Revenge16 min read
The Trident Candle and the Memory They Took
ButterPicks14 views
I woke to a sound I didn't recognize: a short, clean electronic chime that kept repeating.
"Do you hear that?" I whispered in the dark.
"Mm?" Marcus Castle's voice floated up from below. "Sleep."
"I heard a sound." I tried to keep my voice light. "A computer?"
"It's probably the oven timer. Don't worry." He laughed, like he always laughed when he wanted to make me stop worrying.
I swung my legs off the bed and padded across the carpet. The laptop on his desk was alive with little rectangles popping up—messages. I had never heard that notification before.
I bent closer. One window, two, three—my heart knocked.
"Got her?" one line read.
"This girl looks fun. We can do things different with her," another said.
"I can't wait."
"That face—anyone would fall into your hands."
"Who would've thought? Looking like that..." a typing bubble. "But a monster."
My hands went cold.
"Who are you texting?" I called back without thinking.
"Nobody. You okay?" He called up, voice soft. "Dinner's almost ready."
The messages stopped.
I tried to breathe slow. I tried to tell myself they were a joke, spam, nonsense.
A second later two more windows opened.
"Don't be too rough this time. Not like last time..."
"Last time? She died too fast."
I pressed my palms to my mouth and sat down hard in the chair. The laptop was my Marcus's. The words were not mine. I felt them like teeth.
I clicked. A folder opened: dozens of video thumbnails. Thumbnails of a rusted place, a hole, a barrel. My hands trembled.
"Marcus?" I called, bare feet cold on the floor. "Marcus, the sauce?"
"Coming," he sang from the kitchen. "Then we'll eat. You should rest some more."
I shouldn't have been curious. I shouldn't have opened that folder. But something lighter than fear—need—pulled me in.
The first clip started on its own. I could hear a high, ugly scream even though I turned the speakers down. The girl—no, a woman—was bound inside an oil drum, half buried in a cold place I knew by instinct: an old concrete lot near the beach, the place we’d driven past. She had a green snake thrown into the drum as if someone wanted to watch her panic.
Then the camera swung to a hand—slim, male, a laugh in the dark. The hand disappeared, the lid came down. The next clip showed a man in shorts dropped into a pit and cement poured. Another showed a woman having paint forced over her face. Another showed a man hanged.
My skin crawled. I clicked to close the player. The cursor drifted to the next file and the laptop opened it before I could. The camera panned, slow, and the person filming turned the phone. The face filled my screen.
Marcus Castle smiled.
I swore out loud.
A cold, sharp part of me tried to compute: maybe this was edited, fake, something. But there he was, up close and personal, smiling at the lens like it was an audience. The clip ended and then—another. A sofa, an oversized hoodie; Marcus alone in a chair.
A voice off-camera asked, "Why do this?"
Marcus shrugged. "Because I like it."
"And what about next time?"
"We'll switch it up," he said. "Find someone pretty. Make her fall in love. Make her think I love her."
He laughed, small and empty. "Candlelight dinner, wine with a pill—send her to heaven laughing."
I heard a creak in the hallway. The world went sharp. The voice down the stairs: "Gwen? Dinner's ready."
I shut the screen and tucked myself under the duvet like a child playing hide. I could not let him know I had seen.
"Are you up, sleepyhead?" His voice below was syrup.
I pressed my face to the pillow and tried to wash away the videos with breath.
A soft knock. "Gwen?"
I didn't answer. He opened the door and padded in, smelling of herbs and red wine. He touched my hair like he always did, tender—the hand that had put the laptop link had filmed people in pits but his touch was tender.
"Still tired?" he asked.
"I must have been dreaming," I whispered.
He tilted my face to his and frowned. "You look like you cried."
"Nightmare," I lied. "Bad sea dreams."
He held me. There was no warmth. My body didn't absorb the hug the way it used to.
