"Hey, new girl," Judith said in lieu of a greeting, smoke billowing out and drifting away down the alley. Brittni knew that Judith knew full well what her name was, had known for weeks, but seemed to like calling her that anyway.
"Hey," Brittni said, and was about to go inside, when she felt something was off, even though Judith had greeted her the same as always. Brittni flicked her eyes away, toward the nicotine cloud that had already been pushed several feet away by the ambient wind that the shape of the alley created. It seemed wrong, too. There were ripples in it, ones that might have been caused by a slight trembling of the lips that expelled it.
"Everything okay?" she asked Judith.
The older woman, her salt-and-pepper bangs forming a high line across her forehead that accentuated the expressiveness of her eyebrows, looked at Brittni for a long moment, as if debating something, and then asked, "Are you religious?"
Brittni almost took a half step back. The two of them had never exchanged anything other than pleasantries. They knew virtually nothing about each others' lives, partly due to their divergent lines of work. Judith was one of the old-schoolers, who Brittni knew regarded her as a new-age purveyor of woo, just a step above a huckster. But there was such a genuine interest in the question that she couldn't dismiss. "Depends on what you mean," she finally answered. "Do you mean smitey old white guy on a cloud, or an all-encompassing creative consciousness?"
Judith shrugged. "Either, I guess. It probably doesn't matter."
Brittni could tell by the way that Judith wasn't quite meeting her eyes that she was troubled. Not just in a questioning-her-religion kind of way. This was... something more.
"I just kind of wondered about you Reiki girls," Judith said. "Whether you believe it for real, or you're just putting on a show."
Brittni didn't take offense. She knew that the worlds the two of them had grown up in were very different. Judith lived in a time where science had saved the day so many times, it was sometimes hard to believe in the necessity for anything beyond it. Brittni's generation, she hoped, wasn't quite so rigid, and could embrace the fact that there were things beyond science, things it could never solve. So she answered honestly: "I know what I feel. I can sense the energy fields, like they say. I'd be a pretty bad at my job, not to mention a pretty big fraud, if I didn't."
Judith studied her young co-worker from those eyebrows, as if trying to gauge her trustworthiness. "So can you feel someone's... soul, in what you do?"
Brittni blinked at her a few times. "I don't know about people's souls. I know that the human body is a big web of electrical impulses and networks. Power like that generates fields, which yes, I can feel. If that's what you mean by a soul."
Judith shook her head, disappointed. "No." She took another long drag, blew the smoke out and upward by curling her bottom lip just so. "Like, from those fields, can you tell a good person from a bad person?"
She inhaled again, and it wasn't until after Judith latest lungfuls of smoke popped out with a snort of a laugh that Brittni realized she had actually inclined her head in puzzlement at this question. "Sorry," Judith said, "you just looked like that dog that... you know, the old Victrola logo... Sorry." Brittni had no idea what she was talking about.
"A good person or a bad person?" Brittni said. "I don't know if there really is such a thing. You mean, like, can I tell if someone's evil?"
Judith's half-smile dropped away, with such speed that it startled her. "Yeah. Like evil."
Brittni shrugged. "I don't think so. I believe that there are degrees of selfishness in people, people who don't notice or don't care what happens to anyone else as long as they get what they want. Is that evil?"
Judith thought about it for a second. "Maybe. Look, how long have you been doing this?"
"I got my certificate to practice ten months ago," Brittni said confidently. "And got my first job a few weeks after that."
"Well," Judith said, "I've been at this twenty-four years." She held her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and mimed massaging the air in front of her. "That's two and a half decades of actually touching the clients. Working the muscles directly, feeling all the knots, all the little muscle groups where they hold their tension."
Brittni nodded. "I can feel something like that, too. Except, I don't actually touch them."
Judith went on, as if Brittni hadn't spoken, as if this were something that she had to say regardless of whether anyone was listening or not. "Right. But what can you tell about the... I guess I want to say the *nature*... of the energy? Because I think of it as having a color."
