by Hadena James
Watchful
Martha sat in her car, listening to a CD. The song I’ll Make a Man Out of You from Disney’s Mulan was playing. Martha knew all the words and sang along as she watched. Mom was outside, sweat already beading up on her forehead. A little red-haired toddler was playing in a sprinkler while her older siblings played in a small above ground pool.
Dad was in the pool with the older kids, his bare chest well above the water line and edge of the pool. His hair was wet and he was smiling.
Martha wasn’t sure why he wasn’t at work. It was a Tuesday and men who wore suits to work, worked on Tuesdays. She had gotten there early enough to follow him to work, and instead, he played in a pool with his children. Probably strengthen their bond, so their deaths would have more power to summon dark powers.
The song changed and the song Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas came over the speakers. Martha leaned forward and skipped it, bringing up Why Should I Worry from Oliver & Company instead. She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel to the beat. It was a catchy tune, and before long, Martha was also nodding her head in time to the music as the words flowed from her mouth.
It was Tuesday. School was out for the summer, and Martha had heard mom telling someone that the older kids were leaving for summer camp today for a week. This meant Tuesday night was a good night to come back and visit with mom and dad.
The oldest child was a girl named Josephine. She was just starting puberty, Martha had seen Josephine and mom in a store, trying on the small sports bras that doubled as training bras. Josephine was just about the right age, then. If Martha didn’t intervene, Josephine wouldn’t live to progress from a training bra to a real one. She would be old enough that her innocence would appeal to He Who Walks in Darkness.
Even if Josephine was still breathing after the sacrifice, her soul would die. Martha was determined to keep that from happening. She sat in her car, with it running for another ten minutes, the CD changing from one Disney classic to another. She was going to save more children, because while Josephine was the oldest, it would only be a few years before the middle child Jerry was old enough to be sacrificed.
Martha went to therapy after leaving the cute little house on Conservancy Drive. She wasn’t quite sure what the point of group therapy was. She didn’t participate and she didn’t want to hear stories told by the others in group, weren’t they all miserable enough without feeding on each other’s pain? What was needed was action, not sitting around in a circle in uncomfortable chairs trying to pretend they weren’t all judging each other based on how serious they perceived each other’s experiences to be.
But group therapy was a condition of her probation, so she went and she pretended to listen, while thinking about how to save the next child from having to sit in the stupid folding chairs. Once in a while, she came away with good information, though, like Mr. and Mrs. Pelt who had let their neighbor rape their daughters. Lisa had sworn that once her parents found out about it, they had stopped it, but Martha doubted it. Satanic parents weren’t very good at protecting their children.
Therapy started and Martha had to stop herself from sighing loudly as one member began to talk. He had been sexually abused by an uncle. And every week, he’d talk, and he’d break down and cry, because he was weak. Martha could see why the uncle had picked him, he was effeminate and weak. If it hadn’t been his uncle, eventually it would have been someone else, because Mark might as well have tattooed “victim” on his forehead.
Martha had considered killing him, ending his perpetual cycle of victimization. But after thinking about it, she had rejected it because Mark wasn’t a parent and he wasn’t going to offer his children into servitude to a dark master. He’d just be victimized his entire life. When he got married, his wife would cheat on him, but Mark would love her anyway and if she bore him someone else’s children, even if Mark knew they weren’t his, he would love them like his own, because that was the kind of person he was. Mark was willing to let himself be a victim because it was easier than admitting to himself that he was weak and worthless.
Listening to Mark annoyed Martha. He was whiny and unwilling to accept any responsibility for his victimization. This was part of the reason Martha didn’t share in group, her experiences had forced her to come to terms with her own weaknesses, defeat them so that she could save others. The people in this group existed solely to whine about what had happened to them, never once considering that they could use the experience to save others from a similar fate.
They were all pathetic, preferring to relive their torments rather than move on and begin to be productive members of society. The therapist that ran the group had several deep scars on her face. She had spoken about her rape and recovery in group in the past, her rapist had been an ex-boyfriend. He had cut up her face and body to ensure that no one else would ever want to be with her, ensuring she would have to go back to him, because he was the only man that would ever want to look at her scars.
Her battle to come back and use her experience to help others had been inspiring to Martha. It was after hearing her story that Martha decided she could use her experience to stop other parents from hurting their children, robbing them of their innocence and their lives in order to please a detestable master that fed off the torture of children.
After group talk therapy ended, Martha grabbed an early dinner. It wouldn’t do to have a growly tummy while she was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Satanist tonight. She stopped at her favorite taco place. They served pork tacos that were topped with pico de gallo and sour cream. She ate in her car in the parking lot, listening to a Kidz Bop CD from 2003. She skipped forward to the song Hero. She didn’t normally like Chad Kroeger or Josey Scott, Kroeger always needed a hair cut and Scott had once been really fat, but regardless of their flaws, she loved the song and it surprised her that two men who were misfits could produce something that won awards.
