Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Scott made a noise that was neither a yes nor a no.

  “So,” persisted Gayle, “if you’d be okay with me and another woman having sex while in bed with you, how does that not bother you, but me being bi does?”

  “It would be us with her.”

  “Again, how is that different?”

  “It just is.”

  After that the conversation slid further downhill into a hushed yelling match. The kids were in bed so the two of them stood inches apart and had a fight with the volume turned down low.

  That was the end of it for a while and they settled back into their routine. They watched movies at home with the kids. She worked afternoons and evenings at the high school. He played poker or golf with his buddies. One of the very few activities they did together was go to the gun range, but there they had to wear ear defenders and that killed conversation. If sometimes Gayle saw Scott’s face—the version of it he wore when he came—superimposed over the target, then that was probably healthy on some Jungian level.

  Then Scott came to her one morning and said that he’d thought about it and realized he was being selfish and said that she could go out on a date. One date, just to see. To get it out of her system.

  “You’re sure?” asked Gayle, truly startled.

  “Yeah, but there’s one condition.”

  Gayle braced herself. “Which is…?”

  “If it’s just to see how it feels to be on a date with a woman, okay. If something happens and you guys, I don’t know—make out—maybe that’s okay, too. At least you can’t get knocked up. But if you’re looking for someone to be in a relationship with, then no way. No fucking way, actually. We’re married. We have kids. We have a life.”

  She was tempted to correct him about the sex thing again, but left it. Things were good for weeks after that. He even encouraged her to open a Tinder account and twice they’d prowled the listings together. The fact that he fondled her breasts and the insides of her thighs while they swiped did not go unnoticed.

  Then, in mid-August, Gayle met Carrie. A special ed teacher who also worked at Pine Deep High School. Carrie had the right politics. She also had the right look—dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, generous curves. Not a stick figure and not brain-dead. Carrie was one of the smartest people Gayle ever met. Sharp, sophisticated, funny, mannered. A divorced mother of a grown son. Forty-three, but looking thirty-five.

  It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was in that same zip code. And Gayle was pretty sure it went both ways. They talked and talked. They texted. They shared. And they set up a dinner date.

  She told Scott.

  He smiled, nodded, and then said, “No.”

  Gayle blinked. “Wait … what?”

  “No.”

  “But you said…”

  “I know what I said, but now I’m saying no. No goddamn way.”

  “You said I could,” Gayle snapped, hurt and confused. “You said you understood. That you wanted me to—”

  “Yes, I did,” he said, cutting her off, “but since then I thought about it and I don’t want some dyke turning you queer. I don’t want to raise the kids on my own while you’re out there eating pussy every night.”

  It was then that she realized he’d come home from work drunk. And it was then that she knew he wanted a fight. Needed one because someone at work—probably the brokerage chief financial officer who was, admittedly, a total dick—had messed up his day. He needed to own the moment and so he dug in. No. Absolutely and forever no.

  Scott wanted a fight and Gayle, unable to help herself, gave him one. It was big and bad and awful. They both knew he was going to end the fight, because he could play the divorce card and Gayle did not want to do that to the kids. She caved in the end, but she made him earn it. By then they were both in tears, but there was no makeup sex, no truce. All there was, was a silence so cold it withered everything. Even the animals hid from them, and the kids—sensing it the way kids do—crept around as if navigating a mine field.

  Three days later Scott stormed into the bedroom while she was changing, her iPad held up in righteous triumph. On the screen was a photo of Gayle standing half naked in the bathroom. It was a photo she’d sent to Carrie via Instagram. Very private. She never did find out how Scott learned her password.

  That was an even bigger fight. No hushed voices then. The kids woke crying. Gayle slept on the couch for a week. The silences were dreadful.

  After that she watched Scott like a hawk. She didn’t dare change her passwords because that would be like tossing a bottle of lighter fluid on a fire. The kids drifted through the days like little ghosts, afraid to say anything, unsure of where to look. Gayle sent Carrie a very brief, terse goodbye email. Scott watched her compose it. There was no response.

  The drama built, built, and then faded.

  Now it was October and they didn’t talk about it anymore. By unspoken consent they acted as if nothing at all was wrong. Happy life. Happy home. With four minutes of thrusting twice a week, and self-engineered orgasms for her in the rare quiet times when the house was empty.

  Gayle lay there, listening to the rain.

  Thinking of Carrie.

  But not of Carrie. Not her specifically. Thinking of what might have happened on that date. And on nights since. What would it really be like to be in a woman’s arms? To have her arms around someone like her? Would it be strange? Awkward? Silly? Or would it be like finding a way home?

  She absolutely did not know.

  The rain hammered on the roof and pattered on the window and mocked her pain.

  28

  Monk, sat on the edge of his bed, bathed in sweat, his face in his hands.

  The nightmare ended because all terrors, no matter how intense, can’t last. They, like smiles and love and physical pain, can only endure so long.

  Time heals all wounds, they say. But that isn’t true. Nightmares end but memories endure, trapped in the biochemical envelope of flesh that is the human body.