Downstairs he had laid a simple meal on the table, and in the center where a vase might sit, there was a heavy metal candlestick shaped like a trident, each prong holding a tall candle. He poured wine into my glass like a waiter. He touched mine, the laugh from the video—my head said remember, stay calm. I pushed the glass away.
He raised both brows. "Not drinking?"
"I'm not thirsty," I said.
He smiled with no change. He drank mine and his. He watched me. "Okay." He said. "You can sleep more. I'll clean."
The world tipped. Pain like a pressure cave built inside me. It spread from my temples down my arms like someone pouring lead. I stood, mouth dry, voice small. "Bathroom," I said.
He nodded, warm and unaware. I ran up the stairs, heart detonating.
The bathroom light blurred in my vision. I twisted the tap, pulled water to my lips and gulped until my stomach rebelled. I made myself sick. My skin prickled, then loosened. The drug was strong but I had read about things in a first-aid flyer—most pills used to calm take close to two minutes to render a grown woman immobile. I had thirty seconds. I swallowed. I coughed. The world steadied enough.
I crept to the window.
Curtains closed, but something was wrong. The window's glass had been sealed by a sheet of material and a soft glow bled through. When we came up the stairs earlier the curtains had been double-layered. Marcus had planned it all. I thought about the laugh in the video—candlelight, wine—those precise words fluttered like moths in my head.
My phone shook. Miranda Kobayashi called me. Her voice grounded me. "Gwen? Are you okay?"
"Miranda," I breathed. "I need help."
"Stay put. Don't let Marcus in. I called the police. Keep calm."
"He—" My throat closed.
"He won't come up. Don't let him."
"Okay." I said the word I had to say. "I'll wait."
I told Miranda what I'd seen. She believed me. We exchanged short commands: she would call for backup, tell them my location, stay on the line.
He knocked. "Gwen?"
The door opened. He stood there, linen shirt, an apologetic smile. My voice sounded small in my ears. "I'm fine."
He stepped toward me. I felt the hand on my shoulder and all I wanted to do was run but he was close enough to smell like thyme. He stroked my face with a fingernail. "You cried. Who made you cry?"
"I—nightmare," I said, the lie practiced like a script. He watched me like a man watching art.
He scanned the desk and the open laptop. "You touched my computer?"
"Yes." I froze. "I was going to make something special. You'd like it."
He tucked the laptop away, slid the screen closed. "Okay." He smiled. "Thanks."
My phone buzzed with Miranda's voice: "They're on the way. Officer Hudson Harrison is en route. Wait."
Then my phone was snatched. Marcus took it. He opened it and looked at the caller ID. "Miranda," he said casually. "Very old friend. You two have history, huh?"
The call cut. He smiled and clicked something on the laptop. The desktop picture of us kissing bloomed on screen. The videos were gone. He said, "Just a messy desktop. Huh."
Miranda's voice came through again. "Gwen, Hudson's outside. Don't answer the door. Don’t let Marcus out of your sight."
He actually put on a show. He chattered about a long-ago fiancée—"Miranda is old news"—and the weirdness of the videos. He said he had once seen similar websites and that he had been framed by them before. It made a cruel kind of sense. The story fit like clothing draped to hide blood.
Then a knock: heavy, insistent. My hands shifted to the handle. Boots. A man's voice: "Police! Open up!"
"See?" Marcus said, with a soft vibration of triumph. "Everything's fine."
Ellis Box burst in, broad-shouldered, in a police jacket, boots scuffing. "Gwen Blackwell?" he barked. "We need to check the premises."
"He's here," I whispered. "He's here." Miranda's voice on the line had gone white with noise. She said, "Don't let the officer touch anything. I called Hudson again. He'll be there."
Ellis noticed the candlestick. He moved with a policeman's authority. "Hands where I can see them, Marcus."
Marcus didn't flinch. He smiled. "Of course."
