And it was hot. He took a step forward, and the wet muck beneath his feet spattered like stove grease.
But the heat felt good.
Joyously, Kilpatrick dove into the air, twisting like a gymnast and landing on his back. He let the hilly maze of his brain transport him through his life experiences, his past life, hazy memories come alive, remembrances from womb to school to work…
Work. Most of the memories were the same: Kilpatrick in his garage, his makeshift tattoo shop, inking the skin of indifferent clients for a pittance that hardly paid the bills. But it wasn’t the money that mattered; money was dead paper, worthless. The tattoo—the living, breathing art embedded in human skin—was the only thing that drove him. He’d poured his heart into hundreds of skins, creating masterpieces that would make Rembrandt jealous. Even if someone wanted a plain-old skull tattooed on their arm, Kilpatrick had a million ways of looking at a skull, and each was a genuine, original vision—a glimpse of the world as he saw it—that deserved to be carried around on the flesh, to share and enlighten the ignorant.
Watching his creation of tattoos long gone, Kilpatrick became enthralled. So much he had learned since the early days, so much innate talent stitched into the pores of his clients…but something else, something more elusive about these memories, some constant, recurrent theme underpinning each tattoo…
And then he realized what it was: indifference. None of the people whose flesh he had graced with his talent were pure art lovers. None appreciated his work. There were men who got a tattoo to get chicks, or to look tough, or to join a gang…but none really cared about the essence of the artwork itself. There were women who got tattooed for the same reasons, but none understood the true nuances of Kilpatrick’s creations, and none really cared.
No one cared.
Anger returned, and Kilpatrick wanted this visit of his life to be over and done with. Hell, he wanted his whole life to be done with—visiting his past made him realize that it had all been a worthless farce, a catering to the petty needs of others. The payback had once been the creation itself, but that was no longer enough.
He forced himself to the end of this trial—visions rushed past his eyes in a blur. And then suddenly the ride came to an end. A dead end.
He was in a room, again the tattoo parlor of his garage. The walls dripped red and wet, the neurons freshly burned with the imprint of his most recent memory. The images were Technicolor-sharp and surreal; it was almost as if time had skipped back a beat, and he was visiting himself moments before he had entered his own brain….
He slowly drew the inkgun across Coolie’s bicep, inking in the last piece of a panoramic collage of his best “flash pictures,” the drawings and sketches on display in the tattoo parlor that a client could choose from. An eagle with widespread wings squawked an angry battle cry from Coolie’s arm, its wings engulfing skulls and snakes and a poker hand full of sinister black aces of spades. All the usual flash, combined into one image…and more. Kilpatrick had etched a gaping bullet hole in the eagle’s white scalp, and blood and chunks of bone sprayed into the backdrop of a windswept and burning American flag.
Kilpatrick began to ink in the hand holding the gun pointed at the eagle when Coolie finally took notice.
“Whaddafuck is that?” he shouted, pulling back from the needle, scraping a long black line in the process down his forearm. “What the hell are you doing!”
Kilpatrick leaned back smugly and grinned. “You said you wanted a realistic tattoo. Well that’s what you’re getting.”
Coolie’s eyes were black circles of disbelief. “Bullshit! I didn’t pay for you to trash all the stuff you just drew on my arm! I don’t want this shit. Cover it up. Now.”
“You can’t cover up the truth. It is reality. It is hell. It is my life and yours. It is America, the world. And it’s permanent. No sense avoiding it…”
A metallic blur and then the switchblade was pressed against his jugular. “You want reality?” Coolie pressed the cold steel sharply against his neck, and Kilpatrick could feel his pulse beating against the blade. “This is reality, motherfucker!”
He suddenly felt calm, as if slipping into a sleepy daydream. “So you understand what I mean,” he replied, enjoying the coolness of the blade against his throat.
