Emerald

         The alley gave up very few of its secrets. An empty garbage bin was the last object bleeding through the utter darkness. Even in the daylight the alley was dim and foreboding, but light enough to show the bin was green for recyclables. Not even the soft whimpers from the young lady escape the stygian darkness beyond.

         The forbidding alley entrance backs onto a busy downtown street where people constantly walk back and forth, especially the bar crowd on a Friday night. Some might glance into the inky darkness thinking they heard something, but none dare explore to find the source. Most walk passed without even a glance inward.

         It is an alley with a thousand infamous stories to tell. An alley soaked in blood, pain and misery. It is an alley that has seen death many times. A place where cries of pain and begging for mercy is akin to the sounds of home. It is an alley even the newest vagrants know to give a wide berth.

A business man dressed in a handsome suit, maybe a Gucci or a Logsdail, stops in front of the entrance, looks in beyond the large recycling bin and tilts his head, hearing the soft sobbing of a broken woman. He knows the woman in the alley is hurt badly, mortally wounded, and knows that she is a Lady of the Night.

He knows many things about the woman sobbing in the dark, like the protective teddy bear she had as a child named Claus. Claus had been her warrior, a mythical creature that could grow as tall as the trees and loved nothing more than to war with the Monster under the Bed or The Monster in the Closet. Claus relished in the brutality of keeping her safe. Sometimes, in the half-conscious state between the waking world and the dream world, a world the man knows she calls Pandora, she can still hear him roar in the distance. He also knows that Claus failed to protect her from the vicious drunken beatings laid upon her by her dead-beat father. However, even with Claus the Bear failing to protect her, he did give her hope that someday everything will be better.  Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even a month from now, but some day.         

The well-dressed man knows who she was, is, and possibly, who she could be. Time to him is little more than an annoyance. He knows about Claus and everything else about her, even her thoughts to some degree. He steps fearless into the alley, enjoying the darkness as it swallows him whole. His eyes can’t penetrate the darkness quite yet, but they don’t need to. He could find her blind with both hands behind his back.

        “I-is s-someone there?” She whispered from deep in the bitter darkness. Her voice, like her nose, was broken.

        She shrank back as she saw the shadowy figure break through the thick ever present darkness. Seeing a male face her body tightened up, sending a hot skewer of pain through her belly. She never wanted to see another man ever again. Of course, with what she is, men put bread on the table and a roof over her head. When she is better (if I get better, she thinks) she will have to see men again. They may all look different to her eyes, but under the skin they will all look exactly the same. They all looked like the murderous man who beat her nearly to death.

Those three words hurt like hell to say with three broken ribs, at least two others cracked, and a broken nose. She couldn’t tell one of those ribs had turned inward and punctured something vital on the inside. The punctured organ silently spilled blood and toxins into her body. Her left eye had swollen shut a few minutes ago. Coppery blood washed down her chin from her shredded gums and broken teeth.

Worst of all, she could feel his seed. She could feel it festering inside of her, squiggling as it tried to find a way deeper.

“Yes Emerald.” The man said. His voice was soft, almost comforting in the dark. It was comforting like a good father’s voice.

How did he know to call her Emerald?

“I-I’m hurt.” She whispered. It hurt to breath.

She could hear his soft, constant footfalls approaching. “I know, Emerald. I know.”

She wanted to ask the man if he called the police, instead she scolded herself for such foolishness. Of course the man called the police! He must have heard her crying out for help, made the call and now came to comfort her until the ambulance arrived. But she knows how dangerous this alley is. This is where gangs do their unsavory business with people they don’t like, and where dying junkies come for that final suicidal hit. Every lady of the night knew enough to stay as far away from this place as possible.

“I was walking passed on my way to…on my way to work.” She whispered to the man with the calm and compassionate voice. She didn’t even know why she was talking or why she was explaining what she had been doing, it just seemed the right thing to do. “I saw him walking towards me but he looked normal like every other Joe on the street and…” She winced in pain. “…and I didn’t pay him any attention…”

“I know, my darling, I know.” He said almost cooing as if she was a young babe.

