Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  The arm of the chair is cold metal. The whole chair is metal, one of the ones they used to have around the kitchen table. Mark’s butt hurts, and he realizes that Dad has taken out the cushion to punish him. The steel frame bites into his bones, cramping his spine. Mark struggles against the bindings, but there is no room for him to slip his arms or legs out, no room to escape the pain.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Mark asks.

  Dad laughs. “I saw you.”

  Why won’t he stop saying that? What did he see?

  And then it hits him.

  Me and Mommy. He saw me and mommy.

  And he’s MAD.

  Mark suddenly feels guilty. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but he now realizes that what Mommy did was somehow wrong. It didn’t feel right when she did it, either…it felt yucky…but she’s Mommy, and she said it was all right. She said it was good.

  Dad turns to face Mark. He still has that funny look on his face, he’s still all dirty and scary.

  And he has something in his hands.

  “What are you going to do to me, Dad?” Mark has already accepted the fact that he will be punished, tortured. It has happened before, and he is used to the pain. Punishment still hurts, but not as much as it did at first. It is the surprise that really hurts, not being ready for it like he is now. He knows something is coming and he accepts it, accepts it to make it not hurt as much when it finally arrives.

  He expects Daddy to be holding a tool, but he is not. The object is too small, hidden by the palm of his father’s hand.

  Dad just smiles that crazy pumpkin smile, as if eating his own face with his top teeth.

  And then Mark sees the wire. Trailing from the thing in Dad’s hands and attaching to a cable. The big cable is hooked up to Dad’s big metal machine—a generator—and the other side of the cable leads to…

  His chair. His metal chair.

  Dad reaches over and turns on the generator. It is loud, like the choo-choo trains that sometimes shake the house late at night, or like the motorcycle that Daddy burned him with.

  “NO!” he screams as loud as he can, till his throat hurts, but Daddy can’t hear him, Mark can’t hear himself, and no one else could possibly hear him over the roaring engine. Daddy looks like he’s laughing, but Mark can’t hear him, and it doesn’t matter anymore, because Daddy is turning the dial on the tiny black box in his hand. He’s turning the switch, and now Mark can hear something, something sharp, something clacking and fizzing, something like a spark singing “I SEE YOU!” down the thick greasy cable as it moves closer and closer towards his cold metal chair, and he feels like Prince Valiant being tortured in his very own throne….

  Kilpatrick spasms from the mental jolt of white hot light, frantically opening his eyes to devour the reality around him.

  He sees the open wound, the exposed innards, and the brand new photograph…a trophy for his wall…a brand new child, spawned from his mental gallery…and he knows that everything is going to be all right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I.

  Murder had become an art form in itself. A craft, that took precise knowledge and ability in order to achieve a particular effect. Creation and destruction were acts that had always required the exact same resource: an artist’s vision. And it was the artist that mattered, as much as the art itself, for both existed simultaneously. Mark Michael Kilpatrick knew this, and lived this, in order to achieve his one and only goal: to go public.

  And he was certain that he was well on his way: Coolie had been seen on the news, and his masterpiece canvas in the museum was also on display. It didn’t matter, he realized, if the tattoos were on living bodies or dead ones, whether the skin was attached or not. All that truly mattered was that his artwork was out and circulating among the public at large; out there, out of his mind.

  The television set was blank in his bedroom, a gray slate like a blackboard begging for chalk. He still wanted to get on the news, needed to see his wondrous visions on public display. The three-faced demon of his own creation had not punished him since the museum—in fact it had rewarded him with dreamless sleep—but Kilpatrick knew that it would punish him again, if he did not get on the TV news. He had hoped that the museum piece would make it, but it only made the local newspaper. That was okay; he was confident that going public was only a matter of time. Plans were still in the works for that; irons were in the fire, glowing bright red. The newspaper would have to do for now. The article didn’t have jack to say about the content of his latest work, but it acknowledged his existence, nevertheless. Progress was being made. He was making a name for himself.

