Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  She sat for nearly twenty minutes more, and then she started the car and drove home. Scott was asleep in front of the TV, the kids were in bed. There was no way for Scott to even know when she got back. Gayle went to the bathroom and, despite having showered at Dianna’s, cleaned up again. She put on her pajamas and then went down to the living room to wake Scott.

  He blinked bleary eyes at her, saw those pajamas.

  “Hey,” he said and smiled in a way that reminded her of how he looked when they first started dating. A sweetness, an innocence. “How long have you been home?”

  “Oh, for a while,” she lied. “Didn’t want to wake you, you looked so peaceful. So I took a shower and read for a bit. But then I thought about how your back gets sometimes when you sleep too long in the La-Z-Boy, so I figured I’d wake you. Is that okay?”

  He rubbed his face and got heavily to his feet. Sighing a lot.

  “That’s sweet of you, Gayle,” he said and kissed her cheek. “You’re the best.”

  He stumped up the stairs, and Gayle followed. He was burdened with weariness. She carried much heavier baggage. He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Gayle did not sleep at all that night.

  Not one wink.

  80

  Owen Minor lay naked on his bed.

  Spread-eagle, erect, panting, bathed in sweat.

  The tattoo on his forearm burned as bright as a spotlight, catching blowflies in flight, throwing their shadows against the wall.

  His body was in the room. His mind was not.

  Everything that defined him was miles and miles away. At the edge of town, down a country lane, around past Davy Peach’s organic produce store, near Pine Walk Park. In a house with a big porch, past a door hung with corn dollies, up a flight of stairs, beyond a half-closed bedroom door, past a trail of clothing—black tights and black jeans, a silk sweater, a wool tunic, two bras, one thong, and one pair of Victoria’s Secret high-waist underwear—and onto a bed where one body lay naked in the velvet darkness. The woman was covered only by a sheet, and barely by it. The temperature was turned up and the room was warm. A scented candle guttered in its Mason jar. Music played on an Echo Dot.

  That was where Owen Minor was.

  Inside the house, inside the room, inside the skin of the sleeping woman.

  Inside her mind.

  Feeling the crystal clear echoes of very private experiences. The touches and kisses. The tastes and pungencies of natural oils. Hearing and sometimes uttering the cries and gasps.

  Owen relived each moment.

  The recent memory of Gayle, new and fresh, but fleeting. Used up and gone, leaving only a fading scent of passion. But the deeper he went into Dianna’s tattoo the more he found stored there. The real nourishment came from older memories. Of Dianna and the first woman with whom she had made love. Not just kissed or fondled, but the first person who had ever taken Dianna up above the normal, out of her skin, and into a light so pure that it still burned. He fought to capture that person’s name.

  Andrea.

  Yes.

  Years and years ago. When Dianna was seventeen and Andrea was nineteen. It was a defining moment. It was the first time sex had become lovemaking. An act of beauty. A thing of purity.

  Owen Minor lay on his bed and remembered every kiss, every touch, every flutter of a heartbeat. It was so wonderful. So delicious.

  And in his secret, private darkness, he fed on it and was well satisfied.

  Later …

  Much later.

  Owen forced himself to let go of Dianna Agbala, to leave some of her tattoo there. On him and on her. The woman was so rich in experiences—good and, to his delight, bad—that he did not want to use her all up. Not yet.

  She would feed him for weeks, he thought. Maybe months.

  But he was still hungry.

  That was the problem … the hunger was always there now. Always. It no longer faded like it used to. There were none of the gaps of months, or weeks, or even days anymore. The hunger was massive and it followed him and owned him.

  He had to feed it.

  There was no option B. He fed it because he must.

  And so, he got out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, turned on the yellow light, and stared at his nakedness. He had a dozen tattoos that he hadn’t yet unlocked. Some of them belonged to an old Vietnam veteran. He wasn’t in the mood for those tonight. Nor was he in the mood for the despair of the farmer, Burleigh. He needed to give that a rest and taste something new.

  There was a big full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and Owen turned, looking over his shoulder at the images on chest and ribs and back; on thighs and buttocks; on his arms and even one between the cheeks of his ass. Tattoos stolen here and there. A menu.

  But even as he studied each image, he knew which one he was going to pick.

  The new one.

  Brand new. Stolen without notice and now fully formed on his chest, right over his heart. He stepped close to the mirror and studied it. Several curious flies landed on his shoulders and neck and crawled down toward the image.

  “Mine,” he said, and they did not touch it with their little black feet.

  In the mirror, the small tattoo of a young girl’s face stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. Asian eyes. Those eyes looked at him. Saw him. And knew, with the bitter wisdom of experience, what he was going to make her do.

  Owen touched the tattoo, caressing the cheek.

  “Show me,” he said.

  The mouth of the tattooed face opened into a wide and silent scream.

  “Show me, Tuyet.”

  No one else could hear the little girl’s scream.

  No one except Owen Minor.

  81

  Monk Addison sat on the front porch of his house. He vaguely remembered driving home, but he had no idea where his keys were now. The door was locked. His handgun was gone. The car was locked, too.