She couldn’t make out any specific detail about him except that he was tall, standing straight, with broad shoulders. He also didn’t seem nervous about being in this alley. Not once did he look down the alley in front or turn around to see the way back. She felt pity and eternal sadness in his eyes as he gazed upon her shattered body.

Right below the broken rib that had been shoved inward was another grievous wound. It was thin and deep, deadly in its own right. It had been where her attacker stabbed her. All of the other wounds she suffered could kill her given time, but the stab wound had penetrated deep and would kill her soon.

“We started passing each other in front of the alley, no one on the block was looking at us, and suddenly…” She gasped painfully. After a moment, without knowing why, she continued with her story: “…he wrapped his hand around my mouth and dragged me in here.”

The well-dressed man stepped up beside her and sat down. He reached around her head with one arm and put it down on her shoulder and pulled her close, carefully. She went easily enough and found herself laying her head on his shoulder, expecting excruciating pain but found only a sort of comfort from a perfect male stranger. He did not seem to notice the blood oozing from the edges of her mouth onto his jacket, or if he had he did not care.

The stranger smelled like a man she once loved: Jeffery Turner. They had dated for a whole two years—her longest relationship. In those blissful years she had put the sex-trade behind her. If he had an issue with her being a prostitute in her past, he never shared it. Jeff seemed to be the hope Claus had whispered about all those years before. But of course she had mucked that up in a single night of drinking. She cheated on Jeff with his best friend; that friend had come clean a few days after.

That had been the day her heart shriveled and turned black; when every ounce of hope abandoned her. There was only one enemy Claus could never protect her from: herself.

She broke down and burst into tears on his shoulder, muttering incomprehensibly what happened next: the begging, the pleading, the rape and finally the beating. The man, the stranger who heard her cries on the street, merely sat there listening to her, holding her with an arm as she bled, slobbered, and cried on him. He watched her, the broken woman who had a single chance to change and mucked it up by her own stupidity, with a ghost of a smile on his lips.

Just a trace.

“He’s a Bad Man, Emerald. A Bad Man who likes to hurt people.” The stranger said rubbing her arm, looking down to inspect the bloody knife wound in her side. Her life-blood washed out of her body somewhere between oozing and streaming, staining the side of her crisp white shirt a deep shade of maroon.

Her time was drawing to a close.

As the stranger’s eyes touched the wound that would kill her, she began to feel a deep pain in her side and the beginnings of a burning throb.

“Are you satisfied with the life you have lived so far?” The man asked.

His gentle voice has gained a hint of seriousness to it, like the edge of a sharp blade. He knows that she is thinking. He can feel her thoughts dancing around in her confused, terrified, mind. “No.” She whispered feeling her heart sinking deep down into the pit of her stomach.

The man nodded. “Tell me where you think you went wrong.”

Emerald, as Jeff loved to call her, started shivering as the blood loss started affecting her more and more. She closed her eyes and called up the image of Jeff: a handsome twenty-something year old with medium-blue eyes, short brown hair, and almost perfect facial features—except for one little scar on his left cheek he gained from falling off a fence as a child.

Once that memory had been called up, others flowed like a broken embankment trying to keep back a torrent of water. Before tonight, the embankment between her conscious and subconscious would let a memory or two seep through, but when it was done, usually close to tears, she would quickly patch up the hole. Now the dam had shattered and all of the bitter-sweet memories flooded down into her dying conscious mind like a flash-flood. She waded through them as quickly as she could, looking for that one memory of that one night where her actions caused her to lose all the love they shared.



        “I remember it was a Sunday night because Monday was a holiday, but I don’t remember which one. It was a birthday party for one of his friends. There was a lot of booze: beer, wine, hard liquor, coolers and much, much more. There was also a lot of pot floating around, though I remember we were asked to take it outside to smoke. I think there was also some cocaine floating around—yes, I remember because one of the girls offered me some and I refused. I am a drinker, only once in a while do I smoke pot, but I never do hard drugs. I’ve watched what that shit does to my friends—” She chuckled, breaking her train of thought for a moment. “—I’ve seen more than a couple girls die because of that shit.”



