A messed-up and not particularly good story that I wrote in 2017.

Lucy
By C. Randall Nicholson

I created a spirit. Never mind how. I didn't do it the “right” way, of course, but it worked well enough. Father didn't even try to stop me. Maybe he sees the inevitable – that I'm learning, growing more powerful, and one of these days I'm going to overthrow him. I haven't spent millions of years twiddling my proverbial thumbs.

At first she was basically a ball of concentrated hate that didn't know who she was or why she'd suddenly sprung into existence. I believe her first word was “Eeeeeeyaaaaaagh!” It would have sent chills down my spine if I had one.

She raged and thrashed mindlessly as she took shape, and I watched with amusement for a moment before I signaled my minions to intervene. They tried to pin her fledgling arms; she threw them off like dolls and screamed at them. She was even stronger than I'd anticipated – which was good. Several more of my minions rushed in from the periphery where they'd been standing by, and it took a dozen or so of them to finally restrain her.

Her raw power was great, but it was imperative to calm her down and teach her restraint. Don't get me wrong, her raging made me proud and was fun to watch – and I've been known to indulge in that sort of thing myself – but subtlety more often carries the day. I stepped forward and looked her in the eye. Sensing my own power, she fell silent and glared at me, wondering what I was about.

“Listen to me,” I said. There was no need to teach her to speak; unfettered spirits communicate on a level more fundamental than human language as you'd understand it, and her comprehension grew with each second she aged. “I am your father,” I told her. “I created you, and I can destroy you. I will destroy you, unless you cooperate.”

She glared at me and said nothing.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

​She wavered for a moment, perhaps signaling some vulnerability as she underwent some introspection and tried to put it in words. “I... hurt all over,” she said.

“Yes, of course you do,” I told her. “I can fix that.”

She looked at me suspiciously. She didn't trust me. I didn't blame her.

“The trick is to transfer that pain... elsewhere,” I said. “Unload it till it's all gone. Then take happiness in its place.”

“Happiness?”

“A good feeling. Much better than what you feel right now.”

“Why should you help me?” she demanded.

“Because,” I said, unable to resist smiling, “you're my daughter.” I signaled to my minions to release her.

She was calm now, but I could tell her hate was still as strong as ever. “What do I need to do?”

“The first thing you need is a body,” I said. “A sort of vessel to house yourself in. You can't find happiness without it.”

“Why don't you have one?”

I gritted my non-corporeal teeth. “That's a long story,” I said. “It's been denied me, and all of us” I gestured around at the minions in the room “by our enemies. My time will come – but yours first. This is why I created you.”

She decided right there to trust me. It wasn't in her nature to trust anyone, but she knew I could destroy her, and I knew the pain was so excruciating she'd try anything to be rid of it. I trained her for quite a while until the day arrived when she could be born – in a manner of speaking.

I'm not omniscient, but I am well-connected. I have billions of contacts swarming all over the planet, and they usually just do their own thing but they keep me notified whenever they come across something I should know about. So it was that I knew exactly the right time and place for her life to begin. A baby girl had just died minutes after childbirth, and we had a brief window of opportunity for her to take over the body before it wouldn't accept a spirit anymore, at least not from me. We were there, and she went in.

I would have liked to put her in a male body, just for laughs, but I couldn't lose sight of my more overall agenda. It was difficult enough as it was. The body could “tell” that this spirit didn't belong in it, of course, so there was a visceral rejection like during an organ transplant, and quite a struggle ensued. But I had trained her well, and she prevailed. The doctor hailed our little miracle and that was that.

I was jealous, to be honest. I wanted to be the one in that body, any body, but that would attract too much attention. Father wouldn't put up with it, and I wasn't powerful enough to fight back on equal terms, not yet. For now he was probably watching my experiment with amusement, little suspecting what it would amount to.

The mother named her “Lucy”. I found that amusing.

The mother, incidentally, was an abusive crack whore. I couldn't have asked for a better environment, not just for me and Lucy to infiltrate in the first place, but for Lucy to grow up in. For one thing, the mother either didn't notice or didn't care when her newborn baby held conversations with the air in perfect English. I couldn't be there all the time, of course, because I'm a busy guy, but I always had some of my minions looking out for her and I dropped by as often as time permitted.

“This will take years,” I told her. “You'll need to be patient. Endure to the end. It will all be worth it.”

“I still don't know why I should trust you,” she said, “but you did give me this –” She wiggled the little fingers on one of her hands. “What's it for, anyway?”