  Lying on his bed in his underwear, he reread the small type of the Gazette’s page 7B article for the seventh time this morning. The headline read: BURGLAR STEALS THE SHOW AT LOCAL MUSEUM. The article told the story about how an unknown “frustrated artist” had sneaked into the museum to put his work on display. Quoted in the article was the museum’s curator, Michael Rodriquez, who said, “I have never seen art quite like the one this burgling artist had made. I won’t describe it for you, because you’d just censor it out of your news article anyway. All I will tell you is that I am both shocked and appalled.”

  Kilpatrick ate it up. “Artist!” he shouted aloud. “They’re calling me an artist! Finally! They have recognized my talent. They are appreciating me.” He focused on the words “shocked and appalled.” Considering the fact that the flesh-painting was a self-portrait, he was a little upset by these words, but not much. “I am shocking and appalling. As any good artist should be…shit, they ain’t seen nothing yet. They want shock? I’ll give ‘em shock.”

  He shook his head and finished the rest of the article, reading the bad news that followed the good news. News that said his grand masterpiece had been confiscated by the police department. News that said it was unlawful to display artwork in a public forum funded by city tax dollars. News that said the policeman who confiscated the art was refusing to comment. News that spelled that officer’s name in bold-faced letters: Sergeant John F. Lockerman.

  Confiscated. That meant that his greatest attempt to go public had been squelched. Or even—what did that curator say?—censored.

  But he made the newspaper. That was enough, for now, to soothe his mental demon. His plans were working, slowly but surely, and he was going public. Almost free from the scathing lashes of his tormentor.

  He stood, used a razor blade to cut the article out of the newspaper—a perfect square, just as he had cut once before for his canvas of flesh—and tacked it in the center of his Polaroid-laden wall. The article itself would now be the centerpiece of his photo gallery; the shiny color photos made a box around the excised article in their arrangement, a frame of inked-skin gore.

  He looked at the photographs of the piece he had donated to the museum, the throned king. It was like looking into a mirror. He stood straight and thrust his chest out: “Obey me, minions! I am your maker! I am ruler of flesh and ivory! I am Mark Michael Kilpatrick the First, King of Inkland!”

  He saluted his photo gallery.

  “You’re sick.”

  He quickly turned. “Shut up, bitch!” He rushed over to the far corner of the bedroom, beside the trash can, and brought his multicolored forearm down against the bruised and battered face of Cheri Carvers.

  II.

  It was late Thursday morning, and Roberts sat alone in his kitchen, letting the fresh-ground coffee stoke the glowing coals of his morning mind, forcing it to awaken in the real, living world, burning off the dead world of his dreams.

  The image of the Tattoo Killer’s latest victim—a disembodied chunk of flesh—had haunted his sleep. In the dream, he was naked and tattooed in motley colors, a jester for the ugly creature, entertaining the throned king in a cemetery-turned-courtyard. He had danced for the king, his bony toes sinking into the wet earth of fresh graves
as the king’s subjects watched and laughed. The subjects of the court sat cross-legged on tombstones—tablets of flesh tattooed with names and dates; the subjects themselves were skinned bones that dangled stringy muscles and entrails, meaty skeletons without eyes, clapping their jawbones together as they laughed at his dance.

  That was about all he could remember from the dream, the graveyard setting and the king laughing at his antics. He was juggling something for the king, too, yet he couldn’t quite recall what it was. He just remembered squeezing the three wet and mushy balls in his hands and being disgusted enough to jolt awake. They had felt like bags of blood or skull-less heads or castrated testicles. He wanted to drop them, but the king kept them spinning in the air above him.

  Roberts rubbed his eyes (they, too, felt like the wet and bloated things he had juggled in his sleep), trying to rub the nightmare away as well.

  How could that stupid photograph from the museum be so damned powerful that it would give me such a nightmare?

  Sipping the hot, bitter coffee, he recalled Corky’s words: images are sights, man. Reality. If you can see something, it’s really there.

