#Grudgegirl

Eighteen Years Ago ...

The toddler stared hard at the thing in front of her playpen. Her almond eyes blinked every few seconds as her three-year-old brain made perfect sense of what she was seeing. She gazed through a beam of sunlight, and she stood on her tippy toes; stretching out her hand through a pillar of light filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny white flecks drifting and churning in the warm air of the small Vancouver house.

Just beyond the sunbeam, no more than a few arm’s lengths away stood the thing she was looking at: another little grill dressed in a frilly cotton jumper with a torn sleeve. She clutched a battered Teddy bear tightly in her right hand, and she was shoeless. Dark red scabs and scrapes covered her feet, and the little girl’s toes were black; as if someone hand colored them in with a thick black crayon. The thing’s lifeless didn’t blink, not that it mattered much to the toddler in the playpen because she had seen this one before. A thick, pasty smear of redness clung to its scalp – it was so red, the toddler thought it might have been finger paint, which didn’t make any sense at all. Why would a little girl smear red finger paint on the side of her head? That was an open invitation to a spanking from an angry mommy.

The toddler remembered a picnic on weeks earlier because it was the first time she’d ever seen the thing now standing no more than a few feet way in the living room of her house. She remembered the sting of her mother’s hand on her bum after saying hello four times to something that her mother and father couldn’t see. But the toddler didn’t cry when her mother smacked her bottom. She just stared in wonder at the little girl in the torn jumper, and that only seemed to make her mother even angrier.

And the thing continued to visit the toddler. Once in a while it was nearly transparent, like one of the nighties her mommy wore to bed during those bedtimes when she listened to the sound of her mother moaning and calling out to God in Cantonese. Other times the thing flickered like static on the TV when thunder and lightning and rain battered the house so much the floors would shake. This time, it was just as any other little girl and to the toddler in the playpen, it simply made sense to want to play with her. Maybe they could both make something pretty with the finger paints.

Mommy! the toddler called out. I want to play with my friend!

The thing in the frilly jumper just stood there, and the toddler noticed for the first time that it wasn’t standing on the ground – it was floating.

Maybe, the toddler thought, she could learn how to float too.

They could float together – all through the house, or maybe even outside at the playground across the street.

Mommy! she shouted again, this time a little louder. The toddler wanted out of her playpen. Loud thumping filled the air as the toddler’s mother stomped down the hallway from the kitchen.

Jia Song, there is no shouting in this house unless it comes from me! the toddler’s mother barked. It’s not the time for your show yet, and I am making noodles. Play quietly!

The toddler began hopping on both feet as she pointed through the sunbeam. I want to play with her! she shouted back. I want to finger paint with my friend!

The toddler’s mother scowled. There is nobody in this room to play with, and my daughter will not have invisible friends. If you cannot see it, then it isn’t real.

This only made the toddler hop on both feet a little harder. She scowled back at her mother and shouted, She’s right here, mama! She’s wearing a jumper, and she has a Teddy bear. But her toes are black. Why are her toes black, mama?

The mother leaned into the playpen and gave the toddler a swat on the bum. There is nobody in this room except your mother and you, Jia. Stop telling lies.

The toddler didn’t cry out. Instead, a flash of anger rippled across her face, and she said, She is floating, mama. She can show me how to float. Listen, mama … listen! She can float!

The mother didn’t swat her daughter this time. She turned around to look at whatever her child was looking at and all that she was a wall along with a small bookshelf filled with picture books. The temperature in the room suddenly dropped as a shiver crept across the back of her neck.

A flash of light – like a camera flash. It was then she saw it – for the briefest of moments. Less time that it took to blink: the mother caught a glimpse of a little girl with a gaping wound on the side of her head. A smear of blood and a misshapen skull; dented by a hard object like a hammer.

The mother spun around and gazed down angrily at her daughter who smiled at the place where she’d seen … something.

It’s just my mommy, the toddler said to whatever she was looking at. Where is your mommy? Does she spank your bum hard too?

There is nothing to talk with, Jia! the mother snapped. Stop talking to shadows.

But she’s right there, mama! Can’t you see her! She has red finger paint on her head, and I won’t get any on me. I want to play!

The mother thrust her arms into the playpen and snatched the toddler up, digging her fingernails into the child’s armpits. But the toddler didn’t cry out. She just kept on smiling at her new friend. She smiled right past her mother’s fiery glare, and that only made her mother angrier.

