For Good or Ill
I don't own Koudelka, but I highly recommend playing the game if you can find it. In case anyone is wondering, the events predate Koudelka, the game. Just my interpretation of what might have contributed to the 19 year old we saw at Nemeton. Rated M for a good reason.
My teacher had gone on to India for a time and I - I was left to my own devices. She had given me a small purse with a few shillings, but not enough to do much more than buy a loaf of bread. Poverty and hunger, my old companions, came back to meet me at the docks one night when I was searching for work. I was leaning on the rotting and smelly sidewall of a local tavern, slivers of wood ramming uncomfortably into my back, considering my options – go in and earn a drink, a bed and a meal – or leave, staying cold, hungry and safe, for going in would not be the safest answer to my needs. But, it was a familiar one.
Finally, the grinding of my stomach and the smell of greasy meat pasties decided for me, and I pushed off from the wall and entered the pub. It was dim in there, as are all pubs, the light of day or truth would be too bright for such squalid places. The air was fetid with stale beer, urine and the thick smell of meat. A few tables dotted the crowded, sawdust-covered floor, and there were a dozen booths set along the walls. The patrons - sailors, longshoremen, thugs and whores - paid me no mind as I looked as much like them as they did like me; poorly clothed, dirty and a little shady. Yes, that's me, a street walker, a whore, a doxy for your bed. Nothing has changed, not me, not the world. I'm still a poor woman with no prospects, no matter what learning my teacher gave me. I stepped up to the barman and listened to the ambient conversation. He didn't bother giving me a drink, knew by looking at me I hadn't a coin of my own. But it didn't take long.
After a few minutes, a large man waddled his way to the bar for a refill of his ale and he looked me up and down, like a side of beef at the market. Yes, I was his type… God help me. We went back to his table, and he had me entertain him by listening. He fed me a little, just enough I suppose to keep me docile, and nattered on about worthless rot. Then, with a hand the size of a ham, he grabbed my arm and dragged me up the back stairs, tossing a coin to the proprietor.
Upstairs was no better than downstairs. A small, unlit corridor lead to three doors, their wooden slats showing age and violence. He took the back one at the far end and shoved me in, pushing home the bolt to the door. It didn't matter - I knew what to do. I slowly took off my clothing – my threadbare jacket, a skirt, blouse and shoes, my long black stockings. These I laid aside and stared for a moment at the mattress lying grey and lice-ridden in the corner. I sighed and lay down, waiting. It wasn't long. The man, though big, could divest himself quickly, probably from practice, and when I saw him, I thought my ill-purchased dinner would come back up. He was filthy, unwashed and crawling with bugs. He had lesions where he should not, and a roll of fat around his belly. He lay on top of me and began, without finesse, and the smell of him made me forget about the lice, and the lesions.
Time passed, the room moving back and forth with the man's actions. He was no expert, no love-maker. His concentration was total, his arms on either side of me, pinning me to the lumpy bed, his body's weight crushing me to the mattress. I didn't care. I had been here before, in this place, in this position. When he was done, when he slept, then I could move. Assuming he didn't kill me. I didn't think he would.
I let his movement send my thoughts away, carrying them away from his stench, his grunts, and his foul breath. Drops of his stinking sweat pattered on my face like rain, my legs stretched over his shoulders ached, but I thought of other things, of fog along the riverbank, crickets chirping and the small cries of seagulls, so much like the cries of children. I remember the first time I saw the sea – father had taken a wagonload of straw to the lighthouse at the end of the point, feed for the horses and penned animals. I went with him, a treat for a lonely child and, after helping to offload the hay, I stood on the waving grass alongside the wagon while father went in for his pay. The birds were circling overhead, riding the cool wind from off the Irish Sea. They swooped and circled, and their cries were like children playing and I smiled up at them, wishing I were so free, so unburdened. I had felt their freedom from the swaying grasses and I could feel their freedom now, as the man on top of me grunted, his stinking seed filling me like piss.
Freedom. I didn't have it then. I didn't have it now. So, what did I have?
The fat man on top of me grunted, mashing one heavy fist on my breast, not satisfied with one time he continued to push into me, the meat for his table. I sighed quietly, giving him what he wanted, letting my body take the abuse while my mind stayed clean. My teacher had taught me that, how to separate my mind from my body, letting my spirit soar to new heights while my mundane self did what it had to do, what it needed to do. Like now, taking this man's abuse was nothing to me, I'm only flesh and blood but my mind, my soul, could soar with those seagulls I remembered.
The day before my teacher left for India, she had told me how proud she was of me.
"You have learned what I could teach you, girl. It's up to you to use it wisely. The day I found you, I saw in you the power of God in His Heavens, the power to Hear and to See. You've proven me right." She had nodded and accepted tea from the servant, watching me like a hawk the whole time. I sat across from her, my bony elbows resting on the tabletop and wondering more about what would happen to me now that she was leaving.
"You proved yourself that first day, by seeing my guides, the Ascended Masters. And you proved yourself in the crypt – though you have yet to tell me what you saw. However, you have yet to find your own guides. I don't know why you're delaying that, or perhaps it is because you have some special talent you haven't found yet... I believe you are a natural, girl. You can learn anything you put your mind to. Like the traveling, the spirit walking that you did just last week."
Traveling on the Astral Planes, she had called it; loosing my spirit, my soul, to walk the world. Remembering that here, now, with the man pushing his way into me, his fat belly scraping across me like sandpaper, made me shudder inside and, in my belly, a fire began to burn; a fire that had nothing to do with the manhood deep inside me, or the stinking seed dripping from me when he was finished. I burned. The fire grew, filling my belly, consuming my chest, by breasts igniting, my hair crackling and my eyes... I felt my eyes dry and shriveling and suddenly the fire of my own consumption lighted the room. I moved then, tossing aside the puny man, sending him crashing to the far wall, and I rose from the grey and fetid mattress, my body burning with a fire I had never seen or felt before.
I looked at the man, the pathetic excuse for a human being, and saw the worms in his belly, the little demons that lived in his heart and mind and his soul... his soul was black with his deeds. He was beneath my contempt. I reached out and touched his mind, seeing all the squirmy little things that he hid from himself and from the world, and uttered one word, watching as his mind shriveled to a walnut as he grew slack and his bulk slid to the filthy floor, spittle oozing from his parted lips.
And then I blinked, the fire banking, the room returning to the dingy darkness and I looked down at the man, lying in his own spit and piss and wanted to scream. Quickly, I donned my clothes and ran.
And I kept on running, south. Out of town, out to the country where I could think, and hear, and listen and not be afraid. Only I was very much afraid. What my teacher said came back to me in words I had ignored when she spoke them. The day I had acted as medium for her to prove I had learned my lessons. I had spoken with the voice of a murderer, spewing forth bile and vitriol and hatred for women and whores and – Helena said I had called forth the spirit of Jack. When I asked whom she meant, she pointed at the nearby newspapers, their print old and the paper yellowed, but with clear headlines of murdered women in the East End. I didn't understand until now what she meant.
"You are more than a medium, girl. You have spoken with the spirit and soul of a killer, one who walked the streets of London. You can speak to the living as well as the dead. You have a gift lying within you. May God be merciful."