by Brian Bowyer
Marla nodded.
The cop set the gun down on the floor. From his gym bag, he retrieved four items: a knife, a roll of duct tape, a collar, and a leash. He placed the four items on the floor.
He removed Marla’s shoes, socks, pants, and panties. He put them in the gym bag. He picked the knife up and cut away her shirt and her bra. He put those in the gym bag, too. He taped her mouth shut. He snapped the leather collar around her neck. The collar had a stainless steel ring on the front of it. He attached the link at the end of the leash to the collar’s ring.
Then he dragged her into the house.
The fattest woman that Marla had ever seen was sitting on a couch in the living room. She probably weighed a thousand pounds at least. She was eating fried chicken from a five-gallon bucket. She looked up when the cop dragged Marla into the living room and smiled grotesquely. “Oh my,” the fat woman said. “Did you bring me a new toy?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the skinny cop responded with absolute reverence in his voice.
“Is she local?”
“No.”
“Bring her to me.”
The cop dragged Marla to the couch and forced her to her knees. He handed the fat woman the leash. “Bow your head before the queen,” he said.
Marla did. The fat woman’s feet were hideous and smelled like rotting cheese.
“She’s beautiful,” the fat woman said. “I will take great pleasure in destroying this woman’s beauty.”
“So you are pleased?” the cop said.
“Yes.”
“Then may I please have a piece of that chicken? I haven’t eaten since those two crackers yesterday and I am starving.”
The fat woman looked up at the cop. “You didn’t sneak around today and eat at work?”
“No, Your Majesty.”
“Not even a bagel or a donut?”
He shook his head. “No. I drank some coffee, but I haven’t eaten anything at all.”
Marla could hear the skinny cop’s stomach growling and she doubted that he was lying. She also wondered what kind of strange dark hole in the universe she had managed to fall into.
“Then yes,” the fat woman said. “You may have a piece of chicken. Actually, you can have as much as you like. But first, bring me my wheelchair.”
The cop left the room. He returned moments later pushing the biggest wheelchair that Marla had ever seen. There was no coffee table or any other furniture in the living room to block his path as he pushed the wheelchair right up to the couch. Marla wondered if it was a custom-made wheelchair. She saw electronic control panels on the armrests. Its wheels looked like motorcycle tires.
The fat woman handed Marla’s leash back to the skinny cop. Then she used a bariatric walker to move herself from the couch to the wheelchair. “Take her to my torture chamber,” the fat woman said. “I have to go to the bathroom first.”
“As you wish, Your Majesty.” The skinny cop dragged Marla into a dark room elsewhere in the house and turned on a light.
The first thing Marla noticed was the drain. The room’s floor was concrete, and—like the grate-covered drain in the garage—the drain in the center of this room’s floor was covered with a metal grate.
The cop grabbed a handful of her hair. He yanked her head up until it was level with his waist.
Marla saw what looked like an operating table on one side of the drain. On the other side of the drain was one of those hospital beds like the kind she had seen in ICU rooms.
The cop said, “I’m going to remove your duct tape. The queen loves to hear her victims scream.” He ripped the duct tape from her face.
Marla said, “I have to go to the bathroom. I’m about to piss myself.”
He dragged her to the drain. “Go right ahead. You’ll be pissing and shitting and bleeding in this drain all night long.”
She squatted over the drain and emptied her bladder, trying to think of something to say that might persuade the two lunatics to release her, but she knew it was useless. I’m fucked, Marla thought. Tonight is the last night of my life.
The cop pressed a damp cloth across her face. Probably chloroform, Marla thought. Moments later, she was unconscious.
• • •
The smell of ammonia woke her up. She opened her eyes and saw that the fat woman was holding a bottle of ammonia beneath her nose. Marla looked around. She was lying on the hospital bed in the fat woman’s torture chamber. The bed’s head frame had been raised so that Marla was in a sitting-up position. Her hands were no longer cuffed behind her back. Leather straps now secured her wrists and her ankles to each side of the hospital bed.
The fat woman’s wheelchair was parked right beside Marla’s bed. She set the bottle of ammonia down on a metal table beside her wheelchair. There were numerous knives, hand tools, and surgical instruments lined up on the table. The fat woman picked up a scalpel. “There’s no one here but us to hear you scream.” With her other hand, she picked up a blowtorch. “And your screams will be music to my ears.”
“I killed a man tonight,” Marla said, “because he killed a woman in a wheelchair. And now a woman in a wheelchair is going to kill me.”
The fat woman smiled. “I will keep you alive for as long as I possibly can. Long before you die, you will be begging me for death.”
Marla was determined not to beg for mercy. She was long past any hope of that.
She closed her eyes and tried to go someplace else inside her mind. With the scalpel’s first incision, her eyes snapped open and she screamed.
TATTOO MAGIC
The cafeteria was on the first floor of a massive factory in the city’s industrial district. Tanith had been working in the cafeteria for six weeks. Before the cafeteria, she had worked as a housekeeper for an accounting firm in the city’s financial district, but one of the accountants who worked there—Nigel—had broken her heart, and Tanith had been forced to quit.
