Divine Punishment 4: Punished

Zoe was still crying when Julia got to her place. They had already been to her eye doctor, who had been as shocked as the two of them when he saw what had happened to his patient a little over a week after her last appointment. He hadn’t been able to provide any explanation for her sudden blindness. Even more troubling - he didn’t think it was reversible. Julia had held Zoe’s hand while he talked, not just for comfort, but because she was terrified of being left alone.

‘Please, don’t leave me in the dark.’ She had begged.

Julia understood her fear. She couldn’t imagine what would be like to not be able to see her surroundings and the people near her. Anyone could do anything, even in a supposedly safe environment as a clinic. She was surprised Zoe trusted her so much, though. Would she trust any of her coworkers in the same situation? Probably not. As soon as they stepped inside the flat Zoe shared with Keira, a cat showed up.

‘Oh, you have a cat.’

‘His name’s Toby. He’s a rescue and we adopted him three years ago.’ Zoe smiled, and for a moment the tears stopped. ‘Oh, Toby, something terrible happened to mum!’

Zoe leaned forward and stretched her arms, ready for the cat to come to her. Instead, Julia saw Toby’s back rise and heard him let out a half mad, half fearful hiss before turning around and running away.

‘Why did he hiss? Where is he? Did he run? Did…’ Zoe turned to her left. ‘Julia? Are you still here? Are we… are you alone?’

Julia heard the accusation in her voice and her first instinct was to argue. After all, she had been nothing but helpful since she’d found Zoe panicking in the bathroom, but then she remembered her own reservations about her coworkers. The truth was that they didn’t know each other that well and Zoe had just found herself in a terribly vulnerable position. The cat’s reaction had been odd and there didn’t seem to be a reason for it.

‘We’re alone, Zoe. I closed the front door behind us, and the place looks empty like you said it would be. Animals are more sensitive than people, so maybe he picked up on something.’

‘What would he pick up on?’ Zoe sounded pretty unconvinced.

‘Your blindness. It’s not natural. Something happened to your eyes, something that caused the kind of ocular degeneration that usually takes years of illness and neglect to manifest.’

‘But nothing happened! I just felt some itching and redness and went to the bathroom to use the same eye drops I’ve used for years and which I had used this morning with no problem! The vial is transparent, so I know there was no mould or dirt or whatever. The doctor said it was fine, too!’

Julia was about to ask something, but hesitated. It was ridiculous, and yet her journalistic instinct told her to do it.

‘Did anything happen involving a blind person today?’

‘What do you mean? Do you think it’s contagious? But no virus is this fast!’

‘Please tell me if it did. There’s a story I’m investigating and what happened to you reminded me of it.’

‘Well, there was something. I was making a video for my TikTok and a woman bumped into me. I complained but then saw she was blind and that was it.’

‘You complained?’

‘I said ‘Hey!’ and frowned. Just that. She totally ignored me, so I doubt she cared.’

‘Did you post the video?’

‘Not that one, I made another. But I didn’t delete it, yet.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Sure. It’s on the Rejects folder. I like keeping the first drafts for a while. Sometimes I change my mind and find something worth salvaging.’

‘Do you mind if I send it to myself?’

‘No,’ Zoe shrugged, ‘go ahead.’

Julia took Zoe’s mobile from her bag and held it for her to unlock it with her print. Best way to get a finger chopped by a thief. For her part, Julia preferred using a good old-fashioned password on all her electronic devices. The video was easy to find and after sending it to her e-mail, she watched it. Julia was about to deem her quest a failure when the frame veered a little to the right after the woman bumped into Zoe and she turned to her. There was a man in the background, scowling at what he was seeing. The blind woman might not have cared, but he had. Julia knew that look - she’d seen it before.

‘Did you find anything?’

‘There was a man watching you. He didn’t look happy about your behaviour. Average height, stocky, light blond hair,’ she hesitated, ‘maybe Eastern European, intense stare, shabby clothes. Did he talk to you?’

‘No, no one talked to me then, and I’m used to men staring. How close was he for you to notice all that?’

In that moment, they heard a key turning on the door, and a short, dark-haired young woman stepped in.

