suzanne returning to me now.
There was only one course of study open to a young man as steeped in malice as I was: the Black Arts. I apprenticed under a Haitian Voodoo princess, then journeyed to China and Africa to investigate their ancient witch cults. In Europe, I studied the darkest, most powerful of the grimoires and other unholy books of Black Magic, books bound by spells of hiding and protection so strong that only the gifted Adept can ever locate them, let alone understand them. And when my studies were complete and I had mastered the Arts, I returned home and bought a little cottage up the road from the estate where Suzanne Masters now lived with her husband and two children. For the next three years I refined my potions and incantations while I watched her and waited for the right moment.
Last Saturday night it came.
Suzanne Masters’s death in an automobile crash was not by any art of mine. In twenty years I had not recanted the belief that killing her would be insufficient revenge, but it was I who stole into the funeral home early Monday morning, when the crowds of mourners had returned home to their tear-soaked beds; it was I who lifted the coffin lid and gazed upon her broken face, parted her torn lips, and spilled into her dead mouth the precious fluid that was the culmination of my many years of research.
Now I stand here with the moonlight glinting off a long row of gravestones, luxuriating in the screams of terror seeping up through the earth. As her broken fingers punch through the icy soil, I drop to my knees and sweep the black earth away from her face, clearing her mouth. She gasps for breath, her cracked and shattered teeth chattering with the cold, then looks into my icy blue eyes, knows who I am and what I want, and her screams become shrill.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” I tell her with a smile. My hands wrap around her broken neck and crush the new breath from her, and my pain abandons its old home in the pit of my stomach and floats away in the night air like a beautiful butterfly. As she takes her last breath for the second time in less than a week, I take a vial of my special elixir from my pocket and pour another dose into her gaping mouth. “See you again tomorrow night, my darling,” I whisper.
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