Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Once inside, Patty went immediately to one of the barber chairs and sat down as if the effort of walking from the car to there had sapped what little strength she had.

  “Beer me,” she said, waving a hand in the general direction of the fridge.

  Monk stared at her. “You out of your mind? You drank a whole case of—”

  “Give me one now or I’ll just wait until you go.”

  “Patty—”

  “And you look shitfaced yourself, Monk. And don’t even get me started on how you smell.”

  The standoff lasted for half a minute. It felt longer, and Monk knew he was going to lose unless he ankle-chained her to the bed. Chief Crow would love that. But there was nothing in the box except a Diet Dr Pepper, a tub of hummus, and a mass of leafy greens that was evolving into something vaguely threatening.

  “Sorry, Pats,” he said, “but you’re dry.”

  “Will you go get me something? There’s a beer place a couple blocks down.”

  Monk went over and sat in the adjoining chair. He looked around the place, seeing it in daylight, listening in his head for an echo of the vague feeling of threat that was there yesterday. That sense someone was watching, or waiting. It wasn’t really clear if that feeling was gone because there was never a reason for it to be there in the first place, or because whatever it had been was no longer there. Or no longer looking. He said nothing about it, though.

  “Look, I saw a pho place on the way into town yesterday, I could get us something.”

  “I want a beer.”

  “Well, that’s just tough,” he said frankly. “Christ, Pats, look at yourself. Have you eaten, like, anything since you came here? You were borderline malnourished before you bugged out of New York, but now … shit … I’m surprised they kicked you loose from the hospital. Kind of expected them to put in a feeding tube.”

  “You know how to charm a girl.”

  He snorted.

  She looked away. “I don’t want pho.”

  “Chinese?”

  “No. You going to run through the whole of Asian cuisine?”

  “What do you want, then? Pizza? A steak? Every other store around here’s a takeout. Or we could go to that big diner, what’s it called? The Scarecrow? Get some eggs. You need a protein hit and a crap-ton of carbs.”

  “And you need to stop being my mother.”

  “Okay, fine. Skip the food for now. How about we sit here and talk about what happened? How about we talk about Tuyet?”

  She gave him a withering look. “You can really be a cruel bastard sometimes, Monk.”

  “And you can be evasive as fuck. How ’bout we stop playing games?” He stabbed a finger in the direction of her bandaged hand. “Let’s not forget that I was there when you inked Tuyet’s face on your hand. I was there for all of it.”

  “Don’t…”

  “I know what that art means to you, what it’s always meant to you. You can spin some bullshit to the cops and the doctors, Pats, but you can’t lie to me. Not to me. We don’t do that. Neither of us. Ever. That’s the deal and we don’t break the deal. Not once in all these years.”

  She looked down at the bandage on her hand. Time seemed to stall. Monk sat there, watching her, watching the way her shoulders painted a picture of total defeat. When he glanced at the wall clock he was surprised that time was actually passing. Outside it was raining again. Was that all it ever did in this town?

  Patty said, “Monk, do you love me?”

  It was a sudden question. Full of sharp edges, and yet spoken in a voice that was completely calm.

  “You know I do,” he said, not moving from where he sat.

  She nodded.

  “I know something’s wrong with me,” she said after another long silence.

  Monk did not dare speak. He did not dare contradict or try to make it better with some encouraging bullshit. Patty was telling her truth and they both needed him to be her witness.

  “I’m not going to kill myself,” she said. “I wouldn’t. I wasn’t trying to do that yesterday, in case you’re wondering. The shrinks at the hospital grilled the hell out of me and they let me go because they can tell I’m not a danger to myself. Well,” she glanced bitterly at her bandaged hand, “not to my life. Turns out there’s no actual law to prevent people from banging themselves up. I got Twitch on the phone to explain that to them. Even so, they wouldn’t have let me out unless they believed me. You can believe me, too. I’m not going to kill myself. Not now or ever. And me not eating isn’t some kind of subtle slow suicide. Nothing like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I’m not okay, either.” Patty wiped at her eyes and studied her fingers, looking a little surprised to find them dry. “I know this is killing you, baby. You want to save me and I don’t know if I can be saved. If I’m worth the effort—No … no, let me finish.” She cut a look at him, saw that he was merely sitting there. She nodded. “I went to the Fire Zone last night.”

