Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Patty was asleep by then, but it wasn’t a good sleep. Not anywhere close to that.

  Owen Minor was also asleep, smiling as he dove deeper and deeper. He kept getting hard and soft, hard and soft, in time with the things he saw. The things he did. His pale fingers clutched the pillows and tore at the sheets and his tongue tip darted out every now and then, clever as a snake’s, and licked sweat from his upper lip. Flies crawled over his face and there were maggots down deep in the sweaty folds of his sheets.

  Out on the road, Monk Addison was way down in his own dark hole lit by remembered flashes of guns. Ghosts stood all around his car, and some were inside, on the front seat, crowded into the back. Looking at him. There were always ghosts with him. Sometimes they screamed him awake. Tonight they let him sleep, and he slept all through the night. Monk stirred only once, when the rain eased and then stopped. He murmured a single word—a name—before sliding farther down.

  “Tuyet…”

  The ghosts and the nightbirds all heard that name. They heard him repeat it throughout that long night.

  Slowly, smirking at a job well done, the rain and the storm went away.

  PART TWO

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  For all that it was at its worst

  And all that it wasn’t at its best

  The memory of us is a flame smouldering

  In the aftermath of a monsoon

  A flickering spark waiting

  For a new moon,

  A mourning sun,

  And a soul to ignite

  The fire of my next big blaze.

  “KINDLING” BY JEZZY WOLFE

  I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

  I lift my lids and all is born again.

  (I think I made you up inside my head.)

  “MAD GIRL’S LOVE SONG” BY SYLVIA PLATH

  31

  It wasn’t the first time Patty Cakes woke up on the floor.

  Not even the first on a bathroom floor, hers or someone else’s.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d fallen down the mouth of a bottle and tried to drink herself to the bottom. Life was like that sometimes. Maybe more than just sometimes.

  At least it was her own bathroom this time.

  The puddle in which she lay was her own spilled booze.

  Her own blood.

  She lay there, her cheek and hair in the wet. Her body was twisted into a boneless sprawl as if she’d been cut down from a scarecrow post and simply allowed to drop. No vomit this time. No piss. That was something. When you were that far out on the edge for this long, you took your comforts where you could find them. However small and cold.

  Sound was the only thing that seemed to be alive, to have movement. A faucet dripped stubbornly, punching into the metal ring of the drain as if determined to erode it to nothingness, no matter how long it would take. Outside the window the crows of night gave reluctant ground to the morning pigeons. A cricket, who had no damn business being in a yard in this part of the city, whistled for attention, and got none. There was wind, too, but it was subtle and secretive, as if its sound belonged to someone else’s experience and not hers.

  Patty did not make any sound. She couldn’t even hear her own breath. Nor did she move. She didn’t want to move. Not yet. She’d learned the hard way that moving too quickly summoned the migraine demons and invoked the storms of nausea. No thanks.

  The smart play was to try and assess the damage from where she was. It meant listening inside her body for damage, for misuse; separating new pain from old. Allowing wrongness to make its case. That process took time, whatever time it needed. She was in no hurry. Her tattoo parlor could not open without her, and there was nobody in town who needed to be inked this early. If it was early. Everybody could wait.

  Awareness came creeping like a timid nun, whispering to her, tugging on the fabric of her consciousness.

  She could see that this was her bathroom. The flowers and tigers and dragons painted on the wall. The soaps and shampoo bottles huddled together on the edge of the tub. She could see that without turning her head. The bunched-up blue bath mat pushed hard against the base of the toilet. All the beer bottles she could see were her favorite brand. Fat Pauly’s, a craft lager from Iligan City in the Philippines. The bathroom smelled familiar. All bathrooms had their own smell. This one smelled of her and her habits and her stuff and her life.

  Her iPad in the other room was playing its way through every song she’d ever downloaded, one album at a time. Last she remembered it had been somewhere in the G’s but had clearly made its way to the N’s. Right now it was grinding its way through Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Murder Ballads.