        She shivered again. The night’s chill was starting to get under her skin despite the thermometer still pushing twenty degrees. “We arrived a little early, Jeff wanted to spend a bit of time with his friend and play some video games. I was content to sit and talk to the few girls that were there, two of them being his friend’s roommates. Around eight o’clock people started to filter in and the party started, my boy and his friend put the games away for the night. Then, around nine thirty, his best friend Ron walked in. I found him attractive and fairly intelligent, and unlike Jeff he could hold his booze a lot better. By one in the morning most people had passed out or gone home, including Jeff. He was in the spare bedroom fast asleep where I planned on being in the near future…but that’s not really what happened. Ron and I were talking, just shooting the shit as they say, and I started becoming aroused. I don’t know why, neither of us had made a move on the other and the conversation wasn’t anything that could make me, or presumably him, horny. Eventually we did it. We did the deed.”



        She let out a soft sigh, her eyes starting to become heavy and tired. The memory slipped away, rushing back into the dark ocean from where it came. She found herself back in the arms of a stranger in an alley. His arms, whoever he is, were warm and inviting, comforting. They made her feel safe and secure, so much so that if the Bad Man came back to finish the job she would be immortal in this position. The Bad Man could beat her and never actually leave a bruise. She swallowed hard, her throat making a clicking noise. The tears wanted to come back, but for the moment she managed to hold them back.



        “That is exactly what went wrong. I got drunk and fucked a man I had no business fucking. If I had just gone to bed in the spare bedroom, this—all of this—would not have happened. We might have been married and we might have had a couple of kids.” She started coughing, a rough and deep sound she didn’t like. Where are the police? “We might not of course, there’s always the chance that we would have broken up and this would have happened a little later. Damn I’m thirsty.”



        “Tell me why you stopped sculpting.” The stranger said, so very much aware of the time and her worsening condition.



        “I stopped when we broke up. I had to move in with that shitty asshole named Billy Bronx.” She muttered angrily, ending in a fit of coughs. When it cleared up she went on: “He would just sit there watching television or playing his Xbox games, not bothering to get up and get a job. He knew I’d work and pay the rent just to have a roof over my head, and I did. I wanted to restart, it would take my mind away and make me forget the hurt for a bit, but I couldn’t afford it, and when I moved out of there into someplace a little less Billy, I just couldn’t. I bought a lump of clay and stared at it, fiddled with it, but nothing—no shape—came to mind. My creativity, my love and my life was gone.”



        The man said nothing for what seemed an eternity. Then, slowly, he spoke: “If it meant living happily in the future, would you suffer more pain in your life right now?”



Emerald lifted her head—it felt heavy, much heavier than it should have—and looked into the stranger’s brown eyes. What she saw made her gasp: they weren’t the eyes of a human. Everything about them seemed normal from the whites to the irises, but deep down inside she knew the truth.



        “You’re an angel and I’m dying.” She whimpered.



        “If you could have a life that finally ends in happiness, even though you would have to wait and go through more pain, would you want to live? Or do you want to die, go in front of God and see how he judges you?” He asked with just a little urgency in his voice.



        A prostitute by trade, now mortally injured, the young lady with the pet name of Emerald sat back and stared at the garbage bin with an angel, probably Death himself, behind her. She heard the slight edge of urgency in his voice and knew she had to answer quickly. Her time drew near.



        Emerald had to think. “Will it be good? Will it be like it was when I was with Jeff?”

“In time.” The man cooed, nodding. “In time.”

For all the hell her life had been, she could remember how wonderful the good times had been, even if the reprieve was short. “I want to live.”



        The man pulled his arm back from her shoulders, eased himself away from her, and stood up. She watched him feeling uneasy, colder and even closer to death than she had cuddled up in his arms. He looked down at her and smiled warmly, knowingly, nodded and walked away into the darkness. When she could no longer hear his footfalls, she started hearing the terrible whine of sirens rushing towards her.