Brittni's eyes lit up. "A color! Exactly! Like you can tell what kind of thoughts the energy originated from."
Judith looked at the younger woman for a long time, silently, making a decision. "Would you do me a favor? What does your schedule look like this afternoon?"
Brittni responded, "I've got someone in about twenty minutes, but I've got about a two-hour window after that. Why?"
Judith took one long, final drag on her cigarette and looked her co-worker straight in the eye. Amid the obscuring cloud, she asked, "Can I ask you a favor?"
---
Judith's room was small, but efficient. Even if she hadn't told Brittni how long the occupant had been working here, the younger woman would easily have been able to guess. There was not an extraneous object, nothing that wasn't exactly where it should be. A feng shui consultant would have taken one look around and walked right back out, unable to improve the arrangement. From the tapestry-covered wall screen, to the tiered shelves bracketed with singing bowls, pink salt lamps and often-replaced candles, each aspect of the room had found and proven its right placement, the perfect arrangement of objects.
So it was strange to see Judith in such an agitated state within such a calming place. The woman paced compulsively, looking at her feet as if she had never witnessed them walking before.
"Jude, it's going to be okay. What's going on?" Brittni said, trying to be reassuring, but at the same time not actually moving toward the woman. She had agreed to accompany her, but as the moment of the appointment actually approached, she was starting to wonder if that had been a good idea. Brittni perched on a stool in the corner, merely because she felt doing so would restore the room's innate balance if she could balance out Judith's apparent agitation.
"Just... watch at first. Tell me what you can sense," the older woman said, hands circling each other as if in search of another cigarette.
"I will," Brittni reassured her. She had already asked several follow-up questions, but Judith had deflected them all, saying that she didn't want Brittni too know too much of what to expect, to go in as cold as possible.
Finally, there was a knock on the door. Judith's pacing immediately stopped, her eyes flicking toward the door in something just short of utter fear.
"Promise me you won't leave, okay?" Judith said, and those words made Brittni really afraid for the first time. What was about to come through that door?
"Come on in," Judith said, her voice suddenly full of breezy calm, and the knob twisted and the door opened. In stepped a man dressed in a blazer and tie. Just a man, tall, tan, with perfectly slicked hair. He looked like he could have just walked out of the boardroom of any business building in the city. He was already halfway through process of taking off his jacket, folding it once over his arm before he even noticed that Brittni was in the room.
"Hello," he said flatly. Brittni made sure to look him straight in the eyes.
"This is Candace," Judith quickly jumped in to explain. "She's a trainee, and has been shadowing me for a few days. Is it okay if she sits in? She'll just be watching."
The man took a longer look at Brittni, then back at Judith, then back to Brittni, as if considering. Brittni found that she didn't like the feel of his gaze. It felt oily somehow, that feeling she sometimes got when she sensed she was being watched from afar. This time, however, she knew she was, which just seemed to make the uneasy sensation worse.
Suddenly, his face broke into a toothy grin. "Sure, why not?" he said, and folded his jacket twice more before laying it to rest in a tight bundle on the only available chair, the one Brittni would have felt wrong sitting in. He then took off his tie and shirt, similarly wadding them up and placing them atop his jacket, until there was an oddly-colored little snowman of fabric in the very center of the chair.
Brittni was starting to see why Judith was creeped out by the guy. He moved so smoothly, crisply, without error, and paid absolutely no mind to the fact that there were two women in the room with him. He might have just as easily been entirely alone, going through the same motions.
The silence in the room was uncomfortable. Brittni was willing to wait it out, but in her agitation Judith blurted out, "So how has your week been so far?"
The man hesitated just a shade too long before responding, "Oh, you know, the usual. I've really been feeling it in my shoulders. Could you give them some extra attention today, please?"
"Absolutely," Judith said in a manner that was far too practiced and loud in the small room. She suddenly turned to busy herself sanitizing her hands for the fourth time as the man finished stripping to the waist.