  Well, she thought, that’s a bit on the nose.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them the light had changed. Just a little. Enough, maybe, for the sun to have moved an hour’s worth across the sky. Hard to tell, though—the bathroom window was tiny and it looked out to a shared alley. Across the way was the dirty brick wall of the back of Hucksters, one of those fashion places that sold upscale clothes no one would be caught dead in.

  Patty’s face was turned away from her hands. One hand was tucked under her, the other stretched behind. Awkward. Starting to hurt a little as the muscles woke up to these stresses of angle and reach.

  Then, like a switch being flipped, her body told her it was time to move. Maybe it was the pain, maybe it was shame for finding herself like this again. Whatever. She had to move, and so she moved.

  Sitting up was awkward. Her muscles were stupid and didn’t know how to work. Her body had too many disconnected parts, and her brain had no blueprint for reassembly.

  But she managed it.

  After three or four hundred years, she managed it. Cursing was involved. No, it was integral to the process. In Vietnamese, because that was the language she spoke when she first learned about pain. In English, too, because the Americans—particularly the New Yorkers—were better at it than anyone.

  Then she was up, sitting naked against the cold edge of the tub. Gasping, as if she’d run up ten flights of stairs. Sweating, despite the chill. She blinked away the fireflies that suddenly swarmed around her. She dragged the back of her hand across her forehead and cheeks.

  Which is when she saw her hand and understood why there was blood in the puddles of spilled beer. She’d assumed she’d cut herself somewhere on broken glass. No. A cut, even a bad one, would be better than what she saw.

  Blood leaked from the back of her left hand. Tiny beads, seeping through the crust of a heavier flow that had mostly dried. She looked around for the tattoo needle and saw it on the floor, over by the toilet. Not the big professional she used. This was something crude. A disposable syringe filled with black ink. The kind of makeshift tool street kids and squatters used because they couldn’t afford to visit a pro. She’d inked over those kinds of tattoos a hundred times over the years.

  Now it was the opposite. She’d inked a crude image onto her own skin.

  It was a face, but there was no artistry to it. No skill. No trace of talent, of control. It wasn’t much better than a monotone stick figure’s empty features. Eyes, a dot for a nose, a smiley mouth. Heavy, wavering lines. Too much ink.

  That was bad enough. If it had been on her leg or arm or anywhere else it would have been no big thing. A fuck-up done during an alcoholic blackout. She had fifty friends in the trade who could have fixed it and turned crudity into beauty.

  No, the poor quality wasn’t the thing that punched a cold hand through her breastbone and began beating the shit out of her heart.

  The tattoo was on the back of her left hand. Thick lines cutting through the delicate features of a face Patty had inked onto her own skin. A smiling, beautiful face. Drawn years ago, not from a photograph but from a mother’s own broken heart.

  But … whose face? Patty was positive she should know the name. That she should know everything about the little Vietnamese child staring up at her. But there was no
name in her head.

  Or … there was … but it was so far out of reach.

  On her skin the awkward, clumsy lines of new tattoo ink tried to block those memories. Or trap them? The bars of a cage prevent passage either way.

  “Don’t go,” she whispered to the face on her hand. To the place in her mind where the memory should have been. She looked at the original ink, and then at the stupid smiley face that covered it now. That little girl. Obliterated by her own hand. A crime, a sin committed in the emptiness of a drunken night.

  Patty Cakes threw back her head and screamed.

  32

  Monk jerked awake and reached for his pistol, but his fingers hit the zippered front of his leather jacket. He looked around, searching for what had kicked him out of his dreams. An old Kenworth T600, heavy with grain, thundered past, shaking the whole car. But … that was happening now and whatever woke him had been then. Seconds ago.

  He stopped trying to find his gun. It was locked in a safe in the trunk.

  Monk blinked his eyes clear and watched the grain truck whip away, pulling a train of wet leaves behind it.

