Who am I to say that she wasn’t really a murderer? I wasn’t there. Who was I to say they shouldn’t have killed her when the legal system refused to do so? I wasn’t there. Laws aren’t perfect, any more than humans are perfect. And I might not approve of ‘street justice’, but then again, it wasn’t my street, eh?
People tend to believe that “innocent until proven guilty” is some kind of loophole that makes it easier for criminals to escape, because it makes convictions more difficult. But it’s actually a clear response to tyranny. Nobody likes seeing someone potentially get away with misdeeds. But presumption of guilt leads to either governmental tyranny, or private mobs, and the challenge is, these things don’t work out very well.
Because once she’d been executed by the crowd, the crowd thought they’d made the world a better place. And more specifically, they thought they’d made their lives a better place.
And what they did not count on was her ghost.
…and no, this is not a story of the supernatural. She did, in fact, come back as a sad spirit, but nobody was psychic, so nobody heard her rattling chains in the attic, and she had no corporeal existence or telekinetic powers, so she couldn’t go around stabbing people, even if she wanted to. And nobody knows what she wants, because people aren’t psychic.
(This is a bit ironic, considering that some people claimed she was a murderess specifically because they said that they could tell what she was secretly thinking and feeling. But that turned out not to be the case.)
No, I mean her figurative ghost. Which is to say, the results of deciding they had been living alongside a homicidal maniac.
First they spoke to each other in half-excited, half-scared tones. “That one time I was alone with her, she might have killed me! I got lucky!”
And then, as a matter of course, the stories became more vivid. This is hardly wickedness; sure, fishermen exaggerate the size of the fish that got away, but that’s also partly because they aren’t totally sure about how big that thing was in the first place.
“I just realized…I was down in her basement, and I could have sworn she was looking at me oddly. But then I got a phone call and had to go upstairs for better reception, and if I hadn’t headed upstairs right away, who knows what would have happened?”
And the response: “Oh, that’s nothing! That one day when she ‘accidentally’ bumped into me at the garage sale…that was no accident. There was…something sharp, maybe it was a knife set? Something bad, I’m sure of it, and it was right on the table next to where I was, and if I’d lost my balance, I’d have been impaled. She tried to kill me in broad daylight!”
Some people were exaggerating. Some were showing off for their friends. Some were telling the truth as they remembered it.
Funny thing about memory. Go look it up. We don’t “remember” things in a consistent way. For example, I think that my ex-husband and I were happy for most of our 13 years together, but I don’t really remember being close. Everything I remember feels like it was tinged with the distance and the icy cold of our divorce, and that’s all; I can remember a dozen times when he said something that I now hear as being an absolute dismissal of my life or my actions or my goals, but I can’t remember our first kiss.
I don’t want to, either.
We know that memory works this way.
And yet it’s still our judge and jury.
Which would be fine…if it worked. If it made us feel better.
If the people we thought we cared about, those who—we thought—cared about us, would just obligingly vanish from the Earth love turned to hate…
…that would be grand, wouldn’t it? So that we could bury those memories, as a murderer (ought to) (more carefully) bury her victims.
And if that’s your hope…prepare, in this regard, as with so many things in your life, to be disappointed.
But because these things roam through the mind, they don’t stay dead. Even if the person dies, the memories scream to us with new pain.
This is not a system that works; not unless you want to be haunted by horrifying ghosts.
But the more they’re convinced that they got it right, the more they’re encouraged to step up and speak their tales of horror. And again: if that were cathartic, then, fair or not, true or not, at least someone would benefit.
But the stories only feed the ghost; and the ghost is in their heads; and their heads are, now, never at peace.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. You can get most of my books right here. Go ahead, pre-order “I HATE Your Prophecy“. It may make you into a bad person, but I can live with that.
