Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  And, as it always did, the memories of those harvest nights turned a knife in Crow because everyone else from their crew was gone. Billy died during the Black Autumn of 1974, killed by a serial murderer—a monster, really—who lived in town. There was a wave of slaughter that year and Val’s uncle was one of the victims. The same killer nearly got Crow, but Mr. Morse—who everyone called the Bone Man because he was so skinny—saved him. Morse discovered who the killer was and murdered him down in Dark Hollow. But because the killer was a wealthy white landowner and Morse was a homeless black man, it was easy for the blame for all the murders to be laid on Morse. A vigilante group beat him to death and hung him on a scarecrow post.

  Then, thirty years to the day when the original murders started, there was a fresh wave of violence. The Trouble. Before it passed it claimed the lives of Mayor Terry Wolfe, Val’s father and brother, and thousands of other residents and tourists.

  Those memories were always there. As real as if they were happening again right now. As vivid as if they were tattooed on Crow’s flesh.

  He rolled down the long slope and drove along the fence line.

  There were good memories, too. Falling in love with Val. Losing their virginity together out in the cornfield. Getting married and building a life there. The children.

  That twisted the knife even harder.

  They had four biological kids and one adopted child. Mike Sweeney, of course, was the first to join their family. Then Val had four babies. The twins, now fifteen, Henry and Faith, and then Terry followed Abigail. The younger two were buried side by side beneath the sheltering arms of an ancient oak tree that guarded the front of the house.

  With a flash of prescience, Crow knew that’s where he would find Val. It was that kind of night. Had been that kind of month.

  He punched the cassette player and ended the music as he turned off A-32 and onto the private drive ending in a gravel road that wrapped around the patch of grass where the oak stood. He stopped, switched off the engine, and sat for a long moment. The only sounds were birds in the trees and the tinkling of the cooling engine. Val was over there, seated on a canvas folding chair, hands clasped between her knees, strong back slightly stooped. Crow got out of the car and closed the door quietly, then walked across the grass to her. She’d brought his chair out, and beside it was a thermos of coffee. Crow did not kiss her head, touch her shoulder, or say anything. He knew her. Knew her needs at the moment.

  He removed his wallet before he sat down and flipped through the glassine photo sleeves until he found the two pictures. Terry and Abigail. Their faces had all of Val’s strength and beauty and Crow’s grin. It was taken on Christmas morning. The last Christmas before Terry got sick. The last Christmas when they were all together, and healthy. And alive.

  Crow placed the wallet on the grass so that they could both see those beautiful, smiling, perfect faces.

  After a while Val reached over and took Crow’s hand. They sat there for a long time and even the storm, vile as it was, did not attack until that vigil was done.

  INTERLUDE ELEVEN

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  Owen stopped more than twenty times on the drive from Malibu to his apartment in Oceanside. To stare at the tattoo. He didn’t dare do that while driving, because the image entranced him.

  All along the way he thought he saw real blowflies whip past his windshield. At the rest stop near Camp Pendleton he saw a whole cluster of them crawling over the carcass of a dead crow. Owen froze in his tracks halfway to the men’s room and stood there, staring.

  Then his jaw fell open as the flies—at least three dozen of them—stopped their busy scurrying and turned toward him. To look at him.

  The fly on his forearm throbbed with a sensation that was exactly half the distance between pain and pleasure. He shoved his sleeve up and stared at the ink. His heart lurched to an abrupt stop in his chest. The fly rendered by Malibu Mark was far more than photo-real.

  It was real.

  As he stood there, watching it, and aware that all of those flies were watching him, the inked fly trembled.

  The tiny wings fluttered.

  Owen did not even try to tell himself that he was imagining it. He seldom drank, hadn’t done any drugs since getting off the antipsychotics, and wasn’t nearly exhausted enough to be hallucinating. The fucking fly was moving its wings. He saw it.

  He felt it.

  And … he heard it.

  “God almighty,” he breathed.

  The buzzing of the fly increased, and all of the other flies—the real ones—began buzzing, too. Owen’s words seemed to echo in the air, sewn into the fabric of the moment.

  God almighty.

  Was he talking about himself?

  The buzzing grew louder and louder and …

  63

  The storm killed business at the store and Ophelia let everyone go early.

  Dianna debated driving to Wegmans, loading up on cake, risotto, and a big bottle of cabernet and maybe binge-watching something that did not involve too much rain, creepy clients, lost time, and problems with expensive tattoos.

  It was a good plan, but that’s not what she did.

  Instead, she popped a very large umbrella, angled it into the wind, and pushed her way through the rain as she hurried along Boundary Street. The stores were going dark but the clubs lit the gloom with a hundred colors of neon and LED lights. Dianna sloshed past Othello’s, where some of the leather boys were smoking under the big awning. Past the open doors of Pallbearers, where the plaintive self-lament of Armor for Sleep’s “Car Underwater” was losing an argument with the thunder. She wasn’t in an emo mood. It was too early for Tank Girl, which always had good dance music once the dinner crowd moved out.

  What was left?

