Newbury & Hobbes 04 - The Executioner's Heart by George Mann

woman to focus on something other than her own lowly lot in life, her pauper’s existence.
    At the time, however, the old woman terrified her. She thought her a witch, an avatar of the devil himself. She cowered from that cavernous mouth and its spittle-flecked lips that spewed only poison and fear, trying to shut out the woman’s spiteful words. The onslaught was relentless, however, and by the age of seven she found herself believing what the woman said: that she had killed her own mother upon quitting the womb, that her very soul was inhabited by evil, and that she would never amount to anything in this life. All that awaited her was an eternity in the fiery pits of Hell.
    One day the woman described this terrifying place to her, told her of the torture she was likely to endure, of the demons with their silky forked tongues and pitchforks, the way they would force her to live out her worst fears for all eternity. The girl asked the woman if she, too, would go to Hell, since she knew this place so well. The woman reached out and cuffed her brutally across the back of the head for her insolence.
    She wished the old woman dead, then, and not for the first time. She balled her fists and could almost see the woman’s wizened old face contorting in pain as she collapsed upon the hearth, near where she sat in perpetual, indolent repose. Her hair would catch alight like dry tinder, and with a whoosh of flame she would ignite, blazing suddenly bright in the grainy dimness of the parlour. The chair would catch fire, and the flames would spread, licking at the table legs, engulfing the wooden shelves, and finally spreading throughout the orphanage. The entire building would be razed to the ground in the purifying inferno, and all of the nannies and maids and tutors would burn incandescent like tallow candles.
    The girl would be free, then, to escape a diabolical future in the acrid pits of Hell.
    It did not happen quite as she’d hoped. When the old woman finally did drop dead, almost a year later, the young girl was peeling potatoes in the kitchen with two other orphans. They heard a wheezing grunt from the adjacent parlour. The girl put down her paring knife and—with some hesitation—tiptoed through to the parlour to investigate what had become of the old woman.
    She was thrilled to see the scene from her imagination brought vividly to life.
    The old woman lay face down upon the hearth, her jaundiced eyes still open but unseeing, her skin pallid and grey. Her mouth yawned open, slack jawed, and drool pooled upon the slate tiles beneath her. Her arms were outstretched, as if she’d been reaching for something when her heart had suddenly given out. Everything was as the girl had imagined, save for one small detail. The woman’s hair had not caught the dancing flames that even now leapt and caroused in the grate, but had fallen just a little short, fanned out like grey bristles upon the hearth.
    She was fascinated by the sight of this dead thing that had once been a person. It was unreal to her that the woman had ever actually been alive. She stood over the corpse for a full minute before she was struck by the notion that, if she wished, she could bring about the conflagration she had always dreamed of. One nudge from the edge of her boot and the woman’s head would be close enough to the flames for her hair to catch alight. She could encourage the fire to escape, just as she longed to escape. She could feed it the flaccid corpse of this horrid old woman, who would burn—not in Satan’s realm, but there on the hearth, roasting like a suckling pig. It was everything the old woman deserved, and more.
    It would look like an accident. She would not be held accountable. She would claim she had found the woman that way, that she had attempted desperately to put the flames out with the jug of water from the table, but it had not been enough; the fire was too ravenous, too eager.
    She stepped forward, raising her foot, her heart