She wondered if she had made the choice in time.



        The pain came back in a hurry, harsh and bright. The pain came from anywhere her rapist touched her.  It became so intense Emerald started crying and then screamed, which caused the wounds in both sides to scream louder. Blessedly she passed out.



Ron Derby sat in the living room of his well-established luxury downtown condo watching a rerun of Dr. House, his favorite show until the final season. With a cold beer in hand, he sat back against the white leather couch beside a matching love-seat on his left. In front of him stands a darkly stained wooden coffee table with a glass top, maybe mahogany or California Redwood, he can’t remember—it’s not important. On it is a coaster for his beer, a Scientific American Mind journal, and an Esquire magazine next to a small pile of remote controls for use with his entertainment center. There is also a Wii stick that he never uses, it’s there for his son when he comes over. Beside that pile is the cordless handset for his land-line, his iPhone and his iPad. Mac fan-boy all the way.

Directly in front of him is a very expensive entertainment center holding all of his gadgets, including a seventy-some inch plasma LG screen. There are a few pictures of his broken family here and there. All the rest of the photos Ron enjoys are hidden in his desktop computer in the office. The type of pictures that would get him a long stay in jail, in isolation away from the general population.



         He took a long quaff of his beer, uttered a satisfied sound followed by a loud burp that echoed off the clean white walls. Wonderful pictures of violence danced in his head, while his groin throbbed pleasantly thanks to the lovely playtime he had with the whore on the street.

He thought she would eventually alter the way she went to and from her godforsaken corner to work her magic. The dirty whore who put her fingers into hard working men’s pockets. She deserved what she got. He watched her for a good long time: two, maybe three, months. She always arrived at her corner by nine, usually a bit earlier. And she was always alone. Ron thought about his son for a brief moment and how he was a pleasure to take, his tight little body was just about perfect, but he always took it easy on the boy. After all the boy was his kin. But he wanted to be rough with the whore, and how he had been! He wanted to beat her to a bloody pulp as he fucked her, then he wanted her to die. He stabbed her good and hard—with a twist!

Now she was dead and wouldn’t be found until morning.

She was not the first Lady of the Night to appease his horrible desires, not by far, and she was definitely not going to be the last. Her death would satisfy him for a good long time, but in the end he would do it again and again. He wouldn’t just enjoy it every single time, he would revel in it.

He downed the beer in one large gulp. He hardly drank, usually only on nights like tonight. He already called in to the office lying that he wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be in tomorrow. He probably wouldn’t be in the next day either, just to make it look good. Now all there was left to do was to enjoy the gentle waves of his fine orgasm, the wonderful throbbing of his knuckles that beat the bitch half-to-death, and get drunk.

“You have a very nice place here, Mr. Derby.” A cheerful voice wafted in from his right.

Gasping in utter surprise, Ron turned his full attention to the intruder standing in the middle of his kitchen. He was wearing a black suit and a white shirt with a thin black tie, a pair of black slacks and polished black shoes. His hair is brown and short, eyes a much deeper brown. He was fairly tall, somewhere around six feet and four inches, maybe one hundred and eighty pounds.

“What are you doing in my house?” Ron cried, furiously.

He eyed the intruder standing at the kitchen with anger and suspicion, and wondered if this man knew what he had done to the bitch in the alley. If he was looking for a payout to be silent, Ron would give him one. Money was easy to make, it came and went.

“Unfinished business, Ron. Unfinished business.” The man said looking around the recently remodeled kitchen noting that every counter was made of granite, all of the appliances are brand-spanking-new and stainless steel, and the cupboards are a nice deep red hard wood. Finally he turned to Ron. “A certain lady of the night you…encountered tonight.”

Ron glowered, his assumption had been correct.