Suddenly the atmosphere pulled like net. Ellis's eyes flashed to his wrist—a small flame tattoo. My mind jumped to a detail in those videos. The hand when the camera had shown it had that tattoo. The room dropped away.
No—no. Marcus had pointed to a shoebox under the table. I lunged. I opened the drawer and saw nothing but napkins. Ellis grabbed my hair and dragged me. Pain flared.
I yanked at the trident candlestick, feeling metal bite into my palm. He struck my ribs and I crumpled, the room a whirl of sound. I meant to scream but my voice was a paper tear.
Ellis pressed my face toward the floor. "Stop pretending. You're lucky you didn't go down in the ditch like the others."
I tasted blood.
Then, as if conjured, a door burst open and a uniformed man—Hudson Harrison—stormed into the room with a team behind him. There was a flash, a shout: "Freeze!" A single shot cracked. Ellis staggered, clutching his jaw. Marcus went down, a surprised, bloody bloom at his shoulder.
"Miss Blackwell!" Hudson's voice cut. "Are you hurt?"
They cut my bindings, and a dozen hands were suddenly there—gentle, efficient—pulling me away. Everything blurred into the bright, sharp sound of radios.
When the smoke of the moment cleared, Marcus looked up at me from the floor, a trickle of blood at his temple. He shouted, "Gwen! Don't go with them! Don't trust—"
They all hustled me to the car. I didn't look back. Miranda's voice came through once more, alone on my phone. She said, flatly: "I told you. They can't be trusted. They framed you."
I clung to the idea that I'd been saved. But the pictures in my head wouldn't stop moving: the barrel, the drill, the snake. They kept moving like a stitched film. Someone in the patrol car asked me what had happened and I told them fragments. Marcus had been shot. The man who first burst in? He'd had the flame tattoo too when Hudson's jacket fell halfway: the same mark.
Hudson was efficient, but tired. He asked me a string of questions, soft then clinical. "Did you see videos? Who is Miranda? Is Marcus your boyfriend?"
"Yes—Marcus," I said. "Miranda's my friend." My voice left like a bird.
But then I noticed Hudson's heavy watch and a gap of skin—there on his forearm—the flame tattoo. My stomach dropped. The world narrowed.
"No," I said. "No—he's got the same tattoo."
Hudson's jaw went hard. "What tattoo?"
I pointed.
For a moment his face went into a small shape I couldn't read. He looked away, swallowed, and then a firm set of his jaw. "We have to take you to the station."
I watched Marcus' face. He strained to whisper. "Gwen, don't go. Don't trust them. I didn't—"
The radio fussed. The team hauled several people from the yard as officers poured in. Some of them had the same mark. The net closed like a slow animal.
The screen of my life then cut to black.
When I woke I was not in a hospital. I was on a cold slab of concrete and the sun was a twice-bright lamp above. My limbs were lashed to a crossbeam. I blinked against a light so sharp it felt like an accusation. Around me, people with tired, hard faces stood with arms folded—the same faces I had seen in Marcus's videos. The smell of ground cement was everywhere.
A man stepped forward: Baptiste Vieira. "Wake up." His voice was not gentle.
"What—where—" I croaked.
"You remember this place?" he said. "You were very good at making it work."
I stared at him. He had the tattoo on his wrist.
From the shadows Marcus rose and walked toward the center of the lot. He had no tenderness on his face now, only an accumulation of cold weather. Blood had stained his shirt. He looked like the man from the videos and the man who'd loved me. "You don't deserve the name Gwen Blackwell," he said. "You don't deserve mercy."
"Marcus—what is this?" I whispered. "I didn't—"
"You don't remember," he said, like a teacher testing a student. "You don't remember because someone...helped you to forget."
"Who shut my mind?" I asked, panic threading.
Driscoll Girard, a thin man with a small, cruel mouth, laughed. "They gave you a new life. They rewired what you were. They called it justice. They called it hope."
