Page 101 of If Looks Could Kill
She released my wrist and attacked my face with clawed hands, scratching at my eyes.
That one instant’s release let me throw my weight backward. I stumbled back and tripped on something. I fell hard on the floor, landing painfully on my tailbone. Miss Stella fell with me, crying out as her bird-weight body landed atop mine. Even as I fell, I managed to turn my head away, away. My head fell back and hit the floor, and my eyes flew open.
I found myself face-to-face with the decapitated stone head and terrified face of the pimp and brothel strongman Joe.
She’d killed him. Like a Medusa from ancient times, she had turned him to stone.
Look at me,she’d said. If I’d clung to any doubt, now it was clear. She would kill me, too.
God, save me.
I clamped my eyes shut once more and heaved a disoriented Miss Stella off me, then stumbled to my feet and over more debris—more heads, more bodies—till I found the wall, the door, the stairs, and the downstairs entryway, and raced away to the sound of an old woman imprecating curses upon me for depriving her of her beloved daughter—herdaughter!— Pearl.
Pearl—Evil Incarnate(Monday, December 3, 1888)
Pearl finishes her toast and coffee, leaves a nickel on the diner counter, then heads for the coat rack. She dons her coat and reaches, out of habit, for her poke bonnet—that screaming advertisement for the Salvation Army—then remembers it’s gone. She catches sight of a light gray shawl hanging on a nearby peg. She takes it. That’s stealing, says a voice inside her head.
I know, she tells the voice. I’m getting good at it.
Of course, having your first robbery targets passed out in an empty train car, after you’ve stunned them, makes embarking on this new career easy. It’s one big slippery slope from there.
That’s wicked, says the voice inside her head.
Not really, she tells the voice. I didn’t stun them to rob them. I just wanted to be left alone. I needed a safe place to stay the night. It was a crime of opportunity.
She’d found enough cash in their pockets to rent a decent little hotel room. This could be her regular racket.
The shawl’s owner wears perfume. Something French and sinful. Good. If she is Evil Incarnate now, she might as well enjoy herself.
She drapes the shawl over her head and steps out onto the street.
The light blinds her. That, and the freezing cold. She shades her eyes. Her vision is different now. Swirls of purple warmth around chimneys and doorways catch her eye. Hot puffs of breath are coral-colored until they disappear. Here and there, little pink buttons glow faintly through canvas-clad chests. The heat signatures of human hearts. So many New Yorkers, so very cold. Even their hearts are cold.
At the corner, she looks uptown, then down.
Uptown, she thinks. Go uptown. The pull tugs like a cart rope.
Instead, she turns toward downtown and starts walking.
Something wants her at Tenth Street. She wants to be ready for it. Which means, first, practice. She needs to know her power. She needs test cases worthy of her wrath.
She crosses one street after another, making her way through the din of New York City at midday. She moves, a monster among masses, unseen and unknown.
We work at punishing the men. The men who hurt women.It sounds so juvenile, put that way, but now that her mind is more her own, should her mission be any different? She glances about at men moving through the throng. Which of you hurt and kill women? she wonders. Which of you do not?
There it is. The alleyway. She remembers it. This is the place. She turns down the path and finds the rusty fire escape where they’d waited before.
She strides down the alley toward the concealed door. Voices seep out through walls.
This is where those who hurt Cora and Freyda work. They are the monsters, in here. Violators. Traffickers, growing rich off the bodies of women and girls. They prey upon female flesh. Now they are her prey.
If she is fallen, if she is Evil Incarnate, and an offense to God, then by God, she can wield her evilrighteously.
Meeting George Frischmann Briefly(Monday, December 3, 1888)
A man—it hardly matters who, but in this case, his name was George Frischmann—emerged into the alley from a secretive establishment situated in the rear ground-floor level of a building that was, on its more legitimate side, a Persian rug showroom and warehouse. He looked to the left and to the right, and was relieved to find himself alone in the alley.
George had long ago learned that interludes such as the one he had just spent could sometimes alleviate the monotony of his life as a shipping tariff clerk who found the routine of work and family uninspiring. Some days, one’s faculties and one’s experiences cooperated to bring amusement. Unfortunately, this was not one of those days. Still, such is life, and in the market exchange he’d just transacted, part of what his money bought was the freedom to leave his mortification behind on his way out the door.
