The Bad Seed

'The Creep', that's what they call you. It started when you were a kid, when you discovered you could get inside people's heads and fuck with their lives. Nobody knew that you were doing it, only that they got a weird vibe from you when you did. They blamed the feeling on the strange way you used to watch them, with a kind of single-minded intensity, like you were staring at bugs in a jar. No one took kindly to it, but a lot of people were too afraid of you to do anything about it. Those people acted like you had leprosy. They crossed the street to avoid having to look you in the eye. Other people were a little more direct. Neighborhood bullies would kick the shit out of you for no reason at all, just because you gave them the willies. That lasted until you told Jimmy Himack to jump off a bridge and he did. All his friends saw it. They didn't know how you did it, but they knew you were responsible somehow. At the funeral, they came up with the theory that you knew hypnosis. At the time, you didn't even know what hypnosis was. They vowed to get you back, but at 23, you're still waiting.

Although you're an adult now, you don't have any friends, you've never had a girlfriend, and you're still a virgin. The only person who even counts as a friend is Angie, but she's married now and hardly ever speaks to you anymore. You still live with your parents and your seven sisters. They live on the first two floors, and you live in the basement, hidden away like an old dog with a bad temper. Still, these days, you're happier than you've ever been. You've finally learned how to use your power.

Growing up, you had no idea how you did what you did. Sometimes, especially when someone scared you or made you mad, you would just go into a weird place mentally. It was like the real you just stepped aside and there was someone else inside your head, telling the other person what to do. And they did it. When it happened, you didn't really think about it. In fact, you thought it was normal, until you told someone about it and they acted like you told them you were possessed by the devil. It took you a while to figure out that it didn't happen to other people, that it was something different about you. But ever since then, you've made a point of keeping it secret.

Your teenage years were the worst. It's bad enough being a teenager, but being a teenager who is different from all of the other teenagers is even worse. You were completely shunned by everyone. Even your sisters would ignore you in school, though they had to talk to you sometimes just to keep your parents from getting on their case. The only person who ever willingly spoke to you in school was Angie. Angie was a good Christian girl on a crusade, and you guess you must have looked like the saddest soul in the school and to be desperately in need of saving. To her credit, Angie was a good Christian and a good friend and ignored the reprisals of her family and friends in her efforts to save you. She listened to everything you said, which wasn't much, and never passed judgment on you except to tell you to seek strength in the Lord. You spent more than one night masturbating to visions of Angie in compromising positions and indecent situations. She was beautiful, with a kind of homespun good looks that seemed to point to the benefits of being a good Christian, and a good daughter, but she was very conservative and very modest. She did her best to hide her generous natural endowments, but it only seemed to add fuel to the fires of your imagination. A sweater didn't so much conceal her buxom figure as accentuate it, like a mantle of snow gleaming on the peaks of a mountain.

The frustrating thing about having a strange power, whether god-given or demon-sent, is not knowing how to use it. You can't remember how many times you tried to harness your power to fight back at the bullies who still dogged your heels all through high school, or to win the favor of the ladies you were so to cherish and hold, but nothing seemed to work. It seemed to be sporadic, random, unrelated to your mood or state of mind, the situation, your hormones, or the alignment of the stars. You studied every branch of religion, occultism, psychology, and philosophy looking for an explanation and a means to control your power. You tried to learn hypnosis and creative visualization, hoping to understand your innate powers through reverse engineering. No matter what you tried, nothing worked. Eventually you gave up and began to study eastern religions and spirituality in earnest, looking for peace of mind, if you couldn't have complete control. You began meditating and eating right, you started to exercise on a regular basis, got a job and taught yourself to work hard, bought a motorcycle, and even began studying martial arts. You turned yourself into a fit, lean, and disciplined young man. Girls began to take more and more notice of your good looks, but they still seemed to be put off by the strange aura of supernatural danger they sensed in your presence. And then, one day, during a meditation session in the park, you finally got it.