  “Fuck me,” he mumbled. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining so bright that it made his head hurt. All around the car water dripped from the leaves and glistened on the blacktop. It was pretty, like something from a painting. “Shit,” he said and meant it.

  Monk popped open the door and got out, unfolding himself and feeling every minute of all his years and miles. His joints sounded like someone cracking walnuts. There was a vile movie-theater-floor taste in his mouth and about a pound of sleep crust around his eyes, which he wiped away on his fingers, then wiped his fingers on the seat of his jeans.

  “Shit,” he said again.

  The sky was broken into pieces. Clouds here and there and patches of blue. It reminded him of the way the sky looked way out at sea after a gale. Troubled, like it still had things to say.

  On either side of the road the fields had a hammered-down look, and there were deep puddles everywhere. Those same chattering crows were still lined up on the fence rails and power lines.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Monk said, as if they’d made some kind of stinging observation. He walked up and down the road until his body felt like his own. His lower back hurt from the position he’d fallen asleep in.

  The morning air was clean, though. It smelled of rainwater and mud, but there was nothing nasty about it. That was something.

  “Shit,” he said once more. It was an eloquent word at times like these.

  Then he cut a look at his car, hurried back to it and called Patty. No answer.

  “Shit,” he growled, meaning something entirely different. He got in, started the engine, spent two minutes working his tires out of the drying mud, and headed on his way with the U-Haul thumping along behind.

  33

  It was the ringing of her cell phone that brought Patty Cakes back from the edge.

  She was surprised to hear it, jerked backward into the now. She was sure she’d left the phone on her night table, plugged into the charger and with the ringer off. She’d done that deliberately before she started drinking last night because she didn’t want anyone calling. Not customers, not her cousins who lived in the Bronx. Not even Monk Addison.

  So how did the phone get all the way under the ancient claw-foot tub?

  The ringing snapped her back so quickly and so completely that the echo of her last scream still seemed to bounce off the walls; and it no longer seemed to belong to her. More like the cry of a seagull far away down a windy beach. Even her tears stopped.

  It kept ringing, refusing to go to voicemail.

  Patty leaned down, her shoulder hard against the cold curve of the tub, and fished for it. Finding a wadded-up tissue that was soaked with beer, blood, and bathwater. Finding the lip liner she’d lost before Christmas. Finding the withered husk of an ancient roach. Then her fingers found the phone, clawed it toward her palm, caught it like a reluctant fist, and pulled it out.

  The screen display was blank. No name, no text.

  Patty punched the green symbol anyway.

  “Yes?” she asked, surprised that her voice wasn’t shrill. When no one spoke, she repeated the greeting.

  Nothing. No sound. No rustle of someone who’d accidentally dropped their phone.

  “Hello? Who’s calling?”

  There was a faint hiss, like the way open lines sounded back in the days of landlines. No one spoke.

  She tried saying hello a few more times, and then punched the off button. As she did that, in the fragment of a second before the connection was completely dead. she thought she heard a voice. Two words. Small, faint.

  “Mẹ ơi?”

  Patty Cakes froze, staring in horror at the phone. She rarely spoke Vietnamese, though she often dreamed in her native language. Even after all these years living in America she had never forgotten a single word. And certainly not those two words.

  Mẹ ơi.

  Mommy.

  And the voice. The voice.

  Her voice.

  Tuyet. Yes! That was it. That was the name of the little girl whose face was looking up at Patty from her own skin. Tuyet. Sweet Tuyet.

  Or … was that her name at all? Doubt suddenly welled up in her. Was this little girl just a ghost from too much drink? She’d had the DTs before, and they always came with visual aids. Cruel stuff, with clarity to sharpen the edges.

  “Làm ơn, mẹ ơi,” cried the little girl’s voice. “Làm ơn đừng quên tôi…”

  Please, Mommy … please don’t forget me.…

  The scream boiled up inside of Patty as she stabbed the buttons to hit callback. The phone rang. And rang.

