Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Abby was their oldest girl and was very much her father’s daughter—practical, grounded, always clearheaded. When he was away, Abby ran the farm.

  “Abby’s here,” said Belinda dreamily. “She’s waiting for you, too. We’re all waiting for you, Burleigh. Come home to us.”

  And then the line went dead.

  He’d called back dozens of times, but there was no answer. There was never an answer.

  Later, during the official investigation, they asked him about that call. He went over and over it, and even showed the call log on his phone. The officials glanced at one another and they stared at him. If it wasn’t for the call log he knew they’d have dismissed him as confused, drunk, or so grief-stricken that he only imagined talking to his wife.

  The call he made matched one received on Belinda’s cell phone. The log on both iPhones listed the call was made and received at 8:19 on that evening. The call lasted for two minutes and ended at 8:21. There was no way to refute that the call had been made. What no one could ever explain to Burleigh Hopewell was who had answered it, because Belinda Hopewell had been one of a group killed when a bomb went off during a magic show that was part of the town’s massive Halloween Festival. Abby and her brother, Trace, were found murdered that same evening, likely victims of either the white supremacists blamed for the terrorist attack or victims of people driven out of their minds by the hallucinogenic drugs in the town’s water supply. The only thing the authorities could agree on was that none of the Hopewells took that call.

  We’re all waiting for you. Come home to us.

  Burleigh Hopewell knew different. That had been Belinda on the phone. There was no doubt at all about that. He pushed up his sleeve and looked at the ink above his wristwatch. A small heart—red in the center but a morose gray around the edges, and in a circle around it were the names of his wife and family. The flesh beneath and around the tattoo ached. A dull sensation, like a bruise so deep it didn’t purple the skin. But the heart looked strange lately. Not as vibrant. Paler. As if the ink had faded. Maybe it was time to have it redone, he thought.

  “Yeah,” he said aloud, waving at a fly that buzzed near his face. “I’ll go to that new place in the Fringe.”

  The breeze through the darkened corn seemed to whisper a low and sneaky, “Burleigh…”

  And it said that in Belinda’s voice.

  He clutched the hot bowl of his pipe and tried not to cry. He failed, as he failed every single night. The ache beneath the tattoo throbbed.

  67

  The bar was dark as pockets.

  Flashes of lightning outside stole Gayle’s night vision and she had to feel her way from the door to the bar. Tank Girl was semi-crowded, but most of the women there were huddled together in conversational envelopes, voices hushed, faces only marginally lit by tea candles. The music was loud, but deliberately so, forcing people to lean in. Gayle didn’t recognize the singer or the song. A woman singing about standing on the ledge of a building, wondering if she can fly. Hoping she could because she was taking that step.

  Gayle’s paranoia meter was banging it at a solid ten and she was sure every eye was on her, judging her, criticizing her clothes, her weight, her right to even be there.

  She slid onto a seat at the far end of the bar, with her back to a corner of a wall around which were the bathrooms. Tucked in there, with a sight-line to the exit.

  “What can I get for you?”

  Gayle turned, yipping a bit in surprise because the bartender had apparently materialized out of nowhere. A thin, tall, broad-shouldered Latina with a drop-fade crew cut and amused eyes.

  “Um … I…”

  The woman smiled, and the amusement turned to warmth. “You’re new here.”

  “Yes,” said Gayle, taking the question as multilayered and answering the same way.

  The bartended nodded, her eyes shrewd but kind. “Don’t worry, sister. This crew’s pretty well behaved. Mostly guppies, a few sharks. No one gets out of hand.”

  Gayle laughed self-consciously. “Does it really show that bad?”

  The bartender laughed, too. “Yeah. It’s cool, though. If anyone messes with you, I’ll set them straight. I’m Juana. Now … what can I get for you? Thinking of starting slow? A draft or some white wine? Or are you looking to kick it some?”

  “What’s in the middle?”

  “How about a gin and tonic with lime?”

  “Gin can sneak up on you.”

  “I know.”

