romantic wishes' Tome: Lamia

[shibrogane]

The summoner slept, and for that, Lamia was glad.

Oh, of course she hated the summoner. What demon didn't hate the one who pulled them from the abyss and forced them to do their will? Perhaps the ones who had fallen by accident, like Sofiel the librarian. But oh, Lamia hated Jezebel with all her heart, and the weeks where the girl didn't awake were the best.

With a mind to destroy it, she opened the diary at the child's bedside and looked at the first page; about to rip it out, she stopped and stared at it for a moment.

Then, she began to read...  

[shibrogane]

the message

Totally pointless to tell those of you who don't know me and don't want to, I'm horrible at remembering appointments. No, really. At my level, there's really no point in saying that I'm just horrible at remembering that I have to be somewhere at such and such a time. It's better to just aggressively let everyone know I am really, really, really without equal in the realm of forgetting what time it is and that I have to be somewhere at a certain time.

But, you say, how do you get along in life? Aren't you late all the time?

Oh... well... duh.

But that's not the point of me keeping this log. What is the point? That something of what I'm about to attempt may go wrong, and if I do, I fully intend to honor my contract with Mr. Fauste. I will give this diary to him in lieu of allowing him to observe me any farther.

To tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about Mr. Fauste, or his compatriot Mhin.

What I care about is revenge.

Revenge for everything that anyone's ever done to hurt me, and believe me, there's been a lot.

Mother, for belittling me and blaming everything wrong with me on Dad when there's nothing wrong with me.

Mr. Fugue, for attempting to tell me that I will never be anything more than what I am; for David and Daniel, for stealing my books, for telling me I look like an old granny; for anyone who's ever hurt me or ever planned to hurt me or ever will hurt me.

That's all I care about.

Oh. I almost forgot.

In the event that anyone, besides Mssrs. Fauste and Mhin read this tome, I should at least introduce myself.

I'm the world's most pathetic student, the girl who will die like a dog. I used to say my name was Jess, and I was called by that name, but it's not the name that will go on my tombstone- an artifact that will hopefully appear soon.

My name is Jezebel Wicoreszek-Disrael.

Good night, and good nightmares.  

[shibrogane]

the high priestess

Lamia remembered the stories she'd heard through the demon grapevine, passed from Banshee to Sofiel and then to herself.

Her name was Jezebel- “not exalted”. Or, if she felt confident that day, it meant “where is my God?” But she was never confident, therefore always not exalted. Oh, how she longed for power, for the secret knowledge that she knew rested just beyond her reach. She came to the shop of Edward Fauste like a supplicant, head bowed and eyes to the floor, and she read books, learning the dark arts sitting in a small, cramped aisle in a shop where dust danced in spirals in the light from the windows. It turned the draperies soft in the glow.

--

Sure, my name's Jezebel. Weird name, right? I mean, what kind of parent names their kid "not exalted"? I think she also might have named me after a character in a manga who ends up getting killed protecting his father. Well, I hope she wasn't trying to say anything about me. Because...

Well, never mind.

See, the thing about the name Jezebel is, it has two meanings. The first, "not exalted"... The second, "Where is my God?" And even though I normally think it means "not exalted" I know that second meaning's there, and I like to think that's Dad's meaning.

You know, the thing I really want out of all this is power. The kind of power I can't have, right? The kind that sort of hovers just outside your reach, where you can see it, taste it. I want that kind of power. I want to be able to kick a** and take names, and not care who I'm offending by doing it. I want the power to tell the ones who've hurt me to...

GO ******** YOURSELVES

and not care that they're going to beat me up later and probably break my ******** glasses, while I'm at it. I have contacts. Mother just doesn't like it when I wear them. She says I look like Dad, which makes her sad. Well, bloody good for her. I don't care.

That's why I went to Daemonolgie.