Soon the client had stepped out of his shoes and pivoted neatly on a heel to approach the massage table, which Judith had overlaid with a pair of towels, one that his body would lie on, and one that overlaid the metal arms that held up the padded ring off the end that his face would rest in.
He turned around, sat down on the table, then drew up his legs and rolled onto his stomach as he turned, so that he ended up face down on the table. It was an utterly efficient move, but Brittni had never seen it done that way. No matter how proper the individual, climbing up on a table and arranging oneself face-down always resulted in some awkward shifting around. In contrast, she felt as if she had just watched an android that had been programmed to move in a precise way. She and Judith shared a look over his prone form, the older woman's eyes seeming to say, "See what I mean?" There was more than a little fear there too, which unnerved Brittni more than anything had up until that point.
The man lay absolutely still, his face placed neatly in the cushioned ring at the end of the table. His salt-and-pepper hair was immaculately clipped, not a bit of it out of place. Even the swirl at the very crown was a neatly sculpted counterclockwise whirlpool. Brittni had a fleeting sense that it was another eye, staring at her with the same lizard intensity his actual eyes held. She blinked, and the feeling passed.
He had only stripped to the waist, so Judith didn't bother to cover him with a towel. She moved into position at his side, but held her hands higher up than they needed to be, as if reluctant to touch him. Brittni looked like the prospect wouldn't be entirely unpleasant, though. He had surprisingly well-defined muscles on his back. She guessed that he probably worked out every muscle group in his body equally, giving no preference to any particular one.
"So, your shoulders have been giving you trouble, you said?" Judith said, giving her palm a small pump of oil from a dispenser on the shelf next to Brittni's stool. The younger woman could see just the slightest tremble in those hands before they started vigorously rubbing their palms together. Brittni tried to meet her co-worker's gaze, but Judith turned away too quickly.
Judith stepped into position, paused to take a deep breath, and placed her hands on the man lying facedown on her table. Brittni could see her reluctance, but that seemed to lift a little as Judith began to work the muscles of the man's back, starting the shoulders, making forays down between his shoulderblades.
It had been a while since Brittni had seen an actual massage therapist at work, and she closely examined the way the older woman worked. She could see the honed muscles in the fingers flexing and twisting, kneading and arching across the terrain of her customer. Before too long, Brittni became aware of the slowing of the man's breath, which she couldn't hear, but saw in the undulating waves of his back. It was rising and falling in slower, deeper cycles. It wasn't until she heard a low hiss coming from Judith that she looked up from the process of watching the man slip into deep relaxation, and when she did she was looking at a woman almost out of her mind with fear. Brittni almost jumped down off her stool in reaction, but managed to hold back until a jerk of Judith's head said that she needed Brittni to come over.
The young woman slid off the stool as quietly as possible, making sure that none of its four feet scooted on the wooden floor, no extraneous noise made. She found that she did give a wide berth to the man's head, however, making sure that even though he was probably not watching, her feet would not pass through his field of view, narrowed as it was by the padded ring his face was pressed into.
She stepped up next to her co-worker, who was still working the client's lower back muscles. It was clear how badly Judith wanted to stop, but kept going in fear of breaking the spell her endlessly weaving hands were casting over the prostate form.
"There," Judith said in less than a whisper, no more than a shaped exhalation. She nodded toward the center of the man's back, right above the spot where his heart was. Brittni nodded in agreement, and raised her hands.
She rubbed them together a little bit, warming the palms and awakening the nerves. She had learned quickly in her training how unbelievably sensitive hands are, the closest a human being can get to experiencing the nearly-invisible totality of the world around them. Through them, she had sensed things that most people don't believe exists. And she prepared to push them to the limits, trying to feel what Judith claimed there was to be felt. She lowered her hands into the envelope of body heat that the man on the table was encased in, closed her eyes, and centered her attention.