  He sat on the Ikea rattan chair, his head in his hands, shuddering from time to time. His ghosts stood around him. Silent now. Shocked and frightened. As he was shocked and frightened.

  Monk touched the bare spot on his chest.

  It took him a long time to make his brain work right. To reconnect with the patterns of logic, of cause and effect, that defined him. There had been the guy at the bar. Something Duncan. Maybe Arnold or Andrew. The guy who lost the tattoo celebrating his wife’s remissions from breast cancer.

  And there was Patty. She’d lost a tattoo, too.

  But … of what?

  It was a face, too, but it was gone. Whose face was it, though?

  A name floated just beyond his ability to hear it.

  The storm was worse now, and the wind slashed him with cold rain. That was good. That was fine. It felt like punishment. It felt deserved.

  Though for which sins, he was not sure, and the night refused to share its secrets.

  He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A thick fly walking along the arm of the other chair. Bold as brass, the little fucker.

  Monk’s hand moved at the speed of his fury and smashed the fly to paste.

  “Fucker,” growled Monk, wiping his hand clean on his jeans.

  Twenty minutes later he got up, walked through puddles down his side yard, and kicked in his back door. He propped it closed with a kitchen chair, stripped out of his clothes, and let the various pieces lay where they fell. He stood in the hottest shower he could bear for almost half an hour. Then crawled into bed and fell asleep almost at once.

  PART THREE

  Wine dark lips

  In it for the Night

  In it for the forgetting—morning

  Waking the monsters

  With the sunshine—

  tangled around me around you

  “TANGLED” LEZA CANTORAL

  The Devil doesn’t have a face.

  He has a hundred damn faces.

  “DEVIL IN THE WOODS” OREN MORSE

  82

  Morning is a
lie in Pine Deep.

  It explodes with light and color, laughing the clouds away and shouting among the many-colored leaves. The lingering raindrops on the grass sparkled like jewels and birds sang happy songs in the trees.

  The morning was sneaky like that. Manipulative. It insisted you accept the fiction that all was right with the world and each new day was, indeed, filled with the promise of good things and happiness. Those people who moved through life with little awareness, barely noticed, because they had not really taken note of the intensity of the darkness the previous night, nor the harshness of the storms. They sleepwalked through their days and got lost in TV or computer screens at night and were somehow armored against the world as it was.

  For the others, though, the ones who counted more than five personal senses and who were wired into the nervous system of the town, the lie was obvious. Some took the reprieve from shadows and storms, accepting it with the gratitude of the beaten, who bless the moment when the bully takes a breath. For some the morning offered at least a chance to shuffle the cards and maybe deal a better hand. And for those special ones who could not unsee the things that moved behind the curtains of either day or night, the bright sunshine was a joke, a deception, a crocodile smile.

  * * *

  Dianna Agbala got out of bed and stood by the windows, shivering despite the heat turned high last night. Even the bedroom carpet felt like ice beneath the soles of her feet. She stood rubbing the place on her arm where the tattoo had been fading, where the roses had withered. She was not aware she did that.

  She thought about Gayle. About the things they talked about, the things they shared. The sex was the least of it. Gayle had been sweet and earnest, but too uncertain and self-conscious to be a good lover. Maybe she was in her hetero life, but she did not yet understand how to make love as a woman with a woman. Dianna wondered if there would be a second time for her, or if last night had gotten it out of her system. Her instincts said that a door had been opened, though, and maybe couldn’t be closed.

  A mockingbird drew her attention for a moment and when she returned to thoughts of last night they were oddly vague. As if it were something that happened months ago rather than hours.

  “Christ,” she said aloud, “how drunk was I?”

  It annoyed her because she had to fight to reconstruct the face of the woman she’d slept with. Grace? Or Greta? Something like that.

  She waved a fly away from her face and the action broke her concentration. She did not return to thoughts of last night. Not even for a moment.

  The streets were still wet and the morning sunlight painted impressionistic landscapes with colors borrowed from the trees. It was easy to behold such rampant beauty and forget that there were shadows in the world. In moments like that Dianna even forgot about the tattoo on her arm. When she shivered, she smiled and dismissed it as the last of the storm breezes.

  * * *

  Andrew Duncan sat on the bed of the motel room where he had slept badly. He wore boxers and a tank top and stared for hours at the scarred spot on his arm. His wife had called her sister and gone to her place in Easton. There was no invitation for him to follow. She’d even blocked his number.

  He stared at the faded scar on his arm and wondered if the local bars were open yet.

  * * *

  Down a crooked farm road, Alexa Clare sat cross-legged on her bed, all the lights out, rubbing at the spot between her breasts where a circle once connected her to the world, to her first love, to her sanity. She used the pads of forefinger-and-index fingers and made circles with such consistent force and pressure that the skin was abraded, raw. Tiny droplets of blood tickled down her stomach, but she didn’t notice.

  She tried to remember what she did last night, but could not. There was a room somewhere in her mind where certain thoughts were hung. Alexa was aware of its existence, and knew without doubt that there were times when she went in there and put on those thoughts like a second skin. In her dreams there were some vaguely erotic images, seen as indistinctly as shadows on the other side of a drawn shade. No real details. And a lot of lost time.