  Monk’s heart jerked sideways in his chest, but he held his tongue.

  “I went looking for her. For…” She paused and had to take a breath before she said the name. “For Tuyet. It was so weird, because we could hear and see people. Laughing, talking, singing with the Music. I saw this woman. Lady Eyes.” She told him about the encounter. “But then there was this sound. A buzzing. At first I thought it was my ink gun, like some kind of flashback to either me doing that original tattoo or what … I, um … did last night.”

  “Take it slow, Pats. It’s okay.”

  She nodded and sniffed. She was panting as if she’d run up three flights of stairs. “The more I heard that sound, the harder it was to even remember why I was there. Who I’d come to look for, you know?”

  He nodded.

  “And that lady kept asking me to say a name.”

  Monk leaned forward. “What name? Tuyet’s?”

  “No. She wanted me to say someone else’s name. And—you’re going to think I’m crazy here, but … I think it was the name of the person who … who…”

  “Give me a noun, kiddo.”

  “She wanted me to say the name of the person who stole Tuyet.” She cut a pleading look at him. “Am I crazy?”

  Monk managed a smile. “Patty darlin’, I’m an ex-soldier who has dead faces tattooed on his skin and who sees ghosts. You do some kind of weird magic with your tattoo gun, and more than half of what’s inked on me is stuff you did. Somehow your most precious tattoo, the one with five thousand times more meaning than anything else, has started to fade and it’s taking with it memories of your little girl. Crazy? No, sweetheart, the world is bugfuck nuts and we’re stuck in the madhouse.”

  Patty started to say something, but he held up a hand.

  “There’s more,” he said and told her about Andrew Duncan. Patty’s eyes grew wider and they filled with a deep, deep dread.

  “What … what…? I mean … what?” she stammered.

  “And it gets worse,” said Monk. He stood up and shucked his jacket and grabbed the hem of the Minor Threat T-shirt he wore. He had to steel himself to do what he did next. Then with one abrupt move he pulled the shirt over his head and dropped it on the chair, standing naked to the waist in front of her. The eyes on all those faces were open and awake as they always were when he was alone with Patty Cakes.

  “I don’t…” began Patty, but then Monk touched the bare spot over his heart. Her face slowly lost all color, all muscular tone, and she slid slowly—very slowly—out of her chair and onto the floor. Monk caught her before her bony knees could hit the hard tiles. He pulled her close to him and held her.

  “They stole her from me, too,” he said.

  They held each other, clung to one another. Patty screamed and Monk wept and their heartbreak filled the whole world.

  92

  Mr. Pockets had a route he liked to follow. The pubic trash cans on Corn Hill, always good for half a sandwich, down the street from the Pinelands Brewpub, or some crusts out of the Dumpst
er behind Peace-a-Pizza. It never mattered to him what he ate, as long as he ate, and he was always hungry.

  Always.

  Deeply.

  He was digging for a bite of anything when he found the tattoo.

  He’d seen a lot of things over the long years of his life, but Mr. Pockets had never once found a tattoo. With two immensely filthy and very delicate fingers he plucked it out from beneath an empty soda cup and held it up. The thing drooped, so he pinched two corners and raised it to the weak sunlight. It was still soft, a little damp. Takes a while for a slice of skin that thick to harden into something like parchment.

  The tattoo was that of a face. A little Asian girl. Pale, beautifully rendered. More like a photograph than something done by an artist. The eyes were open and stared at him with a horror so bottomless that it made his groin stir. The mouth was open, and Mr. Pockets turned his head and leaned close to see if he could hear the scream.