Coolie’s eyes were spinning in circles. “You are one sick bastard, man. I’m walkin’ outta here. You ain’t gonna stop me, hear?” Coolie threw Kilpatrick back with his elbows and nicked his ear with the knife. Then he found Kilpatrick’s cigar box and withdrew a fistful of cash. “I’m not paying for this garbage work you did on my arm, but you’re gonna pay to have it covered up. And I better not see you again. Understand?” Coolie backed toward the garage door, as if expecting Kilpatrick to pull a gun.
The artist crossed his arms like a tattooed shield. “You never saw me at all. You’re blind, Coolie. Blind.”
And then Coolie was gone, slipping out of the door and hopping on his cycle. A kickstart and then he was fleeing down the street. Amid the fading sound of a groaning motor, Kilpatrick thought he could hear Coolie’s laughter.
No one fucking understands art anymore, he thought, and then….
Back in his mind. He turned from the scene, now sad instead of angry. Coolie had stolen from him. Not just his money, but his latest masterpiece. He’d pick-pocketed his talent, for his own purposes. Like everyone else.
Never again.
He walked with head hung low, watching his naked feet spatter on the floor of his brain like walking through hot puddles on the street. He could sense the scenes of his past life roaring around him as he walked aimlessly through the corridors of his cranium.
Coolie and all the other had stolen him. Taken his life. He felt dead.
No, I AM dead, he thought. Maybe Coolie DID cut my throat and leave me to bleed to death. That would explain why my life just flashed before my eyes. That’s what they say happens when you bite it: you relive the past and then you go to judgment.
He raised his head and looked vacantly around, wondering when judgment would come.
And then the floor opened up beneath him.
Darkness—not blackness, but an absence of all color—grasped him, pulled him down, surrounded him as he fell in the hellish abyss…it sphinctered behind him, and he could feel its undulating fibers gripping him, tongues of flame dancing across his naked flesh. He was swallowing darkness, it was filling his nostrils, and again he was choking, but this time he could not cry out, he could not think, he could not feel…the darkness was taking him, eating him inside out, and then…
And then he was in another room. No, not a room, but a cavern with slick, pink walls. It was the brightest, hottest room that he had seen so far, the walls glistening like the guts of slugs, throbbing like the inside of a beating heart.
And then he saw…flash.
Placed with the geometric perfection of an art gallery were seven framed portraits, each embedded firmly into the pink and wet walls of his brain like square scabs. Seven dark, revolting images. Seven shadowy memories, each trapped in a capsule of time by ink. He approached one, and its shadowy dark color became more defined as he came nearer: His father, trapped in a moment like a statuesque pose, towering above him in still life with a ratchet gripped in the hairy palm over his head, ready to swing….
Kilpatrick fell back, wrenching his head from the powerful image. He curled up like a fetus on the fiery floor of the cavern, spilling tears from his eyes.
This must be hell. I must have died and gone to hell. Through blurry and burning eyeballs he looked up from the floor, avoiding the portraits. There was no roof or ceiling—just the darkness that had engulfed him. There was no way out. He was trapped, imprisoned.
He returned to his tears, enjoying their soothing wetness. He did so for what seemed like hours. Waiting for judgment in lonely isolation—wait
ing for the punishment he knew was bound to arrive.
He thought that perhaps isolation itself was his punishment. Hell is a place of loneliness. Hell is not being able to do what you want, not having any freedom to express yourself. Hell is done to you, not by you. Hell is limitations, life’s freedoms frozen in ice. Or life trapped within time, like the images caged on the walls in this gallery he was trapped in.
He cried.
He cried until he noticed the tattoo machine in the corner, plugged into the wet walls of the gallery with a serpentine cord reminiscent of the umbilicus that jutted from his torso.
He decided to wile away the time by doodling on the floor of his brain, much like a child in detention will carve his initials into a desk while awaiting the principal’s punishment. The first thing he etched into the floor of his brain was thick, Old English lettering that read: LET ME OUT OF THIS LIVING HELL. It looked vaguely like a title to the gallery, so he signed it: BY MARK MICHAEL KILPATRICK.