  She rubbed the spot on her chest and wondered why it hurt. And wondered what it was.

  She was not aware that she had a new tattoo in the center of her back, at the angle where the eye does not usually fall. There, in her skin, the blowfly trembled and waited.

  * * *

  Gayle Kosinski lay alone in bed. Scott was gone—up and out to play golf with his friends. The kids were still, mercifully, asleep. She lingered at the edge of wakefulness, recalling bittersweet fragments of a dream in which she had gone prowling in bars along the Fringe and found a beautiful woman. They had talked, and laughed, and kissed, and made love in a big bed. It had been so good, and Gayle came over and over again. But then the dream changed as she tried to bring this new lover to orgasm. She tried and tried, but nothing worked. Not fingers or tongue. After a while the effort fatigued her own muscles. Her jaw ached and she started getting a headache from the position, lying facedown between the woman’s thighs. It was also uncomfortable for her breasts because there was a fold of the top-sheet beneath them and Gayle didn’t dare stop what she was doing to move it. Then the woman reached down and pushed her fingers against Gayle’s forehead, breaking the contact, pushing her back, and in a cold voice laced with disapproval, said, “You’re useless.”

  That’s when Gaye looked up, past stomach and breasts, to the woman’s pinched and shrewish face … and saw her own. Saw that this woman was her. That the only woman she could ever meet, ever seduce, was herself, and even in that she had failed.

  She lay in bed, her hands clenched to fists, pulling the blanket over her body so that even she didn’t have to look at it.

  It took her hours to remember what actually happened last night, and when it all came back she sat up sharply, gasping, confused. The strangest thought popped into her head—that it was not her own memory that was faulty, but that she was somehow being forgotten. Which made no sense at all.

  * * *

  Miles away, Malcolm Crow sat on the edge of his bed. Val, sweet and smart and strong, slept next to him, twitching as if something in a dream stabbed her. Memories, Crow knew. Like the ones that had pulled him awake. The birds singing outside were hateful and noisy. He leaned his forearms on his thighs, hung his head, and felt lost.

  Val slept on her back and wore a thin white camisole. It was not sheer, but just translucent enough so that he could see the faint outlines of the ladybug and the lightning bug on her sternum. He wondered if she was aware of how many times a day she touched that spot.

  Seeing those tattoos shoved his mind in the direction of their meaning and of Patty Trang. Forgetting a child, even if that was the result of stress, head trauma, or some other cause, was truly appalling. Crow was in no way a religious man, but it felt like a sin.

  He got carefully out of the bed and walked over to the window that looked out at the oak tree and the two headstones.

  “We’ll never forget,” he promised his children. His babies. The lost ones.

  There were dozens of nightbirds hidden among the leaves of that ancient tree. They all cawed in a soft, plaintive chorus. Closer to the house, blowflies buzzed as they looked for a way inside.

  * * *

  In a hospital bed at Pinelands Regional, Joey Raynor lay staring up at the ceiling. He wanted a drink so badly that tears ran from the corners of his eyes and soaked his thin pillow.

  As he lay there he ran his hand over his chest and stomach. Over the smooth artless skin. He had his eyes closed and was barely aware that his fingers stopped here and there and there … each time lingering where a tattoo had been. It was not memory exactly, not on the surface anyway. It was deeper than that. A habit of awareness. His deepest mind, his truest heart, was aware of the absence.

  But an absence of what?

  He wept alone in the darkness of his hospital bedroom.

  * * *

  Monk Addison lay on the flo
or of his living room. Sprawled where he’d fallen when the alcohol in his system flooded the control room and short-circuited all awareness. The loss of that tattoo on his chest was awful for him. He wasn’t scared of much in the world, but the few square inches of bare skin terrified him.

  Truly, deeply terrified him.

  He was already drunk when he walked in the door and grabbed the rest of the whiskey bottle he’d started that morning. He’d been mad at Patty for poisoning herself with too much alcohol, but he outdid her by a mile. Good bourbon was a velvet cudgel and he let it smash all his lights.

  It was not the morning light or the chorus of songbirds that woke him. It was the ringing of his cell phone. It took him so long to make sense of the sound. Longer still to climb up that dark, steep hill to awareness. His punctured hand spider-crawled to where the cell lay, found it, grabbed it, scuttled back to press it against his face.

  “What?” he croaked in an old man’s voice.

  “Monk?” said Patty Cakes. “They’re letting me go. Can you come get me?”

  INTERLUDE FIFTEEN

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  It was in Pine Deep that Owen Minor discovered something about himself he did not know.

  On a warm spring morning, while he was sitting in the Scarecrow Diner eating liver and onions and reading about some new special effects tattoo techniques, he saw a man come in and sit down at the counter. Even if he hadn’t been wearing a sleeveless denim vest with CYKE-LONES MOTORCYCLE CLUB embroidered on the back, Owen would have pegged him as a biker. The nickname “Slider” was stitched below the emblem. He reeked of pot, testosterone, and violence. The whole place went quiet, like a saloon in an old Western when the evil gunslinger pushed through the batwing doors. Two people at the counter even got up and moved to a booth at the far end of the diner.