The stranger grinned from ear to ear; Ron stared dumbfounded at him. How dare he come into MY house, throwing the dead whore in MY face and grinning like he owns the place! Ron thought. How Ron wanted to bash that mother fucker’s grin into the back of the intruder’s skull. But he had to contain and control himself. A lot of trouble could come from all of this. If he put the man in the hospital, or if he killed the man, it might lead the police back to the dead hooker.

“Killing me wouldn’t be a wise idea.” The intruder chuckled and placed his hands down on the serving counter. He tilted his head, looking contemplative with his brow furrowing. “I don’t even think I can be killed, anymore.”

Ron stopped himself from saying he’s killed more people than the intruder could know. If this turned ugly, if the whore-loving man did go to the cops, he would only be charged for the one murder. But if the man said there were more, there would undoubtedly be a bigger investigation, which could link him to other killings. “How much do you want?”

The intruder laughed and shook his head as he wandered out of the kitchen into the living room. Ron felt the urge to kill rising from the pit of his stomach. His ritual had been interrupted. The bliss from the rape and the murder was gone.

“Oh, Ron, I have more money than God—really, I do!” The intruder laughed cheerfully.

Ron brooded for a long moment. “What do you want?”

The intruder grinned. A grin Ron desperately wanted to remove. “When God hears a scream, if He doesn’t have this miserable planet on ignore, He turns his back and waits a few seconds until the mortal is too tired to scream, or they die. Me? I hear every scream. Every. Agonizing. Scream. Do you know what separates me from God?”

“What?” Ron asked indulging the man, who he realized was crazy.

“Sometimes, once in a while, I those screams and I help.” The intruder whispered, low. His expression and eyes darkened. “Oh Emerald! She drew the short stick in life. She gets beaten and  gets to bleed out in some dark alley all alone, all while you sit here in opulence feeling quite pleased about your doings.”

“H-how…” Ron whispered, pale and terrified. “You can’t…”

“Oh, I know a lot about you Ron Murphy Derby.” The intruder said, dismissing him with a simple wave of his hand. He turned around and glanced into the indulgent kitchen. When he turned back, Ron’s eyes opened wide. The intruder’s brown eyes are gone, replaced by pure black orbs from one corner to the other, and all he could see in those ebony eyes was hate. The intruder’s skin paled to an ashy white, the color of a corpse. “I know all of your victim’s names, alive and dead—one in the same I guess.”

Ron stood up and stepped away from the couch. “P-please…”

“Please what? Please have mercy on you like you showed Emerald? Please be as compassionate to you as you were to your other victims?” The creature tilted his head. His voice a soupy mixture of a growl and a laugh. He cleared his throat. “You are nothing but joke. You know what’s going to happen when your son finds out you were murdered? He’s going to laugh. Emerald? Oh the irony! She is going to howl! I think she might even die laughing! Think about it: she’s the one who was supposed to die in that alley, broken and battered—” His voice deepened until it was as black as his eyes. “—but she will live, and she will see your face plastered on the news with a caption that says: FOUND DEAD! EVEN SHAT HIS PANTS!”

The creature stepped towards Ron and sighed. Ron stepped back, jaw trembling.

“I’m not all bad, Ron. In fact, I’m quite nice. I don’t hate you, nor do I want to kill you—well, humanity, that is.” His voice returned to that kind gentleness he showed Emerald. “When God and Michael threw me out of heaven, I was allowed to keep just a bit of my essence. Enough to heal the sick and dying, even resurrect if I so choose, but of course, a balance must be struck. To have her live, I must take a life. Since I own your wretched soul anyway, I’ve decided to…collect you a little early. We’ll call it tit-for-tat.”

And then Ron saw them: the Devil’s wings. They had no substance but still managed to cast a shadow on the living room wall; he saw something dripping off the shadow, followed the droplets to the floor and saw a real pool of blood forming. He looked up into the devil’s face.

“Oh, honey-child, I wanna hear you scream.” The devil said, but it wasn’t his voice. It was female with a thick southern accent. Of course Ron remembered her: she was his first kill, a slut from a dive during Mardi Gras. That was the same line he said to her right before severing her foot.

He screamed in sheer terror and the devil laughed.