  Halfway down the block was a big neon sign that jutted out almost to the curb, and on it was the stylized silhouette of a beautiful woman in a torn white dress with wild hair. The heavy breeze conspired to give the tatters of cloth and tendrils of black locks the appearance of actual movement. Very effective. La Llorona, a coffeehouse by day and wine bar at night. Across the front of the store was a marquee with OPEN MIC POETRY SLAM in black block letters.

  Part of her wanted to flee from the thought of poets baring their souls on a night when she wanted to just forget everything. But that part of her didn’t win the debate. She hurried down the street and slipped in out of the rain.

  Inside it was warm and dark and the air was scented with coffee, whiskey, and baked goods. There were about two dozen people at the tables, filling nearly half the place. A bearded waiter in a lumberjack shirt was bringing drinks on a wooden tray while behind a small counter a woman with shocking magenta hair made drinks. Dianna found a table halfway to the stage but set aside from anyone close. She ordered a sake and gin martini and took her first sip as the manager stepped into a small circle of light in which was a wooden stool and a mic on a stand. He had a clipboard with the open mic sign-up sheet and called the next name.

  “Let’s welcome Leza Cantoral.” There was real enthusiasm in the applause, suggesting the poet was either well known or had her entourage on deck. The woman who stepped into the spotlight was a short, curvy Xicana with wheat-colored hair over intentionally dark roots. Intense eyes that were a deep brown and accented with eyeliner that slashed backward, giving her a decidedly feline look. Very full lips and a strange little smile, as if she’d just told herself a joke but didn’t want to share it. She wore a black T-shirt with a hand-cut deep V-neck and with this on the front: I WAS A WITCH IN EVERY LIFETIME.

  She removed a folded piece of paper from her jeans pocket, opened it, took the mic, and then looked out at the audience for a moment, letting things go quiet. Dianna reached out a bit with her senses and tried to get a read on the poet, and found a lot of darkness. Not negative, not born in her, but wrapped around the woman. As if she’d been through strange emotional landscapes and survived, but had memories and scars. Dianna could certainly relat
e. She sipped her drink and waited out the fall of silence in the place.

  “This one’s about obsession,” Cantoral said in a slow and husky voice. “About how we can’t let some people go. Even I’m doing it with this poem. I’m obsessing on the way people obsess over Marilyn Monroe. We’re all necrophiles in our own ways. This is ‘A Series of Images to Convince You That She Is Dead.’”

  Those dark eyes looked around, then the poet nodded to herself and began reading.

  “A series of images that show her naked body in various poses … back when she was in the movies … some candids, outtakes, the ones that did not make the cut,

  the ones with a big red X drawn across them … in red marker—her way to X out her imperfect selves.”

  Cantoral’s voice was like smoke, coiling around the meanings and images.

  “… this is a movie … you are watching it … it is old scratched film … Super 8 film. You are drinking. You are drunk. You don’t know why you are watching this.”

  A breath in an otherwise silent room.

  “… her eyes seem very alive … bright black in that projector glow … she is in a scene with other people—mostly men … but some women. There are a lot of bodies …

  but it is somehow difficult to make her out, between the flesh and the ropes and the whips and the dogs, but then you start to recognize her body parts.”

  A flash of those eyes.

  “Cut to a morgue … and she looks different. Her face—deflated. Dimples gone … skin pale … more pale even than before.”

  Cantoral’s lip curls in disgust.

  “Back to the glamor shots—early ones, from before she was famous, before she bleached her hair … and became the movie star. Full bush, scared but bold eyes … a smile to hide the pain.”

  Another breath.

  “You think if you had loved her … if you had known her … you would have saved … protected her. But really … how?”

  Cantoral’s eyes glittered like jagged pieces of obsidian. Sharp and dangerous.

  “What was her alienation that wrapped her up like a thousand scarves … pulling and pushing her from intimacy … holding her body as a shield between herself … and anyone … absolutely anyone … because it hurts more to be hurt again … than to be alone, with familiar wounds. You still can’t believe she is dead though…”

  There was a long moment before the applause began. Dianna glanced around and saw that the poem had hit some people more deeply than others. The ones who seemed indifferent to it, or who were possibly conjuring exactly the wrong kinds of Marilyn images, were fewer in number than those who seemed to get what the poet intended. Or, at least, get something deep for themselves.

  “Damn…” breathed Dianna.

  She finished her drink and stared into the empty depths of the glass. As she did so, her fingers absently—very absently—rubbed the place on her forearm where the beautiful rose had nearly faded away.

  64

  On the most distant outskirts of Pine Deep, near Songbird Bridge, a homeless man huddled into the doorless husk of an old refrigerator, an old rug pulled over him and newspapers lining the insides of his clothes. His name was left behind on a dusty road down south. The path from where he’d been when life turned on him to where he was now that life was nearly over was on some map that had long ago been thrown away.

  The other homeless wanderers called him Aqualung, after an old song from when they were young. Sometimes they’d mock him by singing the first few lines of the song, but they mostly got the lyrics wrong.