The tattoo machine felt good as it vibrated in his hands. It was numbing. And before he knew what he was doing he was drawing his own version of a living hell into the fleshy floor, surrounding the words he had scrawled with torturous visions of burning bodies, punishments of pain with barbed whips and flaming spears and a lake of razors. The sketch grew as he furiously worked, detailing grimaces on the faces of the tortured souls, the limbs torn ragged from torsos, the decapitations. The infliction of pain.
Before he knew it, he was working on the walls, too, tattooing crucifixions and condemnations of faceless beings, hangings with nooses of barbed wire, impossible stretchings by racks with spiked shackles.
So caught up in his work, he no longer feared the gallery of images that lined the walls of the cavern. He ignored them, worked around them, sketching the multicolored and many-limbed form of the demon who controlled the museum of pain…three-faced, bestial, with snarling fangs that reflected the tortures that surrounded him, a slimy mirror of spit and blood. The intricate details of each impossible mouth carried a miniature torture within: stories within stories, pains inside pains, tortures within the organs of the torturer itself.
Kilpatrick leaned back and smiled. He felt aged, experienced. Like an old man. Years had gone by in his mind, and he knew it. The isolation and the punishment no longer mattered, because he had taken control. He was staying busy, doing things, creating art—which was all he ever wanted to do anyway. It was no longer punishment, but pleasure. It felt good.
And then he realized: if he could feel at all, if he was free to create this mural, then he was feeling and free. He was not dead. He was not in hell at all.
But he was indeed trapped. There was no imaginable way out of this mental prison that he could find. Angrily, he pushed against the walls of the cavern, trying to force his way out. It was not death, but the dead end of life itself.
Rage exploded within his chest, a flaming fireball of angry heat that drove him. He ran against the walls, flinging his body against their damp darkness. He pounded his fists against the wet and inky prison of gray matter. Damp flecks of flesh sprayed into his face, covering his arms with brown jelly and yellow goo, but a webwork of dendrites remained, an impenetrable net of nerve. He couldn’t break through.
A thought tackled him, seizing his mind. He suddenly knew how to escape from this private prison: by making it public.
He dropped to his knees and set to work, outlining a black circle in the middle of his mural of hell. Then he shaded it in with a rainbow of colors. When it was complete, he had created a round hatchway, an escape hatch that opened into a glorious landscape of what he imagined reality to be. It was a depiction of the world outside of his mind.
It was not only a way out, but a way to stay out. A way to finally make people appreciate his talent, to recognize his masterpieces of art, to show the world how gifted he alone knew he was. To go public. To draw his way out of this living hell.
Kilpatrick retreated a few paces from the escape hatch he had drawn. Then he charged toward the beatific hole in his mental cavern, furiously pumping his legs as he bound toward it.
But as he moved, so did the mural of hell he had tattooed onto the the walls of his mind. Hands reached out to grab his feet and pull him back, slipping…tentacles lashed at his back and shoulders, twisting him but not getting a grip…loud, thunderous laughter shook the walls, and the hole he had drawn began to shrivel, engulfing his hope, swallowing the real world, becoming a shrinking disk of salvation….
And then he was through, its rim of beautiful ink cleansing his flesh as he poured through it.
The pictures still inside, too, would be cleansed soon. Those images still clinging to the walls of his mind would be purged, rinsed in the wondrous waters of his tattoo ink, washed free. Kilpatrick only needed to go public. To ink his way out from inside of his mental hell. To rid himself of those hellish images by picking those scabs of memories with the tip of a needle. To take the flash pictures out of his mind and get them into the skin of someone else.
Kilpatrick felt his mind shrink back into place, sucking itself back inside his skull and packing itself against the walls of bone. He had regained control. He was back in the paint-soaked reality of his garage—he could see the sign he had once painted above the door: KILLER’S INK TATTOO SHOP.
He had returned to the world of the public, the world he could control.