Stop talking, Jia! she hissed as she shook her daughter. Whatever you saw isn’t real, and you will not talk to things that I cannot see!

The toddler’s smile dissolved as she cocked her head up to look into her mother’s eyes. She opened her mouth, and the voice that came out wasn’t a little child’s voice at all.

This one is an emissary. This one will speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.

The toddler slipped out of her mother’s grasp and fell to the floor. She scuttled across the carpet to where her friend stood only to see the little girl in the frilly jumper fade away. And the toddler started to cry.

Why, mama! she wailed. Why did you scare her away!

The mother didn’t bother to answer her angry child. She raced out of the room desperate to distance herself from her only child. A door at the end of the hallway slammed tight as the toddler sat down on the carpet where the little girl had once been. She turned to look at her Cookie Monster chalkboard. The magnetic alphabet letters slid across the green slate forming a word.

D-A-R-K-N-E-S-S

And the little girl smiled as she blotted out the sound of her mother wailing from the room down the hall.

1

Jia Song lit up a cigarette and went for a walk.

The crackle and hiss of the blaze she’d started echoed in the darkness as she dashed through thick black shadows between a pair of unfinished houses in the new subdivision on the edge of Millersville. She knew the fire would roll across the floor of the new bungalow, melting the carpet fibers into liquid resin. The air would fill with a light gray haze at first, followed by a chemical soup of smoke and burning plastics. Within five minutes the blaze would grow into a roaring firestorm thanks to the gasoline she’d splashed all over the living room walls.

Nobody would hear his screaming because Jia stuffed a sock in his mouth and then wrapped duct tape around his face three times. She’d left his nostrils free enough to allow the toxic smoke to drift down into his lungs. She’d taped his eyes open – she wanted him to gaze out in horror as fingers of flame crept across the floor. The fire had to be the last thing he would ever see in this life. And fire cleansed. It purged. It removed fingerprints. It destroyed evidence. It never, ever lied.

She reckoned it would take at least ten minutes for him to die and if she could have extended the time it took for him to die to twenty minutes, she’d have done it. This one deserved no less.

The fire department wouldn’t find the body for at least twelve hours. It would take that long for the heat to die down before arson investigators could begin their grim task. Jia would be long gone by then. Twelve hours would give her the time she needed to ride a secondary highway on the edge of town. More than enough time to ride through Toronto and head east to Capri Lodge until the next unwelcome visitor came along.

Jia took a heavy drag from her cigarette as she reached her motorcycle – a Suzuki GSX R-1000. She’d had it painted flat black to blend into the darkness. Black like her mop of inky hair that swept the shoulders of her leather jacket. Black like the gun metal of her Sig Sauer P250 Compact nestled against her left breast in a shoulder holster. Black like the ebony handle on the fighting knife hugging her right leg.  She’d learned to keep an edge on her blade sharp enough to perform surgery.

Jia didn’t give a damn if some computer database had her DNA on file – it probably did. She didn’t care if police were looking a vigilante killer in three major cities or that sometimes #grudgegirl trended on Twitter when the police found a dead man with links to the killings of women and children.

Jia didn’t give a shit about much these days.

She couldn’t save the dead – too late for them. And most days, Jia wondered if she could even save herself.

***

She awoke to the sun beaming through a crack in the faded curtain of the Super 8 motel room in Ajax and for a moment, her mind flashed back to the time when she reached through a sunbeam for a little girl with red finger paint smeared on her head. It wasn’t until Jia was eight that she realized the damage to the girl’s skull was deliberate. The specter had been her constant companion for five years until it flickered away and disappeared forever.

Some kids had imaginary friends, she said under her breath as she squinted at the beam of white light.  It burned through her partially closed eyelids like a red-hot fire poker. Next to her, snoring in a still-drunken haze lay the naked body of a boy whose name she couldn’t remember if her life depended on it.

Not that it mattered, as he would only be temporary. All Jia wanted, as she rode into town was a shot of something that burned like battery acid on the way down. There was a tavern next to the hotel and her late night ride from the torched bungalow in Millersville to the outskirts of Toronto made her thirsty enough to forget what she’d been seeing inside her mind at bedtime for the past two months.

A monster that deserved to burn – she had no problem with the morality of what she’d done a few hours ago. The prick would have gone on killing until somebody stopped him. But it was the thing that led her to him that made his killing necessary: a twelve-year-old girl with a face frozen into a hideous, silent scream. A shade of a dead child with a pale body and a large hole in her abdomen. You could see daylight through the gory tunnel.

