No Guilt for the Guilty

While searching for Junk-o’s house as a spirit a few days ago, I found Pestilence instead; the white ends of her hair sold out her identity. Yet, I chose not to show myself to her. Instead, I led Raven to visit her the next morning. It was a challenge issued to her, and she replied in kind.

After I passed her test of strength and vanquished her ‘protector’, I drifted to her house in my spirit form once more. Pestilence waited at the dining table with only one lamp on, gracing the cream-white walls with an ill-suited yellow. She seemed like a wife waiting for her wife to return, while telling herself that there was definitely no mistress involved. And there always was. I got a feeling that the person she expected to see wasn’t Junk-o.

So, I fulfilled her prediction and appeared opposite her. She acted as if an invisible director had just yelled action. Tears flowed on cue, and she leaned on the table. “Why did you kill my best friend? My only friend. Jiyunko. Why? I miss her already. Why do you have to be so cold-blooded?” She sniffled and grabbed a handful of tissues to blow her nose.

“Can we get past this point of you pretending to cry and sob and whine and complain? I’m not in the mood for this. So, let’s talk business.”

Pestilence’s tear dried up at once. She squinted her eyes and leaned closer to me. This was feeling like a job interview. Might even be the first time I’d had one of these. And the first question came. “Are those cracks on your face? Not just your face, but on your body too.”

“What do you mean ‘cracks’?” She wasn’t talking about Raven’s face, because my spirit exhibited my true form. Spirits wouldn’t show up in mirrors, and information about myself was inaccessible to my quasi-omniscience. Everything I knew about what I looked like came from the last time someone described me, the last time that was thirty years ago. A previous time that was irrelevant to the present.

“Literal cracks. I wonder what you are going through to be cracking this much.”

The appearances of our true forms were intimately linked to our mental states, but I had no clue what Pestilence was talking about. It sounded more like a diversion tactic.

“Anyway, back to the main point. Work for me, Pestilence. I killed you the last time we met, and now your pawn is dead too. You have no other choice.” In the years I’d known her, this was the best strategy to deal with Pestilence, a show of power. That was also how War got Pestilence to submit to him over and over again.

“About that. My name spoken in Japanese just sounds so menacing. ‘Ekirei’. So thorny. Call me Karen. Get it? It’s an Internet meme. Have you heard about the anti-vaccination movement? Hilarious.” Her tangents were getting ridiculous. But if she weren’t interested in joining me, she wouldn’t wait for me at the table. Maybe she was playing hard to get.

I proceeded with my pitch. “Are you sure you want to stay like this? From the looks of it, I don’t see War around. Are you two on a break again? Then you have no one to rely on.”

“Your Japanese name, on the other hand, ‘Shibo’, fits you so well. Much better than ‘Death’, but I got a better one. What about ‘Dede’? ‘Dede-chan’. I love it!”

She just kept trying to lead me around, and I absolutely wouldn’t allow it. “Pestilence. Do you want me to be here the whole night?”

“That’d be a good idea. You will be pulled back to the body once Midorikawa-san wakes up. Speaking of that…” She grabbed a pen from a nearby holder and tossed it at me. It passed through me as if I weren’t there. And technically, I really wasn’t.

“Just checking,” she said.

“If you want to test whether Raven is nearby, she isn’t. And even if she were nearby, I wouldn’t be so stupid as to catch the pen and reveal to you how far away she was.”

Pestilence didn’t seem interested in picking the pen back up. “Raven… What a cute nickname. That settles it. I’ll call you Dede-chan for now.”

“Did your worms or herpes viruses damage your brain? Stop acting so childish.”

“Are you going to say no to this face?” Pestilence pursed her lips and pressed her finger to her lips. She widened her eyes so much that she might become an anime character. She should really get a job at a maid cafe and save this pose there, not when I was negotiating a favorable arrangement for the both of us.

There was no point in talking to her when she was like this, so I crossed my arms and gave her the dreaded silent treatment normally reserved for children, waiting for her to come to her senses.

I should have done this from the start, because she retired her seductive pose soon after. “You don’t need me. Just let Midorikawa-san die and take over her body. I’m sure you can find a justification if you look hard enough.”

She made me out to be some sort of maniac. “We need our host. We are the four horsemen, not the four persons.”

Pestilence giggled. “You just called Midorikawa-san a horse.”

“Laugh all you want. That wouldn't change my epiphany.”

“You still killed Jiyunko-chan, my dearest friend.” This time, there weren’t overblown tears and strained voices calling for pity. She said it deadpan, as a neutral statement. Honestly, it was eerie to see her lose all her expressiveness in a single second. But after she spoke, her smile returned, as empty as before.