‘Keira?’ Julia asked, just to be sure.

‘Yes.’ Keira saw Zoe and was horrified. ‘Oh, my God, Zoe, your eyes!’

Zoe threw herself into her friend’s arms, on the verge of tears.

‘Do you need any help? Julia asked, just to be polite. Please say no.

‘No. Thank you.’

‘Okay. Call me if you need anything.’

Before she left, Julia glanced at the framed photos on the table near the door. They showed Zoe and Keira together, smiling, goofing for the camera, and looking very couply. It seemed Jin’s crush was even more hopeless than she had thought.

———————————————

Back at her place, Julia re-watched Zoe’s video to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake - she hadn’t. The man glaring at Zoe was the same one she had seen glaring at occult bookshop. Of course, it could be just a coincidence; after all, nothing had happened to her. No, it’s not, and you know it. But what did it mean? How could that man be doing any of this? Zoe hadn’t lied about how insignificant the incident had been. So, why would anyone decide it was worth blinding her for it? It was just cruel, but so were the other punishments.

‘An eye for an eye…’

She had initially thought that it was some Leftist conspiracy to educate the masses, then a bunch of online scammers, but now she was beginning to think the culprits might be Christian fanatics. Well, that was probably better for her image than exposing a group of SJW with blue hair and custom-made pronouns. However, that still didn’t tell her how they were doing it. Toby! She remembered the cat’s reaction. Animals were more sensitive. Could it be something nuclear? That didn’t explain the instant fatness, though. Julia was no expert, but she was fairly certain weight gain wasn’t a side effect of nuclear poisoning. Of course, they could be using different methods, or maybe some of the cases were fake so people wouldn’t suspect what was really going on.

She went over the other photos and videos to see if there was something she had missed. Her heart jumped when she noticed the same man again on the background of a video made by the woman who had become paralysed. Like Zoe she had been filming during her incident, and Julia saw the now familiar scowl directed at her back, the same back that would become inexplicably and irreparably damaged a few hours later. Much like it had happened at the occult bookshop, she felt her skin crawl. The man had the eyes of a fanatic and there was something… primitive about him. Not a caveman - more like a Biblical prophet, making fire rain on God’s enemies. She found him again in the background of the Italian tourists’ video, and she was sure that if some of the others had been filming or taking photos when their fate had been sealed, she’d see him there, too. Maybe the tall young bookseller knew who he was or where she could find him… or maybe the man had just turned up one day, glaring at everything. However, it was her only lead, and Julia decided to go back to The Bog Witch the next day.

———————————————

As she got closer to the street where the bookshop was, Julia looked around, trying to find the creepy man, but he wasn’t there. Instead, she saw a blond woman with a file and a pen waving at her. Her first reaction was to look over her shoulder, convinced the woman was calling someone behind her. When she saw there was no one else, she frowned. Great, it’s probably some stupid survey. If the situation weren’t so urgent, she would’ve turned around and left, but she couldn’t, so she kept walking.

‘Oh, my God, Julia, don’t you remember me?’

‘What? Do I know you?’

‘It’s Susan, from Oxford Brookes. I know I look a little different, but come on. We were roommates.’

The Susan Julia remembered had been a scowling girl with mousy hair. They had been roommates, but for less than a year, and there had been three others in that house. Their cohabitation had been a forced one; the only way that they’d been able to afford renting a place near the campus. The five had had little in common, but Susan had stood out the most. She had been expected to carry on her education like everyone else in her family before her, but she had only been able to maintain passing grades. Despite the others’ varying degrees of dedication to their studies, they had all wanted to be there, even if only for the opportunity to party away from their disapproving parents - Susan didn’t. Her utter lack of humour about anything and everything hadn’t helped the situation, and neither had the fact that, as mean as it was to say it, she just wasn’t very bright. Armed with all the certainties and arrogance of youth, the others had teased her. Julia had been more focused on her studies, but she had sometimes joined in. She wasn’t proud of it now, though she didn’t think it had been that bad. Of course, she knew Susan might’ve disagreed, and now there she was, a blonde wearing red lipstick, matching red nail polish, and a navy blue pantsuit. She looked very professional and confident, a marked change from her student self.