“Oh, I do love your screams!” The Devil laughed stepping ever closer to Ron Derby the murderer, rapist, and pedophile. “You can even scream as loud as you want! Only you and I will hear!”

He reached out and clasped Ron Derby in his arms; pulled him into a tight grip and drew in a deep breath, enjoying the scent of his corrupted soul and all the blood on those insignificant hands. Not a moment later he could also smell piss as Ron’s bladder let go, the hot liquid streaming down his leg. Rich, acrid, and delightful. He hugged Ron hard, breaking his spine with a muffled crack, opened his mouth, and sank his fangs into Ron’s throat. He sucked and sucked and sucked, engorging on the blood of the prey-turned-hunted. He pulled his mouth back for just a moment, a ghostly white trail of something emanating from the two tiny teeth marks leading into the devil’s maw. Lucifer let out a ferocious howl and dug back into Ron’s neck, ripping through his throat and severing the artery.

Soon Ron Derby, the murderer and rapist, is dead. His life blood spilled on the Devil’s suit. He drops the corpse with a meaty thump as it crumples to the floor, now uninterested, turns around and starts walking. In a moment he vanishes with a loud pop as the air rushes in to take his place.



She is unconscious for the entire trip to the hospital. The police recorded a call from someone reporting Emerald’s situation. Before the tipster hung up, they had time to trace the call. What came up was 666-666-06666.

But those details are unimportant. The moment the gurney hit the emergency wards automatic doors, she woke and looked around to see the white tiled ceiling and the sterile white walls. Two people were pushing her forward and two more were shouting about her condition and the various injuries. But once again, like the tipster, the details are unimportant. What was important to her is that she is alive, though teetering on the cusp between life and death.

She wanted to live, even if it meant the agony of a few more years of pain and torture; loaning herself out for an hour or two. She believed the Stranger had told the truth when he said she would have more heart ache before peace and quiet.

And then, before passing out again due to a wonderful drug called morphine, she saw him: the well-dressed man. He was standing in the hallway out of the way. The man that looked like Jeff Turner but not quite. He raised his hand and gave her a bright reassuring smile.

The next time Emerald woke she found herself in a comfortable white bed with a blue cover over her body that had been draped in a simple papery blue hospital gown. She felt confused, not quite able to remember what happened to her. She looked around. There, sitting next to her in his own blue gown was the Jeff-Turner-but-not…

She blinked a couple of times and shook the fuzziness out of her head and looked at him again. No, this was not the Jeff-Turner-but-not, but the real thing. He smiled down at her from the chair, reached out and took her hand that had been comfortably lying on the bed beside her. He looked more mature, thirty-something now…thirty-two? Maybe. He’s only a couple of years older than she is. He looked more mature, more handsome.

“I can’t believe it.” He whispered, very lightly squeezing her hand. “I watched them wheel you in, and when I saw the name Sarah William Parks I nearly had a heart attack, which in my condition isn’t good.”

“You son of a bitch.” She chuckled, not to Jeff Turner but to the Jeff-Turner-But-Not.

“Listen Emerald.” He whispered. “We broke up and I tried to find you but you vanished, you’ve always been good at that. After cooling off, I realized I didn’t want to break up with you. I wanted to heal our relationship and move on. I tried finding you over the years, but I couldn’t. I don’t know what you’re life is now, and I don’t know whether you still care, but I see you as the ‘one that got away’. Maybe we can be friends, maybe not, but before anything else I needed you to know that.”

Sarah smiled weakly, tiredly, up at him. “I still love you, but I think I’m going to fall asleep again.”

“Before you do…” He reached behind him and pulled out a stuffed teddy bear and gave her a curious look. “A friend of yours came in and asked me to give this to you. He said you might need it in the future.”

“Jeff meet Claus. Claus meet Jeff.” She whispered hoarsely as she her eyelids became too heavy to keep open. Sarah Parks, Emerald to some, smiled and wondered who that special, wonderful, stranger had been.

She dropped into a dreamless sleep.