Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  “In the middle of a lecture?”

  “Hush now. Okay, good old Anton LaVey is actually the one who coined the phrase psychic vampire as part of his Church of Satan. This is in the 1960s, mind. His take was that psychic vampires are actually emotionally weak or deficient people who feed on others to make up for some natural lack in themselves. And it was, of all people, violinist Graham Smith who coined the term ‘energy vampire,’ though he was talking about how much fans seem to take from performers. Bottom line is that there are a lot of people in the vampires’ real-world, nonsupernatural communities who believe very heavily that they, or people they know, are psi or energy vampires. Some people in the BDSM community are even subs to dom psi vampires.”

  “Okay,” he said, stabbing a potato with his fork. “Whatever floats your boat.”

  “But if we’re talking the actual ability to steal a tattoo from a living person in order to feed off of the attached memories, then … gosh, Monk, that’s a new one even for me.”

  “So what’s it mean? That I’m seeing this wrong?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m saying this is something I haven’t personally or professionally heard of. That doesn’t mean no one has. I’m research girl, so let me dig around, ask some colleagues, poke through the literature.”

  “Why do you sound happy about that?”

  “Well, not happy for what’s happening with you and Patty,” she said quickly, “but if this is something new? Or something old that hasn’t been documented, then … hell, I can see myself publishing a juicy paper.”

  “I’m so fucking tickled that this is making your day.”

  “Oh, bite me, Monk. You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “In the meantime you should see if you can put together more information. Apart from you and Patty, is there something that links either of you to Mr. Duncan? Or his wife? Maybe there’s a local connection there in New York and—”

  “We’re not in New York anymore,” said Monk. “Didn’t I tell you? No … I guess I skipped that part. We’re actually in your husband’s old stomping grounds.”

  There was an audible gasp on the other end of the call. “Wait, wait, god … you’re saying this is happening in Pine Deep?”

  98

  Mike Sweeney stood behind the single visitor’s chair in the single room at Pinelands Regional Medical Center. Crow sat, forearms on his thighs, a coffee cup cradled between his palms. He rolled it slowly back and forth.

  “Take your time,” said Crow gently. “No stress, no pressure.”

  On the bed, Joey Raynor, the old homeless veteran, seemed to crouch beneath the thin hospital sheets, as if terrified of the conversation. He was hooked up to machines that monitored his vitals but told no one anything of real value about the man. Despite the fluorescent lights overhead there were shadows huddled in every corner and the whole room seemed washed in an unhealthy yellow-gray.

  The Veterans Administration had responded to Mike’s information request and said that the physical description he provided matched that of Alan Joseph Raynor, born in 1946, formerly a resident of Philadelphia. Served five years with the air force. Honorably discharged, but subsequently treated for PTSD, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, malnutrition, and other illnesses related to a life lived on the downward slopes of poverty and disenfranchisement. He was eligible for medical care and also qualified for-as-yet-unclaimed disability benefits related to frequent exposure to Agent Orange and other chemicals. The last official record of Raynor visiting a VA office was in June 2012, and until now he had been presumed dead by his caseworker.

  Joey Raynor lay huddled into a ball of trembling tension on the narrow hospital bed as the two cops waited for him to speak. Silence was a fist closed around the three of them, broken only as Mike fidgeted in slow motion, shifting every now and then from one foot to the other, his leather gun-belt creaking for a moment. A fly crawled without sound on the metal headboard a few inches above the vet’s head. Mike wanted to swat it, or snatch it out of the air and crush it in his fist. The fly was fat and bloated, loathsome in its indifference to this old man’s pain. But Mike didn’t want to do anything to scare the poor guy.

  The old man did not look at either of the officers when he began to speak. His voice was creaky and dusty, but he spoke clearly, even with eloquence.