I'm not particularly proud of how I went there. I was like a supplicant before a god, you could say; my head bowed, shoulders all slumped, eyes to the floor, like he was the proverbial emperor and I but a serf. For the first few days, I didn't even talk to him, I just sat in one of the cramped aisles with a book on my knees. The Goetia, or the Key of Solomon, first. I didn't find what I wanted, so I moved on to the Secret Book of Tuesdays. Nothing there, either, and then I found it.

The Book of the Angel Raziel.

I guess you could say I'm the closest thing to an apprentice Edward Fauste will ever have. He made it clear that he knew I was only fourteen and he didn't approve of me taking this action, but he still helped out. I guess that's why I'm trusting to his recommendations of alterations to the ritual. I trust him. Which kind of sucks, because I really want to hate him.

But I sat there in those aisle and read the damn books and collected the damn materials. And when my head hurt too much from all the thoughts just a bit outside the door, I stopped and watched dust motes dance in the light from the windows. Contrary to popular belief, when the drapes- heavy, velvet things- are pulled, it looks just like an antique book shop in that hell hole.

I loved that place.

And when I was ready, I borrowed the book for an evening and went home. It was time to summon Lamia.  

[shibrogane]

the lovers

With her hands on the skull of the priest who leapt from a building, Jezebel summoned a demon. Her words hissed out with her breath, muffled by the dust on the curtains. This would work. It had to work. She could feel the psychic current building up, just as the man at the shop said she would. White tendrils of hair whipped around her face as she told her unnamed demon her dream. Why she summoned her. As she spoke, she could hear a sibilant female voice. Her demon was exactly as she'd expected.

Her demon was Lamia.

--

Okay, so everything is all set up, right? The Seal of Solomon, drawn in my own blood- and that hurt, it really did, and I think I might have fainted for a little while I watched my own blood fall into the silver bowl. Oh, have you ever done that? Well, don't. It's really gross, and nearly impossible to stop the bleeding. I guess I probably should have listened to Mr. Fauste, who said to just cut the palm...

But whatever. It's drawn. And God, blood is warm, and I don't know that it was okay to do this on my pale pink carpet. Well, I can say that I don't know where it came from. Mother will believe me, because she's stupid, and I am not. But that's besides the point. At least I didn't cut my left arm or I'd never be able to write this, and then there'd be no point to all that ranting yesterday and last week.

I've got the skull of the priest who committed suicide right here, next to my hand as I write. I think he leapt off a building. I looked for an obituary, but wouldn't you know, I couldn't find one. Anyway, it's pretty effed up. There's a hole, right over where I guess his ear would have been, but otherwise it's all in one piece. It was hard to get, but I've got it, and that's what matters.

So anyway, all that's left to do is cry. That shouldn't be too hard, I just have to think of all the injustices I can remember. I'm such a damn crybaby, just ask anyone. That's why they tease me so much. I hate it!

Mother, Mister Fugue, David, Daniel, Priest Zaphiel, the children in Nigeria, SUVs, cold and dark places, my visions, the curse from Mother's family, the way my father is so absent, but of course I don't hate Daddy...

--

"Daddy, I love you forever! Come back to me!---"

--

The rest of the entry about her summoning was illegible, but Lamia knew how that went anyway, so well it seemed that it was burned on the back of her eyelids just like the faces of her dead children.

The sight of the white-haired girl-child, her soft hands wrapped about a skull with a shattered hole, drapery, the blood in the silver chalice. She could still taste the iron on her tongue. How well prepared she had been, a Circle of Solomon upon the floor, salt in the skull where the hole wouldn’t let it spill. She remembered the burning of the salt on her face. She had given Lamia the contract, ordered her to sign, salt burning her skin. She saw the child's name, Jezebel, the Philistine queen eaten by dogs. And then she signed it, and they were bound.  

[shibrogane]

justice

Jezebel set her new powers on the cruel boy at school. She gloried in the pain, laughing when he slipped and cracked his head on the diving board. How glorious was her demon! How magnificent was it to know that no matter what she did, no one could catch her? How could anyone resist the tingling under their skin that came with true power that bore no restrictions? Instead of running her laps in gym, she made a thunderstorm and danced outside in it, hands raised, as the delicious power ran down from the tips of her fingers to her bare toes.

