The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.16 A Ridiculous, Silly Thing

June 5, 10:41 pm

"Look at her, Mattie! She looks just like your sister. She looks just like Frances!"

Billy was weeping in the mall parking lot, his tears disappearing into nothingness as they fell from his eyes. The brutally stabbed and slashed girl was dead now. Her moaning boyfriend, covered in blood and holding her, was in shock, rocking the body back and forth in his arms. The other girl, who may have been her best friend, was strangely silent, her face a mask of disbelief that Billy knew would soon crumble as the reality of the loss settled over her.

Billy had seen both the living and the dead brought low by despair and loss for over a hundred and fifty years. He had learned that loss is as much a consequence of being human as breath. Or as death.

Mattie watched him, her face an unreadable mask. Only her narrow, cold eyes betrayed the hatred that consumed her. Billy knew it was the same disgust that the little girl had directed toward him since her own return from the Vastness. It was a hatred he had never understood, fueled by her conversations with the one she mistakenly called God. That dark voice that once spoke to him as well.

The police were arriving quickly, but a reporter had somehow beaten most of them to the parking lot. The cameraman with her seemed stunned, but the reporter was focused. She made a beeline for the girl, who was staring blankly at her dead friend. Gently, she said, "Miss, my name is Morgan Jensen, and I'm a reporter with KUTV. Would you be willing to talk for a moment about what happened?" The reporter was young, pretty, and blond; like so many of them were now.

To Billy's surprise, the girl nodded, and with a hand that supported her elbow, the reporter walked her off to the side, making sure the camera angle would not show her dead friend behind them.

Billy arose, and walked to where Mattie was standing, off to the side of the chaos. As he got closer, he saw the blank malevolence on her face melt into a dark smile. There was pride in her face now. Pride at what she had done. Billy expected her to run away from him, as she always did.

He had been following her off and on, usually at a distance, for more years than he could count. There had been decades at a time that she had not even allowed him to approach her, or he had chosen not to try. But he had watched her helplessly as she fell under the sway of the being that she thought of as God, but the one Tuilla had told him was called the Wanderer.

Under his sway, Billy had seen Mattie commit many small cruelties, and he suspected she had done far more than he knew. But never had he seen her commit murder.

"Princess, talk to me," Billy said, sinking to his knees at her feet. She was still such a little girl. She had to tilt her head down to stare at Billy with eyes that were glowing brighter with hatred with every passing second.

Billy tried to speak to her, but there seemed so little he could say, in the wake of such a devastating act. Finally, he found some words.

"Did... he make you do this?"

Her eyes narrowed. "My God doesn't make me do anything, Billy Travers." She actually took a step toward him, which he couldn't remember her doing for more than a century. "I do what God wants because he loves me. And because I love him."

Mattie had not lost the cadence in her voice of the little girl she used to be. The boy Billy had been in 1857 was long gone, having disappeared quickly after his return to the Hereafter. Even though his body still looked like the same fifteen-year-old, so much had happened to him since then. All of that had changed him. Why was Mattie still the same little girl he remembered from the prairies?

"Mattie, please look at that dead girl. Doesn't she look like Frances? Do you even remember your sister Frances? Do you remember how much she loved you? Do you remember how you used to laugh when I called you 'Princess'?"