Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  I nodded. Jacob didn’t yet know the difficulty of researching others with the Mark, but he was right about the language, and right in that I had much more to work with than my dad ever had.

  What’s in the box?

  “You’re right,” I told him. I wasn’t just agreeing with him. I was grateful for having someone who knew that I needed a kick in the pants to get over the hump of self-pity that was threatening to paralyze me. I didn’t tell him how much I needed to hear what he had just said—and how suddenly afraid I was.

  The idea I might push him away had become more terrifying the more I opened up. I had thought that once I started talking to him, it would be over. Either he would accept me, or he wouldn’t. But it wasn’t like that. The more I said, the closer I felt myself coming to some unspecified line that, if crossed, would spell the end of anything between me and Jacob.

  And I was beginning to think that there was more between us than I’d allowed myself to think, which made the threat that much worse.

  I had gone this far; it was enough for now. I couldn’t push it any farther. I couldn’t ask him to believe that the Mark made me much more an alien than I had told him already.

  Not tonight, not when I had already pushed myself—pushed both of us—this far.

  So I let the subject trail off, and Jacob let it go. We spent the rest of dinner talking about things that were much less disturbing. I asked him about his life, his family, what he did with his time off. And by the time we had finished eating, I realized that this had turned into an actual date.

  I hadn’t been on a date with anyone since high school.

  We spent much longer at the table than our meals justified. When we finally left the restaurant, we walked out to the parking lot. I took a step toward my own car, and Jacob reached out and took my hand. I froze.

  “Dana?”

  I turned around and looked at him. There was something sad, almost melancholy, in his expression.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to put you in a difficult position.”

  “Huh?”

  “I see how uncomfortable you are with this.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “We work together. I don’t want to make that difficult for you.”

  I saw the concern in his face, and something melted inside of me. I took a step in front of him and placed my hand on his cheek. His skin was warm and just slightly rough from a day’s worth of stubble. I felt the contact almost as deep as the Mark touched me.

  “Dana, I really—”

  “Shhh.” I bent forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. Just a brush, but enough to set my pulse accelerating and make his eyes noticeably widen.

  I stepped back and told him, “Thank you.”

  Then I turned around and walked to my car. He didn’t stop me, which was good, because I didn’t know what the hell I’d just done.

  NINE

  ONCE I GOT home, I pulled the yellowed banker’s box out of the closet and brought it down to the glass coffee table in my living room. I stared at it for several minutes before I gathered the nerve to take off the lid. The top layer was just like I remembered—a few pictures and my adoption papers. I reached in and pulled out the adoption papers, a thick sheaf of legal-sized pages held together with a binder clip. I flipped through the pages and saw the important date.

  According to the state of Ohio, Mom and Dad officially became Mom and Dad when I was thirteen years old. Or when we assume I was thirteen. We didn’t really know my real birthday, did we? There were more court papers in the bundle: a declaration making me a ward of the state; Mom and Dad officially becoming my guardians; my official name change from a Jane Doe.

  It was all exceedingly dry legal paperwork, none of which should have made me tear up. Still, I found myself wiping my eyes. I scanned through it, finding nothing unexpected. All of it I knew about, at least subliminally. The only thing that felt unexpected was how long it took before my parents actually fostered me, and before they could go from fostering to adoption. I was institutionalized for over a year before they took me in. I barely remembered that.

  Under the legal paperwork and some more family pictures was a thick manila envelope. I pulled out a stack of medical paperwork from twenty years ago, from that period of institutionalization. Physically I seemed to be okay, but mentally my keepers had me all over the map. I saw diagnoses of autism, borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, PTSD—apparently, I was prone to emotional and angry outbursts. It didn’t help that I spoke an unknown language. After I started to learn English, the doctors added psychogenic amnesia to my long list of problems, trauma of some sort left me unable to communicate the most basic facts about who I was or where I came from. I don’t know why, but it made me uneasy that my lack of self-knowledge went back that far.

  Under the medical records was a sealed envelope with my name written on it in my dad’s handwriting.

  “A letter?” I whispered. “Dad?”

  My hands shook a little as I used a house key as a letter opener. I pulled out several pages of folded notebook paper. I unfolded the pages and saw the words, “To my dearest Dana:”

  I almost dropped the pages when I read that. My dad had been gone nearly a decade. It was almost too much to be holding a letter from him to me. I glanced at a date scrawled in the corner and saw that it was written five years before he died.

  I blinked my eyes clear and read.

  * * *

  —

  TO my dearest Dana:

  Yesterday your adoption was made official. You don’t even know. I wanted to mark the event with a cake and a party. Your mother—who is now officially your mother—vetoed that idea. She pointed out that you already call us Mom and Dad, and that you have a deep need for us to be a “normal” family. And, in the end, it was only a legal formality. You are already our daughter, aren’t you?

