Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

  Henry paled. “You killed her?”

  Betty cocked her head. “What do you care? You know anyone with tickets to the Rialto last night?”

  “That’s not the point, Betty. You can’t go round killing people if you’re staying in my house.”

  She grinned and nodded. “Of course, of course. Did you tattoo the improved picture on anyone while I slept?”

  He shook his head. She pouted. “Poo. It’s all right, though. Your design was nice, but I’ve got some real knock-out ideas.”

  Henry looked past her shoulder to his daughter’s darkened room. The door was closed. He willed himself to run to it, and lock the vampire out, but his feet would not obey. Betty tugged on Henry’s shirtsleeves.

  “Aren’t you curious, Mr. Nevins? You do want to try something new, right?”

  Henry sighed and sat down hard on the stool next to the barber’s chair. “This whole situation is new, Betty.” He kept glancing at the mirror to affirm her lack of reflection. “I just don’t think I really need an artist in residence, you know?”

  Betty pursed her lips over the fangs and raised one eyebrow high. “You have it all wrong, Henry. You are working for me. I can still kill you at any time.”

  “Right. Because you’re a vampire.” Saying it aloud made it no less ridiculous. Betty didn’t see the joke.

  “You caught on pretty quick, Mr. Nevins. Most people don’t call me that until I’ve got my teeth in their neck.”

  His eyes swept over to the door to Jane’s room, then snapped down to the floor. “I’ve read Dracula more than a few times.” He smiled, in spite of himself. “I recognized the signs.”

  “Dracula?” asked Betty.

  Henry’s smile faltered, and he sighed at the vampire sitting in his parlor. “There are a lot of books in that room you stole from me, Betty. You ought to read a few.”

  She sneered at him. “No need to make personal remarks. Fetch me some of those little paper cards and a pen. Your art board wants refreshing.”

  Henry resisted the urge to bow before turning to dig out some old cardstock from the supply cupboards. He glanced in Betty’s direction, but didn’t take the cards to her. He tested the freedom further by hesitating at Jane’s door, but that was still off limits. He carried his rebellion into the kitchen and tossed the cards onto the table. Henry was free of all obligation save that regarding his daughter’s door. He heard Betty get up from the chair in the parlor, and reveled in the ability to ignore her by busying himself with the coffee pot. She sat down at the table and began to sketch. With the pot on to boil, and the vampire lost in her drawings, Henry left to stand at the threshold of his daughter’s room. He couldn’t raise his hand to open the door. Betty coughed; a forced and unnecessary sound, and called to him from the table.

  “You can’t go in there, Henry. That’s my room, now.”

  Henry clenched his fists. “When’s the last time you touched a bar of soap, Betty?” The scribbling in the kitchen stopped. Chair legs scrapped across the floor.

  “I hadn’t much a chance to wash on the train, you lout. There’s no call for cruelty about it.”

  He walked back into the kitchen to find her standing over the sink. She was shifting about the mugs and plates stacked there; life without Jane left Henry with excess, and little remembrance for doing his own dishes. She spun on him as he approached her. “You aren’t making it easy on me, hiding the damn soap. And if I bothered you so much, you only had to say something.”

  Henry leaned down and got a bar of soap from under the sink. He handed it to her, and adjusted the water so it wasn’t so hot it would burn her hands. “I can get you some towels,” he said in apology.

  “Yes, thank you. This whole business doesn’t have to be unpleasant, you know. I can be a very kind employer.” She took the towels from him and scrubbed her face.

  He took the coffee off the stove and sat down with a cup. “Why do you want to run my tattoo shop, kid?”

  She started on her hair. “I’m not running the shop, that’s still on you. But I want to see my drawings on somebody’s skin. You need to do that for me, Henry. I love tattoos. I just can’t imagine anything lovelier than someone wearing around my ideas.” She paused to run the towel over her head and wrap up her sopping hair. “When somebody asks for my drawing, you have to make the appointment for night so I can see you put down the ink.”