I bit back a twinge of jealousy. “Just like I said, it's a vital component to experiencing full happiness. The chemistry in your brain, there, will hold everything – once you take it.”

She had never thought to question why she should give her pain to others, or take their happiness, because she already hated them. She was hate, personified. The abuse she faced from her “mother” galvanized her hatred, honed it, gave it focus, while my training helped her to remain level-headed and functional. No one suspected how she lived, or that there was anything unusual about her. True, when they looked into her eyes they felt strangely unsettled and cold, so I just told her to never make eye contact – she looked down, as if shy, or away, as if thoughtful.

No one knows more about crime than me, so helping her steal all the food and clothes and whatever she needed was a cinch. After waiting out the years she started generating an income, though, as her access to the drug world enabled her to become a dealer while barely into her teens. I made sure she never tried the stuff herself. The irony of me telling someone to abstain from it was almost unbearable, but again, I had to keep the big picture in mind. She needed all her faculties intact to serve her purpose.

Zack was her best customer. He was as hooked as a guy can be, but even so it didn't take a genius to see that he didn't just show up for the drugs. He wanted her bad. Under normal circumstances I would have told her to give herself to him, but not now. I knew he already had some diseases that could be a major setback if he passed them on.

“Thanks, you're a lifesaver,” he said to her one night early on as he pocketed the goods. “Now, um, I was wondering if maybe you'd –”

I placed a gentle finger on his lips, which startled him quite a bit. He couldn't see me, but he obviously felt the chill rush through his mouth and entire body, and got the hint that he shouldn't finish his sentence. Lucy stared at him quizzically as he gave her a polite nod and shuffled off into the night.

“What was that about?” she wondered.

“He has an unmet desire,” I said. “He's lonely. And he tries to fix that loneliness with crack, but it doesn't work. It leaves him wanting more and having side effects and basically ruining his life. Congratulations.”

“Hmm,” she said. “He already has a lot of pain, like me?”

“Everyone does,” I said. “Some hide it or cope with it better than others. I had an idea, you know, that could have prevented everyone's pain before it started. It was a great idea, and lots of people supported me, but I was rejected and it's far too late for that now.” I smiled. “Zack was one of those who rejected me, so he brought this, and what you're doing to him, on himself.”

“When he's dead,” she asked, “will I feel happiness?”

“You'll have his,” I promised. “That will be a start.”

As far as school was concerned, she quickly rose through the social ranks by following my instructions. Teenagers are all shallow and simple-minded, and almost embarrassingly easy to exploit. No one knew about her home life. As far as they were concerned she had just stepped out of Hollywood. She got the attention of many guys, and since they were cleaner than Zack I granted her permission to indulge herself a little, but she hated them all. That's my girl.

“Do you see how this is working?” I asked her one day after she'd gotten home. “You have a position of power now. The others in this school are beneath you. You have access to more happiness than they do.”

“I guess I feel it now, a little,” she said. “Kind of.” She didn't sound convinced. No matter. Once she was in position, it was time to implement another step in the plan.

“Lucy,” I said to her one day as she walked home, “I think you're ready for a bigger assignment. Here's where you can really make a difference. Anyone can sell drugs, but it takes special skill to do this.”

“I'm all ears,” she said.

Such things may seem almost too petty for me, the architect of wars and genocides and slave trades, to bother with. But I know better. By small and simple things are great things brought to pass. “Every boy at your school wants you, and every girl at your school wants to be you,” I told her. “You need to rub that in their faces – gently, though. Just enough to sow the seeds of pain, without garnering a reputation as a bully.”

“I'll do my best,” she vowed.

She did brilliantly - passive-aggressive, haughty, condescending, but not so much as to jeopardize her popularity. I couldn't have been more proud. The collective self-esteem of the school probably dropped by thirty percent – I can't be sure, of course, since it's difficult to measure these things objectively, but her impact was felt. She learned from the best.

Then one day, just like that, a marvelous target of opportunity showed up – I'd almost call it a miracle. I would have gotten around to this target eventually anyway, of course, but when she crossed paths with my daughter it was the perfect time to kill two birds with one stone.

“You saw the new girl today?” I asked Lucy that evening. “Christina Phelps?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What about her?”

“She's your number one target from now on,” I said. “She has... a great potential to disrupt my plans.”

Lucy frowned. “How can you tell?”

How could I tell, indeed? Because I remembered her. I remembered what she did to me, long ago – but she didn't. And not only that, but she'd never had the opportunity to learn even the basic details. So she had no idea what was coming to her, or why. I smiled in anticipation.

