Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  He looked at the page opposite the Doberman artwork. It was a story, entitled “Burn Out.” Fiction, probably. Roberts wondered if the story was half as good as the art it accompanied. He decided to find out, to kill time.

  IV.

  BURN OUT

  by

  J.R. Corcorrhan

  She was beautiful. But it was the ugliest damned tattoo Bonz had ever seen in his life: a cheap attempt at a skull’s profile, with a gory pink tongue twice the size of the ivory skull dangling from between its rotten teeth, as if the tongue were biting the skull and not the other way around. The face was oval and elongated, looking somewhat like the head of a dog once flattened by a semi. Beneath the sloppy artwork was the name PATRICK in blurry, zigzagging letters. The novice job was enough to make Bonz turn his head and raise an arm, waving the ugly mess away in disgust.

  “So will you do it?” Mary asked, her blue eyes shooting flames at Bonz, demanding an answer. She thrust the inked bicep at him, forcing him to look.

  Bonz blanched at the scene she was making in front of the crowd at the Corkscrew Bar and Grill. “How could I say no to a tattoo like that fucking piece of shit?” Someone at the bar chuckled loudly, as if in agreement.

  Bonz relaxed as Mary rolled down her long sleeve, enshrouding the ugly skull. “Good. Let’s go then.”

  The pair left The Corkscrew, Bonz following Mary’s chopper back to her place. As she led him into her decrepit shack of a house—gray splintered shingles, stained white painted walls, and dead grass—Bonz flinched at the bark of a dog from somewhere behind the yellow-wallpapered walls of the living room.

  Mary noticed his nerves. “Don’t worry, man. Chewy is locked in the bedroom. Helluva dog. Scares the shit out of me sometimes, but I need him for protection. Ever since Pat left…” Her voice trailed off to a whisper as she reached for a pack of Winstons from a wooden coffee table.

  Bonz crossed his heavy arms and nodded. He understood what it was like for a woman living alone these days, though he could hardly believe that this Patrick guy had left her voluntarily. But fuck the personal shit, he thought. Let’s get down to business.

  Speaking of ‘Patrick,’ why don’t we get started here, so we can get rid of him for good. But you gotta understand, my methods aren’t exactly painless, nor foolproof…” He raised an eyebrow, checking to see if Mary would back down. Despite the money she offered, he hoped she would.

  She puffed on her cigarette, nodding. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all before. Fuck the pain. No pain, no gain, right?” She flashed Bonz a bitchy grin. “I just want the damned thing gone, so spare me the lecture.”

  “Well, you get what you pay for, and I ain’t no doctor, so I can’t promise you anything.” Bonz set the blue gym bag he carried with him down on the coffee table, and quickly unzipped it. “But I haven’t failed to get rid of a tattoo yet. I don’t know what people have told ya about my, uh…service…so here’s the deal. For fifty bucks, I’ll do all the work. You just sit there and sit still and I’ll burn the fucker right off. That’s all there is to it. No fancy skin grafts, no cover-ups, no blades or laser beams, no nothing…just pure flames.”

  Mary stamped out her cigarette, having sucked the Winston down to the butt in a matter of seconds. She nervously shrugged her shoulders. “Sounds good to me. Let’s just get it over with, okay?”

  “Not so fast,” Bonz replied, flashing her his teeth. “First a little anesthesia…” He reached down in his bag and withdrew a fifth of 151 rum, handing the bottle to her like a waiter. “There you go, madame.”

  Mary’s chest heaved in an obvious sigh of relief. She quickly uncapped it and took a swig.

  Then he pulled out another bottle. And another.

  * * *

  The drinking started slowly, the both of them doing the occasional shot between beers. Led Zeppelin’s third album poured softly out of the speakers that hung from the corners of the living room concert-style. But soon they began slamming the rum, gulping it down like a drowning man swallows air—and it had become much like air, smooth and tasteless, routinely necessary. Judas Priest now screamed for vengeance as it throbbed out of the speakers, rattling the walls and drowning out Chewy’s voracious barking.