Ghosts never talked. But they always had something to say.

Four years, Jia whispered as she lit up a cigarette and crawled out of bed. Her sleek, muscled body silhouetted against the pillar of sunlight. She took another haul. The long days and nights she’d been on the road pretty much erased the old Jia Song. Once upon a time, she had been a dutiful student. She’d carried a ninety-five percent average thanks to a mother who shoved structure down her fucking throat from the first time she picked up a book at age three. (Never mind that she sometimes read her books to her friend in the torn jumper and that Jia’s mother would beat her for pretending to have a friend where no friend existed.) Predictable Jia Song who dressed in a conservative white blouse and black skirt at Everton Private School in Vancouver. The girl who never, ever considered not following the rules.

That Jia Song never existed, did she?

At twenty-one, she’d been killing monsters since she was seventeen.

Hey baby, got a cigarette for me? the dumb blonde twisted inside the bed sheets said, half-yawning. He eased his body up against the headboard and scratched his bare chest.

On the nightstand, Jia said as she shuffled over to the drapes and peered out into the yellow morning light.

He lit a cigarette, and then patted the spot on the bed where Jia had been laying moments ago. Shit … I don’t even know your name.

She flicked some ash onto the windowsill and said, It’s a fuck – names don’t matter.

Want to go again, madam stranger? he purred, still patting the mattress. Jia strode across the carpet and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. She slipped her t-shirt over her breasts and slid her underpants over the tattoo of a vine of ivy snaking up her left thigh.

Nope, we’re done, she said as she grabbed her jeans, backpack and leather jacket and headed toward the bathroom. The room is paid up until 11 AM. I’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes.

She shut the bathroom door and turned on the light and fan. She locked the door, plugged her card reader into her smartphone, and swiped the Visa card she lifted from his wallet back in the Tavern at half past two that morning. Later, when she’d roll into another town, with resources low, she’d deposit some money from his account into her PayPal account. Not greedy, lifting fifty dollars here or a hundred dollars there didn’t seem wrong. Small enough denominations so she could fly under the radar. Small enough she could email money transfer into one of her six bank accounts and never need to pay more than a dollar in banking fees.

It was the little things that counted.

Jia brushed her teeth with a tiny toothbrush from the complementary vanity kit she picked up at the front desk. Then washed her blade of any residual blood from the wound she’d inflicted on last night’s kill – she’d hobbled him from the shadows so he couldn’t run away. She slid the blade back into its sheath and strapped it onto her leg, and then she pulled her shoulder holster and SIG Sauer out of her backpack and clipped it across her chest. Jia heaved a sigh as she leaned across the bathroom counter, gazing at herself in the mirror.

That it was her image looking back at her and not the image of another dead girl’s shade came as a pleasant surprise. Jia zipped up her leather jacket and stepped into the still-dark hotel room.

The boy had lit up another one of her cigarettes and tossed her the lighter. She snatched it out of the air with one hand as he gazed up at her with a sly smile.

I never did it with an Asian chick before, he said with a surprisingly honest lilt to his voice. That was crazy. My name is Bryce.

Right, Jia said as she grabbed her cigarettes and dropped his credit card to the floor. She’d learned sleight of hand in her four years on the road. Another useful trick. Like I said before, the room is paid up until eleven, so take your time. It’s not even nine in the morning yet. I gotta take off.

He stretched out his arm and took her hand with a small squeeze. Jia didn’t pull away, but she didn’t squeeze back. Hey, you know … we could go to breakfast or something. There’s a Denny’s just up the street from here.

Jia glanced at his hand and then his eyes. Cornflower blue in the dim light. He wore a mischievous smile etched into a face set against a pair of high cheekbones and a solid, square jaw. He wore good ink that ran down his right and left biceps, with tasteful artwork. The left arm displayed a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream while the right arm showed Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh – about as far from the usual bad boy tats as you could get.

I’m not hungry, thanks, said Jia as she pulled away. Last night was fun – take it easy, okay?

Wait, he blurted out as he stumbled out of bed and raced across the room to the small desk. He scribbled down his name and phone number on a sheet of Super 8 stationary and handed it to Jia. Text me sometime, okay?