"Miranda?" I croaked. "Miranda—what did you do?"
Miranda stepped forward like a shadow stepping from behind a curtain. Her smile that used to comfort now split her face into a blade. "We saved you," she said. "No. We saved the world."
She told me our story. She told me they had discovered a technology that this world had used to wipe memory and 'soften' criminals. The state had argued that rehab was the only humane road—no death. The families screamed and got nothing.
"So we kidnapped you," Miranda said. "We brought you here to make you see. To make you remember what you did. To make you pay...to the edge."
She walked me through videos they said were mine. The sound of her voice filled the lot. "You killed seven people," she said plainly. "Three men. Four women. You buried them here. You liked the feeling."
I grabbed at air. "That's impossible."
"Did you think you could hide?" Baptiste asked, blunt. "Do you think those families would accept forgetfulness? Do you think this world is kind enough to let you go?"
"But—" I said.
"Your first memory they gave you back," Marcus said, and at that the others turned to look at me like students watching their lesson show a slide. He forced a chuckle. "You were brilliant at it."
"You're lying!" I shouted.
"Are we?" Miranda said, and then she held up a screen and there it was: my face in a child's hand, a grin lime-bright. The screen showed the slow editing process: old footage, AI overlays, my lips, my eyes placed where another face had been. The footage snapped, and my voice—my voice—came out of the speakers, layered, practiced, like a film doppelgänger.
"You can't," I said. "I can't remember any of this."
Marcus looked at me with something like pity. "You can't remember because the world let you forget. They treated you. They changed you. You grew older and softer in the wrong parts. We brought you back."
They began to list names: "Sun Zhen, the pianist—" "Li Yuanbo, the boy who planned to be an engineer—" "Qiu Yue, my daughter's name—" Each name was a spear. Each image they flashed was a small sun. The crowd around me murmured, some wept outright, some spat.
"Why did you do this?" I asked. "Why make me remember? What do you hope to gain?"
Silence. A voice rose from the back, more crushed than avenging: "We wanted justice."
Marcus stepped closer, the trident candlestick memory in my hand like a child's toy. "You will do penance," he told me. "We'll give you your memory back piece by piece. We'll make you look at every one of them."
They passed out knives. "A symbolic cut, not fatal," Baptiste instructed. "We are not murderers."
No one stepped forward. Marcus dropped his knife. He lifted a photo and slapped me hard across the face, audible under the sky.
One by one they slapped me until my cheeks burned. Their voices became a chorus of grief. "You killed my boy!" "You killed my sister!" "You ruined my life!"
They began to vote. The room smelled of old dust and answers. The consensus hardened. They would bury me. They would pour concrete. They'd make the world see how forgotten lives matter.
I watched Marcus's face. He moved like a man who had learned cruelty as a grammar. He took the microphone that had been set up and started to speak to the circle.
"This is not about us becoming gods," he said. "This is about memory. If the world erases their crimes, we will not let them go. They must feel what we felt. You killed their children, and you laughed."
He reached for the control box by the cement mixer. "We can make the world look at you, again and again."
He lifted his hand. "Are you ready?"
A long, terrible moment passed. The crowd hesitated. Then someone at the edge—a woman with salt at her temples—asked, "Is she really who you say she is?"
"She is," Driscoll said.
"Has anyone actually seen?" the woman pressed. "What if she is cured? What if she has changed?"
A small voice from the back said, "Do you want her to live in a society that will forget again? Do you?"
The group split like a pane with a hairline crack. Marcus's fingers closed around the red button like a temptation. He said, "If you do not press, I will."
At that moment the air changed. A sharp, distant sound—gunfire?—rang. Someone yelled "Police!" and then a shadow fell across the lip of the pit and a figure collapsed: someone had fired a dart. Marcus fell forward, convulsing, then went still and slid into the pit.
