The Confession of One Melony Kelly

My dearest, oldest friend, Constable Matthew Gothard,

What a mess you have made for yourself. Did you never consider that it would come to this? That you would never find me? That it is I who would have to reveal myself to you? You preach of your powers of deduction yet you can not catch me, how strange. I have been the water in your shoe all year. I left you clues, Constable, perhaps they were too difficult for your meagre male mind. It is too late now. Two good men went up a ladder to bed from your misjudgment. I remember how I laughed when I heard that stiff-rump and surly boot Constable Matthew Gothard, the Jack in the office, had caught the Springhollow Horror. I was at work, it was a Saturday night. I do not remember the name or face of the man I was below, but a folded over newspaper was in his possession as he undressed. I imagine he thought me illiterate, or too distracted faking my womanly pleasure to read it. You were on the front page, Constable. The hero of the hour. How does it feel knowing your hand put to death two innocent young shipyard labourers who could not even speak the language of our land? Did they have hang-gallows look? Or were you simply eager for a foreigner to shake a cloth in the wind? Are you not ashamed, Matthew? You saddled the wrong horse. They had names, those boys in deadly suspense. Yesayi and Kiwregh Aghabekyan. Brothers. Children of the same mother and homeland. Boys of twenty and twenty-six hung like they were three skips of a louse. You will be glad to know, Constable, that my great spree has come to an end. The blood of guilty men I have slain I wear as perfume but the blood of those innocent boys is too dark. It stains not only your hands but mine too. They died for my crimes and for this I hope God shows them peace. I shall not kill again, Matthew, I swear it to the almighty…well at least not here. Still, the world deserves to know of your failure. 

My name is Melony Elizabeth Kelly, daughter of no one, wife to no one, mother to no one. I have killed six men. You believe I have killed five. I do what I do because you fail at it so miserably. By the time you have read this note I shall have shifted my bob. You will never see me again. This is my confession.

I pray you will excuse my scrawl, my hands are like feet. I have tongue enough for two sets of teeth and so I cannot promise brevity. 