She crumpled up her trash and put it in the passenger’s floor board of her car. It’d already been a full day, group therapy was three hours long, an unbelievably long time to sit and listen to people whine. She’d watched the house on Conservancy Drive for five hours before therapy. She’d had to stop and fill up her gas tank, some jerk at the pump across from hers had been rude regarding certain parts of her anatomy matching up with parts of his anatomy.
She quickly stopped by her aunt’s house and picked up a work uniform from one of the local pizza places that delivered. She kept it folded neatly in a bag and just grabbed the bag telling her aunt she was going to go out for the night with some of the girls from her therapy group.
Martha wasn’t entirely sure why she told her aunt where she was going all the time. Her aunt had assured her multiple times that it was unnecessary, Martha was an adult after all. She was supposed to have friends, friends were normal and friends not associated with her former cult were beneficial to her deprogramming and readjustment to society.
It was already dark when she arrived. Mom and Dad Satanist were in the kitchen, she could see them through the windows. The youngest girl was also visible through the windows. She was sitting at the table, moving something to and from her lips. Martha guessed the little girl was eating but couldn’t figure out what it was. She watched and waited for a long time. After what seemed like hours a light came on in one of the upstairs rooms. Martha changed shirts in the car, slipping into the pizza uniform shirt that announced her name was Amber. Then she grabbed her bag and headed to the door.
She knocked once. Dad opened the door. She explained she had a pizza delivery for this address. He insisted there was a mistake. Martha gave him the address and the receipt for the pizza. As she did, she pushed past him, entering the living room. She pulled a gun from within the bag, and pointed it at him.
“Don’t scream, don’t yell, or I will shoot you and whoever else comes into the room, do you understand?” She asked. He nodded, his eyes were wide and unblinking.
“Take what you want,” he told her. “There’s a
couple hundred dollars upstairs in my nightstand along with my Rolex.”
“This isn’t a robbery,” she told him. “Go into the kitchen.” She nodded towards it. He complied. It was amazing how threatening a family always made fathers compliant, even fathers raising children for the sole purpose of sacrifice. He dare not let the children be killed too early, it would displease the Dark Lord.
He sat down in one of the chairs she pointed to and she reached into her bag and brought out duct tape. She bound his forearms to the chair legs on either side of his body, covering about four inches of exposed flesh in the silver tape. As she did so, she hummed I’ll Make a Man Out of You from Disney’s Mulan. He struggled once he was secured to the chair, but she knew it was impossible for him to do much other than flip the chair over sideways, which would cause him to hit his head on the floor and possibly break an arm.
Mom came downstairs calling his name,. or what Martha assumed was his name, anyway.
“Mitch, where are you?” She called, making it a question. He grunted in response and Martha turned, facing the door, gun held steadily out in front of her. “Mitch?” She came into the kitchen, swinging the door nearly to the wall as she entered.
“Let’s be smart about this and sit,” Martha told her, indicating a chair near Mitch. “You don’t want to bring your daughter in here because you’re screaming and shouting. That would be bad for her.”
“We have some money, but not a lot. We don’t keep a lot of cash in the house, but I have some real diamond earrings and my engagement and wedding rings are valuable. Mitch has a Rolex. We won’t report any of it stolen, so you can pawn it all for more money. Please,” she said as she pulled at her rings and took a seat in the chair Martha was standing behind.
“Please what?” Martha snarled, pulling a long strip of duct tape free of the roll as soon as the woman had sat down. “Please don’t save your children from a fate worse than death with you horrible people?”
Martha went back to humming, this time deciding to hum Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as she secured mom to the chair the same way she had secured Mitch. She put duct tape over both of their mouths and put the gun back in the bag. Then she pulled out the syringe and bottle of drain cleaner. It was smeared with dark brown stains, not blood, but the acid. It turned brown as it dried on surfaces.
Martha set the drain cleaner bottle on the table. It was just a big white bottle with red lettering. The only reason anyone would ever know it was dangerous was because there was big skull and crossbones on it, in two different places, in the same bright red ink as the lettering. Martha left the bottle there and put the syringe next to it. Let them imagine what horrible things she was going to do to them. Mitch was stoic. A touch of sweat broke out on his forehead, but he didn’t cry or make noise or rock his chair like most fathers. He sat there and stared at the bottle, as if by not moving Martha might forget he was there.
Mom started to cry. Then there was a strange noise and Martha saw liquid spew from the top and bottom of the duct tape. There were a few more weird noises and Martha realized mom had vomited and would die if she didn’t take the duct tape off her mouth, die before Martha could punish her. Martha grabbed the woman’s head and jerked the tape off as fast as she could, forcing the woman’s head forward. Vomit spilled out onto the floor.
“Mom! Dad!” A boy’s voice was shouting. The boy was supposed to be gone. The older kids had left for camp. Martha grabbed the gun and stormed from the kitchen into the living room.
“Kelly, call the police there’s a woman with a gun!” His voice was already getting further away from her. As he ran toward into the dark outside.
