Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  He was not big, not impressive-looking, not handsome, not in any way pleasant to look at. At the same time, there was nothing specific about him that made Dianna recoil. Except, maybe, that he was completely hairless. Totally bald, no mustache or beard, and as he approached she saw he had no eyebrows or eyelashes. A cancer patient? Maybe. There was definitely something sick about him. His skin was pallid, doughy, tending toward gray-white. Like something grown in the dark when no one was looking.

  Lord of flies.

  The three words flashed into her head, unbidden, unconnected to any deeper thought.

  Don’t be here for me.

  For a moment the man stood there, looking around at the store layout. The shelves of spiritual books, the many tables of stones and crystals, the displays of statues—Ganesha, Buddha, Kokopelli, Quan Yin—and all of the other items for sale. Things to uplift, expand, deepen.

  She watched the slow smile that formed on his mouth. No, not formed. Crept. As if the smile were an insect sneaking out from under the fridge, ugly and knowing.

  Don’t come over here.

  She thought it, pushed at the thought, tried to load it like a bullet into the barrel of her desire. But even as she thought it, even before he turned that smile in her direction, Dianna knew that he was here for her.

  For her.

  For her.

  His grin widened but did not brighten. It was as gray as the dirty clouds. His eyes were pale, the color of spit. He walked toward her, his body lumpy, his gait awkward. Dianna looked away, then down at the schedule sheet. Her fingers shook as she pulled it out and opened it. The first name was one she did not know, one she thought was someone from Boundary Street.

  Owen Minor.

  Lord of flies, hissed her inner voice.

  And then his shadow fell across the table.

  10

  The story the couple—Corinne and Andrew Duncan—told Officer Mike Sweeney confused the living hell out of him.

  “Wait, wait,” he said, interrupting the wife’s second telling of her side. “Go back to the part where you hit him.”

  “Of course I hit him,” she yelled. “You would, too. You’d have probably shot him if he did that to you. Are you married? No? Well, if you were married and your wife went through cancer—twice—and your husband, the man who is supposed to love you until death do us part—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Corinne,” bleated the husband, “of course I love you.”

  “—but then does something as mean and callous and cold-hearted as that, you’d hit him, too. I mean, he pretended that he never even had it in the first place.”

  She was crying now, and Mike felt deeply uneasy. He was never good with people crying. He cleared his throat again and gave the husband a hard look.

  “May I see your arm?”

  “Why? I told her and I’m telling you,” said the husband, “that I never had any damn tattoo. Don’t you think I would remember if I had a fucking tattoo?”

  “Please watch your language, sir,” said Mike automatically. “Now … may I see your left forearm?”

  The man, Andrew Duncan, swore again and thrust out his arm. His sleeve was rolled up and he rotated his forearm so Mike could see the pale skin above his wristwatch. There was no tattoo.

  But there was … something.

  Mike bent closer. “Is that a scar?”

  “Of course it’s a scar,” hissed Corinne. “He had it removed. Burned off with lasers or however they do it.”

  “It’s not a scar because I never had a tattoo,” insisted Andrew.

  “It does appear to be a scar of some kind,” said Mike, and he could feel himself shifting to take sides. There was something on the husband’s arm. It was small, about the size of a thumbprint, but faded, almost smeared, the way a watercolor looks after it’s been soaked. Mike could see no trace of any specific pattern, and certainly not the pink ribbon emblem of breast cancer or the black ink of the two dates when Corinne was declared cancer-free. All he could make out was a faintness of pink and gray, but the effect was of a scar that was so old it had nearly vanished.

  “It’s been there for six years,” said Corinne and now tears were rolling down her cheeks. A fly buzzed around her face and she slapped it away in irritation.

  It was drizzling, with the droplets moving in misty waves as storm winds came sweeping along the road. The clouds promised much heavier rain, and soon. A tow truck had arrived during the narration and the driver was busy hooking the Kia to the tow-bar, throwing frequent looks at the sky.