I first decided to kill a man in February. The eighteenth day to be exact. It was blashy. Men sought shelter in our fine abode and comfort between our thighs. If it has not yet become apparent to you, Mr Gothard, I serve the night and the men who stumble through it and have done since I was a girl. I have spent no less than twenty years fed, watered, unprotected and unclothed in the walls of a house of civil reception. I know men almost as well as I know women. I know men intimately. Men like brandy-faced Bernard Langland. An upstanding whapper of our little community. You know dear, kind, Mr Langland as the topping man who teaches the boys their sums and calculations. That is not the Bernard we know. We know not a man of break-teeth words with guts in his brains but a caitiff of violence and brutality. It was a Monday so we knew he was coming. He would come through the door just as the ninth hour struck, bacon faced and on the high ropes. He looked like God’s revenge against murder. He had not a specific girl of preference. He would sample whatever he considered the prettiest in the twilight’s shadow. He was in a most foul mood that night, more foul than his usual foulness. I volunteered myself for his temper. I am now a woman long past the prime of my sensuality and so it is my duty to ease the pains of the young girls cast into my world. If not me then who else? I was flapped with a fox tail. I have taken his anger before with Eve’s house, rear and throat. He does not know care or respect. He sees only flesh fresh for violation. He took to his usual room two girls whose names I shall keep to myself, all you must know is that the first was a gallied game pullet, christened by a baker, cute. The second a guinea-gold old robin. A hopper-arsed, bushell bubby. The rest of us brought our arses to anchor outside the door whilst he marched them up the stairs. We heard every sound. That filthy smacking of flesh on flesh and his throaty, strained groans. The beds squeaking and thudding against the thin walls. We heard their tears and how their rehearsed performances of submission soon became true fear. They were screaming, begging. We heard their nails scratch against the door. If Mother Abbess was not looming over us, salt eel threatened, we would have rushed the door and rescued them ourselves. The furniture clattered and Mr Langland began to yell. He called them ‘whores’, ‘sinful girls’, ‘fatherless degenerates’. We heard how they whimpered when his fists pummelled their bodies. The whistling sound of his palm chalking their faces. It was not until we heard the ripping of fabric that our horse godmother stepped in. She did not care if her girls were brutalised, but the bravery, they belonged to her, that fussock. Seeing all of us crouched on the floor, eyeing him as a housecat does a field mouse, he settled his bill and quietly left. The first girl, the child, was shaking in fear. Her hair had been pulled so harshly that long copper coils had fallen from her scalp. Her nose was bloodied, her buxom body marked with large handprints. The brown of her dress, now ripped from ankle to womanhood, masked the blood that spewed from her entrances. The van neck was not unfamiliar to his abuses. She had endured them many times before. She held her naked breasts to her chest, her corset cast across the room, biting down on her split lip. Her hair that had sat so royally atop her head, hung loose down her back. The black that lines her eyes had run in tears down her cheeks. As I approached her, my friend, my sister in all but blood, she would not permit me to touch her. Her throat was bruised and for the next month she would remain mute. In less than a half hour those girls would both be servicing a second client of the night. They were sore, battered, weeping long into the next day. The rest of us seethed that night whilst we worked. You, Constable Gothard, vilify us as draggle-tailed and dirty light hussies, but when it is one of our own sisterhood who falls in battle, we can be vengeful in ways that would make soldiers run to their mothers. As we rested, the prow died in the loving arms of the women who knew her best, silently as the night itself. The doctor said her ribs had been broken and stabbed her lungs. It was a slow way to die. It was just before dawn when I left. We all knew where Bernard lived, there were times we would be delivered to him directly. When you lead a life like mine you become efficient in getting into places you should not be able to get into. I know what you found therein, Constable. His face slashed mouth to ear. His throat gouged deep. No less than seventeen wounds to his chest where my blade, sharp and cold as winter, had pierced his flabby, hairy, sweaty skin. Perhaps I went off the hooks. Then, of course, there was the mystery of his severed manhood. I kept that as a gift to myself. He was dead as a nit before he even woke from his nap. It came as quite a surprise to me to learn that men had the same amount of hot, red blood inside of them as women. I have seen girls bleed. I know by heart how much blood can come from just one unfortunate woman. Bernard bled just like all others, it squirted out of him like an old man pissing in the night. I know of your inaccurate reports, Constable, so allow me to shed some clarity. A straight razor left rather unsafely on the side. I admit this was not my weapon of choice for the other victims but for bagpipe Bernard it was the most convenient. Much like how he chose his girls. 

There are some things in life I fear you will never understand, Matthew. You have lived your fifty-seven years knowing power. You control Springhollow more than any monarch or politician could ever hope to. I did not have this privilege. I did not know power. My life, my calling, I had been groomed since the day the laced mutton Madam brought me in to always give my head for washing. It was not until that night when I held his razor in the palm of my hand did I know how it felt to be powerful. I do not need to inform you, Constable, that once you have tasted but a lick of power, power is all you crave. 