  Everyone who knew him when he’d been Staff Sergeant Gerald Addison was gone. Dead, or moved into different versions of the world that were particular to them and did not involve him at all. That last night, that raid, was not a bonding experience. His team killed nearly three dozen people. Not one of them was the target. Blaming it on bad intelligence did not change a thing. Blood was spilled, lives ended. Men, women, and children. All of them snuffed out in a confusion of gunfire and explosions. How much of it was Monk’s to own was something he could never quantify. He did not try to stop his men in time. And he had pulled his own trigger.

  He raised his head and looked at his hands. As lightning flashed and flashed outside he saw the bright-red blood dripping from his fingers and palms. He could smell the stink of explosives and that of burning flesh.

  “God help me…” he whispered.

  Around him the ghosts wanted to touch him, but they were spirit and he was flesh. Their faces were on his skin, and that was touch enough.

  “I’m sorry,” said Monk as once more he buried his face in his hands and wept.

  INTERLUDE FIVE

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  The person in the casket was not anyone Owen Minor knew.

  Nor had been the body in the last thirty viewings he’d attended. Viewings were rarely listed for family only. And it didn’t much matter who it was beginning to rot in the box. Male or female, young or old, any race—it was all the same to him. He wasn’t there to see the corpse. No, he liked the crowds. He loved going through the handshake line. Owen knew how to arrange his features to have that meaningless half wince people wore when shaking the hands of the grieving family members.

  “So sorry,” he would say. Or, “If there’s anything I can do…” leaving that hang because there was never anything anyone could do. And if the bereaved asked how he knew the dead one, he would have something cribbed. You could learn a lot from paying attention to the obituaries, doing some searching on social media, and also subscribing to a W
hite Pages app that allowed him to search everything from old phone numbers to former street addresses. If the deceased was young, he could claim to have known them in school. Or if they worked at a big enough company, then he was someone from work. “Yeah, we were always gabbing. You know [fill in the blank] was so funny. Always cracked us up.”

  Everyone loved to hear that about the person they were burying. They were funny. They were sweet. They were really stand-up.

  All lies. Sometimes—often, really—they were a comfort. A tiny Band-Aid on a huge wound. The comments were also generic and mildly vague, which prevented any real conversation. He made sure to position himself about halfway through the line of friendly mourners, picking up cues from what the folks in front of him said so as not to make any unusual or conflicting remark. One very useful thing was to troll the deceased’s Facebook or Instagram page for pet pics. It was so easy to claim they’d “often met and chatted” while walking their dogs. He had Photoshopped pictures of himself and the dead dog owner grinning, just in case the conversation went that way. He’d only needed to use it once.

  This was his hobby—well, one of them anyway—for years since his mother died. He began doing it while still in foster care and liked it too much to ever stop. He particularly liked funerals for children. If he got tears on his face or the side of his neck, it was an erotic thrill. More than once he had to hurry to the funeral home bathroom to jerk off in a stall.

  Then, on a snowy evening at a well-attended viewing in Denver, something happened that nearly screwed everything up. The dearly departed was a soldier who’d come back from Afghanistan with a headful of ghosts. From what Owen picked up by moving from one conversational group to another, the soldier had been in too many firefights, had lost friends to sniper bullets, IEDs, and other horrors. The man himself had not gotten a scratch, though, and survivor’s guilt drove him into a bottle and then to a crack pipe and finally he put a pistol in his mouth. It was a closed casket and Owen stepped into a line of people who came up, placed their hands on the polished hardwood lid, and then shuffled off to shake hands with the family. His cover there was that generic neighbor from the block. The dead man lived and died alone, so there were no conversational bear traps, no way they would know he was lying.

  But the older brother of the deceased was a big, gruff-looking guy who had the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up over Popeye forearms. His skin was covered with sleeves of tattoos ranging from crude and moderately offensive—devil girls with improbable bustlines—to high-end nature art of vines crawling with flies, bees, and a praying mantis that came down all the way to his knuckles.

  When it was Owen’s turn, he offered both his hand and his condolences, and the big man gave him a nod and a powerful two-pump handshake. As soon as Owen’s fingers wrapped around the man’s hand and touched the edges of that ink a massive jolt of energy shot through him. It was like touching a live wire and Owen shivered, staggered, and would have fallen if the brother hadn’t used his grip and his other hand under Owen’s arm to steady him.

  Owen was instantly terrified because he thought that somehow, in some unanticipated way, the big man knew that he was an imposter. He was going to smash Owen. Out him and beat him and humiliate him. He threw a frightened glance up at the man, expecting fury and accusation in the craggy face.

  What he saw, though, was surprise and compassion. The man steadied Owen and then astounded him by giving Owen a hug.

  “It’s okay, brother,” said the big man, the corpse’s actual brother, “he’s in a better place. Thank you for coming out, man. This is rough on all of us. Why don’t you go sit down, catch your breath a bit? And again … thanks for being here.”

  Owen tottered away, dazed by that bizarre encounter, but more so by the power of that touch. He even took the man’s advice and sat for ten minutes, catching his breath, trying to understand. His fingertips tingled where they’d touched the ink on the brother’s hand. And the back of his own hand burned. Not horribly, but definitely.

