by Brian Hodge
“Then one day, the ship returned.”
“You said he never came back,”
“And he did not. The ship came back. Most of his men came back. Angus died of a fever, wasted away to nothing in the cabin of that ship. They buried him at sea, but before he died, he set them to bring his boat home. To bring her the treasures and secrets of the world he’d found. To tell her he loved her.
“None of it mattered. They pulled in and she flew to that shore a woman possessed, to find no man, but only wealth. Only salt-soaked boards and men too-long away from home. Only more loneliness washed ashore.
“They brought it all to her, and she held a feast such as had not been seen in those parts since Angus himself was alive. They drowned themselves in the food they’d missed and the local girls, and they washed it all down with barrels of wine. She watched, smiling all the while as if she shared their good humor.
“When they woke, every man-jack was locked in that ballroom. She’d had men come in during the night and bar the doors with stout planks. They were left to rot with what remained of the food, and the wine, even the women who’d joined them. They carried on and wailed at her, even tried to set the place on fire. None of it worked. They were trapped, and she was going to go and let them stay, leave and never come back.”
Jeremy shuddered, casting a glance at the door – toward what lay beyond. “What happened?” he asked softly.
“That night, she stood on her balcony as always,” Terry replied. “As she stood, staring into the waves, he came to her. Moss was matted and woven into the long hairs of his beard, and his eyes were half-eaten by fish, but he came, staggering from the waves. She just watched him come, no effort to help him, or to hinder. She watched as he staggered to the walls of the keep and beat his rotting hands against the stone.
“Let them go,” he cried. “Let them go, my love. I’ve come back.”
“No one knows for certain if she listened,” Terry said at last. “She released the men the next day, giving them back enough of what they’d brought her to build a new ship. She made certain that everything was perfect – every board, every sail - hand-picked. And she sent for an artist. A young man, some say a Eunuch. He brought the wood with him from Egypt, a solid block of it, taking up half his cart. As the ship was built, the man worked.”
“She sailed with that ship?” Jeremy asked, breaking the silence.
“No. She died. She died, alone in her tower, leaning on the wall that overlooked the waves below, but the work was finished, and when they saw what she’d commissioned, the men couldn’t bear to leave her behind.”
Both men stared at the doorway now. Beyond it, they felt the draw of the wood, dark and curving tightly to the wall behind, eyes sockets of something darker than shadow. In their heads a voice called out softly.
“Your great grandfather found that ship,” Jeremy breathed. “He brought her here.”
Terry rose and turned toward the refrigerator without a word. The lights flickered and threatened to die, then steadied. They were dimmer, their radiance more yellow, and Jeremy staggered half to his feet, bracing himself on the arms of the chair as the floor lurched sickeningly.
“Damn,” Terry cursed. He turned back, a brown-necked bottle in his hand. Tipping it up, he took a long swig and strode across the deck to where Jeremy now stood, staring at the doorway where stairs led up to a wind-tossed deck once more. Beyond the walls, the waves crashed, and Terry – not Terry – handed over the bottle with a wild-eyed stare.
“We can’t let her go down,” the man whispered softly, almost plaintively. “We must keep her afloat. She … she loves me.”
Jeremy took the bottle, turned to the stairs, and staggered through - -into the clear night air beneath the stars. The moon was bright and full. He downed the beer in a single gulp and fell heavily over the hood of his car. In the shadows behind him, he felt the weight of eyes, and the call of farther shores.
It was good to be home.
To Dream of Scheherazade
The sun had just set, and business was unusually slow. The mid-day heat hovered just above the pavement, mixing with the moisture from the ocean breeze to form a cloak of hot, damp lethargy that settled over the downtown streets like a shroud. Chance sat, staring out the window toward the street and wondering where the next month's rent would pop up from. It was a habit – worrying about money.
There was one skinny, obviously runaway kid looking fixedly at a flash card of half-naked women in the clutches of various demons, but there was no real business in sight. As the streets faded to dusk, he flicked the switch beside his chair and brought the cheap, pink and blue neon sign to life on the street.
"TATTOOS"
The word would blink on and off like a beacon throughout the evening and into the night, drawing those with nowhere better to go like moths to a lantern. Business at Ace's came in three types.
There were the regulars, street people, bikers, rock musicians and fans, soldiers, sailors, and marines. For them, tats were a way of life, a badge of individuality – almost a part of their clothing.
Next came the "impulse" buyers. These were young girls on a night away from home, runaways with a few dollars or a nice ass, businessmen with one or two too many drinks in their systems – housewives whose husbands were out of town trying to spice up their lives. These were less frequent, though often more interesting than the regulars.
Then there were the "special" cases. Chance lived for those moments, the moments where his talent might truly make a difference to someone. A "special" case was someone who actually believed in tattoos as art. These were the driven and the obsessed, customers who would either bring in incredibly detailed ink or pencil drawings, prints, things that were unique and challenging. The best of them were those who left the art to him.
Chance had no illusions about his career as an "artiste". He was a tattoo artist, and that was what he would remain. The money was sometimes good, sometimes not there and occasionally amazing. The rewards were the same.