Martha took the stairs two at a time. She had to find the little girl she’d left asleep upstairs. Below her a door slammed close. Martha turned and ran back downstairs. The front door was still shaking from where it had been slammed too hard to latch close and had rebounded of the wall. She could see there was a car idling outside directly in front of the house. The little girl was in the backseat. How was this possible? Martha fired two shots, both missed their target and the car sped off. Martha tucked the gun into the waistband of her pants and started running to her own car. Somehow, this brat had managed to come in, get his little sister and then distracted her by yelling for his mom and dad as he ran back to the car that had brought him here. It seemed impossible.
Lights were coming on all over the neighborhood. A man stepped from his front porch, identified himself as a sheriff’s deputy and told Martha to drop the gun. Martha ran. He didn’t chase her, she looked back over her shoulder a few times as she ran down the block. There was a bright flash that caused her to stumble just before she got to her car.
More flashes as she started the car and took off, someone’s cell phone was taking pictures of her. How had this all gone wrong? She ditched the car, in a lake, putting the gun in the glove compartment before setting a rock on the accelerator.
As she watched, the car got bogged down on the shore. The back wheels spun while the front wheels did nothing in the water. Great. Just great. Everything had gone wrong and she didn’t know why or how.
Ten
“Let’s go!” Gabriel was shouting through my hotel room door.
“Go where?” I shouted back, instantly awake.
“Open the door and I’ll tell you,” he responded. I pulled my boots on and picked up my overshirt, still pulling the shoulder holster over my arms.
“Where?” I asked, nearly breathless. It appeared I was the last to join the party, everyone else was in the hallway still pulling themselves together. Gabriel had his boots on, his Marshals’ hat under his arm, and his pants weren’t yet zipped or buttoned.
“We just had a 911 call, a kid walked into his house after getting sick at a friend’s house and found his parents duct taped to chairs and a woman in the kitchen with her. He went upstairs and got his little sister, and after she ran out to his friend’s mom’s car, he shouted for someone to call the police and ran to the car as well. But according to him, he walked in, realized something was wrong, got his sister out and then yelled for help only to try to lure the killer away. She didn’t hear him come in and get the little girl. The neighbor is a deputy with the Sheriff’s department. He went in and took off the duct tape and noticed a bottle of sulfuric acid drain cleaner on the kitchen table. He reported it with the 911 call, they called us.”
“Where’s the woman who was in the house?” I asked, moving quickly to the SUV.
“She got away, but the deputy’s wife followed her and got pictures of her car, I understand there’s a few pictures of her, but the face is blurry because both women were running.” Lucas answered.
“Oh thank God, I hate investigating, now we can just go kick down someone’s door.” I said getting into the back seat.
“It may not have been God that helped,” Fiona commented, tying her shoes.
“Then I’ll save my thanks for the universe.” I answered dryly, putting my seatbelt on. Xavier crawled into the third-row seating behind Fiona and me. It didn’t take us long to be on our way.
The neighborhood was nice. It was very much a two-car garage and white picket fence type of neighborhood. Not the kind you expect to have murders committed in. Especially not gruesome murders.
Except the homeowners were alive. There hadn’t been a murder. We had clues. We might have an identity. Wrapping up the case was assured now, it was just a matter of time. There were lots of flashing lights and people milling around one of the houses. Gabriel parked across the street and we all got out.
I milled around, ignoring the survivors and their children. I wasn’t a people person on the best of days. A few cops spoke to me, but most kept their distance. Kimberly came up to me after she had finished whatever she had been doing when we arrived.
“What do you think?”
“I think I was right.”
“Isn’t it a little early for an ‘I told you so’?”
“Never,” I answered quietly. “
And it really wasn’t an ‘I told you so,’ it was an ‘I told the FBI’ moment. You know, there’s something bothering me about this case that’s been bugging me since I first looked at it. It’s obvious that she punishes the mothers and the fathers are basically collateral damage. But she doesn’t disfigure the mother’s face.”
“Okay,” Kimberly said.
“I know I’m not a psychologist, profiler, or other fancy titled shrink, but to use acid as a murder weapon means she has a lot of rage that she is aiming at these women. She has been falling into the rabbit hole for a while now, the killings getting closer together, more acid was used in the murder at the temple, and yet, she isn’t disfiguring the faces of the parents. I feel like she should be.”
“You think she is symbolically killing her mother?” Kimberly asked.
“Yeah, something like that. But these women aren’t her mother and they don’t bare a strong enough resemblance to each other to pass as such. So why not disfigure the faces to remove the fact that they aren’t her mother?”
“I’m following you and I agree. Devolving explains this attempted murder, this couple isn’t Satanist. They belong to the Order of the Sun, it’s a newer religion that combines aspects of several ancient religions.”
“Is it a duality religion?”
“If you mean do they have a good vs. evil mentality, then yes, it is.”
“That is what I meant.” I nodded. “Do they use a demonic like deity for their main god?”
“Nope, they focus their worship around a pantheon they created from the mix with Sekhmet at the top.”
“It’s a matriarchal religion?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“With Sekhmet,” I frowned. “Sekhmet was a warrior goddess, hence having the head of the lioness. Even though she was considered the consort of Ptah, I believe it could be misconstrued as promoting violence.” My frown deepened.