  By the time he got home, the burning on his hand had intensified and then faded, leaving behind a scar. Of a kind. He thought it was actually a burn, but then he held his hand up to the living room light and nearly screamed. There, curling around his wrist and spreading down onto the back of his hand, all the way to the knuckles, were vines. Rich and green, painted in a dozen subtle shades, with broad leaves on which walked honeybees and bumblebees and wasps and blowflies. Standing above them, imperious and regal, was a praying mantis. On his skin. Belonging to his skin. Inked as if he’d spent hours in some artist’s chair.

  It was the tattoo of the dead soldier’s brother.

  Or … it had been.

  It was Owen’s tattoo now.

  The pain was gone, but the art remained. Owen took cell phone pictures to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. Psychic fractures can happen, fugues can occur. Owen knew a lot about that stuff from courses he’d taken and websites he’d visited. His loss of the memories of his mother had led him to learn about all that.

  The cell phone’s camera took the photos. When he checked an hour later, they were still there. Too mundane, too static to be a hallucination.

  He had those tattoos on his wrist and hand.

  It wasn’t until late that night, when Owen was in bed, that he had his first memory dream. If it was a dream. In the years since then he’d tried to give it a better word. Fantasy was totally wrong, and dream wasn’t quite right, either. What it was … was a memory.

  Just not his own.

  He dreamed of a man, a tough soldier with a gruff face, falling in love with an Afghani girl. She was from a good Muslim family, but the girl wanted to leave them, her home, her country, and go to America with the soldier. They kissed when no one was looking, and made love in a bedroll out in the desert. He was gentler than he looked and even wore a condom so she wouldn’t get pregnant. They spent hours talking about making a life together far from there. She said it was her dream to walk in a real forest, with thick leaves overhead, vines and flowers and insects and a thousand kinds of birds. The soldier promised that they would walk together in woods exactly like that. In North Carolina and Pennsylvania, in central California and Montana. Places he’d been where nature was always rioting with life and color. He told her that he loved her. He said he would put in the paperwork for her citizenship.

  Then, one morning, the girl was missing. They found her after two days of looking. Out in the desert, sprawled in the bloodstained shreds of her clothing. She had been stoned to death by the men of her own family.

  The soldier, torn by grief, had tried to avenge her, but military and local laws prevented it. His time in country burned off and he cycled back to Stateside. Heartbroken and bereft. He’d told the story to a tattoo artist, describing the things the girl had longed to see, and the artist—an exceptional craftsman named Malibu Mark—drilled the leaves and vines and insects onto the heartbroken soldier’s skin.

  In the darkness of his bedroom, Owen Minor lived those dreams as if they were his own. Every gasp and cry, every tear and drop of blood, were his.

  Only and completely his.

  29

  A police cruiser sat under the sheltering arms of an ancient oak. The tree had nearly died when teeths of flame had gnawed at it during the fire that ended the Trouble. It clung to life, though, just as it had clung to the side of the drop-off for well over a century. Thick roots were dug deep into the flesh of the earth, holding the tree in place through storms and snowmelt and forest blazes.

  Over those years a lot of cars had sought shelter beneath its twisted arms. Lovers gasping out promises in the dark. Criminals hiding until the bloodhounds lost the scent. A priest masturbating over memories of a very special altar boy. A man fitting the barrel of a pistol into his mouth in hopes the bullet would blow away the memory of a wife whose Humvee rolled over an IED in Afghanistan. So many lives. So many stories. The police car was a story still unfolding. It was parked there often. Sometimes the officer
would sit behind the wheel and cry. Sometimes he would listen to music for hours, the radio and his cell turned off. And, occasionally, on nights like this, the car would sit empty. The officer’s uniform folded neatly on the back seat, underwear, shoes, and all. On nights like this that car would be empty for hours and hours.

  On this night, the officer came back, naked and trembling. He stood beside the car, leaning on it while the brutal rain washed the mud and blood from his pale skin. It washed away his tears. It removed everything except the memory of what had happened down in the swampy depths of Dark Hollow far below. The oak tree kept all these secrets close and did not even whisper them to the other trees.

  INTERLUDE SIX

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  The memory Owen Minor dreamed did not belong to him. On some strange level, down deep where knowledge comes more from instinct or intuitive leaps than from rational thought, he knew it was not really a dream. Not a fantasy about something triggered by the tattoo.

  It was an awful thing. All of the pain and passion, the cries and screams, the blood and tears.

  It was a delicious thing. The pain and passion, the cries and screams, the blood and tears. Especially the tears.

  And as he slept, he fed on every single drop.

  30

  They call midnight the witching hour, but no witchery happened. All of the sorcery had been done.

  All the farmers were asleep by then, though their sleep was troubled by thoughts of what that much rain might do to the crops. Harvest was in full swing and torrential rains killed things, drowned roots, washed soil away, and glued the wheels of farm equipment to the ground.

  In town, the clubs on Boundary Street pulsed and throbbed and hammered and feasted long past the two o’clock cutoff. No cops bothered them. No neighbors complained because that was a new part of town and the only neighbors were either running their own clubs or drinking at the bars next door.