  The story was a strange one. While they were driving, Corinne remarked that tomorrow was the sixth anniversary of the call from the oncologist to tell her that she was cancer-free. It was a big thing, because this time they were sure they’d gotten it all. After the first bout, the cancer had crept back in and was more aggressive by the time it was discovered. But the partial mastectomy, the radiation, and the chemo had done the job. Andrew had gotten the ribbon tattoo with the date of her first all-clear the day she got the first good news, and had added the second date two days after the next remission. The tattoo was small and generally covered by his sleeve, but since it was Andrew’s habit to wear his wristwatch with the face on the inside, he’d chosen the placement so that whenever he checked his watch he would see it. See, and be reminded of the blessing of healing.

  While they were driving, however, after Corinne made her comment about the anniversary, she asked to see the tattoo. Andrew had looked at her, frowned, half smiled, and asked, “What tattoo?”

  She thought he was making some kind of joke, but when she pressed him on it, Andrew thought she was making a weird and ugly joke. He asked, “What cancer? What are you even talking about?”

  They went back and forth like a bad comedy act, and that disintegrated into accusations, yelling, and finally she started crying hysterically and slapping at him. At his bare wrist. He tried fending her off, pulling his arm out of reach, and when she leaned over to try for another smack, there was the cow.

  Mike had all the details but none of the story made sense, unless Andrew was a lying piece of shit. And a seriously cruel lying piece of shit at that.

  There was more thunder and the rain began falling in earnest.

  “Mrs. Duncan,” he said, “I’m going to let the EMTs take your husband to the hospital. Pinelands Regional Medical Center is in town. They’re going to want to take some tests and maybe an X-ray and a CT scan.”

  “They should test him to see if he has a fucking heart,” she said, trying to make it sound bitter, but it came out broken and sad.

  Which is when Andrew Duncan, looking genuinely confused, started crying.

  The EMTs put him on the gurney, strapped him into the back brace, and were about to close the door, when Corinne suddenly climbed inside. She wrapped her arms around her lying piece of shit husband, and they both disintegrated into truly awful tears. The EMTs gave Mike puzzled looks. He returned a meaningless nod and stepped back as they drove off, siren wailing like a despairing ghost. The tow truck followed.

  Mike stood in the rain, watching them go. The storm intensified so quickly that the ambulance vanished from sight before it even topped the hill. Wind gusts slanted the rain like scythes, but Mike ignored it. Rain didn’t bother him. He had other things on his mind.

  Then he turned to the cow. She had been munching roadside grass, not looking hurt or even bothered by the collision with the SUV. But as he began walking over, the cow gave a last moo and fell over. Dead as a stone.

  “Ah … fuck…” breathed Mike. He squatted down, letting the rain soak him to the skin, as he stroked the cow’s cheek and neck.

  INTERLUDE ONE

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  His name was Owen Minor, and life was never kind to him.

  He saw no reason to be kind in return.

  Some lives are like that. It’s a roll of the cosmic dice, and as Owen always saw it, those dice were loaded. He was born too early and born wrong. That’s how
his mother described it when she complained to one of her friends, and she complained a lot.

  “Carrying him was awful,” she said once to a girlfriend while they were drinking at the kitchen table. His mom thought Owen was upstairs asleep, but he’d crept downstairs to listen. As he often did. “Bad enough the condom broke. Or it had a hole. Or some damn thing. Thought I was doing the whole safe sex thing—and it’s not like the son of a bitch I was banging was the great prize of all time. Sure, he had a pretty face. Like Brad Pitt, if someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to his face. Good body, though. Biggest cock you ever saw on a white man. Maybe that was it. Even those—what do you call ’em? Magnums?—are a size too small for that kind of meat.”

  Owen knelt in the shadows of the adjoining dining room, in a niche between the china cabinet and a stack of boxes filled with old issues of National Geographic, Soap Opera Digest, and Entertainment Weekly. He shivered there in the darkness, even though the house was warm.

  “So, anyway,” continued his mother, her words a little slurred from the combination of white zinfandel and hits of Godfather OG, which she chain-smoked, filling the whole house with the skunk stink of ultrapotent marijuana, “he banged me cross-eyed right here on this table. Hand to God, Gracie. I didn’t even know the rubber broke and I didn’t give a damn.”

