Make the pain go away.

The words echo.

Harriet smiles and retreats from the room, softly closing the door behind her.

The gun sits on Miriam's chest like a boat anchor.

Her hand – numb, feeling like a giant pillow – flops up onto her chest and feels for the weapon. She tries to curl her finger around the trigger, but it's hard, too hard for such a simple action. Instead, the finger lies across the trigger guard, a worm on a sunbaked road.

It's over, she thinks.

Louis is dead soon. She can't see the time, but she can feel it in her every thundering pulse-beat that the hour is nigh.

The diary is done.

She's been privy to so many deaths.

Why not her own?

This is her power. This is what she can take from fate. She can take her own life in her own hands, snatch it out of destiny's grip.

Her finger curls around the trigger.

Her mother's voice from the dream reaches her, floating to her like a distant song carried on a slow breeze:

"And thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."

She hoists the gun.

Harriet listens, ear pressed tightly to the door.

She hears the stupid girl moving around, slow and sluggish. The brush of her arm against the floor. A moan. The faint rattle of the pistol's mechanisms in an unsteady grip.

Harriet smiles.

This really will be her crowning moment.

She's made people hurt before, but not like this.

Part of her feels bad. That strikes her as disturbing. Yes, she felt some sympathy toward this girl, but guilt? She hasn't felt a pang of guilt since… Well, when was the last pang of guilt? Has she ever had one?

A sour feeling strikes her gut. Guilt. No use for that.

A sound interrupts the tiny song of remorse inside her: the sound of the gun's hammer being pulled back.

Good girl, Harriet thinks. It makes sense. Pulling the hammer back is easier than just using the trigger. The girl's been worked over. Probably barely has the strength.

She'll hardly have to lift the pistol. Just a pivot, a counterclockwise turn until the barrel is up under her chin, and then –

Right on cue, the gun goes off.

Bang.

Harriet's smile broadens.

As the pistol fires the door shudders – probably the girl's leg kicking out. Soon will come the awful odor of voided bowels, a smell that is only pleasant due to the associations Harriet has with it, really.

Harriet takes a step away from the door and feels a sharp pain in her head.

She staggers, almost falls, when reaching for the doorknob.

She tries to ask aloud, "Why is my shoulder wet?"

But the words don't form. They can't. Her mouth won't response to her brain's wishes.

Harriet smells something like burning hair.

A small 'o' sits in the middle of the door. Smoke drifts up through the pencil-sized hole.