“It’s not you,” Nigel had told her. “It’s me. I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
That someone else had turned out to be a new receptionist at the accounting firm, and with the blunt abruptness of a heart attack, her relationship with Nigel was over. After two years together (and after a year-long engagement to be married), he had thrown her away as if she and the years were no more significant than numbers in a ledger.
“I’m going away for the weekend,” he had told her. “So that gives you a couple of days to get your things.”
As if she could just snap her fingers in this city and have an apartment in a couple of days. On a housekeeper’s salary, no less.
Tanith had been devastated.
She stayed at her mother’s house for about a week, and then she moved into a shabby studio apartment not far from the cafeteria. Soon thereafter, she quit her job as a housekeeper, because seeing Nigel and the new receptionist together every day at the accounting firm quickly became unbearable.
She applied for a job at the cafeteria, and was pretty much hired on the spot. It wasn’t a bad job. She worked third shift, so she loved the hours. And, because she could walk to the cafeteria every night and then back to her apartment every morning, the commute was excellent.
Tonight, while prepping the drinks station, she couldn’t stop thinking about Nigel. This was not unusual. He had been out of her life for two months, and Tanith seemingly mourned his absence every day more strongly than the day before. She often fantasized about buying a gun and shooting him right between the eyes, about blowing a hole through his skull just like the hole in her life that hadn’t been there before he abandoned her.
Of all the stations in the cafeteria, the drinks station was Tanith’s least favorite. There was a lot of prep involved: heavy powders to carry around; bulky bags of syrup to maneuver; machines so tall she needed a stepladder just to set them up; cleaning the ice maker and stacking hundreds of cups. Every night she got a different station in the cafeteria. Fortunately, her boss only put her in drinks about once a week.
> At three a.m., the factory workers came pouring in for their lunch break. They swarmed the machines and began guzzling drinks—especially soda. They beat the nozzles with their cups and scuffed the cabinets beneath with the tips of their steel-toed boots. By four a.m., the cafeteria was empty again, and after Tanith finished up everything in drinks, she helped wash pots in the back until it was time to leave at seven o’clock in the morning.
While walking home, she saw a tattoo parlor that hadn’t been there the day before at the end of a row of shops that she passed every morning. There were two signs on the door: TATTOOS BY NEMESIS and CLOSED.
Beside the row of shops was a staircase that descended beneath the road, and Tanith heard a hammering noise coming from somewhere down below. It sounded like metals clanging together, as if swords were being forged down there at seven o’clock in the morning.
Curious, she hurried down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs was a steel black door that looked like a fire door. Scrawled across the black door in blood-red letters were the words GEORGIO’S GEMSTONES AND JEWELRY.
She put a hand on the lever-style handle of the doorknob. The handle was warm, as if perhaps a fire was burning on the other side. She pushed down on the handle and discovered that the door was unlocked. She pushed the door open a little bit. The sounds of the metalwork grew louder. Tanith pushed the door all the way open. Then she stepped inside.
The interior was a large room mostly in shadow that looked like a blacksmith’s shop. She saw a glowing orange kiln and a small furnace against the far wall. A tall bookshelf stood next to the kiln, along with two stools and a wooden table. The floor was concrete. Perhaps forty yards of floor space between Tanith and the kiln were crammed with cargo trunks. A path from the black door to the kiln had been cleared between the trunks.
Tanith stepped down the path. Steam rose from the furnace. The fire in the kiln wavered like the flame of a candle. She noticed that the clanging noises had ceased.
“Hello?” Tanith called. “Is anybody in here?”
She stopped walking and let her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The cargo trunks on both sides were turned toward the path and all of them were opened like display cases. Inside them, on beds of red velvet, lay the most spectacular collection of gemstones and jewelry that Tanith had ever seen. She saw diamonds as big as her fists. She saw an abundance of gold and silver everywhere. She saw amber stones, opals, emeralds, rubies, and countless other exquisite gems for which she had no names.
“Wow,” Tanith whispered, stunned by the prodigious collection. And then she whispered it again: “Wow.”
From somewhere to her left, a man’s voice boomed: “What brings you here?”
Tanith turned and scanned the darkness, but she didn’t see the speaker. “Nothing brought me here. I was walking home from work, and I just happened to wander in.”
A tall man appeared from behind the bookshelf. He had long white hair, but nothing else about him seemed elderly. He wore a black robe with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He held a hammer in one hand and a gold chain in the other. “No one comes to me accidentally,” he said. “Something always brings people to me.”
Tanith remembered the words painted on the door. “Are you Georgio?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Tanith. Sorry if I disturbed you.”
“You did not disturb me. Come over here. Come closer.”
Tanith saw white-hot rocks inside the kiln as she moved closer to Georgio. She also saw that his dark eyes were watching her very closely.
He set the hammer and the gold chain down on the wooden table as she approached him. Then he took Tanith’s right hand in his and examined her palm.
Tanith said nothing, but she had already broken a sweat, and she couldn’t help but notice that Georgio’s hand felt too cold for someone standing next to a kiln and a furnace in a sweltering room.
He released her hand. “Excellent.” He sat down on one of the stools and nodded at the other. “Have a seat.”