During your meditation, your mind wandered back over all of those occasions on which you have used your power, looking for some common denominator. You thought of the time you made your sister Henrietta confess to breaking grandpa Allen's urn so that your parents would stop blaming you. You thought of the time you made your dad promise never to raise his hand in anger toward his wife or his children ever again. And you thought of the time you made Jimmy Himack climb up on the rail of the bridge and jump to his . All these years you had been trying to something to happen, as if there were some other will who would resist you, and make your strongest efforts futile, but the secret was that there was no resistance. What you willed to happen would happen, so long as you didn't fear that it wouldn't. All you had to do was tell the other person to do something in a clear and direct mental voice, without any doubt or hesitation, and they would do it. All this time you had been sabotaging yourself, getting in the way of your own abilities. It was your own doubt that prevented you from attaining the heights of the highest ecstasy.

But the trick lay in the moral hesitation. So many of your conflicting desires contained a seed of moral ambiguity. If you had been taught that it was wrong to do to another, then how could you tell some asshole who is kicking the shit out of you to go step in front of a bus? It had worked one time, but that Jimmy Himack was a real bad seed, and he'd had it coming. Likewise, if you'd been raised to treat women with respect (and grown up in a house full of them as you had) then how could you tell some hot girl to bend over and lift up her skirt? The problem was that you wanted two different things at the same time, so what you got was neither of them. All the times that your power had worked, you'd simply been pushed over the edge, right up to a point where there was no more thinking to be done, just doing. And you'd done it. You don't know how, but you had.

Once you'd figured out how it worked, or at least when it worked, all you had left to do was figure out how to get to that state of mental certainty. And that's where the meditation came in. That same discipline you had used to create a fit, muscular body, to get a job and keep it, to stay up late night after night studying eastern religion and western psychology, could be turned to honing that state of mind. It wasn't perfect yet, you still had duds, and you still had moral ambiguities, but you had at least learned how to control it in small ways.

Over the last few months, you've been using your abilities in numerous small ways, getting your sisters to tell the truth more often instead of trying to pin the blame on you or your other sisters, getting your dad to cut back on his drinking and smoking, getting your coworkers to work a little harder on the job and pay a little more attention to what they were doing, and getting your boss to stop being such a nitpicking prick and a lazy bastard. All of this practical experience in using your gifts in innocuous and morally straightforward situations has given you the confidence to begin exploring the range and extent of your powers in less well-charted territories. You are still a virgin, and still don't have a girlfriend, or any real friends for that matter, and it would be nice to earn a little more money for the work that you do or even to have a better job and maybe even move out of your parent's house. But that is only the beginning: there are lots of other exciting possibilities you would like to explore, and your mind starts racing the moment you think about it. But you know you have to take it slow.

The first thing you need to do, you know, is get laid. Unfortunately, you are still so self-conscious around women--being a 23 year old virgin--that you find it impossible to focus on your gifts in their presence. The fact that they are weirded out by you doesn't help either, since no woman seems to want to be around you, let alone be intimate with you. The only women you know, in fact, that don't seem to suffer from this instinctive aversion, are your sisters and your mother. Having grown up with you, they are just used to you being some kind of weird loser. The problem with though is that it is definitely morally ambiguous. In fact, ninety-nine percent of the population would not hesitate to declare it downright evil, not to mention gross and repulsive. Still, it's your best shot. You will just have to work up to it slowly.

Right now, it's kind of quiet around the house. Your mother is home, cooking supper in the kitchen, and your sister Vicky, who is 20 and unemployed, is in her room, listening to music or drawing, probably both. Your dad is still at work at the auto factory, and will be for another hour or so. Your oldest sister, Josephina, who is 22, is probably still at the university, working on a paper. Your sister Henrietta, who is 21, is probably still at work at the clothing store. The triplets, Suzette, Serena and Sabrina, are probably out making trouble, like 19 year olds are in the habit of doing, and your youngest sister, Hilary, who is 18, is either at gymnastics or her violin lessons. You can't really remember what she takes this day of the week. As for yourself, you just happened to have the day off, and have been sitting in your basement, meditating on what you should try first.