  It was there. Faint. Like someone crying out at the bottom of a very deep well. A child’s shriek and the sound matched the age of the face. Very young. Still a little girl when she died.

  And that made him cock his head to one side, appraising the excised tattoo. This was the face of a dead girl. He could feel it; knew it for certain. She’d been pretty up until she died, and then had died ugly. Ruined by someone.

  Who’d tattooed her on their skin?

  He didn’t think it was the girl’s father—and this was definitely male skin. Middle-aged. Caucasian. But it was odd skin, too. Pale as a mushroom and sticky, the way insect feet are sticky. Not from the blood, either. Mr. Pockets sniffed it. This slice was new but the skin smelled old.

  Thunder boomed overhead and it began to rain. Mr. Pockets neither noticed nor would have cared if he had.

  He debated eating the piece of skin, but instead opened his dirty fingers and let it drop into the can. There was a dead mouse in the litter and he ate that instead. Fur, bones, and all.

  93

  April Chung called back in less than an hour and sounded excited.

  “I was right,” said Chung, “there’s a story floating around that a lot of people have heard. One of those things people dig because it’s cool but no one really believes. Or admits they believe.”

  “What’ve you got?” asked Crow.

  “So there’s this agent named Chuck Richter who worked out of the Los Angeles shop but then transferred to the East Coast as he was coming up to retirement. Worked a lot of oddball cases, cold cases, scut work, like that. Never a first-chair field man but still had some chops. Anyway, we were all at the big Christmas party a few years ago and he’s the kind of guy who can’t bear to be outdone telling cop stories. You know the type. He starts talking about a case he was on that looked both weird and hot but petered out. Started with a woman named Tina Bellamy, known as Tinker Bell or just Tink, who was a receptionist in this swanky tattoo place called Malibu Mark’s. Richter interviewed the owner, who said that he came in and found Tink crying her eyes out and saying crazy stuff about not being able to remember who she was. It wasn’t that she forgot her name, but big chunks of her memory were gone. Very important chunks.”

  “Jesus Christ,” breathed Crow.

  “Malibu Mark told Richter that the memories Tink lost were the ones that explained who she was to herself. Not happy stuff, because apparently that wasn’t in the cards. Bad home, sexual abuse, drug addiction, possibly some prostitution. A long run of bad stuff, but then she came out of it, got clean, did the work the therapists gave her, and had that receptionist job making good money. Now, you’d think that having the bad stuff suddenly gone would make her happy, but it didn’t.”

  “No,” said Crow, “it wouldn’t. Those kinds of memories are a measuring tape for the distance traveled. They remind us about what the world tried to make us and who we built ourselves to be.”

  “I know,” said Chung. “You told me about your dad. The fucker. Mine was no peach but all he did was yell and criticize.”

  “Abuse is abuse. It’s relative and it always hurts. Always leaves a scar.”

  “Yeah. And the kicker is that Tink had one of those semicolon tattoos, the ones suicide-attempt survivors sometimes get? Except that when she showed her arm to her boss, the tattoo was gone. Not completely, but mostly. And Malibu Mark swore that he’d seen it the day before. Hell, he was the guy who inked it for her as a birthday present. He was proud of her, for all she overcame.”

  “So, you said Richter got this from Malibu Mark? Not from Tink?”

  “No,” she said, “and that’s part of why your suicide triggered me. Tink went out for lunch that day and never came back. Malibu Mark got worried when she didn’t come in the next day so he drove over to her place. She’d swallowed enough sleeping pills to kill an elephant. Left a message on the wall that said ‘I am nobody.’”

  “Goddamn.”