Tanith did. She glanced back at the black door, and shrugged. For some reason, she was not afraid to be where she was. Being here with this strange man in this strange place beneath the city seemed like exactly what she was supposed to be doing at this moment.
She looked into Georgio’s dark eyes. “You have the most beautiful gemstones and jewelry.”
“Thank you. But it isn’t the acquisition of gemstones and jewelry that has brought you here to me. It is heartbreak that has brought you here to me.”
“Heartbreak?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. The same way that I know it is a man named Nigel who has broken your heart.”
“You know all that just from reading my palm?”
“Oh yes. I know all that, and a whole lot more.”
“What else do you know?”
“I know that after he left you for the new receptionist, you started fantasizing about bad things happening to Nigel. You have wished that he would die of a heart attack, even though he is too young for a heart attack. You’ve wished cancer upon him. Aneurysms. Car wrecks. Plane crashes. You’ve even thought about buying a gun and killing him yourself.”
“I thought we had it all,” Tanith said. “We made each other so happy, and then he just threw me away like a piece of trash. It’s a sadness that the person you love more than anything can just decide to cut you out of their life.”
“At first,” Georgio said, “you were suicidal.”
“Yes. I was so devastated that I wanted to end my life.”
“But then you thought that it would be better to kill him first, before you killed yourself, because maybe then the two of you could be together in the next life.”
Tanith nodded. “Yes. That’s exactly right.”
“However, after seeing how happy the two of them were together at the accounting firm, you decided that a reunion in the next life would be impossible, because Nigel’s heart now belongs to the new receptionist.”
Tears formed in Tanith’s eyes, and then a few of them spilled down her cheeks. “Yes. She’s younger and prettier than me, so I was hoping that it was just an infatuation. When I realized that he loved her, all of my hope was gone.”
“So you quit your job.”
“Yes.”
“And you got your own place.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still heartbroken, but now, you’re also very angry, and you would like to get some sort of revenge.”
“Yes. I would. Absolutely.”
“But your desire for revenge is becoming all-consuming, and it is quickly ruining your life.”
“Yes! Well, what’s left of my life, anyway. But getting revenge is all I ever think about! Day and night. Asleep or awake. But I just don’t think it’s possible to hurt Nigel as deeply as he hurt me.”
“I know a way you could do it,” Georgio said.
Tanith cocked her head. “How?”
And then he told her.
Afterward, Tanith said: “But how will I pay your friend?”
From a pocket of his robe, Georgio produced a red diamond and held it up. He smiled, and then proffered it to Tanith. “Just give her this.”
• • •
The following morning, on her way home from the cafeteria, Tanith stopped at Tattoos By Nemesis. As there had been the day before, there was a CLOSED sign on the door. Tanith was not surprised. The time was only about 7:05 a.m., and most places for business didn’t open until at least eight, nine, or even ten o’clock in the morning.
Tanith walked home to her apartment. She took a shower and brushed her teeth. She put on deodorant and clean clothes. She ate cereal and toast for breakfast. Then she went online and did some research on red diamonds.
Unless it was fake (and although Tanith knew little about gemstones, she had no reason to believe that it was), what Georgio had given her was one of the rarest and most expensive jewels on planet Earth.
If it was real, Tanith could sell the red diamond and never have to work another day in her life. Apparently she would have to ask the Gemological Institute of America to examine the diamond to determine whether or not it was genuine, but Tanith had no intention of doing that. A fortune would be meaningless if Nigel was still out there on the planet being happy with the new receptionist, but revenge would be priceless. Besides, the whole experience with Georgio had seemed downright magical, and although Tanith knew as little about magic as she knew about gemstones, she figured that if you did happen to stumble across some magic in your life, the best thing to do was just go with it.
Georgio had told her that in addition to the red diamond and a photograph of Nigel’s face, she would need to take one of two things to Nemesis: either a drop of Nigel’s blood or a lock of his hair.
“I don’t have a lock,” Tanith had said. “But I’m sure I could find a strand. Nigel was always using my hairbrush. Would a strand be okay?”
Georgio had smiled. “A strand will be fine.”
• • •
Tanith went back to Tattoos By Nemesis at noon. There was an OPEN sign on the door. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
A woman looked at her from a sofa where she was sitting.
“Are you Nemesis?” Tanith said.
The woman rose from the sofa. She was tall and lithe. Her long hair was the color of midnight. Her dark eyes were otherwise indefinable. She wore a black T-shirt and black leather pants. Multiple rings adorned both of her ears, but none of her fingers. “Yes,” she said. “I am Nemesis.”
“I’m Tanith.”
“I know who you are.”
“Georgio sent me.”
“Did you bring what he told you to bring?”
Tanith nodded. Then she handed Nemesis the red diamond, a picture of Nigel, and several strands of his hair.
“Excellent,” Nemesis said. “Follow me.”
She led Tanith into a back room, where an adjustable chair and a leather couch glowed beneath blinding lamps. The rest of the room lay cloaked in purple-blue shadows that made Tanith think of blood inside a bruise.
Nemesis put the strands of Nigel’s hair in a silver dish. Then she held up his picture and looked at it. “What is this man’s name?”
