It felt good to be giving a little something back to the community.

Today she was at the park to add to the scrapbook she kept for herself and Mr. Hands; after all, they were partners, on a mission from SHIT, and should document their good deeds for posterity; so, each time Mr. Hands dispatched a monster and Lucy could remove the case from the Walls of Madness, she added those clippings to the scrapbook along with the stories about the odd, horrible, and usually painfully slow manner in which they were banished from this world.

When they were found, that is.

On this late October day, Lucy Thompson and Mr. Hands had rid the world of exactly eleven of the very worst monsters, and they would rid it of many, many more; Lucy had vowed so much to the memory of her daughter.

“Did you know that there are two kinds of time, Mr. Hands? I read about it a book once: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. In kairos, you simply are, from the moment of your birth on. You are, wholly and positively. In chronos you’re nothing more than a set of records, fingerprints, your social-security number, you’re always watching the clock, aware of time passing and of being vulnerable to outside forces that are creeping up on you, pushing you closer to the moment of your death…but in kairos, you simply are. Kairos is especially strong in children, because they haven’t learned to understand, let alone accept, concepts such as time and age and torture and starvation and death. In children, kairos can break through chronos: when they’re playing safely, drawing a picture for Mommy or Daddy, taking the first taste of the first ice-cream cone of summer, when they sing along to songs in a Disney cartoon or talk to an ‘imaginary’ friend or invent secret places in this world only they can see, there is only kairos. As long as a child thinks it’s immortal, it is.”

She applied glue to the back of a newspaper article about the torture-death of Karen Lawrence, then carefully smoothed it in place next to a color photograph the Cedar Hill Ally had run while covering the woman’s trail; a reproduction of Billy Lawrence’s only photograph taken outside the hospital: He was dressed in an infant’s baseball player uniform, holding a small plastic bat and smiling the widest, most radiant baby-boy smile you ever saw.

Lucy could look at it now and feel her heart grow warm at how happy and loveable he was, instead of thinking: He was dead six days after this was taken.

It might have just been a trick of the light, but she could swear his tiny smile actually grew wider when the article detailing his mother’s death was pasted next to his picture.

“It’s important that we continue this, Mr. Hands. Think of every living child as being the burning bush that Moses saw; surrounded by the flames of chronos, but untouched by the fire.”