  Juana nodded and mixed it. Gayle noticed that the pour was modest. Juana was not trying to work her or set her up. That was a comfort.

  Gayle sipped her drink and listened to the music and—as her eyes adjusted—looked at the women. There were no men at all, not even straight or gay BFFs with their female friends. Only women. Gayle tried to decide who was a lesbian and who was bi, or bi-curious, but she had no real idea. Only a few of the women would have registered with her as obviously or possibly gay before she walked in. She was pretty sure there was a big blinking neon sign above her own head, though.

  When an hour passed and no one seemed to even glance her way, Gayle checked herself in the mirror behind the bar. Her long hair was straight and glossy, the natural mahogany highlights showing through the black. She’d applied her makeup with subtlety. She wore a dark-brown Italian silk–merino wool V-neck sweater with a ruffle from the top right shoulder down across the body almost to her left hip. The sweater was nicely fitted to accentuate her curves and show some cleavage, but with long sleeves because it was cold out. And she wore the tight black skinny jeans. A russet-colored scarf was draped around her, which Gayle kept pulling down to reveal her curves and then jerked back into place to hide them.

  “You’re going to pull a muscle doing that,” said a voice and Gayle once more jumped half out of her skin. Were all lesbians freaking ninjas? She turned and then her mouth went totally dry.

  It was her.

  The black woman from the clothing store. Owning the space she stood in. Dark hair and dark eyes and very red lips. A wicked little knowing smile. Lots of silver jewelry and energetic stones. Black knit top with lots of subtle patterning. Black tights.

  “I…” began Gayle and failed utterly to find a way to complete the sentence.

  “You bought those jeans,” said the woman. “Nice. They fit you so well. Is that seat taken? Good. My name’s Dianna.”

  And that fast Dianna was seated next to Gayle, who was absolutely unable to utter a coherent sentence.

  68

  In her dream Patty reached the top of the hill and stepped from the shadows of Boundary Street across the line of light and into the Fire Zone.

  The Music hit her like a wave. Harsh at first, but then everything she was, was suddenly aligned with what it was. The Music. Capital M. Sounds and songs that had been played so long, so well, with such insight and profound understanding that they had come alive, achieved consciousness and awareness and wisdom. The Music wrapped itself around her and kissed her and welcomed her to the Fire Zone.

  Patty felt herself moving forward, along the street toward the avenue where thousands of people were laughing and dancing. The people around her seemed completely insubstantial, wisps of color in the shapes of men and women, and of children. With each step, though, each shape became more defined, more real in every way. Deeper, wider, brighter, hotter, infinitely complex in the way stars are. When Patty looked down at her own body she gasped to see that she, too, was dressed in rags of light. Shimmering and alive in ways she could never be back down in the shadows.

  Dance with us, said a voice, and she turned to look, but instantly understood that the voice had come from inside her own mind.

  “I don’t dance,” she said.

  Everyone dances. It’s how we are alive.

  “I stopped dancing a long time ago.”

  Why? asked the voice, and it was as if the voices of every dancer around her spoke at once. Not in some overwhelming way, though. It was a perfect h
armony, in time with the Music. Many of the voices were familiar. Many were not. All were her family, though. Soul family.

  “I forgot how to dance,” lied Patty.

  No, said the voices. No one ever forgets. We are made of star stuff, infinite and in constant motion. The universe moves within us and life itself is a dance.

  Patty tried to turn away, to hide her shame and her truth, but she realized with a shock that she was deep within the Fire Zone now. Completely surrounded by ten thousand shining faces. Beyond the crowds rose the facades of the nightclubs where she used to dance in her dreams. Grim Torquemada’s, with the massive bloodred neon hand flashing on its white wall. The swirling spike of silver and turquoise that was Unlovely’s. Beyond that, Café Vortex, with a real spiral of wind that sucked up the dancers and sent them laughing into the night. And others. Too many to count. Dance clubs everywhere. Dancers and the dance everywhere.

  “I don’t want to dance anymore,” protested Patty. “I’m not allowed.”