  “I got my first ink in 1966, at a place on South Street in Philly. It was a music note. A G-clef. You see, I was the lead singer in one of those old Philadelphia a cappella bands. The Seventh Sons. Doo-wop versions of old blues stuff. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Albert King. My old man called it ‘nigger music,’ but we didn’t. His generation was back from World War Two and Korea and they were way behind the curve when it came to stuff like civil rights. My buddies and me were cool with everyone. Black, white, brown—it didn’t matter as long as they were into music. That was our race, our religion. It was all about the tunes.”

  He paused and sighed, and even though he was turned away he seemed somehow to have grown younger as he spoke.

  “There were five of us,” said the old man. “Me, Tommy Murphy and his little brother Dan, Pat Reilly, and Stan Pulaski. None of us were seventh sons, though. That was just from the songs, from the blues.” He paused for a ragged breath, eyes still averted. “We started singing in seventh grade. Not in school, but that’s where we met. Sang on street corners, holding a Coke bottle over our heads like it was a microphone, and all of us in a circle. I’d start a song—I think it was a Lightnin’ Hopkins tune—and sing it with that doo-wop slow rhythm. Dan would add falsetto and Stan would be the bass. Pat and Tommy sang harmonies and you never heard better. They could follow me anywhere, and if I fell off the note they’d bring me back. Tommy had perfect pitch and he always shined a light on the right key. I got good at runs, and if we’d stayed together we might even have done some soul. We all liked Ray Charles, but he was more up-tempo. We were poor kids from the worst part of Philly. Kensington. Factories, row homes with no room to breathe and every family with five or seven kids.”

  He paused and stared at the shadows in a corner of the room, as if they were a window to the past. Mike found himself holding his breath.

  “We all knew there was a lottery for the draft,” the man continued, “but we also knew that none of us were going to come up with exemptions. None of us were ever getting into college. Our folks didn’t have influence or the money to protect us. We all knew a bunch of guys who’d gotten drafted into the army and sent to ’Nam. None of us wanted to shoot anyone. We used to joke about being lovers, not fighters. And that was true, though what we loved was singing. Making music. We even cut an LP with a small company in South Philly. Fourteen blues a cappella songs, and even got radio time with ‘Hellhound on My Trail’ and ‘Born Under a Bad Sign.’ But we knew the clock was ticking on us. So I had a plan. I went to the air force recruiting office on Kensington Avenue and asked some questions. I figured, it’s the soldiers and marines who get killed. Not the navy and not the air force. Dan had a fear of drowning, so that’s why I picked the air force.” He made a soft, sick sound of derision. “I went in there thinking I’d get straight answers. After all, I was coming to them. Being a patriot and all. That recruiting sergeant never stopped smiling. Told me that ‘sure, son, you and your friends can enlist and we’ll keep you Stateside.’ He promised that. Gave it to me in his own handwriting, signed and all. If we signed up together they’d train us to repair trucks or drive motor-pool. Not near home, he said, he couldn’t promise that, but down south somewhere, most like. Worst-case scenario was we’d all do a year in Germany or Okinawa. That wasn’t too bad. See the world, meet some foreign girls, have some adventures, and then come home. When I told him we had a group and were on the radio, he said that made it even better, ’cause the air force had a lot of officers’ clubs and they always needed entertainment. That’s what he said and he was smiling the whole time. I guess crocodiles and sharks smile just about the same w
ay.”

  Crow turned and glanced up at Mike, who gave a sad shake of his head. Neither spoke.

  The man in the bed wiped at his eyes. “You can guess what they did. They sent us straight to Vietnam. Not with the USO or anything like that. Not motor-pool, either. They put us in the 819th Red Horse Squadron. Civil damn engineers. We went to Da Nang and then Pleiku to build bases, repair fences, put up housing. Then they thought of better uses for some of us. For me and my friends. They’d drop defoliant on some forward area and then send the Seventh Sons in with a platoon of soldiers to watch our backs while we built helicopter bases. We were sucking Agent Orange every day, but we wouldn’t have cared much about that even if we knew what it was.” He paused for a long time, maybe a full minute. “Dan went first. We weren’t even out of the jeep when he took one in the right cheek. Blew half his face away. His teeth and tongue hit Tommy and stuck to his face and shirt. The force of the impact knocked one of Dan’s eyes out its sockets but with all that damage he wasn’t dead. I remember sitting there, staring, unable to move a finger as he reached up and tried to put his eye back into the socket. His fingers were rock steady, like this was nothing. Blood pouring down and all of us screaming. Then he started choking. Drowning on his own blood. We sat like idiots and watched him die, bullets zipping through the air all around us. I remember hearing them and thinking how bad the flies were. That’s what I thought. Then the army guys grabbed us and pulled us out of the jeep and we all huddled in the mud, heads down, watching the infantry fire a couple thousand rounds into the jungle. Monkeys screaming in the trees.”