  The laughter was shrill. Like jackals Owen had seen at the zoo.

  “Anyway, he went off to Afghanistan about two weeks later and got killed.”

  “The Taliban get him?” asked Gracie.

  “Nah. Got his stupid ass run over by a truck. No great loss of a person, but a real waste of a good dick.”

  More laughter. Then the scalding steam hiss as one or the other of them took a deep hit on the joint.

  “So, here’s me with a bun in the oven. Try to explain that to a husband who hasn’t had a stiff dick since Clinton was president. Fucker beat the shit out of me. I threw him out and filed a paper on him, but damn if he wouldn’t have earned a little bit of thanks if he’d hit me in the guts instead of the mouth. One miscarriage and a lot of things would have been better, you know?”

  “I heard that,” agreed Gracie. “Heard it was a bad pregnancy…?”

  “Oh, god … this is why I’ll never have another damn kid. Got every symptom you could get. Swollen ankles, hemorrhoids, mood swings, my tits blew up like balloons but they hurt, nipples leaking through my blouse, threw up every fifteen goddamn minutes, and when I wasn’t hurling I was pissing.”

  “Damn, girl.”

  “Only blessing there was, was that the bun popped out of the oven just over seven months in. Just a red wrinkled piece of almost nothing. They had him on ventilators and incubators and all that. Always sick then and still sick all the damn time. Asthma, psoriasis, heart stuff—and you know I’m still paying off those bills. Health coverage in this state sucks the big one.”

  “He’s a good kid, though,” said Gracie, and Owen leaned out just far enough to see his mother’s face. Looking for a smile. What he saw was the hard line of her mouth turn down into the ugliest of sneers. Then his mother looked away, so all he could see were her slumped shoulders and the curl of smoke reaching up above her untidy hair. He heard her take a hit, saw her back go rigid as she held it in, and then the long exhale.

  “I wouldn’t ever say this in church, Gracie,” she said slowly, “but between you, me, and the wall … I wish the little fucker hadn’t even taken that first breath. No, don’t look at me that way. Not saying I wish him ill—not really—but there’s something wrong with that kid. He’s not right. Everyone sees it. You see it, and don’t lie … it’s just that you got a good heart and you won’t say a word against anyone. You see it, though. Owen was born wrong in every way you can mean that.”

  Owen’s shiver turned to a tremble as he waited for Gracie’s rebuttal.

  Which never came.

  11

  The storm wasn’t predicted. It came out of nowhere and got big and loud and it pissed Monk off.

  The skinny blonde on Channel Six Action News out of Philadelphia said it was going to drizzle and then mostly clear. But it was raining harder than hell as Monk drove toward town. Big fat drops at first, splatting onto blacktop behind him. Monk saw them in the rearview and tried to outrun them. They caught up.

  By the time he passed the sign for Dark Hollow Road, the rain was rapping on the hood like a million knuckles. The car was too old to have automatic headlights, so he punched the button and then turned on the high beams. The storm that had chased him out of New Jersey now barraged him here in Bucks County. Within minutes it was raining so damn hard he couldn’t see five feet in front of his headlights. On a twisty country road like this there were too many ways to get killed, so he pulled to the verge to wait it out.

  He tried Patty’s cell again and got voicemail. Left a message. He popped the cassette and found a bootleg tape of Buddy Guy killing the crowd at his Legends blues club in the South Loop of Chicago. Singing about dying of a broken heart in the rain.

  “Preaching to the choir, brother B,” murmured Monk.

  The sky outside the car was raining hammers and nails, so Monk turned the sound all the way up. Then he sat there eyeing the stale butts in the ashtray. Weighing his options and making bad choices.

  On either side of the road, the nightbirds stood in lines on the fences, huddled into their wings. Cold but curious.

  12

  “Um,” said Dianna, momentarily flustered, “have a seat.”