  And rang.

  Her daughter did not answer. Of course she did not. Tuyet was ashes in an urn. She was memories sewn into the tissue of the past. She was seven years old—and had been seven for ten years. She would be seven years old forever, because little murdered girls do not age.

  The phone rang and rang and then it stopped.

  When she stared through tears at the screen display there was no record of any outbound call. Not since she’d called Monk yesterday afternoon. There was no record of an inbound call at all. Not in a full day.

  She wanted to hurl the phone away. Instead she clutched it to her chest, where she could feel the beat of her heart through the skin of her tightly curled fingers.

  “Please…” she begged.

  The phone rang. Patty jumped and sobbed as she punched the button.

  “Tuyet!” she cried. “Tôi đây. Đó là mẹ.”

  I’m here. It’s me. It’s Mommy.

  There was nothing for a million years as she strained to listen. Only the echo in her mind of those words. Those terrible words.

  Please, Mommy … please don’t forget me …

  “God, no,” begged Patty.

  The voice on the other end said, “Patty…?”

  It was not her little girl, and Patty caved over the phone. The voice was male. Familiar. A friend, but right then she hated him. She hated anyone who could possibly have been on the other end of that call except the one person who could not be there.

  “Patty?” called the voice. “Are you there? Are you okay?”

  She raised the phone as if it weighed ten thousand pounds.

  “Monk…?” She wept. “Oh my god … Monk…”

  She couldn’t finish the call because the shakes hit her then. They hit her like fists, like kicks, and the phone tumbled from her trembling fingers.

  34

  It was going to be a great day.

  Owen Minor knew that before he even opened his eyes. The buzzing of the flies told him. He could feel them, too. Walking on his skin. Wriggling in his flesh. He’d sent so many out into the storm last night. Watching. Remembering for him. Playing some fun games.

  Minor, eyes still closed, lay in his nest of sheets and murmured the names the flies had brought him.

  “Eileen Sandoval,�
� he said, smiling.

  A fly crawled across his chin.

  “Orson Hardihey.”

  Another fly fluttered its wings under his nose, tickling him.

  “Andrew Duncan. Oh … and Mrs. Duncan, too.”

  Flies walked on his face, over his closed eyes.

  “Dianna Agbala. Mmmm.”

  Minor felt himself getting hard.

  “Patty Trang,” he said softly. “Patty Cakes.”

  When he opened his eyes the blowflies scattered, then spiraled in the air above him. Beautiful and dark, colorful and sweet. His hand moved, faster than any snake, and he caught one and slapped his palm against his open mouth. The fly exploded between his teeth. The blood and ink tasted like heaven.

  35

  Monk found the address, but it wasn’t easy.

  Patty’s new store was on Corn Hill, in a part of town that was as close to the rough side as artsy-fartsy Pine Deep ever got. He didn’t know the cross street and his map didn’t exactly match this version of town. He kept checking painted numbers on curbs and storefronts until he found the right area. She was in the 700 block and he was coming up on it.

  But he nearly wrecked his car when he saw the crooked sign for the cross street.

  Monk stamped on the brake and sat there for five full seconds. The car behind him gave him an angry honk, but he didn’t care. He barely heard it. The sign said:

  BOUNDARY STREET

  His mouth went totally dry.

  “No…” he said. “No … no, fuck no … no goddamn way.”

  One of the reasons he’d left New York was because of Boundary Street. Not on any map but there, sure enough. He’d left Chicago for the same reason. And Lisbon. And New Orleans.

  Fucking Boundary Street. Did every goddamn city have a goddamn Boundary goddamn Street?

  One of the nightbirds landed on the sign. It stared at him, head tilted. Then it opened its mouth as if to cry, but there was no sound. Even so, Monk thought he heard it. As clear as if it had been the billboard by the bridge.