--

The power is every single thing I thought it would be.

You might describe the use of this power as a continual orgasm. Well, I've never had one, but what I feel when I use this power matches up the descriptions in the books and the songs pretty well.

Today I got Daniel. He deserved it, all of it, for all the black eyes and the broken ribs. And no matter how well he recovers, he's never going to be able to fix that one searing probe. The one that broke his ability to do arithmetic? Which, I happen to know, is his favorite thing to do. What right did a math geek have to pick on me, when all I ever did was read? Well. I got him. Slipped and cracked his head open and fell off the diving board and no one the wiser that it was me.

Me.

I did it.

I pushed Daniel off the diving board and cracked open his skull.

And I loved every damn second of it.  

[shibrogane]

the devil

Lamia remembered asking Jezebel once if she never felt a pang of grief for her actions, and the response she'd gotten had chilled her to the bone.

“I can stop any time, so I keep going. Does that make any sense? This power that I have now, it is so strong and I can’t help but notice it and honor it. I feel the pleasure of power trembling beneath my skin and shivers down my spine from the sheer strength of the power that you give me. I can kill them with a thought now. There is nothing there that can stop me. Nothing at all. So, because I can stop, I keep going. Even though I see frightening things, I see more things that are beautiful.”

--

They're all gone, all except for one, and I can tell you how they died and I'll laugh while I write it out here, so Mr. Fauste will know that I did exactly as I intended. You were right to fear what I might do, Mr. Fauste. Two hundred thousand million percent correct. Because with all this power, who wouldn't become a monster? I only followed the most natural path.

Everyone thinks Lucifer is the devil.

No.

I am the devil. The people who are sick and tired of being tred upon, we're all the devils! We're the ones you should fear, not the strong ones. We're the ones who, given opportunity and strength of conviction and a lack of fear, will stab you in the back and spit on your dead corpse.

We're the monsters, and no one even realizes we are there.

I killed Mister Fugue first, I made him shut himself in his car with the exhaust backed up and the windows rolled all the way to the top. The car was running and he suffocated, but before he died I made sure he knew why he was dying. His last words were: FORGIVE ME. But sorry, Mr. Fugue. I won't forgive you. I don't forgive.

Then I got Daniel. I didn't kill him, but he'll suffer just as much. What career can he have now? What career can he enjoy when the mere thought of numbers gives him a splitting migraine and nausea? He doesn't know why, but I do. That's enough.

David next. He's dead. That one was an accident, but I don't care. His blood staining that half-pipe, the vertical ramp? Beautiful, like looking at the classic Masks and Reaper. There's an artistry to the way they die and I love every second of it.

Everyone else, I don't even remember their names: strangulation, blunt force trauma, stab wounds, fire, suicide, falling, so many ways to kill and I've done them all, oh, I've done them all, because haven't I told you?

I'm the devil himself.

There's just one left, the one that'll send me to a deeper hell than even the ninth, the one that'll make a demon of me when I die, and that's Mother. And believe me, Mr. Fauste. You don't know what I'm going to do to Mother. You can't even imagine it.  

[shibrogane]

the moon

Lamia watched without concern as the child thrashed in her sleep, kicked her sheets away and clawed at the mattress of her bed. Her lip split and bled as she bit at it, and she wondered what Jezebel saw in her nightmares. She had been around the child long enough to know the signs of her horrible visions. Not that she was attached- Jezebel was always more vindictive when she wasn’t feeling well, and that always occurred after these nightmares. Reflectively, she smiled. Was it the past, or the future? Lamia crouched in the corner, waited for her to wake up.

--

I might have miscalculated.

No. I can't have miscalculated; that's impossible. The doctors said I had inexhaustible room for growth in the psychic sector of my brain. Inexhaustible means that I can't have messed up. There is nothing I could have added to that contract. There is nothing!