If I took a blade to every man in Springhollow who had dirtied me, there would be no men left. I recall the name and face of each and every one of them as if they stood before me here and now. Do you remember the name and face of the first woman you ever made love to? The first girl to seep in your mess? I remember the first man to ever take me. The blacksmith’s unlicked cub of an apprentice. Now, the blacksmith. I met Mr William Graves at the tender age of thirteen. He worked most diligently in his father’s little forge. A man of twenty-one. I was to pick up new horseshoes. I was left alone and face to face with William. He asked me to call him Bill as everyone else does. Bill was handsome in the way all twenty-one year old men are handsome to a thirteen year old little girl. A mopus in a mourning shirt. Perhaps that is why I did not call for help as his hand grazed my barely grown breast. I did not run as his mouth brushed my ear. I tuned my pipes only once I was at home safe in my bed, girlhood violated, thighs bloodied, my mother trying to soothe me, begging me to tell her who did this to me. It may shock you to know that I did once have a mother. Does it disgust you, Constable Gothard? That my maidenhead was bled before my body was even ready for motherhood. I would never be wed. Never bear children of my own. If that man had let me leave with my purity, I doubt our paths ever would have crossed, for I would be hand in hand with loving husband, my sex given only to him, our children playing without care in the garden of a home we built. My biggest worry would be a wife in water colours. That was stolen from me. Every time I earn my keep on my back or my knees I remember how he felt. I laid on the hot, filthy floor of that forge, unmoving. He did not dress me, he left me naked in agony. I never learnt the name of the woman who found me, cleaned me up and walked me home. I limped, unable to stand. The kindness shown to me by that stranger was more than could ever be repaid, that is why I knew that this was my true calling. I was made for more than taking sugar sticks into my mouth. I had a purpose at last. I could save girls like me. Protect them. It was the eleventh day of March that I struck. I retraced the steps of my childhood back to that forge still as grubby as ever. He was quenching a very fine looking sword — the kind of sword donned only by a lord. The belly-gutted beef-head did not recognise me. He smiled politely and welcomed me as he does every customer. His eyes of the most dull hazel seemed to undress me as I stood there. He looked me up and down then up again. But I am not a little girl anymore. Even as I stood over him with that most gorgeous but weighty sword plunged into the depth of his chest, he did not recognise me. I am ashamed to admit that I did attack him from behind. Even grown, he towered above me. If he had seen me and decided to fight I would have been thankful if he gave me a quick and merciful death. I intended to take his manhood, add it to my growing collection but when I looked upon it it was putrid with boils of green and rashes of red, swollen and bruised. It was almost as grotesque as the rest of him.

That, old friend, was true liberation. For twenty-one years I had carried the soreness of that night in both heart and skin as if they were scolded burns upon me. Just as I had avenged the girl who died at Bernad Langland’s hand, I had now avenged my own rotting corpse. Nay, not avenged. Avenged is too clean of a word for the emotion that stirred inside of me as I washed that monster’s blood from my hands. I was reborn.

Every woman deserves her rebirth. Mine was so glorious, so Biblical that it would be wrong to not extend such revelation to those I loved the most. Those I loved from afar. My mother never loved me. You see, I have my father’s eyes. I never met him but that is what she says. So given my recent disgrace at Bill’s hands and my refusal to simply pretend as if it had never happened, she soon turned on me. I left the next year. I left rather than spend the rest of my spinster life looking at her whilst she grieved the little girl she had lost that day she sent me to pick up horseshoes. I have not seen her since, nor spoken to her. Every month I check the