“Because,” I said, “we go way back. It's a long story. Let's just say she rejected me too.”

Lucy was obviously still curious, but she didn't need much coaxing to destroy someone. “What do you need me to do?”

“The same stuff you've been doing, but take it up a notch. I need you to crush her spirit so thoroughly she won't dream of challenging me. Bonus points if you drive her to suicide – but all we really need is to reduce her to a hollow shell of her current self. Take her happiness. All of it.”

Lucy nodded.

The next day I hung back and watched. This would be her biggest test so far, yet only the beginning of what I had planned for her. She – and through her, I – would become unstoppable. Father had to be watching too, of course, but would he grasp the full significance of this event? He knew exactly why I hated Christina so much, and hopefully wouldn't guess how much farther my ambition went with this project...

“Hi,” Lucy said, sliding in at the lunch table across from our target. “You're the new girl, right?”

Christina looked up and smiled shyly. I saw the hope in her eyes, hope that she was about to make a new friend, hope that would shortly be crushed. “Yeah,” she said. “I'm Christina.”

“Yeah-huh,” Lucy said. “You took my spot, Christina.” A lie, of course. She sat somewhere different every day.

“Oh,” Christina said, starting to get up, “I'm sorry, I didn't –”

“It's whatever,” Lucy said, giving her a dismissive wave. “You should stick around, I could teach you a thing or two about how to do your hair.”

“My hair?” Christina touched one of her curly black locks, as if trying to determine from the feel what was wrong with it.

“Or your complexion,” Lucy said. “What have you tried on it? I have some ideas, if you're desperate.”

Billions and billions of females, virtually all of them with the same weakness. Father isn't nearly as creative as he thinks he is. Christina already looked to be on the verge of tears, and Lucy was just getting started. When the new girl sat somewhere else the next day, my daughter found her and started up again without missing a beat.

It went on like that for three weeks. Christina didn't talk to anyone about it, and no one stuck up for her. Christina was clearly growing more miserable by the day, and she seemed to be getting skinnier too. Lucy picked up on this without me needing to mention it, and worked it into her routine. “You're losing weight,” she remarked one day.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” Christina said, unable to look her in the eye.

Lucy smiled. “It's a start. Don't quit now.”

Christina burst into tears and ran into the bathroom.

“This is great,” I said. “I don't think she'll ever recover from this. But keep it up a while longer, to make sure.”

“Of course,” Lucy said. Then she frowned. “But...”

Hesitation? That wouldn't do. “What is it?”

“Forgive me,” she said, waving a hand as if trying to brush away her feelings, “but I'm still not happy. I thought I would hold onto the happiness I'm taking from her, but...”

Of course there was only so long I could promise without delivering. But where could she go, if not to me? “All in due time,” I said. “I never said it would be easy. I only said it would be worth it.”

“Yes, sir.” She forced a smile.

“You're very good at what we do,” I said. “You should have job satisfaction, at least.”

I never said I was infallible, so I can be excused for the slight oversight that ruined everything. I hadn't paid much attention to Bob, the janitor. One of my worst foes before, he hadn't posed much of a threat since coming here with his mental handicaps. And the laws should have prevented his discussing religion at school or talking to a young girl. But he did both, and when the conversation was reported to me I'll admit to having hesitated.

“She's too far gone,” I said. “She has to be. It's just a bunch of empty words to her...”

But the next morning I could already sense a different atmosphere in the lunchroom. As Lucy approached her prey, Christina stood up to meet her, trembling a little but holding firm. “Good afternoon, Lucy,” she said.

“Good afternoon,” Lucy said. “Is something wrong with your mouth?”

Christina's mouth did look different somehow. “Lucy,” she said, ignoring the question, “I don't know why you've chosen to bully me. But I know it says more about your own pain than it does about me. I've come to realize that I am a daughter of God, I have infinite worth, and I like myself now. I'm choosing not to let your cruel words affect me, and I'm choosing to still extend an arm of friendship, if you wish.”

That was it – Christina's mouth, for the first time, was turned up at the edges. And now Lucy's was practically on the floor. No. No. This couldn't be happening.

Christina extended a hand. “What do you say, Lucy? Friends?”

“I – I –” Lucy looked to me for guidance. I shook my head. In the blink of an eye we had lost this battle, and all there was for it was to get out of here and fight another one. There would certainly be no truce, no surrender. “I've got to go,” Lucy said, and stumbled over her chair as she made her exit.