  Bonz thought it was cute the way Mary would excuse herself like a lady to use the restroom, only to return moments later to down the liquor like a marine. He hoped she could handle the fire to come like a jarhead, too.

  But he had to admit it: this girl could party. It seemed like years since he’d had such a good time prepping for a tattoo removal, and he figured that that was because this time he was doing it with a knockout blonde rather than some scrawny wimp who can’t get his mind off the upcoming torture. Mary had more guts than half the assholes he’d done this for, and this was sexy in its own way. If she could handle the pain of being torched, God only knew what else she could handle….

  The Priest tape ended, and so did the first bottle of booze. The silence in the room was getting ugly, so he finally asked her about the tattoo. “Okay, I give up. Who’s Patrick, and how did you end up getting such shitty work done on your arm?”

  “Pat’s my ex,” she said, rolling her eyes as if this were common knowledge. “But he still pops by sometimes. I just sick Chewy on him. Anyway, after a year or so after we got hitched, he asked…no, demanded…that I get a tattoo with his name on it. He called it a ‘vow to him’ or some stupid shit like that. As if marrying the bastard wasn’t enough!” She lit a cigarette from a second pack, placing it in the yellow-stained edge of a brimming ashtray. “Anyway, I knew we were on the rocks, so I told him no.” She took a shot of booze, wincing. “But good old Patrick, he had to have his way like always, and he forced me to get the tattoo, to make the vow. It wouldn’t have been so bad, I supposed, if he hadn’t done the work himself—he was no artist, believe me. Man, he sure did fuck it up, not using the proper equipment and all. What a loser…don’t know what the hell I saw in the guy.”

  She rolled up her sleeve and looked at the ugly ink on her bicep. The twisted letters of his name proved to Bonz how much of an idiot this Patrick guy was, and he knew that Mary was being honest with him, just by the look of the thing. “Well, Mary, I see what you mean. If I ever meet this guy, I’ll personally tear out his equipment, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  She chuckled, spewing smoke from her nostrils like a drunken dragon. “I know, I know…I married an asshole. But like he said after he put his name on my arm, Now I’m his forever. He was right, too.” She frowned.

  “I don’t follow ya,” Bonz said warily. “I thought you hated the guy.”

  Mary stared at the floor as she spoke: “It’s as if he’s still around, sometimes. I’ll be watching the tube, and swear I hear him in the basement, making those weird sounds he used to make. Or I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, thinking he’s lying on top of me, waking me up for a quick thrill. I have nightmares about the bastard, and they are so real. I swear he’s still here, punishing me.” She looked around the room as if looking for ghosts.

  Bonz reached over and softly placed a hand on her cheek, to get her attention. “C’mon, Mary. You know he’s gone. He’s probably shacked up with another gal somewhere, using her just like he used you. And you can bet he won’t be hanging around here with that Doberman you got locked up in the bedroom.” He laughed, almost convincing himself of what he was saying.

  She looked up at him blankly. “You just don’t get it, do you? He’s still here, man. I know how he does it, too.” She lit another smoke off the butt of the last one. “He was into the occult. Heavy stuff. I just ignored it when he did that shit in the basement—lighting black candles and stinky incense, chanting like a moron, and all that stuff, just like ya see it in the movies—but now I can’t ignore it anymore. It won’t go away. It’s like he’s still down there in the basement, still doing his stupid rit
uals!”

  “But he’s gone, Mary, he’s gone. You’re just imagining it—your memories are getting the best of you. Let him go.”

  “I can’t. I know he did something to this tattoo. He possessed it somehow, I just know it!” She shot him the same burning eyes she did at the Corkscrew, when she first approached him. The eyes that made him say yes against his better judgment. “And you’ve got to get rid of this fucking tattoo! It’s cursed! Burn it off! Right now!”