graveyard to see if her stone has appeared. It has not, not yet. Alas the real tragedy in abandoning my blue stocking mother was waving goodbye to my sister, Odette. She looked up to me as an idol. I had neglected her since the incident. When I looked into her eyes and I saw all the wonder and innocence and joy to be alive in this bleak and desolate hole we call home, it sickened me that I would never feel that way again. By chance our paths crossed many years later. She had two sons, a babe in arms and a young hemp to her knees. I saw no father nor husband. What I saw was the purple bruising of her eyes. The finger marks on her wrists. I saw how she flinched in fear at even the slightest touch or sound. Whatever heinous man had befallen Odette, he beat her, of that there was no doubt. We met each other’s eyes. I smiled at her as gracefully as I could. I did not want to admit that I was out that day begging for coins to pay our sick of the idles squire of the placket so I could keep a roof over my head. I had been without work for a week with a most irritating itch that turned the men away. She looked at me with disgust. She no longer saw her sister. She saw a hoyden. Ravaged, ungodly, unclean. Just as Mother had when I came home that day. We were both in bad bread. Though I never stopped thinking of her. I tried many times to write a letter explaining it all but there were no words brief enough. I asked around, us harlots are very good at that, and found out she had wed a man named Dudley Pope just after she had turned seventeen. I wish I would have known sooner. I myself had serviced Dudley Pope. He was a tender lover, flashing the gentleman. He liked control. He liked routine. He liked perfection. Nothing else would do. One night my sweet mouth tricked him into inviting me to his humble home. As we strolled through the midnight blackness of early June, I asked of his family. He said his whither-go-ye was melancholy as a gib-cat, repulsed by the idea of fun and that his boys lacked intelligence and vigour. The Odette that I knew, the Odette I had helped raise, was the most lively, jovial little girl in all Springhollow. It hurt deeply inside of me to hear him speak of her as a husk of the woman she should have been. I had always pictured her grown into a gilflurt. If I had stayed, endured Mother’s judgement, maybe her life would have fulfilled her. In their home, Odette had fallen asleep by the fire waiting for her husband to return. Once again she was bruised and tears still stuck to her eyelashes. Dudley laughed to himself, dowsing the fire. Through a half-open door I caught a fleeting glimpse of the nephews who would never know of my existence. They too were dotted with his wrath. There were two beds yet in one they huddled together, the elder wrapping his body around the younger. Dudley took me into the bedroom where he made love to my little sister. Her virginity was taken in this bed. He laid me down and began to struggle through my undergarments. Dresses are most uncomfortable but in all those ruffled layers there is no better sheath for a dagger of your own. I disposed of him the same way as all of the others. He yowled as a child does, wriggling and writhing like a fish fresh caught upon a hook. I was tempted to get creative but you see, Constable, I wanted you to know it was me. I wanted you to fear me. I wanted to be a symbol of something noble. I was Odette’s golden bridge. I saw Odette again, a few months after. She had her light back. In her eyes was her light. In her son’s eyes was her light. In the giggle that slipped her lips as a young man cast to the streets offered her a most stunning red flower. I wondered if the light returned when she found the dustman the next morning. Or was it when she opened the box on her bedside and saw his cock all shrivelled and small awaiting her. Maybe it was when the last of the soil topped his grave. It mattered not, at least not to me. Her happiness was all I required. She did not see me this time. This was a blessing for me. I had given that most precious girl a second chance for she deserved it more than anyone. I did not deserve a second chance and that is a belief I maintain to this day. I have killed and I do not regret it. I am no monster. I am a hero.