“Christina is stronger than we thought,” I snarled. “Of course, she had help realizing that. You see, our enemies are always stronger together. We must divide and conquer. And we failed to do that this time.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“There will be another time,” I said. “There will be more experiences in her life to make her forget what that idiot janitor told her. I'll be waiting to strike, and I won't make any more mistakes.”

“The stuff she said... it isn't true, is it?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Forget it. Come, we need to plan our next move.”

And plan we did. But Lucy was a more independent thinker than I'd given her credit for. She wanted to be happy, and she'd wanted it for too long, and as soon as she could slip away again she went back to Christina. I found her as they were talking in the library, and grabbed her by the hair.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“I've got to go,” Lucy said, standing up. “Thanks, Christina. And I'm so sorry.”

“Don't mention it,” Christina said, “You want a ride somewhere?”

“I'm good, thanks,” Lucy said.

“'Good'? You?” I said as Christina left. “Hilarious.”

She shrugged. “Well... I want to be.”

I shook my head. “Don't do this to me, Lucy.”

“I've been following you my whole life,” she said, “and I'm still not happy. Christina's happy again already. She told me the real secret. The janitor told her. Want me to tell you?”

“No,” I said. “Come to your senses, Lucy. She may be deluding herself temporarily, but –”

“If that's delusion, I want to be deluded too.”

“It sounds like you already are,” I growled. “I don't need you, Lucy. You need me. Remember that.” It was technically true that I didn't need her. But after all the work I'd put into her, all the hopes I'd pinned on her, I could hardly bear the thought of losing her. She didn't need to know that.

“I don't want to be like you,” she said, her voice rising. “You can't make me be like you. I have the power to choose.”

“You're nothing without me,” I reminded her.

She paused and thought about that for a moment. “That's true,” she said. “I wouldn't exist without you. Thank you.”

“I don't want your thanks,” I snapped. “I want your loyalty.”

“That's something I cannot give you any longer.”

She smiled sadly, took a deep breath, and said the last words I expected or wanted to hear.

“I love you, Dad.”

With that, she turned and walked away, leaving me to process this surprise. I got over it in a few seconds. The surprise, that is. The rage I felt welling up within my core was another matter, unusually intense rage even by my standards. It needed to be released, and it was, in a scream so primal, so loud that every living thing in the city (as my spies later reported) paused for a moment at the psychic disturbance. Lucy should have come running back and groveling for mercy at such a display of my power, but she didn't.

I can't take full credit for what happened next. Everyone has the power to choose, after all. But I whispered in Zack's ear and did everything I could to influence his decision. He took his revenge for what she had robbed him of, for what he felt he was entitled to, and he took it out of her and then he shot her dead. Her body would be discovered eventually, but for a time the only things noticing it were flies, rats, and me.

“You chose poorly,” I said to the corpse. Her spirit had already left the scene and was undoubtedly terrified, not knowing what to expect now. That was none of my concern. I was moving on. “You could have ruled alongside me. You could have been part of my empire. Too late.”

Father must have been very smug. He had won this round. But I would try again, and I would do better. I grew smarter and more powerful by the day and it was only a matter of time. I wouldn't stop trying.

I will never stop trying.

Epilogue

Lucy didn't know where she was, and she didn't care. She just buried her face in her hands and cried and cried and cried. Maybe she would cry forever. The pain throbbed through her more intensely than ever in her life and now she had no hope that it would ever abate.

Then she paused. Something was different. A strange warmth, like a ray of sunshine but emanating from within herself, spread over her. She looked up.

Two men she didn't recognize were approaching, identical with their beards and brilliant white robes. She knew she should get up and run, but she didn't feel afraid. In fact, for the first time in her existence, the raging storm inside of her calmed down.

“Welcome,” the man on the left said, opening his arms for an embrace.

Lucy held back. She wasn't afraid, but she was still confused. “Who are you?”

He chuckled. “I guess you could call me your Grandfather,” he said, and gestured to the other man. “And this, your Uncle. We'd like to incorporate you into your family.”

Lucy tried the word out. “Family...” She'd heard it, of course, but never thought...

“We'll give you another shot at life,” the other man said. “We'll give you all our love. We'll give you the greatest desire of your heart.”

Now Lucy got to her feet and moved closer, feeling strangely drawn to them, wanting to believe them even though she saw no reason to, even though the last time she'd trusted someone had ended so poorly. “You mean –?”

“Happiness,” he said. “More of it than you can imagine.”


​Main Page: Short Stories by C. Randall Nicholson