  She shoved her sleeve up to her shoulder like a junkie, revealing the full grotesque profile of the oval skull. Its eyes seemed to glow like pearls as its rotten jagged teeth smiled dauntingly up at Bonz. It was as if the tattoo were daring him to even try to get rid of it.

  He froze. He looked up into her wet, hungry blue eyes, and was suddenly overwhelmed by her intensity. Blonde hair draped and curled around her dilated eyes like silk curtains. Her lips were slits of soft pink. His gut lurched as he fought back the urge to grab her, pull her over to his lap, and kiss her.

  Suddenly, he knew that he couldn’t go through with the job. How could he burn the very flesh he desired? How could he torch the tanned skin that he wanted to kiss and caress?

  Her cheeks flushed bright red with anger. “Well if you won’t fucking do it, I will!” Before Bonz knew what was happening, Mary had grabbed the bottle of rum and doused her arm with the flammable liquor. A lighter was in her hand, and she thumbed the wheel.

  He lunged forward, tackling her to the shag carpet. She struggled beneath his weight, thrashing her arms like an epileptic as she gargled insanely in pain: “Let me do it! You fucking bastard, let me do it!”

  He held her tightly against his chest, managing to strip the lighter from her hand. He pinned her arms behind her own back. He held tight—like a human straitjacket—and her convulsions slowed, her muscles loosened and relaxed. Soon, their breathing subsided, but Mary avoided his stare, as if ashamed.

  “You need to get rid of him, Mary, but not that way. Burning that tat off will still leave a permanent scar—it won’t be the skull, and it won’t be the ‘vow,’ but it will be there forever, an eternal reminder of that fuckhead and what he did to you.”

  Mary pouted her lips, but he thought she understood.

  “What you need is something to cover it up, something to cover him up.” Bonz felt himself blushing, his face getting hot. “What you need is someone who cares about you. Not some asshole like him…but, you know, someone you can just have a good time with.” His mind drifted as he felt her heat beneath him. “Someone like me.”

  She looked up at him with wet eyes. It was as if she had been waiting for him to say it all along. Her lips parted, and their mouths met in a hungry kiss of lapping and probing tongues. She writhed beneath him like a cat.

  They began to undress each other, tossing their shirts across the room, when Bonz had a sudden, guilty urge. To piss. His raised his head from her neck, not knowing how to put it. “Uh…can I trust you alone for a minute while I go answer nature’s call?”

  Mary smiled. “Of course. Nothing’s burning ‘round here, except the hots I got for you, babe.”

  She was drunk, he knew, but seemed to have changed her mind about the whole tattoo removal. He stood up, confident that she would be safe alone, and walked toward the bathroom. A bra landed on his shoulder. “Don’t take too long, honey.”

  Her bathroom was nicely decorated, like a shrine for her cosmetics. He felt odd standing in the overtly feminine bathroom, relieving himself. But it felt good, too, as the stream flowed from his groin, clear as a firehose putting out a burning toilet.

  He noticed an overturned medicine bottle next to the sink. Stooping over, he picked up the bottle and read the label, the water steadily trickling in the background like a gutter after a rainstorm. They were barbiturates, and he thought it might be a good idea to pocket a few. He uncapped the bottle, and saw that it was half empty.

  She took these to kill the pain. No wonder she’s acting so weird.

  He tossed the brown bottle in the sink and forced the river from his bladder, wishing it would hurry the fuck up.

  Purged, he ran out to the living room without even bothering to zip.

  She was on the floor, completely naked, having stripped all the way for him. Her flesh was white and cheesy, like blank paper.

  And she wasn’t breathing.

  He stared at the vision that both aroused and frightened him as Chewy barked from behind the yellow-wallpapered walls of the living room, as if urging him to get out.

  * * *

  A week later, he sat on her sofa with a bottle of tequila clutched in his hand. He was waiting, waiting for this Patrick guy to come around. He didn’t have the chance to remove the tattoo that Mary had so desperately wanted to get rid of, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t get rid of the artist who had put it there in the first place. She had said that the guy showed up from time to time, and so Bonz waited for him to show himself. It was his own vow…the promise he made to Mary, dead on the floor.