  The man smiled an oily smile, hooked a foot around the leg of the guest chair, and slid it halfway around the table so he could sit closer.

  “You don’t need to do that,” she said quickly.

  “I’m a little hard of hearing,” he said. “And I don’t want to miss a thing.”

  It was a normal statement but the way he said it was not. He almost sang those last eight words in an imitation of Steve Tyler from Aerosmith. He wasn’t loud or forceful about it, and he even half whispered it, as if making a joke for himself. He settled onto the chair and wriggled a little as if adjusting his buttocks down deep in the thin padding. That movement, like everything about Owen Minor, was faintly repellent. Not openly offensive, nothing she could comment on or bring to Ophelia. Nothing to cancel the session over. Merely wrong.

  She immediately chastised herself for judging a total stranger—a reflex that warred with her trust in her own ability to read energy. But the whole day was a bit off anyway, so her instant dislike could be flavored by that. This man could just as easily have run afoul of someone else’s negativity and simply be carrying it around with him like a bad smell. That happened. The first time she met Chief Crow there was a whole cloud of darkness around him, and a bigger one around his adopted son, Mike. Both were, she learned over time, very good men, which meant that her initial reaction was spoiled. Untrustworthy.

  Be in the moment, she scolded herself. Be fair and be open.

  Dianna pasted on a pleasant and entirely meaningless smile. Like Ophelia’s customer service smile, bright but offering no actual insight.

  She consulted her list. “I see you want a standard three-card reading?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Minor. “That would be … wonderful.”

  An odd pause, and a bit of emphasis on the first syllable of wonderful.

  “Is this your first time getting a reading?” she asked.

  “No,” said Minor. “I’ve had many readings before.” He paused, then repeated, “Many.”

  “Well … that’s great, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mostly use a standard layout,” she explained, hiding behind routine. “First, I’ll pick a deck for us to—”

  “No,” said Minor quickly, touching her arm as she reached toward the stack of boxed cards. His fingers circled her forearm for just a second—less than a second—and then he withdrew. “Oh, dear … my apologies. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Dianna pulled back her arm and wished she could rub it down with
hand sanitizer. Even though his action was fast and light, she could still feel his fingers on her. It wasn’t anything painful. More like an awareness of a smudge of dirt. She heard a buzzing and saw a fat fly on the stack of cards and waved it away in disgust.

  The action sent the insect hurrying away, and also chased the memory of his touch from her mind as surely and completely as if it had never happened. She was distantly aware of the sensation that there was something on her skin, but that was all.

  “First, I’ll pick a deck for us to use,” she said, unaware she’d already said this. Owen Minor smiled and nodded.

  “Of course,” he said and watched as she ran her fingers down the stack of boxed cards, paused, moved on, paused again, and then finally settled, with a tremble of hesitation, on the Rider-Waite deck, identical to the one she had at home. She shook the cards from the pack and held them in her hands for a moment, then took a small breath and offered them to Minor.

  “Please shuffle them any way you want. Don’t look at them, of course. Shuffle and think about any question or problems you have.”

  “Of course,” said Minor.

  Dianna frowned and looked around, trying to locate a faint sound, but unable to place where it was coming from. “Must be a couple flies in here.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” he said, and Dianna had the odd feeling he was lying. He kept on shuffling and shuffling.

  Dianna covertly studied his face. Or, at least, tried to. Despite the strangeness of his skin and the oddness of his energy, his face was so completely ordinary that it was hard to categorize any detail. It was as if the moment she remembered the size, or shape, or orientation of any of his features, the memory was canceled out. As if no short-term or working memories could be anchored. Dianna knew she should be worried about that, but wasn’t able to focus on worrying about it.

  The only detail that stuck with her was his tattoos. He wore a dress shirt buttoned at the wrists and all the way to the Adam’s apple, but peeking out from collar and cuffs were flies. Very lifelike. As beautifully rendered as the roses on her inner forearm, but deeply ugly. A rose inked so vibrantly that it seemed to bloom before the eyes was a thing of wonder; flies that looked like they could lift from that pallid skin and fly directly at her was another.