Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

FLASH

  Like one in the same shocking bursts, he is back in the scene, the scar seamless, attached to the next portrait in the gallery of his mind like the frames of a film…a moving picture that he does not wish to see, but must relive…a film that need be viewed before his mental director will scream CUT…and the director is there, behind him, massaging his shoulders as he watches from the cavernous cinema of his inner hell, at once within and without, as the three-faced demon’s fingers manipulate the muscles of his mind….

  The chair tingles electric, tickling his flesh.

  Mark giggles away the fear, the surprise that he is not dead, that it does not hurt.

  The lips that surround Dad’s face-eating smile flatten to frown. He looks disbelievingly at the device in his hands, the self-made dial that controls the electrical flow to the cable attached to the chair. He frantically twists on the black knob, and hits it like punching a baseball glove, his knuckles turning bloody.

  Mark feels his muscles loosen. He is no longer scared. The leather straps around his wrists and ankles feel less constricting, less tight. He could probably work his way out of them, but it no longer matters. He watches Dad wrestle with the dial, tugging on the cable, trying to make his torture invention work. It feels good to see Daddy fail. He can fix things, but he cannot make them like Mark can.

  And then Mark sees Mommy, peeking in through the square windows on the garage door. Mommy is smiling.

  Daddy is screaming something now, at Mark. He can’t hear what it is, but he recognizes the curse words. Mark smiles, knowing that Prince Valiant cannot be beaten. Flesh is stronger than metal—hadn’t the Prince said that once?

  Daddy rushes toward him, and begins to hit Mark with the hard plastic control in his fist. It hurts, but not that much—buried in the roaring sound of the generator, the sound of the plastic hitting his head is like a dull thud, a knock at a door. It doesn’t even matter that he cannot use his hands to cover his face. He does not close his eyes. He does not even blink.

  He takes on the punishment. It is painless. He is numb. He imagines that he is just like those mannequins in the stores, like those dummy heads Mommy puts wigs on at the beauty parlor she works at. Hollow and empty and numb. His skull as strong as those combs made of unbreakable plastic.

  Mark giggles, thinking of the song: I’m rubber, you’re glue. What bounces off of me, sticks to you.

  Dad takes one more hit before he stops, the dial spilling out of his hands in pieces, broken. He is crying. Whining and shaking, real tears falling from the lids of his eyes. It is the first time Mark has seen Dad cry.

  And now Mark is more scared than he has ever been in his whole life. Because he feels stronger than Dad. More powerful. And he doesn’t know what to do about it.

  But he has no time to consider it, either, for Mommy is behind Dad now, a long shiny knife arched over her head. Dad manages one wet look up into Mark’s eyes—Is he sorry?—before he shrieks up at the ceiling in pain. Mark does not hear it, it is a silent scream, buried beneath the wail of the electric generator. It doesn’t look real. It is like acting, like a movie with the sound turned off the way Daddy watches sports on Saturdays.

  Mommy raises the blade again, and it trails red blood as it cuts through the air. Now she is smiling, grinning like Dad. Her eyes are black pools of makeup. Her hair is standing statically on its ends, the way Mark looks in the mirror when he first gets out of bed. And he can smell her dead flower perfume even now, over the grease and sweat of the garage.

  Dad falls on his face, his arms limp at their sides. Mommy bends down to stab him again.

  And now Mark knows that the scene before him is real. He slowly pulls against the leather bindings that pin his arms to the metal armrests of the chair. It won’t let him go, as if the chair itself is holding him tight, hugging him on its metal lap.

  Mommy suddenly looks at him, as if seeing him strapped in the chair for the first time. Her face turns bloated, the cheeks puckering out a drooling grin, her purple lips pouting like large wounds. She kneels back up, and begins to crawl toward Mark.

  “Mommy?”

  She does not look up. She hasn’t looked at him yet, at all. Her black-dripping eyes stare at the space between his buckled legs. And she crawls, her head leaning forward like a dog’s, the bloody knife trailing across the floor.

  Mark sees the knife, his brain spitting out what he knows she will do with that sharp blade….