  Henry sipped his coffee and leaned across the table to take a look at her cards. As he picked up the top card, she spun around and snatched it from his hand. Water dripped down from her hands and hair and spread to the card, bleeding the ink. “Oh now look what you did. No peeking until I’m done. You should know better, as an artist.”

  Henry’s shoulders slumped and he shook his head at the impetuous dripping thing in his kitchen. “Some rules. You just demanded to watch my work start to finish.”

  She smiled at him and patted his head. “That’s because I’m the boss. Now, you should get some sleep while I finish up. Tomorrow night you’ll be tattooing late. And I get to watch!”

  He fought back a yawn and tried to finish his cup, but it had been a long day, and last night’s sleep was in a cramped barber’s chair. Henry pushed his chair back from the table and went upstairs to bed. He drifted to sleep smiling, as the girl worked contentedly in the kitchen below.

  His kitchen table was clean when he woke, with ten carefully stacked cards set in the middle next to a note decorated with tiny flowers. The dishes were done, minus one broken plate left in a puddle of water on the counter, and the towels were folded and wet. He hung the towels on the back of the chairs to dry properly and read through Betty’s note.

  Your kitchen was in a deplorable state. I cleaned it to improve my own productivity. Here are ten new designs. I’ve already thrown out the ten worst ones on your wall, and I am well on my way to improving the rest of them. See you when the sun goes down.

  Yours sincerely,

  Betty

  The note ended with a carefully etched black heart that dripped dry ink down the page. Henry combed his fingers through his hair as he leafed through the new cards. The designs were beautiful, but far too intricate. She sketched insects for him, bees and hornets and flies, with lines in their wings so fine they were more felt than seen. And flies? What maniac would stain his skin with flies? He went to the parlor to fit her new cards on the wall. She had removed most of the eagles, and a few of the uglier roses. The wall was spotty, and she left the unworthy cards piled together on the floor. None of his own designs were discarded, and he hung her new cards next to his in unconscious pride. Henry picked the cards up from the floor and slipped them into his back pocket, then left for the diner down the block.

  He had coffee and eggs. Later he bought sardines, potatoes, a fresh loaf of bread, and in a moment of whimsy, three carrots. The greengrocer had garlic. He decided against buying garlic. Henry Nevins had no appointments that day, and he did not open his business for walk-ins. He went to bed early, excited to wake when the sun went down.

  Betty knocked at the threshold of the open room upstairs where Henry once slept with his wife. Henry rolled out of bed fully dressed, his mouth tasting old and stale, and he found his smudged glasses with the palm of his hand.

  “We have an appointment, Mr. Nevins.”

  Henry pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at the smiling girl at his door. “You’re up already?”

  “It’s nearly midnight. I can’t find the keys, so you need to unlock the door for him.”

  He did, and let in a haggard old man who smelled of soured wine and sourer clothes. Henry’s lip curled and he looked past the man at Betty, grinning with all her teeth as she took the man by hand and led him to the barber’s chair.

  “Betty, the shop’s not open this late. Sir, I’m sorry, this is all a mistake.”

  The man coughed and reached into his crusty coat to pull out a fat wad of bills that he waved in the air. “S’no problem of money. I got money.”

&nb
sp; “He has an appointment, Mr. Nevins. Didn’t you check the datebook today?” She clucked her tongue and put on airs of disapproval. “You had the whole day in the bright sunshine and didn’t even think to check that datebook. Well, no matter.” Betty turned back to the man in the chair. “You just sit tight there, Jack. Mr. Nevins is truly a knock-out tattooist, even if he can’t remember his dates. But that’s what he has me for!”

  Jack nodded sleepily and smiled at Henry. “Great girl you got here.”

  “Sure…” muttered Henry as he ran his finger across the datebook to find “Jack” written down for twelve o’ clock midnight. The handwriting matched Betty’s note from the morning. He called her over and motioned for her to follow into the kitchen, where he grasped her little shoulders and shoved her down into a chair. She sat without argument and folded her hands in her lap.

  “You’re angry with me.”

  Henry dragged a chair close to her and sat down. “You’re messing about my business, Betty. Where’d that old bum get the dough he flashed at me?”

