Signed Anger, Jealousy and Vengeance

Signed: Anger, Jealousy and Vengeance

A short story by

David T. E. Foster

(Item #EGK-314278 from the Bismarck File. Translation of a document hand-written on high-quality parchment with what has been determined to be oak-gall ink. All but the final paragraph is in formal, high-court, ancient Attic Greek. Several handwriting analysts and experts in phraseology have confirmed that it is probable that at least four different people took turns writing different paragraphs.)

*****

Oh, you foolish benighted creatures! It amuses us that you think of yourselves as predators, the very apex of the chain of life on this planet, when you are truly naught but our playthings and prey. You do not, indeed you cannot, understand. How could you, simple and mortal creatures formed of Earth and Water, begin to comprehend us, the immortal creations of Fire and Air?

There is always a sweet-scented screaming roar of “why?” that pours through your herd’s consciousness after our great hunts, yet you cannot comprehend that the cause does not come from you, nor your societies, but from a place outside your understanding. That roar fades slowly while we savour it — while we make your herd forget.  

We use lesser hunts to counter every Gandhi and King and Bernadotte that springs up with another’s rage and urge to kill or destroy. We so easily create a Stephen Craig Paddock or Dimitrious Pagourtzis or Nikolas J. Cruz and use them as our tools. When we use these tools in our greater hunts, they are unable to pause and think and choose other paths.  

Even when we allow our tools to survive, even when you do not kill them, you pity their deranged minds and often simply lock them away; as if they are diseased and need medical attention. Your species does not and will never know that it was we that made you this way.

We are! We have always been! We are the sourceless voices that whisper to you of insults given and of taking vengeance. We are the colour and texture of your resentments when others have more than you. We are the joy you feel at other’s pain and the pleasure you feel at a stolen opportunity. We are all of these and so much more!

While your species was still young, sowing your fields and tending your flocks, we arrived on your world and built upon your inherent fractiousness and your tendency to think only of yourselves; as individuals with rights and privileges more important than all others. Jealousy, resentment, anger, and the urge to avenge what you feel as slights are so easy to plant, nourish and manipulate in your consciousness — and they add spice and savour to our great hunts. They make it easy to harvest the lives you take with sudden violence, at our urgings, and upon which we feed.

This one we have chosen is almost ready — almost. You humans have an odd instinct towards gathering into pairs and other groupings given how inherently selfish you are. It has taken a special effort to fill him with enough resentment at his mate’s success and make him end their relationship. The tiny irritations we sent at the sound of her voice and her minor habits were not quite enough to make him hate her. We decided to leave her out of our harvest and arranged a success for her at another of your teaching facilities half a continent away to complete the disruption.   

We will enjoy this great hunt even more. The twists and turns required to mold this one were so sweet. This one had a measure of intelligence and had spent years studying long and deeply into the human mind, human history and the workings of society. He had the beginnings of an insight and understanding until we ensured he was alone and ground them away. He had a wish to have no connection with and no responsibility for what we will have him do, and thus struggled against the urges we sent him. So, we allowed him these words in this one scrap of truth recorded in your simplistic ‘writing’, and ensured that he made it difficult to find, as a way of easing his conscience and his hesitation around what he will do. 

The others, those humans who will try to investigate and analyze what they will call his crime, will find the various other documents we have made him write in his own language, but not this, not yet. The ravings we have planted in his mind are all easy to call up on your Internet, or displayed in obvious places around his house and easy to search out; the long rantings we gave him and urged him to write, about how unfairly the university treated him, about being unfairly blocked from his profession, about noise and crowds, about being ignored by his city council and dismissed or laughed at by his neighbours when he complained about the upcoming children’s folk-music gathering. He will be dismissed and eventually forgotten of course, as an aberration, as insane, evil or tragic. Your authorities are incapable of understanding our methods, so no one will search for other reasons for what we will have him do in a short time.

