IX.

The Leper spent the last two years helping the Low Priest put together his Cadre. Using some of her connections in the police force, as well as her knowledge and instincts regarding psychology, she helped him select the right sort of group to help him with his cause.

It had been a great help to her to do this. It gave her a purpose, an aim to keep her eyes on in place of her pain. She was grateful to the Low Priest for this. It’s why she’d taken on the identity he gave her so readily. He’d, in a somewhat perverse way, saved her.

So, when she considered dying, it wasn’t necessarily for her sake that she hesitated. The Low Priest had grown to depend on her. 

He was a persuasive type, charming, articulate, handsome to some. And he had resources as well. A modest inheritance from his fiscally conservative father. But, what he lacked, and what she had provided to him, was intuition and imagination. The poor boy, he’d been raised religious. His folks had discouraged any semblance of fanciful thinking. Everything had to be so straightforward and logical with him. Whereas her, she was a bit more free thinking. 

She smiled to herself sometimes at the thought of him choosing her. Even that was such a cookie cutter first choice. Woman who lost her family in a fire and had nothing left to live for. Could you get more obvious?

It’d worked out for him, though. She was his perfect partner

It was her who decided on the library as an initial target. “We need to attack a place that makes people feel vulnerable,” he’d said. But then, he’d gone on to suggest City Hall or the Courthouse or the Mayor’s Mansion. Showing off that limited vision. The death of public figures, sure, it’d cause a commotion. People might panic. But, would it be a tragedy? Would people look into the faces of their children and fear they’d lose them? No. For that, they would need to strike at a place where anybody might find themselves. He’d fought her over this for a while. Insisted it was too small. But she stood her ground. Stood her ground and eventually won. She was a cop and he was a preacher’s kid. He really didn’t stand a chance.

Would he, then, be able to manage without her? He would have to, she concluded. It was time for her to go.

The Leper took the glass flasks from the clock and palmed them in a fist. She stood, her hands raised, and turned to face the push-cart librarian.

“What is that smell?” the librarian asked.

“Kerosene,” said the Leper.

“Kerosene?” said the librarian, fear taking hold of her features, “What exactly are you planning?”

What the Leper had been planning was a simple act of hit and run arson. The intent was to set the alarm on the clock to a couple of minutes, make her way to the front, and wait for the clock hammer to drop. This would crack open the vials, thereby mixing their chemicals, spark a flame meant to disseminate through the library, and, just as everyone’s attention turned to that, the Leper would turn her kerosene tin into a Molotov cocktail and set fire to the exit before making her escape.

But the librarian had thrown off the plan. Thrown it off but maybe for the best. Because, even though the Low Priest had gifted her with something to aim at, the truth was, at her periphery, the pain was always there. The episode with her son’s book confirmed it. Maintaining her gaze, maintaining it for two years, she was realizing it only then, but, it had been wearying. Like a soldier who’s trudged through a firefight, taking bullets, watching his friends die around him, and now, has finally reached the assailant, grabbed them, choked them, killed them. All that’s left to do is collapse to the ground and die.

With that settled, she cast the two vials to the floor.

The fire spread across the kerosene like a lightning bolt filling the sky. In an instant, the Children’s section was swallowed in flame. The fire sprang easily, quickly, to other sections. The books made for excellent kindling. And there was no hope of stopping it. The sprinklers, the fire alarms, both had been disabled by the Leper earlier. This building was fated to burn.

A scream erupted from the cart-librarian. It was followed by that of a patron, then another, another, another, until there was a chorus of screams coming from everywhere. Then, the bustle of panic, people running, trampling each other, fighting to escape. Some, the Leper knew, would make it out in time. Not all, though. She’d claim her share of victims, there was no doubt of that. One of which would be herself.

She walked forth through the flames like a phantom surveying the chaos she had caused. She herself was aflame, burning away, dying already. But she didn’t feel it, she couldn’t. All she felt was the unquenchable void in her, that part of her desperate for revenge, trying to fill, but ultimately, falling short of full. Even in the midst of all this suffering, she discovered, there was no satisfaction. Perhaps in death she would find it. With that thought in mind, she collapsed among the others.

It was the smoke that had got her. It’d filled her lungs, filled her brain, robbed her of her cognition just as it had that night in her home. And with it, a vision came. In the orange blades of the flames, she saw her family, reaching out to her from behind a pile of rubble. She stretched her hands toward them, shrieking for them, shrieking as some of the patrons were doing even now for their own loved ones. She never reached them. Just as she was to touch their fingers, a fireman had lifted her up onto his shoulder, ripping her away from them forever. But now, she could be with them, finally. In the bliss of the abyss, they would be together. Yes, wasn’t that going to be nice?

All around her, the building collapsed and burned. She too, burned. With nothing left to reach for this time, she welcomed the darkness that threatened to take her. Let it sweep through her like an elixir. The crackle of the fire around her grew faint. Her victims’ screams as well. Into peace she finally passed, her life, or what passed for it, leaving her with a cough. 

What waited for her afterward is not for us to say.