  She shrugged. “He had the cash when he made the appointment last night. I was just taking a little walk outside and he found me and said ‘Hey aren’t you that girl from the tattoo shop?’ and I said ‘Yes, certainly, I keep house for the tattooist’ because you know I did those dishes, and then he wanted a tattoo and I figured if he was awake so late one night he won’t mind the next so I made the appointment for late. I just want to see you do it, Henry. I want to see how it’s done.”

  He narrowed his eyes and stared at her until she blinked and turned away. “Are you stealing from me, Betty?”

  “No!” She looked him true, with eyes wide and wet at the idea of being called a thief. Henry did not buckle, and her face grew feral. “You don’t got that kind of money in this house, anyway,” she said, baring her teeth.

  Henry knew she was right. Jack coughed up a lung in the parlor. Betty jerked her head at the kitchen door, her face back to its girlish pout. “You got a customer waiting.”

  Henry grabbed a basin from under the sink and filled it with water.

  “You want to watch, you got to help me clean him up first.”

  Betty took the soap from the sink and skipped out of the room. Henry just sighed.

  Jack chose Betty’s fly. He wanted it on his chest, crawling down from the right collar bone. Betty washed his skin with care, and stood at attention with a damp cloth that was both unneeded and unasked for. She watched until the blood started to well and mingle with the ink, then her eyes glazed and she leaned in so close she nearly hit Henry’s hand. Henry lifted up for a moment and growled from around his cigarette. “Take a walk, kiddo.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and walked out of the parlor in a trance. Henry didn’t see her split apart into a hundred bats and fly off into the sky. Jack was too drunk to care.

  Henry had a habit of staying up late to watch Betty work. As the sun began to set he’d put a pot of coffee on the stove and set out the pens on the table. Henry placed his favorite nearest the stack of paper. The nib was gold, a birthday present from Jane and far too fancy for him. But he liked it, and she, the girl locked away in his daughter’s room, delighted in the bright, fine things that eventually fell into humble city homes.

  “You’re not rich, but you sure got class, Henry,” she told him one Sunday night with the end of the pen notched in her fangs.

  Henry had been retracing some of her less macabre designs onto paper to train his muscles in her lines. The task was mindless and cheerful and he could watch her sketch her nasty insects from across the table, but at the word “class” he set down his pen and eyed the woman over the sparkling clean lenses of his glasses.

  “I got class,” he repeated, sullenly, and she laughed out loud. “What makes you think I got any class?”

  She shrugged and set his favorite pen down on top of a loose sketch of a blackbird rending apart the flesh upon which it would be inked. “You do. You got airs about you that I’d never have. Can’t have airs when you come from a hole in the dirt.”

  Henry furrowed his eyebrows. “You mean like Dracula?” She had been reading the book, and they had discussed their mutual admiration of Mina Harker, but about her own vampirism she remained coy. He only knew that she drank blood and couldn’t stand the sun.

  “No, not like Dracula. You don’t think I got a damn crypt hidden away in that little room, do you? The place I woke up in, as a vampire I mean, wasn’t more than just a little hole carved into a hillside in the middle of nowhere. It had two beds, a stove, and one window peering out across a dead scabby land with a dead scabby garden that couldn’t feed a mouse. I don’t know who I was before I was this, but I know she didn’t have any airs about her.”

  Henry reached across the table to take her hands, but she pulled them back and reached up to her throat.

  “I don’t know how I got made like this. But I know I haven’t made anyone else like me. So I may not be good, but I’m not evil.”

  “You killed that woman at the Rialto.”

  Her hands dropped into her lap. “I had to eat someone, Henry. I didn’t want it to be you.”

  “You don’t have to kill them, though. Doctors can give blood and they can take it. A man can lose a little blood and still get by.”

  A smile briefly flashed across her face and she gripped her arms tight to steady herself. “You’re right, Henry. Just a little blood won’t kill.”

  She couldn’t stop at just a little blood. The hunger took her as the first drop hit the tongue. The hunger replaced Betty. There was no Betty, only the bats—flocking and frantic at the smell of blood. They cannot stop until a body falls dead on the floor, eyes milky and skin completely pale. It ends before she can think to pull away. The hunger eats until sated, and leaves poor Betty alone to deal with the bodies.