The paintings inside, he knew, would soon come out. They, too, would go public. He wasn’t quite sure yet how he would go about it, but it would be as easy as reaching a hand inside of his head and yanking the walls of the gallery that curdled there inside out. Perhaps the light of day would burn them off. Perhaps they would shrivel and die, like shed snakeskin. Or harden and protect him like the shell of a turtle.
And like the shell of a turtle, people would marvel at the intricate beauty of it all, momentarily forgetting the creature that hid inside.
CHAPTER ONE
I.
James “Coolie” Kuhlman dismounted his custom-built, chrome and leather-adorned Harley outside of Chet’s Bar ‘n’ Grill, completely convinced that anyone in the vicinity was paying full attention to his proud, cowboy-like motions. With thick, oily fingers he pulled a plump nub of cigar from between his wet lips and flicked it away with a snap. A trail of gray smoke streamed from his fingers like a magician as the burning stogie cut through the thin Colorado Springs air toward the gutter.
Coolie was a mechanic, but he went out of his way to make sure he didn’t look like one. Chicks went for bikes, not the poor dreamers who just fixed other people’s scooters. It was the look that counted—and he made damned sure he fit the part of a Harley dealer, which was his own dream. That’s what he’d con the babes with, anyway, by telling them he owned a dealership. And he wasn’t quite lying, since he did deal the occasional ounce or two from the back of the garage at Bob’s Cycles, where he rolled and monkeyed in grease all day.
He slowly plunked open the buttons of his black leather vest as he walked toward the mirrored doors of Chet’s. He watched his reflection grow as he approached: his long brown hair was a tad windblown from the ride, but still moussed in a dramatic part down the middle of his head, his jeans were properly faded around the exaggerated bulges of his groin and his wallet, and his walk was a cool James Dean on steroids. Everything was perfect. He finished unbuttoning his vest before he reached the door, pushing its lapels aside in mockery of a gunfighter revealing his holster.
He stepped inside. The barroom was as dingy and dark as usual, and he knew he would look like a diamond in the rough to every chick in the joint. He surveyed the room, searching for the one he’d choose as his own for the night. There were two brunettes in a booth in the far left corner, smoking long cigarettes and brooding over a couple of Budweisers. One lonely redheaded looker sat spread-eagled on a barstool, leaning into the face of Chet, the barkeep, chatting abo
ut something sexual and private. Some blonde with jeans pulled up high on her waist—jeans that revealed every crease and crack of her privates—stepped out from the small hallway in the back that housed the restrooms. His competition—two other bikers, much larger than Coolie—was sitting at the end of the bar that faced the door, apparently either shaking hands or arm wrestling. Some wannabe hippie with a red bandanna headband wrapped around his long and mousy brown hair sat at the booth on his left with his back to him, and Coolie ignored him, steering clear of anything that could make him look bad.
Coolie moved to the bar, between the bikers and the gabbing redhead, straddling the leather-capped stool with a wide swing of his booted leg. His sleeves were rolled back revealing glorious tattoos—including his most recent ink from that Kilpatrick fucker. He didn’t really like that one, but it was free, and still tough enough to bare in public, and who knew—maybe it would get him a babe for the night? It was worth a try. If it didn’t work, he could always get it covered up with a better one. He flexed his arm, trying to get a kinetic move off the fresh tat. The eagle ruffled its feathers in full plume.
But no one was paying attention to him.
He turned his head toward the redhead, keeping his eyes on her as he spoke. “How ‘bout a beer and a tequila chaser?” The inverted phrase didn’t get any laughs.
Chet turned to face him while the redhead kept her eyes glued to the barkeep’s shoulders. He stared at Coolie, who was still ignoring him to take an eyeball tour of the looker—still no eye contact. The bartender nodded impatiently, though Coolie didn’t notice.
The brunettes behind him giggled. The men beside him grunted, fists still gripped together, though Coolie couldn’t be sure if they were arm wrestling or not. They could have been shaking hands when both suddenly tried to outgrip the other, or maybe they were just stupid, or hell, maybe even gay.
Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 2