  And if that was true, then it naturally followed that the Tattoo Killer’s reality was really fucked up. Hearing about the psycho’s victims through Lockerman was terrible enough…but now he’d taken a glance at true insanity when he saw the gold-framed menace Lockerman had shown him. And it had felt like he had held the skin of a dead man in his hands.

  It was as if he’d been seeing things from a distance all along. Now he had been exposed to the bitter reality of it all; the psychosis was now a part of him. The Tattoo Killer had stitched a sick part of himself not only into his victims, but into Roberts’ mind, as well. It was like watching a rape scene and not telling anyone about it. An infection by complicity, by just being exposed to the thing itself.

  He felt sick, dirty. Inside and out.

  Unshowered, Roberts threw on a T-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, thinking that the news he reported on day in and day out was no different from the Killer’s imagery. Both exposed the world to psychosis, both infected the innocent. And just like a couch potato watching the five o’clock report, Roberts was a passive observer.

  It was time for him to get involved.

  He lit a cigarette and looked at the calendar next to his refrigerator. It still said May in bold black letters above a photograph of Cheyenne Mountain. He stood up, walked over to the page of dates and flipped it over, moving his eyes to the correct date: Thursday, June 4.

  He moved out the front door, locking it behind him, and headed to Corky’s. It was time to tell him the truth. After all, Corky was reliable, trustworthy. He wouldn’t “narc on a bro.” Maybe he could find out more about the way that serial sicko out there thought, what made him tick…and maybe how he would make a mistake. What the hell, he’d appointed himself a pseudo deputy to Lockerman anyway. Any background information might help.

  So would talking to the guy. It’d help a lot. Roberts needed to be around an image maker who was real—real, and not insane. A strong-willed artist who could bring the good out in the world through his vision of it. Someone who shared his talents freely with others, not forcing them to take it. Not a rapist of the flesh in the ugliest of senses, permanently staining their souls with his twisted reality.

  A friend.

  A new friend whose least favorite days of the week were “fucking Thursdays.” Maybe he could wipe that ugly “Ruler of Flesh and Ivory” from his mind and cheer his new buddy up in the process.

  Or maybe he just needed a stiff drink.

  III.

  When he stepped in the door of Corky’s shop, the cowbell above the door clanked and Corky looked over his shoulder. “Hey, if it ain’t the typewriter man!”

  “Hiya, Corky.”

  Roberts walked up to where the bearded biker was standing, his tattooed bulk towering over an aluminum table in the back of the shop. Corky was wearing a blue cotton tank top, a leather belt, blue jeans, and black leather boots. Looking at his back, Roberts noticed white strings of fabric that were tied in a knot behind his waist.

  An apron?

  Roberts looked over Corky’s shoulder.

  The artist had something slimy and oblong in his hands, a tube of flesh with two stalked eyes jutting out above a mass of long, wretched tentacles. He threw it down hard on the butcher’s paper-covered table. It audibly squished and jiggled.

  Roberts jumped back—it reminded him of something horrid and supernatural, like the things he’d juggled in last night’s dream.

  Why did I come here…

  “What’s the matter mountain man? Never seen squid before?” Corky chuckled, the cigarette in his mouth dropping ashes onto the beast as his lips quivered.

  “That’s a squid?” Roberts dared another peek at the orange wet thing. “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “Just came in by UPS this morning.” Corky blew gray smoke from his nostrils. “There’s this kick-ass fish company in Seattle—at the Farmer’s Market, heard of it?—that ships these puppies on ice. Fairly cheap, considering how much it should cost. Hell, if it wasn’t for my quad, I don’t know how I’d afford these luxurious things.” He petted the sea creature like a cat and looked up at Roberts. “Tattooing isn’t exactly the most profitable business there is, you know?”

  “What’s a ‘quad’?” Roberts asked, only half-listening, staring at the ugly squid.