  This little piggy had none, this little piggy had NONE, THIS LITTLE PIGGY HAD NONE!

  And then Dad tackles Mommy, falling on top of her. Her body lands crooked, her head snapping to one side on the concrete floor.

  She does not move after that. She looks like a broken doll.

  Daddy, bleeding, crawls over her motionless body toward the tool bench.

  And falls.

  For the next several hours, Mark stares into Daddy’s dying eyes. Blood trickles from the tear ducts. His back is one giant puddle of red. But he knows that Dad is still alive, because his chest heaves occasionally, like a landed fish on a pier. Each breath he takes causes the puddle on his back to spill over and run to the floor.

  Even when he stops breathing, the blood keeps running, rivulets trailing thick wet lines across the garage, tracing its stain under Mark’s chair, around Mommy’s backward head, next to the legs of the tool bench…

  But Mark keeps his eyes on Daddy’s unblinking eyes. In Daddy’s eyes, like spinning down a spiraling whirlpool. Like being sucked into Daddy’s empty, dead skull, and finding the house of bone empty inside.

  Now it is Mark’s turn. He leans forward in the chair as far as the binds will let him: I see you, Dad. I see YOU this time. I SEE you!

  With a sudden, warming clarity, he now knows why Dad had always told him to never look away, why he would beat Mark if he took his eyes off him. Because it is weak to look away, and shows that you are afraid. And now Mark is afraid of nothing, now that Mommy and Dad are gone. Now Mark is not even afraid of death.

  And it all makes total, perfect sense, until the blood that trickles down from the pool on Daddy’s back reaches the sparking cable next to the generator and sings a song of its own.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I.

  It could have been better.

  Kilpatrick charged into his apartment, swinging the door back behind him in a loud crash. He dropped the tattoo kit to the floor, where it clunked and lolled onto its side. Stomping toward the shackled bedroom door, he purposely kicked the cat out of his way—it screeched like a bat as it ran for cover amid the cardboard boxes that furnished Kilpatrick’s living room. He dug in his pocket for his keys, and, finding them, relaxed.

  He reached up above the doorknob, turned a large padlock toward him, and slid a rusty key into the metal underbelly of the lock. Twisting it to one side, the lock clicked and unshackled on its own accord. He pulled the hook out of the latch, and flung the metal bar that held the door in place to one side. And then he rehooked the lock, cocked open on the shackle. The open padlock swung from side to side on its peg, its violent path scraping the wooden door’s frame in a curved smile.

  He threw open the door.

  Carvers was on her side, her naked back facing him from atop the bed. The curves of her hips stared at him, blankly.

  Good, still here. He tossed the Indian dress on the bed next to her.

  As she snored, he paced the bedroom floor, gathering his thoughts. The job had gone well, even though the museum curator had called the cops. Still, it could have been better: Kilpatrick had planned on hanging the bastard up on the gallery wall like Jesus on the cross, in the spot where the Indian dress had been. Calling the cops meant that the job had to be done elsewhere.

  After strangling the man, he discovered the car keys in his pockets (on a gold key chain that said ARTISTS KNOW WHERE TO DRAW TH
E LINE on it, which was truer than the man knew, Kilpatrick thought). He dragged him by the neck, using the dress like a big leash, toward the fire exit, and out to his car—a big red Chrysler station wagon. He tossed the body in the back seat, and drove out to the wooded area on the outskirts of Fort Carson, where he’d have plenty of time to do the job.

  It was dusk, the mountains beginning to shelter the sun, which gave the car an uncanny glow. Kilpatrick pushed back the seats in the back of the station wagon, creating a flat bed of vinyl, the perfect easel for his next flesh painting. He ceremoniously laid out the portable tattoo gear on the carpeted floor of the car—large bottles of ink, needles, extra latex gloves, and his self-made electric tattoo machine, the King’s crown.