Blood no longer bothers me. At least not men’s blood. The blood on the sheets after we have served our crude purpose still rots me in my core. We bleed for their momentary relief and are offered no comfort or sympathy yet when I bleed them like the swines they were, an appropriate punishment for their crimes, they are hailed as saints. I will never understand this. Whores keep the world in motion. We take the beatings so the wives and daughters do not. We take the fantasies of men and make them be so that their innate hunger for desire does not fester them into beasts. We should be celebrated. 

Alas, Springhollow does not celebrate wagtails. They ignore us until they want us. They celebrate buck fitches like admiral of the narrow seas, Giovanbattista Scarletti. A Venetian sea-crab that sails grand ships across the sea. A tradesman. A merchant. A beau-nasty. The men love him for the tobacco he brings and the fine fabrics he purchases. The women love him for those dashing handsome, sunkissed features. A truly exotic and beautiful man. But he is friend to no woman. He is just another plague brought upon this town. Betwixt the crates of sot-weed and fish, in the lowest, rankest depth of those vessels, bound and forgotten rest the women of America. Virgin girls, on the cusp of age, sold by their own fathers. He took them, promised them there would be no harm as long as they obeyed and forced them upon his ship. I am certain, Constable Gothard, that you and your boys were well aware of the women he sold to men all over town. The lucky ones would mind the children of those wealthy enough to not raise them themselves. The lucky but unattractive ones cleaned the houses of those whose greatest challenge was specs of dust and eggs of flies. The most beautiful of the girls were the most unfortunate. Does it not alarm you how many of my crimes start because men like you have no restraint over your loins? The navel-tied leftovers eventually found their way through Madam’s door. They all knew Giovanbattista by name and face and shook in their heels when they thought of him. One girl told me a story one night as I rouged her cheeks, of a girl on one of Giovanbattista’s great voyages. She was kept in the hull, the only spoils of this trip. They forgot about her. Her hands with rope were knotted and her mouth with rag stuffed. She could not scream and she could not move. She starved to death before England was even in sight. Her body lay there for weeks. By the time they found her the rats had stripped her of flesh and the stench still sticks to the wood now. As disgusting as this tale was, I had to fight the urge to say that it is better to die with hope than alone, in sickness in a corinth. I am not one for casting up my accounts but I did swallow my own sickness that day. I waited by Giovanbattista’s beloved vessel. He loved her as if she were a woman. The toss pot was pump shipping into the sea, slurring an old shanty and staggering on his cat-sticks, drunk as Davy’s sow. Another sailor was with him, sampling old hock, giblet joined they were. They speak in a fast and poetic tongue I could not understand. I knew I had to be smarter than this. A witness would untwist everything I had worked so hard to make happen. I let him live that night. We got word from a sailor tied to a bed with the wax of a candle burning his stomach that they would set sail in just a few days. I wanted Giovanbattista gone to the diet of worms. I used my assets and slattern charm on his crew like a siren luring them to their watery graves. I convinced them to bring him along. They said he had unusual habits in matters such as these. I said I could be accommodating but inside I was a fly in a tar box. It was the final night before they were to depart and Giovanbattista Scarletti was in my domain. Like a dog he was on his knees, gripping the sheets and grinding his teeth as I worked my fingers inside of the earwig’s double jugg. Given the nature of my calling, this was not an unusual habit. As long as the gentlemen pay, their wish is our command. Giovanbattista, for a dandy pratt who dressed as if he were royalty, was full as a goat but empty of funds. I offered him a friendly discount if he would let me see his ship. It was a beautiful ship. Far too beautiful for the cockless tatterdemalion floating and bloated in the shallows beneath the dock with a blood red smile. He fought harder than expected for a light-timbered maltoot. I know not what he was saying but he said it with such conviction for a moment, a fraction of me questioned if it would be funnier to let him live in the constant paranoia that I was just around the corner. I decided against this when he urinated upon himself. They always said he pissed more than he drank. If not me the barrel fever would have taken him eventually. In the newspaper it said I had plucked out his eye. For the sake of accuracy, Constable, that was a rather rotund gull, not I. The next morn as his crew took to the vessel, none noticed his absence for three whole hours. His body lay but feet beneath them, exposed in the shallow waters yet they did not see him. It was one of us coming in late from a night on the corner that did spot him. She cried out so furiously we heard it down the road. I understand now why he was the cock of Venice as I held my prize. Long, girthy, the kind of member women dream of receiving if they do indeed dream of receiving members. It is probably my favourite of my conquests. There is no sin sweeter than slaying a calf-lolly with the blade you stole from his own belt.

The other girls used to tell me that men were pigs. Then I lived amongst men and under men and on top of men and between men. Men are not pigs. Men are the shit pigs sleep in. Aye, in my career our first lesson is to trust no man but to instead let them believe you do. We have trusted men we have been taught our whole lives we must trust. They are the ones who harm us most severely for they know we will let them. Trust is a duplicitous left-handed wife.