  Two years was not enough time to get used to the bodies. But it was time enough for practice. She took to the rails when the death of the illustrated man caused a manhunt in Nebraska. Betty roosted in the boxcars with the luggage and animals that screamed and thrashed at her unnatural smell. At night she walked up and down the passenger cars in borrowed clothes until she found a lonely person who wouldn’t be missed. The hunger let Betty choose her victims, and it led them out onto the deck where the engine would mask their screams. When the feeding ended Betty rolled the bodies off the end of the cars to be found months later with her several states away. A decent way to see the country, but by the time the rails ended in Tacoma, Betty was ready to settle down.

  “Betty?” asked Henry.

  She looked down to see her fingernails had pierced the flesh, and bored down into the muscle.

  “Betty, darling, you’re hurting yourself,” said Henry, and he got up from the table to help her. She loosed her fingers and rubbed away the sludge-black blood that seeped out of the quickly closing wounds. Henry wet a washcloth, but the marks faded from her skin before he could hand it to her. She took it anyway and held it tightly in her lap.

  “It’s all right, Betty. It doesn’t matter where you come from. You’re living with me, now.”

  Her head snapped upwards, and she met his eyes with a glare. “I’m not living. Not really.”

  Henry shook his head. “You’re living enough to make a mess of my kitchen every night and beg me for ink. That’s living if you ask me. And you’re not going to kill anymore, because you’ve got a place to stay, all right?”

  Betty nodded and placed a hand over her stomach. It was always tight, always hungry. Soon it would be impossible to ignore. But Henry was so sweet to her. He wanted so badly to make the monster into a good little girl that he gave her everything she asked for. And he let her design the tattoos. So she smiled with lips closed over the fangs and hugged him tightly as the rushing blood in his heart drowned away every word but the ones he wanted to hear.

  “I won’t kill anymore, Henry. Just a little blood. I’ll be good. I’ll be good.”

  The first body found in Taco
ma was lying on the beach, skinned and drained of blood. It washed ashore a month and a half after Betty came to stay in Henry’s daughter’s room on the opposite side of the port from Union Station, but the papers quickly attributed it to the Railway Skinner. Henry ignored the papers while he shopped for new pens, and he paid for penny candies at the counter before remembering that Betty had no use for them. His shop had become a night operation in the weeks since Betty came to stay, and more of his clients chose insects and bats off his wall. Betty was by his side while he worked. Her stomach had grown stronger at the sight of the little blood that would break through the skin when the needle traced her art, and she could stay the hunger until the work was finished.

  Business picked up when Henry moved to odd hours. His was the last shop before the train station, and news of his macabre designs spread among the dock workers and loggers who wanted a token of home before going off to war. Most were happy to oblige his late hours, but it was Betty who charmed them at the door with a close-lipped smile and convinced them a tattoo made at midnight had more power.

  Once, Betty tried to take the needle. She begged Henry to let her, on a handsome young man named Teddy Keene who asked in the same earnest voice as hers. Both of them insisted that ink on skin couldn’t be so different than ink on paper, and Henry was by now so taken with the girl that he let her try. She stuck it too deep, right away, and the blood welled up bright and red.

  Betty bit the boy. She unhinged her jaw and set her jagged teeth into his shoulder and drank until he passed out from fear or from pain. Henry flung the small table aside and wrenched her up from the boy’s shoulder, his hand grasping at the drawer for the wooden stake. But there were tears in Betty’s eyes, and her hands covered her mouth in shame.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Nevins. I’ll never… I’ll never…”

  Henry held her and kissed her head. He sent her to her room, and cleaned the boy’s wound. He shoved a fiver in Teddy’s pocket and carried him two blocks to the bar, woke him enough to get some whisky down his gullet as he comforted the kid about that dog bite on his shoulder. Poor Teddy; a bite like that would need at least a month to heal, and he didn’t protest when Henry made the appointment for noon.