"Ambush!" someone shouted. The scene burst into chaos. Police in real uniforms poured in, lights blinking, and men in them carried batons and holsters. Officers pushed into the yard. "Hands up, everyone!"
Men with badges took out cuffs. Miranda cursed and ran. But the pinned were many and the real police were efficient. The lot became a blur of radio commands, flashlights, and handcuffs. The real officers had mirrored that little flame tattoo on their unit patch. It turned out we'd been watched.
They cut the ropes from me. They cuffed Miranda, Baptiste, Driscoll, Ellis. They hauled them off. A dozen neighborhood cameras that had been hidden recorded every moment. Someone filmed the arrests on their phones and yelled into the open channel. "This is happening! They're taking them!"
At the station I told my story—half of it in gasps. The files were made. The evidence trove from the lot was massive. The police had mixed feelings: these families had acted outside the law. They had kidnapped, yes. But they'd also pointed to failures in the system—the same system that had allowed memories to be wiped.
In the weeks that followed, trials were scheduled. The country argued over whether the families were heroes or monsters. I tried to sleep. When I could, my dreams were stitched from celluloid fragments.
Then came the day of the public hearing that none of us wanted and all of us wanted at once.
The courthouse steps were stone and bright. A crowd had gathered. Cameras with long lenses jostled like birds. Families of the dead lined the plaza. The accused—Miranda Kobayashi, Baptiste Vieira, Driscoll Girard, Ellis Box—were brought out in cuffs, their faces bared to the sun. Marcus Castle was there too, though his chin had a scar and his eyes looked older than his years. Handcuffs bit into the skin at their wrists.
Hudson Harrison stood to the side with an official stoicism. Hank Dunn, a senior prosecutor, delivered the opening remarks with a voice like gravel.
"Today," he said, "we will not only weigh on the charges of abduction and assault. We will weigh the moral crisis at the center of this tale."
Miranda's face was uncovered. For the first time I saw the woman who had called me as friend and then turned into a judge. Her mouth tightened. The crowd's murmur rose and fell like a tide.
"Miranda," a woman in the front row shouted, "how could you do it? How could you play God?"
Miranda's eyes met the woman's. "Because I had lost a daughter and the law locked its doors on me. Because I wanted to awake what the world tried to forget."
The woman spat. "You robbed us and you robbed them. You created a spectacle and you pretended retribution."
"Spectacle?" Miranda said. "This is the only justice we can make when the law is soft. This is the only way to make them remember."
The crowd erupted into shouts. "Shame! Shame!" a dozen voices cried.
Then came the prosecutor's request: Miranda and her co-defendants would face not only criminal charges but a public accountability session—an ordered, formal confrontation where they would be forced to listen to each family speak and where the court would publish all evidence of the staged "punishment" to the world. The prosecution argued for transparency—make their methods known, make the harm visible.
The judge agreed.
They called each family to the podium. One by one they spoke. "My son could have been a teacher," said a father with hands like two slabs. "You took his life. You erased the person who did it by law—then you took the law into your hands. I wanted you to answer to a court, not me."
Another woman stood and, with a shaking voice, told the court what it was like to watch a looped execution on a screen at night. "I saw my son's hands in the dirt. I watched him sink. I slept with my hands under my head so I wouldn't feel the empty spot of him." Her words fell like stones. People wept.
Miranda's face changed. At first she held a line of iron, jaw clenched. Then she blinked, and the first crack appeared.
"How can you justify kidnapping and torturing a woman out of memory and making her suffer as we did?" asked another, softer voice—an older man with rivered eyes. "You were right that the law failed, but you...decided to punish the wrong person or decided the law could be replaced by your rage."
Miranda opened her mouth to answer. For a long moment all she could do was look at the faces. The cameras captured every nuance. Her eyes shifted, hard to soft, anger to shame.
"Did you feel better?" asked the mother of Qiu Yue, voice broken. "When you slapped her and showed her our children? Did you feel a thing when she cried?"