  Aqualung shivered, partly from the cold, and in his dreams he spoke names he did not know. They were not his dreams, and that was his problem. Ever since he was a boy his sleeping thoughts were filled with other people’s dreams, and other people’s nightmares. Unwanted, unbidden, unbearable. Tonight it was worse, because he knew the things that haunted him were stolen and it was like he was strapped to a chair and forced to watch the ugliest and most graphic pornography. Not sex, but naked emotions, stripped raw and laid bare, and all of it set to a music score of buzzing insect wings. Ugly and unnatural in every sense of those words.

  Aqualung tried to wake up, but he could not. The darkness pressed down on his chest like a nightmare hag, and he was too far away from any house for anyone to hear his screams.

  The wind carried those cries with them, and if ears could not hear them, hearts could.

  65

  Leaving the house was a huge step for Gayle. Up until the moment when she gripped the doorknob in one sweaty hand she was positive that it would be an impossible act of stealth and subterfuge, requiring ninja skills she didn’t possess.

  Scott was playing Gridiron Champions on his Xbox and only barely noticed she was leaving. He grunted something, maybe at her or possibly at the screen. The kids were in the playroom doing homework. Even the cat was indifferent, entertaining himself by licking his ass. There was a statement of some kind there, but Gayle didn’t feel like decoding it. Things sucked enough as it was.

  “See you,” she said to a house that barely acknowledged her at the best of times. Closed the door, heard the lock click, and then she was in the Honda and accelerating out of the cul-de-sac like she was driving a getaway car.

  Her house was on the northwestern corner of Pine Deep and driving to the Fringe was a short trip, though between the old and rather odd layout of the town and the newer, even less orderly pattern of streets, it took fifteen minutes to drive a handful of miles. Traffic slowdowns from the rain as well as vast puddles added to it, but when she saw TANK GIRL in slowly flashing white neon, her heart jumped.

  She drove right past the club.

  Three times.

  Circling the block while having increasingly acrimonious discussions with herself. Her personal parasite—a passive-aggressive little bitch that sounded a lot like her mother—whispered in her mind that she was betraying her husband, endangering her marriage, putting her kids’ peace of mind at risk, and generally acting like a slut. That part of her mind was unkind and unflinching. It nearly won, too, because after her third time circling the block she had her flashers on to head away. To go to the Panera up in Crestville and kill the evening doing nothing of value on her iPad.

  The light turned green and she began to make that turn.

  Then her fingers curled with unexpected strength around the wheel and wrenched it to the right, away from the exit route, into another circle around the same block.

  “If there’s no spot in front I’ll just go,” she said aloud to herself and her parasite. “That’ll be a sign.”

  There hadn’t been a single space on either side of the street the last three loops. It looked just as full this time, and Gayle’s heart began to sink. To accept.

  But then a car pulled out thirty feet ahead of her, angled into the flow of traffic, and left a big spot. Exactly in front of the door.

  As signs from the universe go, it was eloquent.

  Gayle pulled in, took four minutes of debating before she turned off the engine. Ten more minutes before she got out. The rain was moving along the street in lazy waves, like the tail of a big koi, the drops painted exotic colors by the neon.

  “This is stupid,” she told herself.

  And got out.

  66

  Burleigh Hopewell, last surviving member of one of the town’s oldest families, stepped out onto his porch, pipe in hand, eyes narrowed as he scanned the last of the twilight. The yellow porch lights pushed at the shadows, but then seemed to accept defeat and grew dimmer instead of brighter. Beyond the rail, past the gravel turnaround, the corn stood whispering, whispering.

  Hopewell used his index finger to press the 4 Aces tobacco deep into the briar bowl, used his thumbnail to pop a stick match alight, and took long breaths to pull the flame through. He worked at it for a while until the pipe was drawing well, then he leaned a hip against the rail and watched the big stalks sway. They rustled as if something was moving through them. A careful deer or a sly co
yote, perhaps.

  He waited, listening, looking. Seeing nothing except the movement of leaves. The house behind him was empty, all of the migrant workers gone for the day. None of his regular help lived here, and there were no more Hopewells left in Pine Deep. The Trouble had taken his wife, his sister, and both of his kids. He’d been spared because he was at a growers conference in Pittsburgh, all the way the hell on the other side of the state. He was having a beer in the hotel bar, watching the Pirates get their asses handed to them by his own team, the Phillies, when they broke in with a news report. Something terrible happening in Pine Deep. Hopewell called home immediately and was relieved when his wife answered.

  “Burr,” she said in a voice that was oddly dreamy, “when are you coming home?”

  “Belinda, what’s happening? I saw on the news—”

  “When are you coming home, sweetheart?” she’d asked, cutting him off. Her tone so soft.

  “Are you okay? Are the kids okay? God, Belinda, they said the whole town’s burning.”

  “We’re all fine, sweetie,” said Belinda. “We’re home waiting for you. When are you coming home?”

  “Honey,” he said, “you sound funny. Are you okay?”

  “I’m wonderful, Burr. Come home to us.”

  She sounded drunk. No, drugged, maybe. Like she’d taken too many Valium and was floating. The way she was when she overmedicated after writing checks for the bills they couldn’t really afford to pay.

  “Is Abby there?” he asked. “Put her on for a sec.”