As soon as she felt his primary energy field, she snapped her hands back. She involuntarily lost a bit of her footing and had to reposition to steady herself. Shocked like a child who had been unexpectedly slapped, her wide eyes flew to Judith.
The mixture of apology and relief at being proved sane was plain to read on the woman's face. She mouthed the words, "Sorry. I had to know," over what suddenly seemed like hundreds of miles across the man's body. Brittni shuddered; she had been prepared to dig deep to discover whatever it was that disturbed Judith. It was like leaning in close to hear the tell-tale drip of a leaky faucet, only to be shot in the ear with a fire hose. It was that overwhelming.
After she got over the shock, Brittni realized that the problem she was now faced with was exponentially worse than the initial experience. Because Judith was right... what was coming off this anonymous man was unrepentantly evil. There was no other word for what it was. The mere intimation of what he was capable of, the depths of depravity she could feel radiating from him in rotting waves, instantly brought tears to her eyes, her very soul offended that such a thing was allowed to exist in the rational world.
Judith saw this, although her working of the foul thing's muscles never slackened. But their gazes met, and they suddenly had a connection over this deep secret, this silent time bomb that was under their fingers at this moment, the rest of the world blissfully unaware of the madness that walked its surface, embodied in this one horrific man-shaped package.
Suddenly, Brittni realized that she had to leave. She couldn't stay in this little room with this thing that walked like a man, knowing what it was. What if it realized that she knew? There was no question in her mind that it would bring her life to an end, and think nothing of it. She would be just another annoying bug that had to be smashed to keep its detestable self safe and alive.
Something of this flight instinct must have shown in her face, because Judith almost reached out to soothe her. The only thing that kept from it was the fact that the charade needed to be kept up, this grotesque pantomime of relaxation. "Wait. Please. Don't leave me," the older woman mouthed silently, and the desperation in her expression made it not quite as difficult to keep Brittni from running out the door and into the street, screaming the whole way. After all, she wasn't alone in this terrible revelation. And maybe Judith had some reason for sharing it, or maybe there was something she could say that keep Brittni's vision of the world from being forever changed.
And that was when Brittni noticed what was happening on the table. The man -- or the thing that at least pretended to be a man -- hadn't moved, but something about it had shifted. Either Judith's hands really were capable of placating something so unrepentant, or...
He was falling asleep. She could see the way his shoulders were widening, spreading as he lost awareness, his instinctual need to hold his physical form in check starting to loosen. Perhaps this was the reason he came to the spa in the first place -- it could be the only place he felt safe enough to relax this much. His breathing slowed, and his muscles really did begin to loosen in a way Brittni recognized. Soon, he was fully under, Judith continuing to work his back and shoulders.
After waiting a full thirty seconds, Judith whispered as she continued to work. "You saw it." Not a question.
Brittni nodded, realized that her eyes must have visibly changed under the pressure of the knowledge she now held. The older woman nodded sympathetically.
"I'm so sorry," she murmured, and now Brittni could see tears in her eyes as well. Was she regretting the decision to bring her co-worker in here, to expose her to this awful truth? But then her back straightened, and her hands slowed. Their rolling motions over the man's skin lessened, at the same time started working up higher on his shoulders, over the trapezia and across the deltoids, moving toward the neck.
There was something fascinating about the way Judith was continuing her work, something purposeful in the way they were moving, as if there were a particular destination in mind. Just as she heard the man on the table lightly begin to snore, Judith's hands moved up and around the sides of his neck, as if to work the collarbone area, but instead each came back up with one end of a towel in their grip. It was the one that Brittni had seen laid across the metal bars that supported the padded face ring on the end of the table.
Moving surely and swiftly, Judith's hands crossed, twisting the towel around the back of the man's neck, as if she were about to tie it in a bow. Brittni's eyes flew wide as she realized what Judith was doing, what the tension in those strong hands, toned from years of healing massage, signified. One of her own hands flew out and gripped the older woman's wrist. "Wait, wait, wait," she hissed. "Are you going to... " Her voice dropped into the smallest possible whisper, "...to *strangle* him?"