  And then he went to work, inking in the man’s flesh. Across his chest, he drew a miniature portrait of the three-faced demon that drove him, its mouth spitting lightning bolts from between its fanged teeth. The lances of fire were jagged, knife-edged zigzags of white hot light that sparked down toward the curator’s groin. After shaving the man’s scrawny organs, Kilpatrick drew little creatures in his lap, grotesque humans who were impaled by the violent thunderbolts, grimacing in a combination of pain and pleasure. The razored bolts of light were swords of lust, lust swords that wriggled into the little creatures’ bodies, and the man’s groin had then become an orgy of pain, ruled and controlled by the demon of Kilpatrick’s hell.

  Across his back: SENSWORD. A new title, a misleading one, but then Kilpatrick knew that what he was doing was purposely devious. If they weren’t going to play the game his way, then they’d have to figure it all out on their own, the hard way. Still, he did initial the broadsword—after all, he wasn’t about to go public anonymously, was he?—with his royal title: MKI, Mark Kilpatrick the First. Mark, King of Inkland.

  Next came the best part, the most important part of the process—the photograph. He peered into the eyepiece of the camera, and then clicked the button.

  The flash was instantaneous, a blinding burst of light that seemed endless—like a blink in slow motion, a waking sleep. He didn’t remember much from his latest visit to his mental gallery…just that he had revisited his parents. But now it was gone, no longer even a memory. The flash was over and he was back in the real world, staring down at the censored, stinking body. It was dark outside, near dawn. He felt cleansed. Another portrait in the gallery inside was gone, set free—forever.

  But he still had work to do.

  He drove back to the museum, meandering the station wagon through the empty streets. Driving by the museum, he noticed that a police car was there—still there—from the curator’s call for help. But the police were inside the building, as far as he could tell, and so he parked the car half a block away, unnoticed. Then he jogged to his chopper parked three blocks from there, and roared across town. When he found a secluded pay phone, he called the Gazette, and then rodded home.

  Home. Where he was now, staring absentmindedly at the photographs and trophies on his wall. He slipped the new photos out of his back pocket, grabbed a few pins from his plastic bowl, and tacked them beside the others. Coolie, the hooker, the square canvas of his self-portrait…and now these. His family was multiplying, encircling the article from the Gazette in the center. The whole photo gallery was octagonal now, like a glossy, psychedelic stop sign. Or a photo scrapbook, mapping out his escape from Hell.

  He heard a light moan. A stirring on the bed.

  He turned around, and looked at Carvers. “Get up, beautiful.”

  Her eyes suddenly shot open, red and veined, but dried out like old and yellowing boiled eggs. Dry, from too many tears.

  Kilpatrick crossed his arms, flashing her an approving fatherly smile. The tattoos that covered Carvers’ body had an excellent composition to them. All were basically the same object, but each round, half-dollar-sized image had its own unique nuance, and special meaning to Kilpatrick. Each piece was special; it was the minute details which separated one from another.

  All were different colors, different shades. All had varying amounts of veins, different-sized black circles in the centers, different-shaped cusps and shafts of hair around them. Some expressed shock, others expressed love.

  But all—all six thousand and twenty of them—were eyeballs. When Carvers moved, just a little bit, they all came alive: winking, glaring, accusing, teasing, ogling, staring, wrinkling…a multititude of eyes.

  A deserving tattoo for a witness. That’s what she got for being in Coolie’s apartment that night when it all began. He couldn’t take any chances. Finding her—at Chet’s Bar, obliterated—was easy. Picking her up and taking her home was a bit more difficult, but well worthwhile. At first it hadn’t seemed important, but because Coolie had died, she was now an eyewitness.

  Eyewitness…just like the news.

  And she was witnessing a hell of a lot now. With all of her glorious eyes. Her flesh a tapestry of sight.

  Kilpatrick looked down at Carvers. She was drifting off, the two dried eyeballs in the middle of her face sinking into themselves. He quickly grabbed the bowl of thumbtacks, and plunked one into her shoulder, putting out one of the eyes. A teardrop of blood trickled out from its pupil. “Wake up, beautiful. Wake up.” He fished inside the bowl and withdrew another tack. “The eye of the needle never closes…”

  II.