‘Susan, yes, I remember. Oh, God, I’m sorry. What we did back then, it wasn’t right. We shouldn’t have made fun of you.’

‘Oh, I don’t care. It was years ago and things have changed a lot since then.’

‘Still, it was wrong. I’m glad things worked out for you.’

‘They did. I’m a social worker now. It can be a very frustrating job, but also so rewarding. It’s how I met my husband four years ago. Fabiano was a newly arrived migrant looking to start a new life in the UK and I was assigned his case.’

‘Oh, that’s nice.’ Julia forced herself to smile while part of her recoiled at the idea of getting married in her early twenties.

‘It’s wonderful!’ Susan looked genuinely delighted. ‘I don’t even remember what my life was like before I met him and the boys.’

‘The… boys?’ For a moment, Julia wondered if Susan had joined a polycule.

‘Fabiano’s… Well, our children. Lucinho and Telmo. Their mother left them and that’s when Fabiano thought to try his luck in Europe. I’m actually going to pick them up from school now.’

Fabiano definitely got lucky. Julia worked hard to maintain a neutral facial expression, even as she went over all the red flags in her head. A desperate single father arrives in a foreign country and meets an insecure, gainfully employed woman, who agrees to take care of his children and even marries him, which surely had made the immigration process much smoother. Had the mother even left or was she still waiting in Brazil, with more children, partly dependent on the money her now bigamous husband sent them to survive? Had Susan already been this confident blonde or was she still the mousy girl she’d met at uni? The latter would’ve been a ridiculously easy mark. Still, after everything she’d done in the past, Julia wasn’t going to be the one to burst Susan’s happy bubble.

‘But what are you doing here?’ Susan’s eyes widen and condescension dripped from her voice. ‘Do you… live here?’

‘What? No.’

‘It’s just that I heard what happened to you and it can’t have been easy. Unemployable, persecuted, a promising career as a journalist gone just like that…’

Susan was gloating, of that she was sure. Her eyes shone with amusement as she patted Julia’s arm and pouted in mock concern.

‘You poor, poor thing.’

In that moment, Julia remembered all the little things that had always annoyed her about her former roommate. Yes, she and the others had been unfair and perhaps even cruel at times, but Susan had looked down on them just as much as they had looked down on her. She’d just never had the courage to make her snide remarks to their faces.

‘You’re right, I am a poor thing, Susan. It’s a shame I didn’t find a job where I could meet a grifter looking for the easiest path to UK citizenship and a babysitter for his children. Letting you suck his dick once in a while probably looked like a good tradeoff. As for the missing mother, you better pray that she turns up one day with a gaggle of additional children looking for her straying husband, because if not, she’s likely six feet under in a backyard somewhere and as soon as he finds an upgrade you could very well end up the same way.’

The look on Susan’s face told Julia that her words hat hit a vulnerable spot, likely because everything she had just said had already occurred to her.

‘You, bitch!’

‘Whatever, Susan. I got things to do, too. Bye.’

Susan insulted her some more, but Julia just kept walking; she had wasted enough time. When she got to the bookshop, she looked around and her heart jumped - the man was standing across the street, glaring, just like last time. She saw him look away and walk deeper into the neighbourhood. The opportunity was too good to miss. Julia stayed on her side of the street and kept track of him with what she hoped were discrete glances. She was convinced she wouldn’t stand out, as she was dressed pretty casually - she was wrong. The people she walked by knew she was an outsider and stared, some of them menacingly. Julia reflexively held her bag closer, hating herself for it. Congratulations, you’re now one step closer to becoming a Daily Mail Reader. She glanced across the street and stopped - the man was gone. As she scanned the buildings, she noticed a door closing. Aha! Got you! Julia crossed the street, wondering how she was going to convince one of the neighbours to let her in when she noticed the lock was broken; this was definitely her lucky day.