The expression on Judith's face was suddenly calm, resolved, as if she had transferred all her tension and uncertainty into her clenched hands. "You see what he is."
Brittni didn't know what to do. "Yes, but--"
"Then you know we have to do this," Judith responded, and her tone of voice might have been that of a friendly conversation about her massage technique. "I just needed someone else to see, to make sure I was right."
Brittni couldn't deny it. If anything, she thought that Judith could have trusted her own understanding of the situation without involving anyone else. But was it right to choke someone to death, right here on the table, in this place that was supposed to be a temple of healing? And what if they both were wrong? What if they were being misled by something that neither of them fully understood? As her mind asked the questions, she felt how false they rang, even to herself.
Judith was whispering again, her hands tightening around the bunched ends of the towel, not yet pulling them taut but looking like they could at any moment. "We can't just let him go again. Since his last appointment, I've been so afraid of what news I'm going to hear... If he walks out of here, I just know that something horrible is going to happen, and we'll have to live with the fact that we just let him *leave*, knowing full well what we know. I can't live with that... can you?"
"So your answer is *murder*?" Brittni hissed, half-hoping that her tone would make the man wake up. Judith would have no choice but to let him go then, right?
"It's not like it is in the movies," Judith said. "We have to stop the breathing, and it has to be for at least five minutes... more if we can. Because we have to be sure that it's done. Then maybe I can sleep again."
Judith's fists gripped the ends of the towel so tightly their tendons could be heard creaking, and began to cross right behind his neck.
Brittni suddenly saw how vulnerable the man was at that moment, completely at the mercy of whatever the woman standing over him chose to do. Seconds passed. Brittni realized that she had stopped breathing, and forced it in and out of her lungs to keep herself from passing out. She couldn't stop thinking about the feeling of malice that she could still feel emanating from the man on the table. It still didn't make sense. That such a thing could appear, and move, and talk, like an ordinary man. She couldn't disagree with Judith, that such a horror should not be allowed to stand up and leave this room, with the two of them aware of what he could do, mostly likely *would* do, as he prowled among the unsuspecting people of the world...
Judith's hands were not moving, neither tightening nor loosening. Brittni looked up at her again, and while the look of determination was still firmly on the older woman's face, there were also tears spilling down her cheeks, one of them falling on the man's spine, forming a tiny standing pool in one of the little vertebral dimples, another landing on the twisted towel, immediately soaking into the soft white material, disappearing.
"What should we do?" Judith whispered, voice vibrating with the tension that ran through her entire body.
"I-- I don't-- I don't know," Brittni sputtered. She had been taught that her hands were tools of healing. How could she even consider using them for the exact opposite?
"You have to say it," Judith hissed. "I can't do it unless we both agree it must be done!"
Brittni was shaking her head. This thing on the table clearly had to be removed from the world. If she had been watching this situation in a movie, she would have been the first one yelling at the screen, "Take his ass out! Don't let him go!" But here in this suddenly too-tiny room, with the scented candles and the soothing wave music and the ordinary smell of the man-thing's cologne and the way his belt snaked through the loops of his slacks so neatly, it was something entirely different. This scene wasn't just going to end, it was just going to go on and on until he either woke up or went to sleep forever. It was just Judith, and her, and that thing lying facedown on the table...
Brittni suddenly stopped shaking. Without speaking, knowing that any more words would end with her betraying her innermost instincts, she reached forward, covering Judith's hands with her own, adding her strength. The two women, their faces only an inch apart, looked into each other's eyes as together they pulled the ends of the towel in opposite directions, held it as tightly as they could. The man on the table shifted a little, his body already beginning a race between being awake and being unconscious.
They had to pull as hard as they could, for as long as they could. They were in this together now, and even knowing without a doubt that they were right, they had never been so afraid.