  “The case was marked suicide because that’s what it was, but it always bothered Richter. For the same reasons this stuff in Pine Deep is turning dials on you, Crow. Richter couldn’t leave it alone and over the next few years found a bunch of other cases—suicides and murders—that seemed to connect. People claiming to have lost both tattoos and memories. He poked at it, but couldn’t actually find a crime, so he eventually dropped it. Still bothers him, though. And, hey, look, I asked him to send his notes to you. If it helps, maybe you can send him a bottle of something for Christmas. He likes good tequila.”

  “Done. This is great, April. You’re the best.”

  There was a pause. “Crow, you know that I know some of what really happened in Pine Deep during the Trouble. It keeps me up some nights. Makes me go to church, you know?”

  “Yes,” said Crow. “I do know.”

  “Is this going to be something like that?”

  Crow took a little too long in answering.

  “Damn,” she said and hung up.

  94

  Grief is a monster. It wins so often and so easily.

  It’s sly and cruel and persistent. Like most scavengers it is opportunistic.

  Monk and Patty held on to each other as the black waves of it rose and fell. Alone they might have perished and been swept away into darkness.

  But Patty held Monk with every ounce of who she was, and that was a substantial anchor. Monk was her rock in turn. They trembled and shuddered as the waves fell, but they were still there. Battered, nearly broken, but there.

  Slowly, slowly, the dark seas of grief subsided and something equally powerful began to rise. First in her. In her mother’s heart, which had been looted but was not empty. She pushed Monk back and looked into his eyes. No, she glared. With heat so intense it was nearly palpable.

  “I know his name,” she snarled. “I know the motherfucker’s name.”

  Monk gasped and sat back hard on his ass. “You what?”

  “That lady in the Fire Zone made me say it. She forced me to say it out loud.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Patty, tell me.”

  Patty hesitated, though, her fires hot but her confidence flickering.

  “It’s … it’s not really a name, though. It’s the name he calls himself. It’s how he thinks of himself.”

  “Tell me anyway,” said Monk, bracing for disappointment.

  She licked her lips. “He’s the Lord of the Flies.”

  “Flies…” echoed Monk.

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  Monk shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you know what it means? Flies … flies … there’s something about that. It’s buzzing in my head but I can’t…” She growled in frustration as tiny fragments of thought, of memory, flitted away. “Shit.”

  Monk wiped his eyes with his fingers and stood up, then gently pulled Patty to her feet.

  “We’re in the middle of something really out there. Out there even for us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Look, we don’t have enough to go on except the tattoo thin
g. You did your tattoo and mine, but Duncan’s was inked by a guy in Doylestown who has a place off of Main Street.”

  “Spider?” asked Patty, brightening.

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, I see him at conventions a lot. He’s good. A little intense. Got some PTSD and maybe some other shit going on. Decent guy, though. Knows his game.”

  “You have his number?”

  Patty got her phone, located the number, and sent the contact details to Monk’s cell. He called, but there was no answer.

  “It’s early,” said Patty. “Maybe he’s not open yet.”

  Monk nodded, chewing his lip for a moment. “Yeah, yeah. Let me think for a sec.” He began pacing around the shop while Patty sat in her chair and watched. “This whole thing is Freaksville and we’re reacting like victims. Fair enough, we are. But fuck if that’s the agenda. I need to grab whatever this is by the balls.”

  “How you going to do that?”

  “Well … my skill set is pretty focused. I’m a hunter, right? So I’m going to hunt.”

  “How? Talking to Spider?”

  He shook his head. “That’s step two because he’s not answering his phone. No, I think I’ll make a call to our friend the professor.”

  “Jonatha?”

  “Sure. Who better to ask about something like this?”

  Patty nodded. Jonatha Corbiel-Newton was a professor of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of more than forty nonfiction books, most of which dealt with myths, legends, cultural beliefs, and religious accounts of the supernatural. She was a frequent talking head on the History Channel and Nat Geographic for shows dealing with vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, fairies, and other creatures belonging to what she called the “Larger World.”

  “Let’s hope she can help,” she said, though the doubt in her voice was evident.