  He finally turned and looked at the cops. The pain in his eyes was almost too much for them to witness.

  “Help me sit up,” he said, holding out a hand. Mike began to move, but Crow waved him back and stood. He took the hand and steadied the veteran as he sat. The vet turned away again, presenting his back. “Untie this damn gown.”

  Crow untied it and the man shrugged out of it and let the fabric fall to reveal a scarecrow body. Sallow skin covered in old scars and new scabs. What drew the eyes of Mike and Crow, though, were the tattoos on his back. From the trapezius muscles to just above the waist, and from armpit to armpit, the man was covered with tattoos. Scores of them, interlocked or merely adjacent. Some of the colors were vibrant, others badly faded. None of them, though, was erased, like those on Mr. Duncan or the suicide victim under the bridge.

  On the exact center of his back was the red knight chess piece emblem of Red Horse Squadron. Surrounding it, spiraling outward, were other tattoos. The screaming face of a tiger and the coiled evil of a bamboo viper; a flurry of musical notes peppered with bullet holes and strung with creeper vines crawling with insects. A swarm of Jolly Green Giants—the Sikorsky HH-3E utility helicopter that defined the ’Nam jungle experience. The faces of four young men—three with distinctly Irish faces and one with the blond hair and blue eyes of a Pole. Below each was a date of birth and the date when they died. The dates were all within five months of one another. There was a picture of the Virgin Mary—looking distinctly Asian—bending over them, arms stretched as if to gather their souls to her breast. There were burning villages and skeletal ghosts in torn BDUs. There were babies and little children who had Irish faces and Vietnamese eyes, but they were all weeping, or reaching for helicopters retreating into the distance. His entire back was the story of that conflict, from heartbreak to heartbreak.

  Mike and Crow exchanged a look. Neither had served in the military, but both of them had been through a war of their own. The Trouble. Although neither of them wore their stories on their skins, they understood what they were seeing. They could perceive the truth of it.

  Raynor half turned, grunting with the effort, as if memories and arthritis conspired to make every movement painful. He said, “That’s where I came from. That’s what I carried. And I always wanted those tattoos on my back because even from the jump, from when the first of my friends died, I wanted to remember them but walk away from the pain. The … horror of it. If it was inked onto my back then it was always behind me. Do you … do you understand?”

  Mike was unable to speak. Crow cleared his throat and answered for both of them. “Yes.”

  Raynor nodded, then he pulled the rest of the gown off and let it puddle around his waist. He lay back on the bed and looked at the cops as they looked at his chest and stomach.

  “I did three tours in Nam,” he said. “I kept going back because I had some stupid idea that my friends were still there. That it was a joke, some kind of cosmic hide-and-seek and I was too high to realize it. The chaplain finally figured out just how messed up I was. Something I said, I guess, and they shipped my ass back home. I spent the last few months doing clerical. They wouldn’t even let me have a hammer. Guess they were afraid I’d do myself an injury, or—worse—someone else. But they were wrong. I’d already done all the damage I was ever going to do in this world. At least to others. You see, it was me who went to the recruiting office. It was me who talked my friends into enlisting. It was me who killed them all. And, no, don’t try to say different. I’ve been through all that with shrinks at the VA and more twelve steps than I care to count.”

  The room was quiet.