  Lockerman sighed. “Listen, Mutt and Jeff. Next time I tell you to hold down the press, you hold them down. Got it?”

  Krantz raised his shoulders, turning his wrists up. Lockerman winced at the pus dripping out of his pocked face, like milky sweat. “How was I supposed to know that there was something in the trunk, Sarge? I can’t predict the future…”

  “Clamp it,” Lockerman said. He felt uncomfortable playing the heavy, but it felt good, too, letting off some steam in the rookies’ faces. “I can predict your future on the force if you don’t get rid of your fucking attitude and start following orders. And as for you, Collins…”

  Collins audibly gulped.

  “You best start pulling your weight around here. You’ve been flap-dickin’ since you first got assigned to this unit.”

  The rookie looked down at his lap, ashamed.

  “Now both of you, get the fuck out of my face.” He looked away, facing the concrete wall as if disgusted at their presence.

  He heard their chairs nervously shuffle, their quick footsteps fading, merging with the rest of the office activity.

  The Gazette stared up at him, beside the rookies’ report. The two documents were almost identical. Both had pictures, and both accurately described the crime.

  But there was one thing that the press didn’t have photographs of—something that would no doubt make the brewing public scare that was about to take over the town even worse. A chicken-scratch manifesto, inked into the curls of both of Rodriquez’ large earlobes: NO SPIKZ. NO NIGZ. NO INJUNS. NO CHIKZ. NO PITY. NO NEWZ.

  Lockerman hated the faceless bastard even more than he already had—if there was a threshold to hate. Not only was he some lunatic with a twisted idea of art, but a racist pig on top of it all. And after a lifelong battle against discrimination in his everyday life, finding out that the Tattoo Killer was a racist only brought back the memories of that battle.

  His worst fight against bigotry was not a personal battle, but a public one. When he was a lowly PFC in the force, he was suspended for beating the living shit out of a skinhead who called himself the leader of a neo-Nazi group. It cost him his stripes, and nearly got him kicked out of the force. Lockerman knew—even while pummeling the pale faced fucker in the nose—that his brutality was manifest in a pent-up frustration with bigots his whole life. The neo-Nazi punk was a symbol of every racist he ever met, every sneer he’d received on the street, every job or grade he didn’t get during and after high school. And every punch felt good, even when the head-shaven teenager w
as in a coma.

  But he’d changed his ways since then—how long ago was that? His wife was alive then, so…six years?—and had slowly jumped through the hoops that the department held up for him to get his stripes back. All three were now on his arm; all three were going to stay there.

  At least, until he found the psycho.

  He leaned back in his wooden chair, which creaked beneath his weight. The case was still going nowhere, and now the whole city was going to know about it thanks to Collins and Krantz. At least they hadn’t found the racist slurs on Rodriquez’ ears…that would only increase tensions. And the Gazette hadn’t seen the Killer’s initials, either. The usual and meaningless MKI was inked into the pink, scabby goop where Rodriquez’ toenails should have been. Except this time the block letters had been crossed out with a large, ugly “X.” Lockerman prayed that the “X” was supposed to fit into the artist’s twisted notion of censorship. That the letter could actually be another Roman numeral was unthinkable—ten bodies missing?

  Lockerman pushed that thought out of his mind, considering the investigation of the museum, and the Indian rain-dancing dress that had covered the wall space of the confiscated square canvas of flesh. No doubt the Killer took the dress with him, though God only knew why. Perhaps he had used it to strangle Rodriquez…his neck had abrasions on it that could have been caused by the fabric. But why would a killer who hated other races than his own take an Indian dress? Convenience? For a disguise?

  Lockerman suddenly sat up, realizing that he had just stumbled onto two important clues. The first clue was that because the Killer was a racist, he was probably Caucasian—it was the only race remaining in his tattooed rant that he hadn’t said “NO” to. His second clue was that if he found the Indian dress, then he’d probably find his man as well. These two clues were hardly significant, but at least they were something to go on, other than a couple of scribbled letters that might or might not be initials.