  The next voice spoke beside her and she turned to see a very tall woman with masses of red hair. Her body was ripe and lovely, dressed in a tight gown of shimmering green, and there was an emerald in her forehead. Not on a circlet—it seemed to grow out of flawless skin. But beneath the jewel and arching brows were smooth panels of flesh in which there were no eyes at all. And yet, on some instinctual level that reached all the way down to her soul, Patty knew that this woman was called Lady Eyes, and she saw everything.

  Every.

  Single.

  Thing.

  Who has told you that you are not allowed to dance?

  Patty felt the tears on her cheeks burning like spilled lamp oil. “I forgot her name,” she said with a sob. “I forgot her face.”

  Whose face have you forgotten?

  “Tuyet … I forgot everything about…”

  Her words trailed off as she realized she’d just spoken her daughter’s name. Spoken it with surety, with a mother’s unbreakable confidence.

  Lady Eyes reached down and took Patty’s hand, lifting it so they could both look. Around them many of the dancers turned to see. Their eyes were filled with fire. Lady Eyes used two very long fingers to pluck away the bandage. There, on the back of her left hand, was the face of Tuyet. The other tattoo, the crude one, seemed to hover above the surface of Patty’s skin, glowing with a faint yellow light. A warning light, maybe, offering a choice: stop now or drive faster.

  She is right there, said the lady.

  “She’s leaving me,” cried Patty. “He took her. He has her.”

  Who has her?

  “Him!”

  The Music seemed to suddenly become muted, distorted, even ugly. There was a frenetic buzzing in the air that made it hard for her to think.

  Speak his name, urged the lady. Names have so much power, little sister. Don’t you know that?

  “But I don’t know his name. He stole her. I have no idea who he is.”

  Yes, said Lady Eyes, you do.

  “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t,” wailed Patty. The buzzing grew louder and louder as if ten million insect wings fought the Music to own the Fire Zone itself. “He stole his name, too.”

  Your daughter is with him, but she’s also with you, Patty. Speak his name.

  “I can’t…” She fell to her knees, weeping, screaming, bleeding. Maybe dying.

  The buzzing was a towering sound now. Patty touched her ear and her fingers came away slick with bright-red blood. Around her some of the dancers were wincing and drawing back. The Music fought to be heard. All at once Lady Eyes raised her hand, fingers wide, and in a voice louder than thunder yelled, STOP!

  The buzzing stopped.

  Just like that.

  A thing like a shadow of light fell across her and the Music was back, soft and sweet and so powerful.

  Speak his name, my love, said Lady Eyes.

  With snot running from her nose and blood clogging her ears, and her tears mingling with spit from slack lips, Patty mumbled seven words. They hurt her mouth like punches.

  “He is the Lord of the Flies,” she whispered. The terror in her voice was vast and bottomless.

  A moment later she felt the softness of lips pressed gently against her forehead.

  Tuyet is your daughter.

  And then Patty Cakes woke up, looking at the hospital ceiling. Around her the nighttime hospital was silent except for the hiss and ping of machines attached to the lost.

  69

  Monk couldn’t sleep, so he trudged outside, ran through hard rain to his car, and drove to Patty’s to double-check that he had, in fact, locked up that morning. He had. Her keys were still in his jeans pocket, so he opened up and wandered through the rooms. Seeing the things she’d unpacked—the tools of her trade, her iPad, some clothes—and the stacks of boxes left untouched. Art, old-fashioned photo albums, stuff from Vietnam, stuff from New York, books, pots, and pans. He debated unpacking for her, setting the whole place up, maybe giving it a good clean, lighting some cleansing incense. But when he found the framed picture of Patty with Tuyet, taken at the hospital where the little girl was born, he stopped.

  He took the picture over to one of the barber chairs, slumped into it, and stared at the image for a long time. How in the hell could a mother forget her child? Fathers? Sure, some of them could let it all go, but they hadn’t spent nine months sharing existence with a new life. It was always different with mothers.

  How could Patty forget?

  How?