  Besides, ever since you started going to school, drawing attention to your origins has upset you. I’m no longer certain exactly how much of your past you’re still aware of. I still remember the last time I talked about finding you. You were eight or nine and asked me quietly, “Please don’t talk about that, Daddy.”

  I saw how much it hurt you to talk about it, so I stopped.

  I’m writing you this in case you ever decide you want to know your past and I’m not around for you to ask. If it still hurts, I urge you to put this letter away without reading further. Hurting you is the last thing I want to do.

  If you do want to know, I should warn you that I don’t know everything. I should also warn you that some parts of this story—according to the doctors—are responsible for traumatizing you and causing you to repress your memories. But if you want to know, I believe you have a right to this story.

  If you’re still reading, I want you to know that we love you, and nothing in here changes that.

  * * *

  —

  “OH, crap,” I whispered to myself. My hand may have shaken a little as I turned the page over. It seemed forever before I could force myself to read again. After a deep breath I read on and felt some relief at seeing the familiar story in my dad’s handwriting. How he saw a dirty, naked, tattooed six-year-old rooting in a dumpster behind a bar. There was more detail than the story I knew: how I ran and screamed in another language; how he had to call for backup to corner me; how I bit and clawed at the officers trying to catch me; how the EMTs ended up sedating me.

  That was the story I knew.

  Then I read a detail that started knocking the world askew.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE they had you sedated, I followed you to the hospital. I think I may have been protective of you even then. But at the hospital they found it wasn’t dirt that covered you. It was dried blood. And it wasn’t yours.

  * * *

&n
bsp; —

  I read that paragraph three times. Each time I did, something tightened in my gut, a long-forgotten panic. Devoid of context, it was just there, as if it had been waiting patiently for me.

  The next few paragraphs talked about my hospitalization, and how there was nothing physically wrong with me. I barely read them, rushing ahead to find some answer, some reason for the blood. Half of me was afraid that there’d be no reason, that it would be just one more unsolved mystery about my origin. The other half of me was afraid that I would find the reason.

  * * *

  —

  THAT morning they tasked a bunch of us to canvass the neighborhood where I found you. The blood was a really strong indication that there was a crime scene somewhere in the area, and even if you weren’t hysterical and sedated, you didn’t have the English to tell us where.

  I wasn’t the one who found it, but I read the reports.

  There was an apartment in a building two blocks away. A man and a woman involved in a double homicide.

  * * *

  —

  I stared at the page describing the crime scene for several minutes before individual words started making sense. Something that might have been a memory started intruding, along with the ancient panic. It was just the briefest sensation of clutching at someone much bigger than me, someone wet, someone unmoving.

  I forced myself to think like a cop and read it, ignoring the stirring panic in my gut.

  The apartment was the scene of a bloody knife fight, or knife versus sword fight. The woman had died from a gut wound, the man from a slice across the throat. The woman had a butcher knife, the man had a long sword. The weirdness didn’t stop there. While there wasn’t anything remarkable about the way the woman was dressed, the man was dressed as if he was headed toward a renfaire or a seriously hardcore SCA event. He was clothed for the eleventh century from his pointed helmet, to his leather armor, to his woolen undergarments.

  Another weirdness was, from the wound on the man’s neck, the woman attacked from behind. Given how badly she was hacked apart, it was also apparent that she attacked first and suffered the guy’s wrath until he bled out.

  I knew instantly that the man had been going after me, not the woman. He had been raising his sword toward me, and she had come from behind and, in desperation, carved into his throat between jaw and gorget.

  I had to stop reading again.

  When I resumed, I was not surprised to find out that the autopsies revealed that both of them bore “tattoos” similar to my own. Or that blood tests suggested that the woman was most likely my biological mother. The man, surprisingly enough, appeared unrelated to me.

  The cop theory, and the one my Dad subscribed to, was that I had been born into some sort of cult; one that my biological mother was trying to leave. It explained the common tattoos, the weirdly dressed assailant, and the fact no one had any IDs or paper trail. Even the apartment had been rented for cash using a stolen identity.

  “They killed my mother,” I whispered.

  I had no idea who “they” were.

  * * *

  —

  I reread my dad’s letter several times over the next few days, trying to tease one more thread of sense out of it. On its own, it didn’t give me any more insight. It just left me with even more questions about John Doe, his relation to the people in that apartment, his relation to me.

  The simple theory was that John Doe was my biological father and the armored figure that killed him was related to the anachronistically dressed assailant in my mother’s apartment. That made some sort of sense. But it made too many assumptions.