Most of the time he'd spend his evenings tracing the same old stencils of Porky Pig and the Tasmanian Devil, daggers with snakes that proclaimed "Death Before Dishonor," the customary hearts with "Mom" emblazoned within their depths, motorcycle emblems and band logos. It paid the bills, but it was meaningless drudge work. It was only the "specials" that made it worthwhile.
The door swung open with a jingling of bells, and an oddly thin, young man entered. The guy wore black t-shirt, black pants, big hair that fanned out to surround a pale, chiseled face. Chance's first thought was Musician.
He recanted that almost immediately when he heard the man speak.
"You are the one called Chance?"
The words seemed to flow from too-red lips. The man's eyes were wet – like those of a wild animal – deep and full of emotion. It was a long moment before Chance shook his head slowly and stammered a reply.
"Yeah … uh, yes. That's me."
At first the man didn’t speak. He stared at Chance with those weird-assed eyes, scanned the walls surrounding them both quickly, and then returned to his stare.
"This is not your true work?"
Somehow he knew the man was talking about the flash boards on the walls. He shook his head, and then answered.
"No, not mine. This is the stuff that we all do, what we share. My own work is in that folder over there." He pointed at a battered black binder on the room's one small table.
Without a word the man moved to the table and snatched up the book. He flipped the pages rapidly, one after another, drinking in the artwork. Once or twice he paused, murmuring quietly over one piece or another, but as far as Chance could tell, the dude was in another world.
Suddenly the man snapped his eyes from the book to meet Chance's own. "You do custom work?"
"If the price is right," Chance answered, trying to figure out why his heart was racing, why the skin on his arms was layered three-deep in goose-bumps. It wasn't like Charles Manson had come thro
ugh the door, was it?
The runaway, not liking the "feel" of the place now that the stranger had come in, banged out the door in search of a meal, leaving them alone. Chance wished, for a fleeting moment, that the kid had stayed.
"The price is not an object," the man said. His left hand had come lightly to rest on the counter top, and Chance's eyes were drawn to the ring he wore on his index finger. It was old, really old, tarnished gold with a deep red stone set in its center. The stone was cut into the shape of a gryphon. That ring alone, he assessed quickly, was enough to keep him in hamburger and beer for over a year.
"Yeah, well, what did you have in mind?" he said cautiously. "It might get busy here any second..."
The man's eyes blazed momentarily, and Chance fell silent. Fine, let him call the plays.
"I have a story to tell," he said. "I will begin with my name, Alex... I want you to record my life."
Chance could only stare at the man. "You want me to tattoo your life onto you?"
"In a sense, that is exactly what I want. Let me explain, and then we can begin."
There was no hint of discussion in the man's tone. It was an arrogant voice, filled with the strength of certainty, vibrant and hypnotic. All Chance could do was to listen.
"I have lived … a very long time. You will have to trust my words for their veracity; I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to prove myself. In all the years that I have lived, art has been the one constant, the one thing that could always remind me that there was beauty in the world. I cherish it.
"I have known great artists … more than you could dream. I have walked the halls of sculptors, played music with the bards; every time, every age, has its genius. My life has not been a thing of beauty, but of blood and violence, darkness and shadow. In this age, that is acceptable. In this age, mixing your very blood with the art is acceptable – you do this on a nightly basis.
"That is what I want, Chance; I want you to make me a work of art. I want to walk with the lines and hues of genius twining across my limbs. I want to be art."
Seeing that Chance was about to speak, he held up a long, delicate finger to his lips. "No, let me finish," he smiled. There was no humor in that smile – no compassion. No debate.
"I have walked the streets of this city night after night, and I have seen your work. There was a girl – Cindy – the horse with the gossamer wings of a butterfly? There was the city, surrounded by a dragon, overlooking a wizard's tower? A man named David? You would remember these.
"I see in them the spark of a genius beyond the scope to which it has been applied. I am offering you transcendence, Chance. If you come through, if my eye is true, and you are the one, then I will pay you beyond your wildest dreams. I will pay you as one of the great artists of history would be paid, and you will have created a masterpiece."
"And if I blow it?" Chance asked softly. "If I am, after all, just another tattoo artist, what then?"
The man didn't answer, but the answer was there to be read in his eyes, in the dangerous, unsmiling curl of his lips. There would be no second chances...tattoos were forever.
"I can't tattoo an entire life in one night," Chance said at last. "It just isn't possible."
"I have chosen the most important tale that I have to tell," the man said, turning to flip the door lock and to turn the sign to CLOSED. "We will start at once."
Chance led the man into the back room of his studio, where the serious work was always done, and laid out his needles, inks, and alcohol in silence. There was nothing left to say. His heart was running in overdrive, but his hands were surprisingly steady. He'd always said it was the "specials" that made his life worth all the crap he went through, now it was time to make good on that.
Put up or shut up, Chance ol' boy, he thought, avoiding the stranger's eyes as he hurried through his preparations.
