Page 16 - Ferry Tales

Mallflower

“Not at all. If you must know—”
“I do know: but don’t let that stop you.”
“All right. I did it to hurt the others. They were bullying me,
sending anonymous messages and posting terrible photographs and
telling lies about me all over the place. They made me feel as if life
wasn’t worth living.”
No doubt I’ll have to hear Kristie’s and Merline’s and Letty’s
versions of this in future: how tedious!
“So I did it to get back at them. Now they will be made to feel like
murderers, don’t you see? Stigma and suffering for the rest of their
miserable lives. And now that I know Hell awaits them, I can be sure
that their punishment is worse than mine. If you stick hot irons in
me, then you will be pulling them apart with tweezers dipped in acid.
I hope we’ll be able to see each other being tortured. Revenge is
mine! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Her shuttle to Shaitan was almost touching land. She didn’t notice
you lurking in the shadows, canis diabolicus. Time to burst her crazy
little balloon.
“It’s not for me, as your escort service, to tell you what sort of
torment is in store for you versus your former friends. But their
behavior was casual cruelty, of limited duration; they would have
moved on, and so would you. But your vengeance is absolute: neither
you nor they can undo or ameliorate it. I’d say you were guilty of a lot
more injury, even without adding in your own family. People seem to
think the harm they’ve done ends with their last breath. As one of my
earlier passengers said, ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the
good is oft interred with their bones.’ The Devil’s accounting is
unbounded in time and space. And don’t fool yourself into thinking
Hell resembles a beauty parlor run by sadists: it’s a lot more subtle.”
So that’s how it ended. Damnation is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?
Now I must enjoy the peace and quiet of a leisurely trip to the other
shore. Someday I hope to find out if your bites are worse than your
barks—find out as a witness, I mean!

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