  Fortunately, thanks to Jacob’s prodding, I had another lead to follow.

  * * *

  —

  WEALCAN has fallen. They’ll come for you. The shadows are coming.

  No matter what my origins, or the origin of the old man, I had a lead on the language he spoke.

  That we spoke.

  It took me two more nights on the computer, playing with various translations of the syllables that formed the phrase I believed I understood. And, when my search paid off, I couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Old English?” I whispered at the glowing screen.

  My search had been harder than normal, largely because my transliteration of the words didn’t use symbols that the language needed. At first, I thought that the similarity of meaning I found was a coincidence, until I found a YouTube video of a professor from the UK doing a dramatic reading of Beowulf. The accent was horrid, and the words sounded wrong, but after three stanzas, something clicked in my brain, and I understood.

  I whispered along with the video, “Weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah, oð þæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan; þæt wæs god cyning . . .”

  How far was I from the world I came from?

  * * *

  —

  THE morning after I made my discovery, I ran for a couple of miles as if it was any other day. And instead of listening to industrial or speed-metal on my iPod, I had a free audiobook of Beowulf spoken by a reader who seemed to have much better enunciation than the professor on YouTube. I listened as I ran, letting the words sink in despite the unpleasant accent. I had been listening to it repeatedly, and with each iteration more words made sense—it was like listening to an unfamiliar song, and only understanding the lyrics on the third go-round.

  By the time I jogged back up the steps to my townhouse, the sun had risen above the horizon, and half the sky was the blocky gray of an oncoming storm. When I went in to the shower, I heard thunder.

  In the shower, I kept imagining the lines from Beowulf, and I realized that in my head, I was no longer translating the terms into their English equivalents. There were just the words, and with them the imagery.

  Who am I?

  Who was he?

  Was John Doe my father? My grandfather?

  Something caught in my chest. I had probably watched another family member, another parent, die in front of me. And not for the first time. The idea filled me with emotions that were ugly, dark, and violent—grief that was indistinguishable from rage.

  When I turned off the shower, I had to stand for a few moments and just breathe.

  My family—my biological family—should mean nothing to me. I had no clear memories of them, no connection with them since . . .

  Since they killed my mother.

  Why would someone reappear, years later? Why do that to me? What was the point of putting me through this?

  Why did he attack the man in the armor?

  “Was he afraid he would attack me?” I whispered.

  Was it a repeat of the scene in my biological mother’s apartment? The anachronistic assailant coming after me, and my family giving their lives to protect me?

  No, the armored figure left after the old man was mortally wounded. It couldn’t have been after me.

  All of this—the man dead in eleventh-century dress, the armored figure that killed John Doe, the stanzas in Old English filling my head—all of it spoke to a universe much wider and stranger that I had ever suspected, Mark or not.

  What kind of future or past had John Doe’s killer come from? Certainly nowhere in the slightly imperfect copies of home I ventured into. And nowhere in those worlds I knew would a child learn to speak Old English.

  How far would I have to walk to find people dressed like the man who killed my birth mother?

  After my shower, I stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom, studying the Mark in a way I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. The Mark had always been there, and I had taken it for granted. I had assumed that what little I knew was somehow the whole of what was to be known.

  The more I looked at it, the more I realized that I had been hiding from it, from the unknown it represented. I had focu
sed myself on what it did, not what it was or where it came from—and I had done so to the point where I had started thinking of it as an abstraction, not a physical object drawn across my skin. As if the dark lines on my skin were some sort of representation of the thing, like a name or a map or a shadow, but not the thing itself.

  Staring at the Mark in the mirror, it would not allow itself to be denied like that. The lines of it held my skin with tendrils of the darkest black I had ever seen, a black that destroyed whatever light shone upon it. What minimal highlights I saw was light reflected from moisture on my skin.

  When I brushed the surface of the Mark, the skin beneath felt no different to my fingers—though the Mark itself responded to the touch in a way that made me catch my breath.

  No tattoo this.

  It had also grown since I was a teenager, since I last gave myself such an exam. I had known then that the Mark was no static impression on my skin. It had grown with me, filling my back without stretching or distorting. But I was about the same height now that I was when I was seventeen, and the Mark had still grown. It had not only pushed the edges of itself up toward my neck and shoulders, and down to cover the curve under the small of my back, it had also increased in detail and complexity. I remembered the main design of the thing, but the spirals and curves had grown and branched to fill most of my skin with its unbroken pattern, repeated at many scales, some details drawn in tiny lines no thicker than a hair.

  Next to the mirror, I had tacked up the photo of John Doe that showed the pattern across his back. While the style of the thing was the same, I could see that his Mark was different, even with the small scale of the photo.

  Maybe it’s like a fingerprint.