  The cops had answered his call that night. They obviously didn’t trust him because of his looks, but his sugar-coated version of what happened seemed to satisfy them. They told him to stick around town till the investigation was over, but there didn’t seem to be much of an investigation anyway—he hadn’t seen the cops since they zipped her up in a black bag and took her away.

  But he didn’t need an investigation to tell him what really happened. She’d overdosed, true, but it wasn’t the mix of downers and alcohol that took her life. It was Patrick and his damned mark on her body, as sure as if he’d taken a gun to her temple and shot her.

  It wasn’t necessarily love that made him stay, though it could be. It was more the fact that it seemed like his duty to finish his job—a distinct part of his underground mission to rid the world of ugliness. Burning off people’s burdens was a horrible job, but a necessary one.

  The phone rang and Bonz caught his breath.

  He violently picked it up. “Who the fuck is it?”

  “Sir, this is Lieutenant Grace down at the sheriff’s department. We need you to come down to the morgue to identify the body.”

  “What? I was here the night they bagged her!”

  “Sir, I know this is uncomfortable for you, but it’s merely a post-mortem formality. We need to have this done before we can, uh, let the body rest in peace.”

  Rest in peace, he thought. There’s probably nothing in the world that Mary needed more than that. “I’ll be right down.”

  The county morgue was polished and clean, but Bonz could smell the death lingering beneath the chemical scent of lime that weakly covered it up, like a cheap block of pine in a clogged urinal.

  Bonz didn’t recognize the faces of the morgue attendants. They escorted him to an aluminum drawer and opened it. The corpse was enshrouded with a long white sheet. The cloth was immaculate, but Bonz knew better.

  When they lifted the sheet from her face, Mary looked somehow different…. This is the wrong body, he thought at first, but held the idea back, realizing that she had merely been transformed by death’s sick idea of plastic surgery. Her pink lips were now purple, her face pale and lifeless; but she appeared younger, too, more innocent and childlike. Almost grinning, almost smiling at her escape from life.

  He had to be sure. “Let me see her arm,” he asked, his voice lower than usual. They folded the sheet down her body as if ceremoniously folding a flag, revealing her once-lovely and inviting torso.

  The skull tattoo was gone.

  But he was sure it was her. Changed as she was, she was still beautiful, he still felt the attraction he had for her weeks ago. “It’s Mary,” he said, and turned, half jogging out of the morgue, as mixed up in his mind as the disturbing odors that entered his lungs.

  * * *

  Back a
t Mary’s shack, he quickly ran to the bathroom. The filth and decay of the morgue felt like it was all over his skin, like a thin sheet of sweat. He stripped in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at himself, making sure that he was a hundred percent there…seeing Mary’s arm without the tattoo was disturbing him. It had to still be there—perhaps the mortician had applied makeup to cover up the horrendous artwork to give her a little dignity in death?

  He looked up into the mirror, and something moved. A sudden fear tingled the back of his neck, his long hair itchy like cobwebs.

  There’s someone hiding in the shower…Patrick?

  He aimed for the shadows and tackled the plastic curtain, ramming his head into the tiles. The tub was empty. No one was there. Not quite ready to believe that he was alone, he searched the corners of the shower, checked behind the bathroom door, and peeked in the the tiny triangle of space behind the toilet bowl. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  You idiot, you let that morgue get to you, didn’tcha?

  He shook his head and smirked at himself in the mirror.

  And then, again, he saw something shift in the mirror, dodging his peripheral vision. But this time he stopped himself, concentrating on the area of movement, trying to catch whatever it was in the act.

  And then he saw it—the familiar skull, a drooling pink tongue wriggling between its tombstone teeth. And it was not beside him or behind him or around him, but on his chest, spread insanely between his nipples, much larger than it ever had been on Mary’s arm.

  He shuddered, checking his body.

  And it faded, an afterimage melting into flesh tones, its outline transmuting to goose pimples. Gone.