  Raynor nodded and continued, “Then my time was up and they kicked me out. You know that old saw about how the military trains us for war but not for peace? Yeah, well, that’s even true of civil engineers. I never once pulled a trigger in anger, but I went in as a green kid and came back a killer. I hit the ground and ran right for the bottle, and then the spike. Really, anything that would sand the edges off and give me a little peace.” He laughed. “Peace. Yeah well. I tried. See this here?”

  He touched the skin over his heart.

  “First day I got clean—and by clean I mean the first day I woke up without a screaming ache inside me for a drink or a needle—I went out and had my six-month chip tattooed. You know what that means?”

  Crow said, “I’ve been going to meetings for a long time.”

  Raynor gave another nod. “Okay. You remember that first really clear day? Not those stupid days when you lie to yourself that you’re never going to want to use again because you’re cured. Alcoholism can’t be cured. You’re always an alcoholic, so the rhythm is to make a decision every morning not to drink.”

  “One day at a time,” said Crow faintly.

  “Yeah. And sometimes one hour at a time. One minute. But there was a day, maybe five months in, when I knew that I wanted a drink but I didn’t need one. You dig that?”

  “Yes,” said Crow. Mike put his hand on Crow’s shoulder.

  “I was a month out from earning my chip, but I had the tattoo done and because it was on my chest with every step—every clean step—I was walking toward it. That’s why I put it there. That’s why all of these were there.” He touched his right chest. “My family. My mom was alive when I had this done in Brooklyn. She never turned her back on me, even after I stole money from her for crack. I knew that I was going to get back to see her one day. Clean and sober. I did, too. Best day of my life. She hugged me and we cried for so long I thought I was going to break apart. And here? This is my sister and her kids. I swore I’d be a good brother and a good uncle. Someone they could be proud of. I did, too.”

  He touched over twenty spots on his torso and told the stories of how he climbed out of the pit. His eyes moved back and forth between Mike and Crow, and his finger was unwavering as it sought exactly the right spot. The right memory.

  But there were no images on his skin for anyone to see.

  It was obvious that the old veteran had been as comprehensively tattooed on the front of his torso as he’d been on his back. And there were hints of color, vague shapes, spoiled lines. That was all, though. It was like a sand painting done by either a Navajo healer or a Tibetan monk, because after those paintings were completed they were then erased. In both of those cases, though, the erasure was part of the ritual, part of the healing or the uplifting of the s
oul.

  Not here.

  No.

  What was left looked like something smeared by a malicious hand. At a glance his skin looked melted, like a burn victim’s, but it was smooth. Like a child’s skin before life put its mark on it.

  “How many tattoos did you have there?” asked Mike.

  Raynor brushed his hand from collarbone to navel, the fingers fluttering. “Twenty-six. The first was my chip and the last one I got was my mama’s face.”

  “I thought that was an older one,” said Crow.

  “The first one was.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I had it redone when that first one went away. Same spot. Based on the same photo. Even the same tattoo artist. Coney Island Joe.”

  “You had it redone after it faded?”

  “Three times,” said Raynor. “Last time was at a tattoo place in Doylestown. But then I kind of … you know … stopped trying. I guess I stopped trying to do anything. I had a job back then and a couple of bucks in the bank. Tapped an ATM on Main Street in D-town and went into this little bar across the street. Haven’t gone too many days without a drink since then, and those were days when I was out of cash.”

  “What happened to the tattoo?” asked Crow. “What made it fade like that?”

  “I don’t know. I asked Coney Island Joe, but after the third time he kind of got freaked out. Didn’t want to try again. Didn’t want me back in his shop. Even refunded my money. By then a bunch of the other tattoos were going away. Not the ones on my back, just the ones that mattered, you know?”

  “When did this happen?”

  “First time?” Raynor had to think about it. His eyes were a little glazed from fatigue and pain. “First time my mama left me was sometime in 2000. Don’t remember the date. After that Y2K thing, but not long after. Maybe March.”

  “What about the last time?” asked Mike. “When did the last tattoo disappear?”