But those dreams...

Yesterday was my fifteenth birthday.

Am I going insane?

No. I have to complete the contract. I have to.  

[shibrogane]

the sun

Sometimes she was so confused. The past and the future mixed themselves together in her head, making her sick and miserable. “I don’t know,” she would shout, fingernails ripping red gouges in her pale skin. “I don’t know,” she whispered, falling to her knees. Had that already happened? Or was it yet to come? No, she thought, no, it’s happening right now, I’m going insane. Jezebel turned her head to see the dust dancing in swirling patterns in the light from a filthy window. “Oh god,” she whispered. “I’m going insane.” Or had that already happened? She could not remember.

And Lamia laughed.

--

I... I can't remember...

I was going to do something. I know it. But... it's so far into the future... or the past... I don't know. I don't know.

God, help me.

I forgot. I don't believe in God...

I have to make use of this time.

Do you know how agonizing it is

to just sit here and watch the time pass by in little grains of sand? I don't even know whether this is the past or the future or the present. It's gotta be one of them. It has to be. Those are the only options. The only options. She tries to confuse me. But I won't let her.

I know what she's thinking. I'm


not lying.

I know what they're all thinking right now, I know

they all hate me.

I can't think straight.  

[shibrogane]

JUDGEMENT

Edward stood in the room, stared at the demon sitting defiantly in the window. He had wondered why Jezebel hadn't come to meet him for the appointment to record Lamia's growth and changes. Now it was obvious. “It’s hardly my fault she’s comatose,” Lamia said. “You shouldn’t have sold her the materials.”

“You gave her too much power,” he accused. “She burned through her mind.”

The demoness laughed. “I augmented her own natural abilities. This would have happened anyway, it‘s only more immediate.”

He frowned at the demon. “Now your contract will never be fulfilled. She can’t release you from it.” The demon’s closed eyes flew open with a hiss. But Edward had won; he turned and left.

--

I hear the camera shutter go off- or do I just think I heard it?

No. I could feel his arm on my shoulder, could see his dark hair as it tickled my cheek.

This was real

this was here

this was now...

but how many times before had I thought that, and been wrong...

Even the demon outside the small side room Carlisle and I stood in had once been nothing more than the hallucination of a sick mind. This could be, too.

I start to hope, and then I wake up.  

[shibrogane]

the world

Sometimes at night, this place frightens her, makes her shake under the sensible white coverlet with her hands pressed over her ears. But she's better during the day, doesn't hear such loud shrieks in her mind, is free of the fear other patients feel. So she stays, listens to the night-time moans and sees the nightmares, and watches the futures of the others. Jezebel sees their deaths but never her own, which is the only one she is curious to know. Lamia coils about the base of her bed, pushes away the men who come with glittering needles and glasses of thick liquid that fall down her throat like slime. Even though night is probably the safest time to be alive in this asylum she is still terrified, seeing burning eyes in a skeletal face and she screams out.

Then Lamia lets them come.

--

I'm pretty sure that once, Jezebel saw her own death. That would have been the thing to drive her over the edge, I suppose. Knowing how and when you're going to die? Going insane to lose that memory doesn't seem to be too bad.

But I'm also pretty sure that the power had something to do with it. Her powers, mainly focused in telekinesis and telepathy, were not meant to be so completely expanded. She wouldn't have seen her death if she hadn't made that contract.

Poor child.  

[shibrogane]

the wheel of fortune

She lay in the grass, hands tucked behind her head. Her nice white dress had become the green of the hill she had rolled her way down moments before, but she didn't really mind. He sat not quite and arm's length away, and since he had walked down the hill, he didn't have any grass stains on his nice clothes. "You're going to go back," he said, and it wasn’t a question. "You know you could come stay with me. You haven't been sleeping well, and I'm…" Left unspoken were the words he dearly desired to say to her.

Her eyes were closed, which she believed made it easier to vocalize her thoughts. "I see many frightening things there."