Jia cocked an eyebrow as she stuffed the paper into her jeans. Bryce stood naked before Jia and she avoided his gaze because if she looked at him again, she might start believing he was a nice guy.

And the last thing she needed was a nice guy. Or any guy. Even if he was cute, earnest, and had a fucking respectable job selling industrial software or designing Chevrolet engine parts at the General Motors plant in Oshawa.

I’ll text you, she said, as she turned on her heels and walked to the door. Take care, Bryce.

2

Jia had been riding for less than twenty-five minutes when her head started pounding. First, a distant rumble that morphed into a series of hard thuds; as if someone was bashing away at the inside of her temples with a sledgehammer. She eased off the highway and onto a short paved road leading to a Shell – Wendy’s rest stop. One of the dozens dotting the roadside of Highway 401 from Sarnia in the west to Cornwall near the Quebec border in the east.

She pulled the big Suzuki next to a trashcan in an empty corner of the parking lot and shut down the engine. A roil of nausea thundered through her stomach, and Jia tore off her helmet just in time to vomit into the bin. The sour stench of rotting garbage burned through her nostrils and she puked one more time. She dropped her helmet onto the pavement as her stomach pitched with a series of dry heaves when a familiar female voice echoed through her head.

You bring shame upon your family, the woman’s voice hissed like a rattlesnake about to sink its fangs into its prey. You will never rest because I know what you have done. I should have seen the darkness in you from your first day and your first breath.

"Fuck. Off. Mother." Jia growled as she lifted her head from the garbage can. A thin slither of drool dangled from her bottom lip as she dug her fingers into the rusty metal barrel.

Your language. The voice seethed with anger. You would curse your own mother?

"Did curse … not would!" Jia spun around to lash out at the voice that was always a constant reminder of how far she had fallen.

There was just no way the voice could be real, she thought. It was an inner dialogue, that’s all. The dead couldn’t infect someone’s mind. They couldn’t own someone’s body and soul, could they?

Her parents had been dead for nearly as long as Jia had been on the road.

Another wave of nausea pounded through her bowels, and Jia gazed through a film of tears at a teenage girl dressed in a poodle skirt standing next to the Suzuki. She wore a sweater draped around her powder pink blouse. Jia shuddered when she saw the bloodstains.

She almost threw up again when she saw the girl’s sliced up face; as if the killer had used a box cutter and had been in a rush to get the job done.

Shit, Jia said angrily as the specter reached out and gestured to follow. I’m not ready yet … it’s too soon.

The spirit continued to motion for Jia to follow but she wasn’t going to budge, even though she knew that she would pay a high price for her refusal. Instead, she climbed back aboard her motorcycle and slipped her helmet back on. She gazed again at the ghost to see that it had started to flicker like a candle flame next to a drafty window. It was an old ghost, and the old ones either flickered or faded before they disappeared and went to wherever the hell old ghosts go.  Jia knew all spirits were often little more than faint echoes of spectral energy. But some ghosts were more active, like the ones she’d called haunts. Spirits maintaining a link to this plane of existence, usually those taken before their time, and almost always as the result of an accident like a car crash. Why fate or some cosmic judge and jury selected Jia to bear witness to the pleas for justice from murdered women was a mystery. And it was always women or girls, never men.

In four short years, the dead had reached out to a new emissary for those restless spirits whose lives were snuffed out. She’d been seeing the dead since she turned three. That’s when Jia’s mother knew there was something different about her only child and when she first sensed the shadow clinging to Jia like a thick cloud of smog over a major city.

There’s nothing I can do right now, Jia said as she started the motorcycle. I can’t. It’s … it’s too early. I’ll be back, and if you’re still here, I’ll follow you. Okay? Please?

She shuddered again as she revved the engine on the big Suzuki. If Jia didn’t act on the spirit’s request soon, her dreams would become a front row seat to the girl’s murder. Her mind would bear witness to every terror the dead girl experienced. She would feel the razor sharp edge of the blade as it dug into the girl’s flesh. She would wake up screaming after experiencing the horrifying pain of the girl’s murder. It would happen every night until Jia took action. Until justice was done. Until the dead girl could finally rest. And even after their killers had paid with their lives, those visions stayed with Jia. They became woven into her subconscious like a thick wool blanket, binding with the fabric of Jia’s memory.

Thank fuck for alcohol, Jia said as she rode back onto the 401 and continued to head east to her sanctuary – a trailer parked at an old hunter’s