Miranda's shoulders trembled. She seemed to shrink.
"Tell us what you did when you found out it was her," demanded a woman who had come from further away. "Tell us if you ever thought perhaps the machine had changed her.”
Miranda's voice came out small. "We—" She stopped. She had nothing to sway back with. The crowd leaned forward.
"Yes or no?" someone called.
"Yes," she said finally. "At first I thought she was an empty vessel. Later, I began to see that the world had already done its rewriting. I began to doubt my right to decide."
"Miranda," the father's voice said, "we are not asking you for your justification anymore. We are asking you to stand before the people you hurt and say their names, and say you will not take another life into your hands."
For a while Miranda could not speak. Then in a voice that had become brittle she said, "I am sorry. I am sorry to all of you. I am sorry to the people I used and to the person I humiliated."
Her reaction changed from anger to bewilderment to denial and then to collapse. The press filmed it. The public called it a breakdown; some called it repentance. Phones crowded the square. People took pictures, livestreams blared.
The prosecutor pressed on. "You bragged that the world needed to watch. You uploaded much of the footage. You called it 're-education.' Did you ever consider the ethical line you crossed?" He laid out a timeline of uploads, a map of shared IPs, a trail of praise on encrypted forums.
Miranda's wife—no, she had no wife in this story. A crowd member spat again. "You made a spectacle. You made us complicit by showing us images of your revenge. People watched."
When the public humiliation opened up, the crowd became part of the punishment. Around the plaza, strangers who had gathered began to hiss and hiss and then applaud the verdict of the people's moral outrage. Some stood up and shoved Miranda and the others with words.
"Look at them!" an elderly woman cried. "You are not above grief. You are not above the law."
Miranda covered her face, and then, suddenly, she stood erect and shouted, "I did what I thought was justice. Take me to prison—do your law's work! But tell me—do not let my children die twice by forgetting them!"
Her voice cracked and she dropped to her knees. The crowd's reaction split between scorn and pity. Cameras followed her fall like vultures. Someone recorded the sob that filled the square and uploaded it ten seconds later. People argued online about whether this was justice or cruelty. A thousand comments poured like rain.
By the end of the day Miranda and the others had been sentenced to long trials. The court gave Miranda a heavy sentence for kidnapping, assault, and conspiracy, plus restitution to the families. She stood in the dock and listened as each family told its story. She did not get off easy. "You wanted retribution," the judge said, "and you achieved it. Now the law must deal with you."
Publicly, people cheered and screamed. Some raised placards: "Justice, not vengeance." Others chanted that the legal system had failed first.
When Miranda left shackled, she turned her head toward me. For a moment our eyes met. There was no triumph there—only a person who had been broken in many ways. Then they closed the van door.
Months later I sat in a small apartment with the trident candlestick on the table. It had come back into my life like a bone. I turned it over in my hands as if it was an artifact. I thought about the taste of cement and the scrape of rope and Marcus's soft voice the first time we kissed. I thought about the men and women who had lost children, who had stood before cameras and said names into microphones until their throats bled.
Marcus had been sentenced, too—complicity and assault. The public called him liar and savior at once. Miranda had been judged, but the debate roared on. The legal system would, in time, have to decide if memory erasure technologies should be restricted. The world watched us with a taut curiosity.
I found that I could not incorporate that truth as sterile data in my head. The knowledge that I might have been someone else was like a second body. I could feel it breathing.
At the end, one cold evening in December, I went back to the concrete lot because I needed to place something there. The cement mixer had been drained. The hole had been filled and left. The place had become a monument of sorts. I dug a shallow edge in the ground and placed the trident candle there, as if marking a grave for things that memory had both held and thrown away.
I whispered to the wind, "I was here. I remember this much."
No one answered, but the sea beyond the lot sighed. It was loud enough to be like a machine: tides and voices and the sound of forgetting.
The End
— Thank you for reading —