As far as you are aware my final victim was one Doctor Gaspar Antonio Qwimper, the Spanish medicine molly of Springhollow’s dingiest hellholes. We trust these men of so-called science blindly as if they were messiahs. They are just men. The same as all others of their species and I do truly believe we are of two different species. Women are human, men simply evolved dogs. Selecting poor Gaspar as my next victim, if he can even be called so, was a decision that came about by chance. I had set out to find out the identity of the man who had infected many of our girls with a most vile condition. They scratched their parts until they bled and weeped from the constant burning itching. Imposthumes swelled. They dripped gunk and broke out in screaming rashes with fevers that left them faint. The cramping pains in their stomachs and wombs left them sobbing. We tended them as best we could playing the roles of both nurse and whore in rotation. Once they became mawkish and began to vomit and defecate blindly, Madam forced us to abandon them lest she comb our heads. She said eight sham Abrahams was enough. I thought to myself, I would find the man whose filthy prick had sickened them and burn him alive as they used to do to witches. Those of us who could still stand worked double the next few days until we had enough money to pay an apothecary we knew. He had treated our injuries before, medicated our sickness, pronounced our dead. Little did we know that letting that dull-swift duke of limbs into the sanctity of our holy place would damn those girls to hell. You are the law around here, Constable, it would be a waste of ink and time and thought to explain to you the joys of laudanum. I am sure you have seen enough bodies of those poisoned by it to know what it does when it is not used well. Doctor Qwimper, in his middling age, no longer cared much for patients. He just wanted payment and a quick unburdening. He was no less of a harlot than we were. Once wide eyed with motivation, now just a soggy shell of flesh trying to figure out where the next meal will come from. Still, a man of his calling should know better than to leave bottles of laudanum in the hands of girls with no life left to live. We begged for aid, showed him their bodies on the brink of death. It was rabbit hunting with a dead ferret. He took our money, the money we had worked so hard to make, gave us the medicine with no instruction and left. We attempted to administer it to them ourselves but the girls were so sick to even look upon them broke us inside. We summoned him once again, sacrificing the very last money we could scrape together. He treated them, swearing they would soon heal and left without so much as a goodbye. The mother of that was a whisker. By the morn each had passed. We frantically tried to save them. Their bodies palsied in a most ghastly way. Their eyes rolled far into the backs of their sockets. Vomit of brown and red choked from their gullets. Then they all fell still and grey and cold. No one mourns a whore. It was us who, between shifts on our bruised knees, wrapped their bodies in the cleanest linen we could find and fell at the feet of the Divine soil-pudding to bury them. They compromised with an anonymous plot away from all the others. One long grave for all of them. No eternity box to protect them. We buried them ourselves, digging the worm-infested soil with our hands. We still pick flowers and leave them there every week. I had made a new enemy now. If he had left them untreated, I fear their fates would remain unchanged but such a visceral and slow demise I would not wish on anyone. Could I blame the man who made them so? Aye and I do and if I knew his name there would be seven bodies to my name and not six. But in his absence, the good doctor would pay and pay he did. It was easy to lure him in. Promise him easy coin in hand and like a fish upon a hook he would be stuck. In the alley behind our humble parlour I did gut him, maim him, scar him and emasculate him as I had all the others. He swore like a cutter as he died dunghill. A shard of glass I had scooped up from the gutter was a most jagged weapon. It was messier than the others. It took a while. I could have struck a fatal blow but that mercy was not shown to my sisters. I stood and waited and watched. He tried to haul his gangly body towards the road. He did not get particularly far. I saw the exact moment he gave up. Constable Gothard, there is no word in our humble language that could define such a moment. His corpse rotted there for almost a week before a blackguard stumbled upon him when a stray cur began to eat Gaspar’s face.

You may think it selfish to rid a town as diseased as ours of one of the few doctors we had left. I do not see it so. What is the life of one man too baked to help his fellow human compared to the hundreds of people his negligence may have killed. You should be thanking me, Matthew. I should receive the key to the town for the vermin I have executed. I have done what you and your boys have failed to do. I have actually protected the weak and vulnerable. Langland, Grave, Pope, Scarletti, Qwimper. They will never hurt anyone again and that is thanks to me and me alone.

Now you know my story. Why I do what I do. Though as you may recall I attest to six victims, not five. You see, Matthew, when I heard of your stupidity costing Yesayi and Kiwregh Aghabekyan their lives, I knew I had to stop. But with them dead, it felt only right to exonerate them as I should have in life. This morning, I killed my final victim before sealing this note and leaving it upon your table. His name is Horace Creely. The bull-calf cold cook. A dangler. You will find his body like all the others. If anything, I was consistent. To the right of this note is a small package wrapped in brown paper with the hoddy doddy’s unintimidating cock inside of it. That will be my final gift to you, Constable. It adds a final chapter to the story I have weaved.

The poetry of my massacre is not lost on me though I must admit it was not my intention. I began to walk this path after a man fucked a woman — two women. Second, the type of dog-bolt who plunders children, a virginity snatching degenerate. A yoked man with heavy baggage. A foppish lout with a career and a life who is praised by all who do not know him. A man who brings about death and cares not for life. It was only fair to complete my bloody poem with the man tasked with guiding the deceased into a peaceful, eternal rest. 