  “A fourplex, dummy. I own the friggin’ dump I live in, and rent out the rooms as apartments. Piece of shit. Used to be worth something when I put my vet’s money into it way back when, but nowadays…shit, I barely make it as it is. Squid’s a luxury, all right, but it’s worth it even if it bankrupts me.”

  Corky slid a thin, long knife from its sheath on his brown leather belt, and quickly sliced off the tips of the six arms and two tentacles that jutted from the mouth of the fish like a really bad moustache, then cut them from the rest of the body. Next he began pounding them with a ballpeen hammer, apparently tenderizing the meat. “Good stuff, squid. I ate it by the buckets in ‘Nam. You think this looks gross, you should see how they dice ‘em and slice ‘em there. They stick their fingers down the things’ throats and yank ‘em inside out…” Corky looked up at Roberts, who was gaping at the dissected creature. “Never mind.”

  Corky grabbed the appendages in his fist, walked over to a space on the floor behind his desk, and plopped them into a cast iron pot of water boiling on a hotplate. He wiped his hands on his apron, withdrew two beers from his mini refrigerator, and handed one to Roberts.

  Corky raised his can in the air, alluding to a toast, then slammed back the can, chugging the pilsner down. He belched, louder than Schoenmacher ever possibly could, and said: “Knew you’d come back someday. You want another tat, don’t ya?”

  “Well…” Roberts gripped his beer can by its very bottom, avoiding the squid slime Corky had gotten on it.

  “Of course ya do. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish business back here first.” He walked over to the rest of the squid in the back of the room, his boots clomping on the floor. “Come on, I want you to see this.”

  Roberts followed.

  Corky withdrew the knife again, and picked up the squid, standing it up to face him. A strange-looking face stared up at them. “If you want to know how to cook a squid, the first thing you need to do is take out the bad parts.” Corky quickly dug out the beaklike mouth of the beast, and then flipped it over, reaming out its anus. Then he flipped it back over so the dead eyes were staring dryly at nothing in particular.

  To Roberts, they looked like the dead sockets of the king in his nightmare, the Tattoo Killer’s artwork.

  Corky carefully dug around the perimeter of the eye sockets, and withdrew the yellow sacks and attached ganglia, flinging the organs on the white but
cher’s paper. “But I ain’t cooking this puppy—just the tentacles, for chewin’ on. What I want is back here…” Corky slid the knife slowly, expertly, into the opening he had made at the squid’s eye sockets, and made a quick cut. With his free hand, he dug into the squid’s face with two fingers, and withdrew a blackish yellow sac.

  Roberts was disgusted, but his voice was solid. The beer had shot instantly to his head. “What’s that? Its brains?”

  “Nope. Sepia.” Corky carefully tied a knot in the thin tube at the end of the sac. “Squid ink.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yup, nothing like it in the world.”

  “That’s a pretty extravagant way to get ink, isn’t it? Couldn’t you get it by the bottle cheaper?”

  “Well, typewriter man…I like to eat the tentacles, like I said. Reminds me of the good ol’ days in ‘Nam. Plus --” he swung the fish knife in the air like a bayonet—“I like to cut things.”

  Cut things? THINGS? Like the square of flesh found in the museum…like THAT thing? Roberts felt himself pale. He suddenly was not so sure of Corky anymore. He didn’t think he could possibly be the Tattoo Killer, but…he obviously wasn’t totally sane. Especially if he looked back on his days in the Vietnam War with fond remembrance.

  “Whatsamatter? Didn’t scare ya, did I?” Corky was grinning.

  “Nah. Just quit being so loose with that knife, would ya? Nearly hit me.”

  “So…you want me to cut it out, eh?” He chuckled falsely. “Okay.”

  Corky set the ink sac—which looked like a flabby balloon filled with ink, a wet, mushy thing about the size of those gross balls Roberts had juggled in his sleep—into a small baby food jar, and capped it. Then he took off his apron, tossed it next to the dead squid, and washed his hands in an aluminum sink.