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THE FACTS WERE THESE: A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD woman named Lisa Bayless was dead. The cause of her death had been officially listed as “anaphylaxis caused by severe allergic reaction.”
The specific cause was shrimp.
Shrimp.
Lisa Bayless had died of shrimp. Case closed, as far as the coroner, the police, and even Lisa’s family were concerned.
She left behind a grieving husband, a three-year-old son named Abel, and a number of very sad students at Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria, Virginia. Lisa Bayless was a good history teacher; everyone said so, and they said it even before her tragic death, although they said it more frequently now that she was gone and no longer able to assign homework.
“I don’t understand,” I told Messenger. I was grumpy because he had come to my abode—I can’t call it home, and I can barely refer to it as mine—when I was just falling asleep. My eyes were literally closing, weighed down by a long day of work with Messenger.
He appeared outside my bedroom and knocked softly but insistently on my door. Softly enough that it wouldn’t make me jump, but with sufficient confidence and persistence that I knew I could not ignore him.
Not that I could conceivably ignore Messenger. I don’t think anyone who has met him has ever ignored him.
First, Messenger is idiosyncratically dressed in a long black coat over a steel-gray shirt and black pants, and he wears tall boots. Thus far he might seem merely eccentric, or perhaps stylish. But then you notice that his buttons are small silver skulls. And then, now that you are looking with some focus, you see the rings.
The ring on his right hand is in the shape of a stately female figure who holds a sword. This is Isthil, goddess of justice and wickedness. This detail, along with his odd mode of dress, definitely draws your attention.
But it’s the other ring, the one on his left hand, that causes your attention to go from wary curiosity to real nervousness. For this is the ring of the shrieking face. It renders in silver the face of a young person screaming, face distorted, eyes bulging in abject terror.
And then there is the fact that Messenger is as beautiful as any male person I have ever seen or imagined. His hair is long and black, and his skin—the visible parts—is pale. His eyes are blue and perhaps judgmental—yes, judgmental—but not pitiless, though Messenger’s duties often require him to inflict punishments the likes of which no civilized government would ever allow.
Here is what I know about Messenger: He is, or at least was, human. He has a name, something other than Messenger, but I know not what it is. He is perhaps the least talkative person I have ever met.
His full title is Messenger of Fear. I am Mara, and I am apprentice to this Messenger of Fear.
“Isn’t it late? Or early?” I was confused. There are no timepieces in this abode; even the display on the microwave just blinks an eternal 00:00.
“We are summoned to our duty,” Messenger said.
This is the kind of sharing, giving, easygoing relationship we have. He says words like duty without a hint of ironic distance. And I suppose the truth is that I have come to have a similar attitude. I have certain duties. These are punishment duties, ones I took on voluntarily—a punishment I deserved.
So I wasn’t going to argue. I was, however, going to look grumpy. I reserve the right not to enjoy everything duty requires of me.
Messenger filled me in on the basic facts—the public facts, at least.
“So she had a severe shrimp allergy and she ate a shrimp. That’s a mistake, not a deliberate evil act.”
“Not if someone gave her the shrimp knowing it would make her sick and quite possibly kill her,” Messenger said.
“Ah.” I thought for a moment, but had not yet had my morning (evening? midday?) coffee, so my capacity for reason was not at its peak. I started a pot. “But allergies like that hit fast. So the coroner would know what was in her stomach and thus what had killed her.”
“Indeed. The answer was chocolate.”
“Chocolate shrimp?”
“Shrimp inside a chocolate.”
This unappetizing thought stopped me from insisting on breakfast. I did, however, drink my coffee. I took it black because he did, or maybe just because in this world I now inhabited, cream and sugar seemed trivial. We had very serious business, and somehow I felt that demanded black coffee.
I had managed four blessed sips before Messenger relocated us. Messengers are given certain powers that they are to use only in pursuit of their duty, which is a very good limit to impose, since among those powers is the ability to move effortlessly from place to place, and even from time to time.
Thus did I find myself in a two-story brick Colonial in a pleasant but not wealthy suburban neighborhood in Alexandria, which is just outside Washington, DC.
I saw a woman with straight blond hair parted in the middle—a cadaverously thin woman, but not anorexic, more just like one of those people who are very into exercise. She had a high, intelligent forehead and wore oval glasses.
She was alone, in a tiny home office, hunched over a laptop, in the act of reading what looked like essays. To her right was an open box of See’s Candies. About half the box was gone, and my first thought was to wonder how this woman could manage to be this thin with such an appetite for sweets. I admit the idea made me jealous.
Understand that Messenger and I were not visible or audible to Lisa Bayless. And the office was so cramped that Messenger and I stood with half our bodies literally inside the wall, so that only our faces, chests, and hands were in the room. Understand as well that yes, this was extremely weird for me, but I was slowly adjusting to the oddness of my occupation, and since I had moved through solid objects before, this was merely a new wrinkle on an existing weirdness.
As we watched, Lisa reached without taking her eyes off the screen, fumbled for and then found a roundish dark chocolate, and popped it into her mouth.
She chewed, then made a face, obviously tasting something odd, something unexpected. But then she continued working for another few minutes.
And then, I saw her mouth working as though she was still tasting something unpleasant. She felt her lips with her tongue, and then touched her fingers to her lips, and all at once: panic.
Lisa leaped up from her chair, pushed open the door, and raced through the kitchen. But by the time she reached the stairs she was wheezing, and her face was puffy, as if her skin was a balloon being slowly inflated.
Halfway up the stairs she tripped and gasped, and her face turned pink. She sucked air with all her might but nothing came. Yet she climbed and turned onto the upper landing. But now walking, let alone running, was no longer possible. Still, she crawled, hands and knees along the carpeted hallway, into the master bedroom, and from there across the tile of her bathroom floor.
The medicine cabinet was above her, and she was desperate by this point, desperate and terrified. Her eyes were squeezing shut, and I don’t believe that by the time she managed to drag herself to her feet she could see at all. It was with blind fumbling that she ransacked the medicine cabinet, knocking pill bottles and toothpaste onto the floor.
I saw the moment when she realized that what she was looking for was not there.
“An EpiPen,” I muttered. “She’s looking for an EpiPen, the injectable adrenaline you keep if you’re severely allergic.”
Messenger said nothing. When words are not absolutely necessary, Messenger does not like
to spend them.
I have by now seen death, most terribly the suicide of Samantha Early. This death lacked the blood and gore of that earlier one, but no amount of exposure can ever really prepare you for the terrible sight of a human being dying before your eyes.
I looked away. I heard rather than saw her slip to the floor. I heard grunted efforts at breathing. I heard a surrendering moan. And when I looked again, Lisa Bayless, history teacher, was dead.
Perhaps ten minutes had passed.
“Someone put that shrimp in that chocolate,” I said, because unlike Messenger, I will occasionally say the obvious. Perhaps it’s a weakness on my part; I can be verbose, but I find that putting awful events into words makes them more manageable. It gives me a little distance.
I did not know this woman, but she was a human being, a human being with life yet to live. And now her life had been stolen from her.
“Murder,” I said. “But how . . . Her family would have seen the chocolates and . . .” I frowned, trying to work it out. But Messenger has more direct means of explaining events. He walked away and I followed.
We walked back through the bedroom, down the hallway, and down the stairs.