As the man removed his shirt, leaned forward over the back of a chair and brushed his hair to the sides, he began to speak. The words flowed forth to fill the room, and Chance felt himself calming, moving toward that peak – that edge where the creativity was automatic, that place where the magic comes from that reveals itself to the world in the words of poets, the oil and pastels of the painters, the ink of the tattoo gun in his hand. He listened, and as he listened, he began to work.
"My brother was always favored," Alex began. "Though I was swifter, more intelligent, stronger, still he was favored. 'Your brother is the eldest,' my mother would tell me. 'He will inherit everything someday. You must support him.'
"Who, then, would be left to support me? In any case, Bryan did not want my support. He wanted to humble me, to use his position as heir to perpetuate his own false sense of superiority. He wanted me broken. This last was obvious to me, even if it was not to everyone around us, and I hated him for it more than I have hated any other in all the days of my existence.
"I avoided him whenever possible. There was the hunt, and there were my studies – neither of which interested him in the same way as they did me. He spent his hours training with the older boys. He was weak – not the best with a weapon or a thought – but the other boys knew that one day he would be their liege – their duke – so they pandered to his arrogance.
"I took to spending more and more time at the hunt, ranging farther and farther from home. At times I was gone for days, always returning with more than the other hunters; not that mother or father would ever take more than passing notice. It was on such a hunt that I met Evander, and my true life began."
Chance was beginning to feel a bit nervous. The things the man was talking about seemed like some elaborate fantasy – a folk tale out of history. If he were telling the truth, then he was either delusional, or much, much richer than Chance had counted on. No one had “estates” in Southern California … no one that came to tattoo parlors on Broadway, anyway.
Chance had begun in the center of the man’s back, tracing the subtle, almost beautiful lines of the man’s face as he listened, and waiting for the vision that would surround those features to coalesce. He was irritated with himself for worrying over the strangeness of the tale. He needed to concentrate. What difference did it make if it was all some weird fantasy? If he recreated it – and that was what was desired, where was the harm in it? He shook off his concerns and concentrated, letting the story leak into his mind and direct his needle.
"Evander came to my fire one night, melting from the shadows as silent as a breath. He could have killed me and thrown my husk to the rodents and the crows with no more effort than a cat toying with a small bird, but he did not. He came to the fire, and we talked, long into that night and again on the evening following. He did not conceal his nature from me – rather he preened, like a beautiful woman who demands admiration. He was truly beautiful, beautiful in a way I had never considered possible for one man in the eyes of another. His beauty was born of the darkness – drenched in the decadent, decaying edges of reality – the places parents warn children of and spend their nights embracing in worlds of dream."
Alex's muscles tensed, then, and Chance hesitated as the man spun, his eyes flashing to meet Chance’s own, as if daring him to refute the statement, or to laugh. "And I don't mean in the way of some dandified little-boy gazer, either. The streets beyond your shop are ripe with those, but they pale in comparison. Evander’s beauty transcended anything sexual in a way that was totally new to me. Rather than taking me at his leisure, he seemed to enjoy the seduction of it – convincing me to give of myself freely.
"I was never the same. I awoke the night after he had made me as himself, and he was there, cradling my head and feeding me the blood of a rabbit he'd killed – just enough to get me on my feet, to give me that chance. I never saw him again. He left me, the hunger rose, and I learned fast, hard lessons, strengthening my abilities and savoring my moment of vengeance, which I knew had finally come.”
Chance felt a slight tremble ripple through his hand, but he steadied himself and continued as though the
madman in his chair was talking to him about the weather, or some sporting event they had a mutual interest in. Drinking blood, beautiful men who drew you in with their eyes – these were more at home in a role-playing game, or a fantasy novel. He began to outline the slender shoulders – the wild, windswept hair. The story droned on, and he drank it in … dwelling on every syllable, every intonation. It was becoming obvious that his future might actually depend on his ability to transfer those words to body art, and Chance was fond of the notion of having a future.
"It was two weeks after Evander left me alone in that clearing that I went to my brother. The family had not yet missed me, feeling certain that I was on another extended hunt and that I would be back soon. I came upon Bryan at the setting of the sun, catching him just returning from a long ride. He'd left his horse with the groomsman and was making his way to dinner when I stepped from the shadows and grabbed his arm."
"Brother Alex!" he said, as though glad to see me. "You have returned! I trust we shall eat well this night – tell me, did you bring us a stag?"
"Much, much better than that, brother," I answered, not releasing his arm. "I have a secret to share – a grand secret. Do you suppose you can promise not to tell?
"He struggled in my grasp, but I could have held him before the change, and afterward he was like a child to me. I smiled at him and let him see my new smile, and then without a further word, I took him.
"He was so weak, so pathetic. He was drained and without life so quickly that my thirst was barely sated. Throwing him over my shoulder, I took off into the night, coming eventually to one of the hunting lodges I frequented used. I had already been there, barring the windows from the sunlight and preparing a place for myself, and for my dear, dear brother, to sleep. He looked so pale, so helpless – and yet I had my true revenge still in store.