The inside of the building wasn’t as bad as she had feared, though there were clear signs of neglect, like the flickering lights and the broken lift, which by the looks of it had been Out of Order for a long time. She climbed the stairs carefully, hoping she wouldn’t have to touch the wall. Upstairs, she heard a door shut and she was certain it had been him. The noise hadn’t come from the first floor, but beyond that she’d have to knock on doors. Great. None of the floors were particularly inviting, but luck was on her side once more when the first person who answered her knocking gave her the information she wanted.

‘The creepy white man? Last floor.’

‘Thank you.’

Julia felt a shiver down her spine when she got there. This floor looked even more desolate than the ones below. You can do this. Journalists report from war zones every day and live to tell the tale. And if she didn’t, well, she had left enough information behind for people to know where to look. Even now, before looking for the right flat, she e-mailed the address to both her personal and work e-mails. Here goes. The first door yielded no answer, and neither did the second one. She knocked on door number three, wondering if maybe the man had stopped at a neighbour’s instead of coming home. Then again, if he was ‘the creepy white man’, it was unlikely he had any friends here. She was about to move on when the door opened and she was face to face with him. Unlike the woman on the second floor, who had spoken from behind a locked door, he opened his all the way.

‘Oh!’ She said, feeling like an idiot. ‘I’m a journalist and I know what you’ve been doing. I’d like to hear your side of the story.’

Shockingly, he didn’t slam the door on her face. She looked over his shoulder, expecting to see desks, laptops, files, bubbling lab equipment, whatever was needed for this kind of operation, but there was nothing. She couldn’t hear anyone else, either. Had she made a mistake? Maybe his presence in the videos had been a coincidence.

‘Arrogant woman. Thinking you know so much and are better than everyone else.’

The hatred in his eyes was overwhelming. What had she done to deserve it? Part of Julia was telling her to run, but another part remembered all the things he had done and would get away with. The latter won and she pushed her way into his flat.

‘Who gave you and your friends the way to judge? You…’

She stopped, surprised at what she was seeing. The interior matched its occupant. It was a one-bedroom flat and it was practically empty except for a mattress on the floor, a chair and a desk on the corner. The walls were cracked and dirty, and she doubted the floor had ever seen a drop of water. There was no laptop or any electronic devices. The books piled on the floor next to the desk were of varying sizes, bindings, and state of preservation. She counted three Bibles and recognised the titles of some religious essays, like Saint Augustine’s. It was the home of a fanatic, but it didn’t seem part of a well-organised conspiracy.

‘Who is helping you?’

‘God.’

‘Oh, please.’ Julia rolled her eyes. ‘Someone gave you something to harm those people with. What was it? And why?’

He took a step forward and she needed all her willpower not to take a step back; her confidence was disappearing fast under his burning gaze.

‘You have all forgotten His teachings. Love thy neighbour, Jesus said, and He gave me the power to remind you. All of you have lessons to learn, including you.’

‘Me? What are you going to do to me?’

‘I already did. Soon you will know what you’re truly worth without that mask of superiority you hide behind.’

He was closer, now, his eyes shining with a fanatical glow, burrowing into hers as if he were trying to reach her mind and… and do what? It was too much and this time her survival instincts refused to be ignored, forcing her legs to move and finally carry her out of there. Julia ran down the stairs, out of the building, across the street, and all the way to The Bog Witch. He said he had done something to her, but what and how? He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t sprinkled anything on her, not even spit. She remembered him glaring in her direction. She had thought he’d been staring at the bookshop, but maybe she had been the target of his anger. But why? All she had done was talk to Susan. Had that been it? The argument with Susan? But she had been mocking her and she’d just responded in kind. And Zoe said ‘Hey!’ to a blind woman who totally ignored her. Doing her best to calm herself down, she happened to look up at the bookshop sign. What the hell? The sign had been fine moments ago, but now, under the bubbling witch’s cauldron there was only gibberish. No! She ran to the window and looked at the book covers - more gibberish where there should be words, words she should’ve been able to read but couldn’t anymore.

‘No, just fucking no! This can’t be happening!’

‘Are you okay? What’s wrong?’

Julia turned around and saw the bookseller standing in the doorway.

‘He… he…’ She felt her eyes fill with tears, but she couldn’t stop them. ‘I can’t… I can’t READ!’