  He wiped tears from his eyes and stared at the tiny baby in Patty’s arms. So newly alive, so full of potential.

  “Goddamn it,” he breathed.

  INTERLUDE TWELVE

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  He went back to Malibu Mark five times. Each time he had one new fly tattooed on a different part of his body.

  On his fourth visit he contrived to accidentally brush Tink, the receptionist’s, arm with the backs of his fingers. His knuckles made the briefest contact with a tiny black and white semicolon. Owen mistook it for two small insect tattoos, but when they appeared on his arm later that evening he saw what the design really was. He was disappointed for nearly forty minutes.

  Until the memories ignited like burning phosphor in his mind.

  Instantly he was Tink—little Tinker Bell—at age eleven. A tiny waif of a girl cringing against the headboard of her bed, pillows and blankets pulled up to her chin as if they were armor enough against the monster who came into her room night after night. Uncle Harry. Big, fat, with a thin mustache and wet teeth that glistened as he smiled in the glow of the My Little Pony night-light. Teeth that glistened as he unbuckled and unzipped. Night after night after night.

  Then he was Tink at fourteen. On the street, living in cars, in crack houses even though she didn’t use. Blowing strangers for food money. Fucking truckers for enough cash to buy the antibiotics that killed what they gave her. Living like a ghost that haunted her own life.

  Tink at nineteen, standing on the wooden kitchen chair in a tiny apartment she shared with three other women. The chair wobbling as she fitted the electrical cord around her neck and then around the ceiling light. Smiling for the first time in years because there was no tomorrow, and that was a beautiful, beautiful thought.

  Tink at twenty-two. Assisting now in the Survivors of Suicide that met Tuesdays and Fridays at the Methodist church.

  Tink meeting Malibu Mark at the group. Comparing war stories. Comparing scars. Getting inked by him with the semicolon, the symbol used by people like her. Because that symbol was used when an author could have opted to end a sentence with a hard stop, but didn’t. Because now she was the author, and the sentence was her life … and she had finally come to the place where she understood there was more story to tell.

  The memories burned through him. He screamed as he was raped, stifled her screams as he sold himself, wept for joy as he tightened the electrical cord, and shouted in triumph when he accepted life as the best next cha
pter. He. Not Tink. Owen. Because it was his story now, his life’s experience, his memory.

  His ink.

  When he went back to Malibu Mark for his fifth tattoo, there was another receptionist at the desk. A black woman with a shaved head. A stranger.

  “Where’s Tink?” he asked, making it sound casual. The woman’s eyes shifted away, but as they did he saw how wet they suddenly got. How filled with grief.

  “Tink left,” said the woman, and then changed the subject.

  Inside the studio, as Malibu Mark worked, Owen asked the same question. The needle paused in its work, the buzz-saw sound filling the air. The artist looked away, just as the new receptionist had. Then he took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and exhaled slowly.

  “Some people can’t swim all the way upstream,” was what he said. Only that, and nothing more.

  Owen found the obituary online. It did not say suicide, but he’d read enough of those things to know. He’d taken her memories and she could not live without them.

  Owen never went back to Malibu Mark for more flies.

  He didn’t need to. Now he understood how it worked.

  Like a fly following the scent of spoiled meat, Owen went elsewhere, and the flies went with him.

  70

  “Crazy weather,” said Gayle.

  The beautiful woman sipped her drink and looked amused. “Yes,” she said, blotting her lips with a paper napkin. “Rain. Been a theme here lately.”

  Gayle flushed, immediately hating herself for having resorted to talking about the damn weather. She fished wildly for something else to say. Small talk was never her thing, and starting conversations with strangers was at the bottom of the list of her skill set.

  “I saw you at the store,” said Gayle.

  “Yes,” agreed the woman. Amusement continued to sparkle in her eyes, though whether it was mockery or a sense of fun at Gayle’s discomfort was impossible to tell.

  Gayle looked around, seeing the same faces, the same hunched figures, the same arrangement of chairs and tables. None of that was helpful.