Jesus Christ, what was she doing? Why couldn’t she get past this? Why was it so impossible to get past the grief and go on with her life? Why couldn’t she just pay the fine and go home?

Because, said a voice somewhere within and without her.

Because she had to have suffered horribly at the hands of the Monster. And as much as you try, you can’t not keep yourself from imagining the depravities the Monster must have inflicted upon her. You can’t not imagine her screams, her crying Mommy, Mommy, help, or Please Mister, stop, it hurts, it hurts, ithurtsithurtsithurts!

Because Monsters like that must be punished, and without fury, there can be no proper punishment.

Another burst of lightning and ear-splitting thunder, and the wind blew her hair straight back as the rain cleansed the mud from her face.

“You dirty, filthy fuck!” she screamed against the roar of the storm. “Goddamn you to hell for what you did to her! GODDAMN YOU! I’d kill you myself if I could…I’D KILL YOU MYSELF IF I COULD!”

She opened her fist and let Mr. Hands enjoy the storm.

“I wish you could have protected her,” said Lucy. “I wish you could have bitten the head off the fucker who took her from me.”

She brought the figure to her lips and kissed it, then dropped it into the pit.

“I wish you could avenge them all. Good-bye, Mr. Hands.”

Then a powerful gust of wind caught her by surprise and she slipped, tried to regain her footing, hit a slick patch of stone, and fell to the ground. She landed in a puddle of mud that was deep enough to prevent any serious injury but not so deep as to prevent her back and legs from screaming in pain.

She tried to stand but couldn’t.

Able to see only by the flashes of lightning, she half-stumbled, half-crawled toward the gate.

Somewhere in there she was able to stand again, and staggered the rest of the way toward her car.

She got inside, slammed closed the door, and immediately lay down across the front seat.

A few seconds later, she passed out.

But not before muttering to herself, as if in prayer, “…kill them all if I could. Filthy fucking Monsters, all of them...”

Lucy Thompson lay in her car, unconscious, shuddering and jerking in the grip of a nightmare.

Outside, hidden by the darkness and baptized by the storm, a confluence began in a damned place where grief and rage meet and say No More.

Within the pit of the sculpture, something began to form around the carved figure of Mr. Hands; a soupy, shapeless pool at first, with no discernable hint of structure—bits of dead leaves, pieces of tree bark, pebbles and exposed bones of dead birds and squirrels mixing with the mud and water—but there was life there, pulsating like a spurting heart suddenly torn from a chest, and it continued to grow as the ground drunk in the essence of Sarah, hidden in her blood that still clung to Mr. Hands’ body, as he slowly came into awareness, developing senses left for him by others who had suffered the fate of Sarah, the blood of children long dead and forgotten whose bodies might never be found, or whose place of torture and death was never known; their blood and tears and fear finding its way into the earth, and Mr. Hands drank it all in, drawing his energy from the death all around him, beneath him in the ground, trapped in the bits of consciousness that drifted through the air around him...