He leant forward, bracing himself by his elbows. "So come stay with me. I have the room." As if in deep water, she reached up to the deep black sky as if she could grip the brilliant stars above her head. As if she thought she could touch the moon. And maybe she did think she could, he didn’t know. It wasn't his business, even though he dearly wished it were.

"Even though so many things I see are frightening, I see many beautiful things too… You know this, I've said this before." It occurred to him that she might be talking to something else. She saw things he didn’t, all the time. He worried, but since she wasn’t crying, he didn’t tell her so. "I can stop any time I want, so I keep going. Does that make sense?"

"Sounds like an addiction," he said.

She shrugged, said: "Maybe it is." As she got up and brushed at the grass stains (he could have told her they wouldn’t come off), he opened his mouth to speak, but by the time he'd coordinated what he wanted to say in his head, she was gone, bare feet turning greener as she tripped up the hill.

Even knowing she wouldn't, couldn't hear it, he said it anyway.

--

Jezebel was weeping. Her demon watched without concern, didn't ask what she was crying about. Lamia just let her go until a nurse noticed, and then she drifted back behind the TV.

"Don't cry, Jess," the nurse Anna said. "Please don't. Was it another nightmare?"

"I'll never find him." She said it with the utter conviction of the completely mad. "I know where he is but I don't know how to get there."

Lamia chuckled, and Jezebel began to scream until someone came and sedated her.  

[shibrogane]

the chariot

The world swayed under her feet. She was unsteady enough without the gale winds, but there the winds were, jerking tears out of her eyes and snatching her breath away. Even her jacket flapped in the wind, the collar slapped her face and left red welts. But her face was numb, so she didn't really care. Jezebel set herself in front of the doors to the asylum; a nurse opened the door and pulled her in, even though she really wanted to stay out. No inmate was permitted to be out where they might hurt themselves. She had been outside when the wind had come, tearing at the roots of the very trees, and was actually the last to come in. As she was hustled back to her room, she thought of the creature all in black that she had seen, and tried to relate it to the nurse.

But he ignored her. Well... she wasn't responsible, then.  

[shibrogane]

the hanged man

Waiting at the airport, he saw her standing a group of white-clad women. Her hands were bandaged and he couldn't help but think he could have done it better, so she would still be able to use her hands- which, he imagined, were pianist's hands like his. But he'd not seen them close up since the day she was born, and perhaps once at a court procedure when Emmeline was telling the judge why he shouldn't be allowed to go near his own child.

His poor child. Vanille wanted so badly to run to her and hold her close. It was torture of the most basic kind, he thought bitterly, to deny a man all access to his child. To the flesh of his flesh, and blood of his blood; Vanille couldn't even imagine anything worse. Then she looked over to him, and he averted his gaze and hoped she hadn't recognized him.

"Daddy," she said, and her voice carried all the way across the busy airport. "Daddy, I love you." The white-clad women looked at him, and, perhaps recognizing him, hustled her away.

Poor Vanille, he thought angrily. Poor Vanille.

She thought it too.  

[shibrogane]

the empress

It's been two years.

I'm getting better. Sometimes I can even shut out the voices of the other inmates. Patients. They're in my head. And time passes more regularly. I lose bigger chunks than before, but it's okay.

They keep cutting my hair. It's finally to my collarbone again, which is a testimony to how long it's been since I lost a big chunk.

Don't you dare think for an instant that I'm ducking out. I'm going to finish it.

...I just want to be able to fully appreciate the murder when I commit it.  

[shibrogane]

Lamia put the book down and closed it, ran one nail down the leather cover, but didn't rip it. She didn't love Jezebel any more, but at least she understood her summoner a little more for it. Maybe even respected her a little. Anyone who held such vicious depths to them commanded a necessary respect from any who recognized they were there. Her words about being the devil himself were truer than she realized.

She slithered back behind the TV. Let her summoner rest for a while. There would be more time to torment her later.

The machines beeped softly and Lamia let herself be lulled into a deep sleep.