Your species almost — almost — began to understand what we are and what we do. You did not have it correctly, of course; it is our belief that your kind lacks the ability to fully understand us. Some of you began, at least, to believe in outside influences as the reason for sudden, violent multiple deaths amongst your herd. You still do, though we are careful not to allow your authorities the proper direction of thought.

Many of your centuries ago there was a group that neared comprehension and might thus have blocked or muted our abilities. It took more effort than you creatures will ever know or could ever understand to reduce their philosophical musings and religious theories into what you now call ‘legend’ and ‘myth’; to make them into stories for entertaining yourselves around your cookfires rather than simple truth. 

They said there were three of us — though there are more of us than you simple creatures will ever know, and our greater hunts involve packs that are far larger than that. They gave us names, judged us as female (though we will never understand how that particular idea came to be), and assigned each of the three its own attributes and portion of the urges and emotions we use to hunt. They even imagined physical descriptions, though we have nothing your ‘science’ could possibly define as bodies. Some of them called us ‘minions of the Gods’ and, to our amusement, some minor cults that worshipped us as Gods sprang up. These scraps of parchment will eventually be found and we will amuse ourselves further at the end of this document to add some savour to our latest great hunt — some spice to our feeding. We do so appreciate a sweet bit of aftertaste.

This much we will allow him. This much of an understanding that it is not his choice but ours will let him tell himself that it is ‘not his fault’ and ease the workings of the urges we send. It will pull away enough strength from the attitudes, teachings and thoughts that block our will, his feelings of responsibility to and connection with his fellow humans, so that he will do as we urge him.  

After he has written this, and after the document is hidden in the place we have made him prepare, he will fully become the tool we use to hunt and he will forget; never knowing that we planted the thoughts making him so, even if we allow him to survive. He has already purchased the necessary implements at our bidding; the automatic rifle he now so admires and practices with daily, the ammunition and large-capacity magazines. Soon we will bid him pick up the rifle … go to the hilltop overlooking the festival … hide in the rocks where we have shown him. Soon the great hunt will run once more!

This one understands now … or thinks he does. It is almost complete! The last of his blocking urges fade quickly and his thoughts become ours. He writes exactly what we send him to think now with no hesitation! We will have him wrap these scraps of parchment in plastic and put them in a metal box. He has already dug the hiding place under the shed and we will now send some final words through his mind and in his own language to write.

Yes! It is a glorious day! … Yes! Now they’ll all know me. The idiots at the university will all be sorry they ignored and insulted me! The stupid city council will regret dismissing my complaints. Time to go to the little hidden spot in the rocks I found and worked so hard to make perfect. Think of how many will be gathered below me in just a short time … chattering and making the mess and noise I can’t stand any longer. Perhaps the neighbour’s bothersome, noisy and dirty little child and their yapping dog will be there … that would be the sweetest revenge for all the times they dismissed what I told them … all the times they laughed at me behind my back … all the times their ‘neighborhood parties’ ignored me! So much for their perfect little lives … end them now… end them all!

Signed, The Erinyes: 

Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone

*****

(Document found in 2040, fifteen years after the June of 2025 Hay Creek Park mass shooting finally gave enough impetus for the permanent ban of military-style assault weapons for civilian ownership and use in the United States. During that incident, the man that mainstream media dubbed the ‘Bismarck Sniper’ used a legally purchased AR-15 rifle to shoot thirty-five men, forty-two women and thirty children, killing sixty-three of his victims, during the annual children’s folk-music festival in Bismarck, North Dakota. It took Burleigh County sheriff’s deputies forty-five minutes, and the loss of four of their own, before they managed to shoot and kill Edmund Geoffrey Keener, a thirty-two-year-old local resident and PhD candidate in philosophy and Ancient European History at the University of Mary. When the new owners of the house Keener had inherited from his parents were installing a swimming pool in their backyard, they found this document wrapped in plastic, in a metal toolbox engraved with Keener’s name and buried underneath a garden tool-shed. The document was added to the archived mass of Keener’s writings, both on paper and electronic, as a contribution to the psychological study of mass murderers.)