No matter how she truly felt about this, it wouldn’t change this: “Your dearest friend was going to kill my host,” I countered her with a fact of my own.

“You could have gotten her arrested. There's so much you can do with your spectral form. Yet you jump straight to killing, as always.”

“But you were helping her. Who knows how you would derail the investigation?”

“Yes, I helped her a little, but I only do that if I'm in the mood.”

“That means nothing. You can control your mood.”

“What if someone else hires an assassin? Are you going to take another life to save the same life?”

“I will. And it will save more than one life. Do you think an assassin will stop at one target? It’s called a ‘job’ for a reason, not a ‘once-in-a-lifetime quest’.”

Pestilence rested her head on her fist, legs crossed up. Her motions were casual and a bit mocking, or maybe, from another interpretation, they could be innocent and unrestrained. “Yeah, you are so strong and noble and wise.”

“Is that sarcasm, or are you pretending to be a bimbo again? I can’t tell with you sometimes.”

Pestilence stood up and stretched her arms. “Interpret it however you want. This is getting pointless and repetitive for me.”

She turned, seemingly about to leave. I couldn’t let this ambiguity resolve, so before she could take a step or sit back down, I flew to the space in front of her. “You haven't answered me.”

“What? Whether I'm a bimbo?”

“Whether you will work for me.”

“Listen, Death… Dede-chan. All four of us have our issues, and it's sooo obvious that since we last met, another issue clung onto you.”

A flimsy excuse. But a rejection nonetheless. And like what someone would say at a breakup. “That’s irrational of you,” I replied.

Pestilence plopped back down in her seat. A frown clear on her face. She shrugged. “I remember you like idioms. How’s this one? Kill first, ask questions later. Is this rational?”

“I had no choice; you were spreading cholera.”

“No! I was researching a cure for it! It wasn't like penicillin existed back then. What? Are you going to ask me if I started COVID?”

“So, you were responsible for the coronavirus.”

“Yeah, keep putting words in my mouth, might as well tie me up and whip me. Punish me, my mistress. Punish this bad little kitten. Do you want to hear me say these things, mistress?” Quite impressive how she slipped on her helpless mask mid-sentence.

“I'm not interested in your kinks.”

“Oh no… You rejected me. I’m so heartbroken. Looks like we have to go our separate ways now.” She rubbed her eyes. I thought tears would flow again, but she just shook her head and then slumped onto the desk.

“I'll follow you.”

“Eek. A stalker! Someone, please help me. Luckily, this stalker disappears when the sun comes up, like any other monster. So goodbye and see you in two hundred years, or something.” She closed her eyes, apparently going to sleep here instead of on her bed.

At this rate, our encounter would end here. Raven’s life would go on. I could manipulate her to advance my goals from time to time. But would that be enough? How many deaths could happen from a single time Raven refused to listen to me? And if I wasn’t watching Pestilence, who knew what she would get up to? There were too many blinding possibilities, but they were nothing compared to the constant stream of reminders playing at the edge of my perceptions, those grim instances of another death that occurred somewhere in the world after each of my thoughts, almost punctuating them.

A woman was just shot to death by her obsessive stalker in Portland, Oregon, United States. She had alerted the police before. They gave the stalker a verbal warning and left it at that. She pleaded for help multiple times. The ones who could help had the information; they had the evidence from those surveillance cameras everywhere, but they did nothing. If only, instead of an unfeeling computer, they had to watch her die. If only they could hear her thoughts. If only they could taste her fear. I knew what they would say…

“I'm sorry.”

Pestilence’s eyes snapped wide. Her head shot up. “Did you say ‘snore-y’? I thought you couldn’t ever fall asleep.”

“I said I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what? Sorry that you have to chase me to the ends of the world now?”

I took a deep breath, unsure why it was so hard for Pestilence to understand my words. Her confused face must be another attempt to tease me. I waited for her to laugh, to play this off as a tease, but she didn’t say another word. Only, she stared at me, forcing me to clarify myself.

“I'm sorry for killing you.”

I had never seen this expression before. Pestilence’s face deformed, melting and wobbling like unshaped clay that had been granted life. It lasted only a second. With a flash, her features returned to normal, to a flat look. Her verdict arrived soon after. “I promise you I won’t run away, but I also can’t give you an answer now. Give me some time to think. Alone.”

I didn’t know what changed Pestilence’s mind, but I wasn’t about to ruin this. So, I whispered a sweet goodbye that might have given Pestilence goosebumps and glided my way back to my anchor, back to Raven’s sleeping body.