This is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near-fatal) event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are therefore entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack.
It was the night of All Hallows and a time for accounting. It was a time to balance the books and a night for justice. They danced around the old wooden outhouse in the clearing, weaving rolls of handmade cloth around it like a maypole. Their bare feet were cool in the soft mossy earth as the witches danced, singing of insults and affronts, of retribution and redress. They danced, those murmuring witches.
From the old wooden structure, listing and creaking under the bonds of colored cloth, a voice emerged: querulous, demanding, and plaintive. Wayne was a long way from the office where he had made laws to cut funding to the doulas, the midwives, and the women he had called “the witches.” Wayne had ascended to power by surfing a wave of public discontent, and along with a handful of other firebrands, had leveraged a stagnating political system to great personal advantage. Decades of stalemate between the two state political parties, each blaming the other for the impasse, had fostered unwholesome social effects. First, it became advantageous to the incumbent politicians to fire up their bases with ever more lurid and fantastical claims about the opposing party. Although the party leaders actually socialized and privately shared many perspectives and treasured benefits, in public the accusations became increasingly incendiary. Secondly, to keep their voters engaged, they proposed increasingly extreme legislation that they knew would be disastrous, but which they could safely table, sure in the knowledge that the opposition could be relied on to veto or block it. This had the added advantage of allowing them to claim, in extravagant and incendiary prose, that but for the perfidy of an unscrupulous and malign opposition, they could have solved all the voters problems. It had been a neat and effective trick, until it wasn’t.
A new breed of politicians had entered the game, intent on breaking up this logjam, not understanding how the game worked (or perhaps understanding it fully and wanting to set fire to it). They immediately went about a scorched-earth process of breaking traditions. They did not observe the social niceties and private rules of decorum that previously existed between the competing political parties and soon garnered power. They immediately put to the vote many of the more lethal and inflammatory social-purity laws that had been promised for decades, but which had always been blocked. This time, the laws came to pass, and soon hospitals and medical facilities were faced with ideological laws that made no medical sense, ran counter to best practices, and would likely have severe effects on the quality and safety of care. Both facilities and providers now faced a daily dilemma: whether to provide accepted standards of care but potentially face criminal consequences, or follow the law and provide care which they knew would likely be less safe, have lower effectiveness, add layers of bureaucracy, and would force care to be focused on the letter of the law, rather than the patient.
To ensure that the hospitals were complying, Wayne crafted a bounty for any accusations by the public that led to prosecution of a physician. Furthermore, Wayne had decided to spend 2 days a week visiting hospitals amidst great fanfare and media attention. During these visits, he made grand televised speeches, accused the hospital and their leadership of criminality, and promised further large bounties for any evidence against them. The spectacles were highly effective in garnering public attention, demonizing healthcare workers, and disrupting hospital operations. They also attracted and further radicalized three distinct groups: those cynics who saw a way to settle old scores or make money, those who reported things in misguided ignorance, and those whose lives or health were suddenly in turmoil. Each report triggered a flurry of fact-finding and accusations, sparked panic and confusion, and generated mountains of extra and urgent paperwork. Defensive medicine became the norm, some services and procedures were subjected to extra gatekeeping, and some were curtailed entirely out of a fear of potential prosecution.
Women’s health was one of the first to see the effects, with wait times stretching out, patient outcomes worsening, and growing anger from providers and patients alike. While the pushback from providers tended to be limited to curt statements in meetings and the occasional caustic op-ed in a newspaper, a previously peaceful constituency became inflamed. The doulas, midwives, and patient advocates who were seeing the bad outcomes firsthand had no natural platform from which to talk and became increasingly frustrated. It was when Wayne laughed out loud in response to a question posed by a Wiccan midwife at one of his hospital visits that a response was eventually triggered. Warned afterward by a staffer that there was a loose confederation of these people, he dismissed it with a contemptuous snort and a juicy comment made with a hot lapel microphone. His comment was overheard and spread via the grapevine throughout the hospital and its satellite clinics. It soon reached the ears of a quiet but central figure in the invisible power structure of the hospital system. Soon, decisions and plans were formed and put into action.
Dr. Melissa Freeman liked her new name and liked her job at the hospital. It was a tiresome part of being undead that she needed to change identities before people noticed that she wasn’t aging quite as fast as anyone else. As a vampire with particular dining interests, it was also wise to move once in a while. Bodies were obstinately bulky things that resisted vanishing, and a person needed to not let them pile up, so to speak. She was an ancient vampire, possibly the oldest around, and had seen kings and queens, empires and nations, and oh so many midnight lovers come and go. Her original name was Lilith, or perhaps Lilitu, but even that was blurred by the passing centuries. It may simply have referred to her people. It had been several thousand years since she had been a member of that partially nomadic group in a place where nations had yet to arise. But here she was, not a familiar in the Bohemian court, or the shadow that stole a crown and a case of brandy from Napolean Bonapart, but the psychiatrist in a woman’s health clinic. She enjoyed this work. There was not so much climbing along rooftops or dodging blades like centuries past, but there were still irritating things in abundance. Just like in the courts of Byzantine, here too there were infuriating scribblers who made life more difficult. She had built a coven that operated unobtrusively but was not without an ability and willingness to flex its muscles when needed.
Lilith had encountered Wayne during one of his histrionic camera appearances. Lilith had not known him, but had suddenly realized that this pudgy-fingered and sweaty little gnome was the one whose scribblings had tied up the clinic in red tape and foolishness. Wayne’s laws had not just thrown the reproductive care of OB/GYN into turmoil, but had also upended gender-affirming care that the mental health and endocrinology teams had built over years. Also, because Wayne and his cohort were ham-fisted and lazy in how they crafted their laws, the same laws also shredded the work of the fertility clinic, the emergency medicine department, and a host of group therapy and outreach programs.
Drugging him with a yew infusion and abducting him had been easy. It was even easier because Lilith had added diazepam to the mixture. Wayne was not a man to turn down a drink at the motel bar, especially not when it was made by a woman with a big smile and a lot of cleavage. He had been somewhat unguarded about accepting an invitation to the room of a coven member for a few more drinks, eagerly following her even though she was a complete stranger. One ice-filled glass of the witches’ special mix was all it took. Halfway through undoing his belt, Wayne was face-down on the musty carpeted floor, lights out. Once he was unconscious, the witch acting as the honey trap opened the door for her friends, and the four women had rolled him in a carpet, bundled him into a van, and headed to the woods.
Now that the binding dance was ending, the voices rose, and the moon broke through thin and scudding clouds. With the chill light glistening on silvery streams, they poured the spirits of their peach brandy crop from heavy jugs. Once the spirit had soaked the wooden structure and drenched the cloth, the chant ended, and the cloth tails were lit. Sparks soon flew high into the night and reached for the cold stars. Eyes were bright in the roaring light as a song of justice and revenge rose until there were just glowing embers left. Wayne’s scorched-earth policies had caught up to him at last.