We lost another girl. A dasher fed with a fire shovel. It is not uncommon, especially as winter draws in. She had crossed the bear. With a beer-garden jaw she refused a man his pleasure after he attempted to deflower her behind. Madam made a great harvest out of little corn, she would find fault with a fat goose that woman. She was too pretty to disfigure, too tallow-breached to beat and earned too much to be dismissed. Her punishment was the corner for seven days and seven nights. She left us in the only shab-rag Madam allowed her to keep and she slept on the street, gutfoundered, with no one’s face but her own. The cold got her in the end with less than Fiddler’s money. Those who found her did not know her life and so she was treated as a lady and not a rat. We have a tradition down in our dark world. When a woman is dead we bind her feet and knees and thighs with rope. You men will violate anything. Not even the dead and buried are sacred. We could not do this for that sweet girl. By the time we found where her body had been taken by the dizzy reaper himself Mr Creely, it was too late to stop him. We gagged and stood openmouthed like trout watching her cold, rigid, white body be thrust back and forth and back and forth. I was already planning my goodbye and great escape, I knew I wanted to carry on with one final celebratory kill. A sign off, if you will. I knew he was the perfect victim. I laid on the snow-laden streets until I was cold and my lips blue. With the help of my fast and firm hands and wet and warm cunt, a kind orderly let me into the morgue. I held my breath, lying in wait for dear Horace, smart as a carrot, to come and see another young woman to desecrate. He pulled back the cloth laid atop me. He thanked God above for ‘another beauty’. I had procured a scalpel from his own collection with which to enact my masterpiece. He is still down there now, I made sure they would not find him quickly. I want you to be the one who finds him, Constable.

Humans are sick creatures — men are not humans. You are the true plague of the world. You take more lives each day than any other such animal. You may think me a monster, Mr Gothard, as I do you. It is almost a shame we shall not meet face to face once more. By the time this confession reaches you it will be too late to catch me. Plus, and I mean with the utmost disrespect, I have outwitted you at every corner. You are a fat, balding, wrinkled old fool living in a system built for your benefit. I am the fly that hovers above your ale. Small and meaningless at first glance but the longer I linger and the closer I get to the amber liquid the more annoying I become. You have much in common with groggified gundiguts Bernard, rusty-guts Bill, paper-skull Dudley, rum-gagger Giovanbattista, herring-gutted Gaspar and bull beef Horace. All of you have had the chance to spare girls from years of suffering and every single one of you denied them their peace. I have the blood of six men on my hands and I am still more human than you. I hope you cut down Yesayi and Kiwregh’s bodies. Whether you can ship them home I do not know but they were innocent young men. They deserve more than an appropriate burial. The men I slaughtered, well, if I had my way I would dig their bodies up and leave them strung up in the brother’s stead. They were criminals. Beasts. Yet it is the victims who are punished.

You know me now, Constable Matthew Gothard. You know my home, my calling, my philosophy, my crimes, my family. Strange how it is that our lives have been entwined as dramatically as they have. I know not if it is true that I have my father’s eyes but what I know to be tenable is that if you were to look into them you would remember me. You would remember the warm wetness of my painted lips sucking upon you. The loose, stabby, dry attempts at intimacy with my hat. You never paid up the other half of your bill, Mr Gothard. I hope the world will come to learn that the man chosen to keep order is at the heart of the chaos. That his nights in the underbelly of Springhollow’s shadow are not spent on a crusade for safer streets but in the punch-house on top of pintle-merchants he can barely raise himself for. You should consider yourself lucky that my reign ends today. You were next on my list, Constable. You see the harm your kind do unto us and yet it is us who face the roast, the noose, the backhand. It is us who pay for their actions. It is us who face consequence when we are the damaged. We are goddesses and you are pondscum. There are only two places where a man calls out to God with honest meaning. When he is inside of a woman and when she has a blade to his cock. That is what I have come to learn this most thrilling year. It is enough to make a dog laugh.

I hope to return to Springhollow some day. When you are sleeping amongst the earthworms. Perhaps I will kill again, perhaps I will not. It is too early to say. Wherever I call home next, if the men are half as callous as those here, I will show no mercy. I am the wrath the world has been waiting for. My life is beginning anew. Born out of spilt blood. I am a reckoning. I will change my name, my hair, my hunting ground but until the day that I feel as though I have done enough for my fellow women left behind, I shall never give myself up. You will be chasing a phantom until you die. And then on the brimstone battlefields of Hell, we shall come face-to-face once more and, Devil willing, I will finally put you to the sword that has long awaited you, Constable.

Do not keep me waiting.

-Melony Elizbeth Kelly