Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  It is done. His gallery is empty. He is free.

  He is reborn.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I.

  Beneath the blanket of color that covered Schoenmacher’s tattooed face, Roberts noticed that his skin had veined out in a pale tint, with raised pink blotches spotting his face like the shell of a rotten robin’s egg. Burnt black-and-gray petroleum jelly greased his temples. After they wheeled him into the room, Roberts turned away, not wanting to see his friend so utterly robbed of his dignity, or worse—his identity. As he himself was robbed as well. Robbed of a close friend.

  He stared down at the white tiles of the floor, still stained with Schoenmacher’s drool from his last episode. “Is he going to be…okay?”

  A nasal, snobbish voice answered. “It’s much too soon to tell. But the signs do not look good. The drugs that were forced into his system earlier might have caused some brain damage. Whether it’s permanent or not is still to be discovered, but we’re taking care of it.”

  Roberts looked up at the man, a pinch-faced guy hiding inside a white jacket and horn-rimmed glasses. A medical name tag labeled him as Frang. His snooty, know-it-all look angered Roberts. “Did you say brain damage? As if putting ten million volts directly into his brain won’t cause even more damage, Dr. Frangenstein?”

  Dr. Frang looked sternly into Roberts’ eyes. “Sir, we are doing the best we can. And we will continue to do so. Your friend here is lucky to still be alive. We’ll give him the best treatment we have to ensure a productive life once he begins to heal…”

  “Bullshit,” Roberts said, his face flushed.

  Frang pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, looking down on Roberts like a stiff-lipped school teacher.

  The phone rang beside Schoenmacher’s bed. A nurse bent forward and picked it up, as mechanically as changing a bedpan.

  Schoenmacher convulsed in the bed—his arms and legs still strapped down with thick, leather belts. His entire face shot open from the shock of the phone call, and immediately he began to mimic it: “Brrl-ing! Brrl-ing!”

  “Dan!”

  He cocked his head toward Roberts like an insane owl, his eyes black circles, his nose beaklike: “I’m Birdy, see me fly? See me?” He puckered his lips. “Brrl-ing! Brrl-ing! Hello, Judy? Is that you, answering my mating call? Come to Papa, lovebird…”

  Roberts shoved his face in his hands, wishing he could plug his ears. This was crazy—Schoenmacher was crazy. Silly crazy, like a really bad TV comedy, only this was real, this was really happening.

  “I gotta get out of here,” he said, rushing toward the door.

  The nurse turned to face him, holding a hand over the receiver while another nurse was sticking a hypodermic needle into Schoenmacher’s tattooed arm. “Phone for you,” she called to Roberts.

  Roberts stopped himself, ran his fingers through his hair, and then stomped back to the phone. “What?” he asked, blatantly pissed.

  “Buckman here. Listen, Roberts…you got a camera crew there with you?”

  “Say what?” Schoenmacher was screaming in the background, his voice high-pitched and maniacal, draining down in a fight against the effects of the medication.

  “Camera crew. For the scoop on our people.”

  Roberts squinted his eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “The story. You’re there to get the story on Schoenmacher and Thomas, right?”

  Roberts pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it, as if it were something else altogether. Then he brought it back to his face. “Buckman…. I mean fuckman…listen closely, ‘cause I’m only gonna say this once.” He gritted his teeth. “Fuck you. Did you get that? Fuck you!”

  He slammed down the phone—the bell inside clanged from the impact. Roberts ran out of the room, charged to the stairwell, and bounded down the steps, pulling a cigarette out of his breast pocket. He shoved it in his mouth and lit it before he was out the door and on his way toward Lockerman’s house.

  II.

  Lockerman never leaves his door unlocked, Roberts thought as the knob turned in his hand. A haunting sense of familiarity crept up the back of his neck—this was too much like his entrance into Judy’s house: the front room all shadows and furniture, the heart-pounding silence, the instinctual fear that something terrible had happened….

  Cool out, man. Maybe he just found a lead in that register, and is out cuffing the Tattoo Killer right this very moment.

  Roberts moved toward the kitchen, where a long white beam of light angled down across the dark shadows of Lockerman’s laundry-scattered living room. The refrigerator hummed gently in the background, in perfect sync with the blood singing in his eardrums.

  He walked carefully into the fluorescent light.

  At first he didn’t see him, camouflaged in the bright white phosphorescence of the flickering ceiling lamp. But then his vague outline asserted itself in Roberts’ eyes, blurry and surreal, like an optical illusion.

  Lockerman looked like a pale ghost, a chalk line on the white kitchen floor that had been filled in, a man dusted in flour.

  Or a man whose entire body had been tattooed white.

  III.

  It was as if it were the first time he had really seen the demon in his mind for what it was. Not three-faced, but many-faced, if it could even be called that. A stew of sensory organs in places where they shouldn’t be—he had assumed some of the groupings were faces, but in this new light he knew it was impossible, just his imagination. The demon was a meandering mutant of changing shapes, the mix of organs spinning and rotating, altering their position as they moved and stirred, held together by something wet, sinewy, but undeniably related to flesh: an upturned nose spewed hairs and snot like seaweed in an ocean of mucus, quivering; a mouth stretched impossibly open, its razored teeth jutted upside down and sideways but still sharp—the bright red-and-silver tongue was like a metallic cat’s, a carpet of needles; winding, aimlessly floating wet eyeballs with irises of dark rainbows, flattened and puffy, looked nowhere but directly at him as he stared at the beast, almost amused because it had changed, because it was still changing, right along with him.

  “Are you real?” Kilpatrick asked, cocking his head to one side, feeling quite comfortable in confronting it, in challenging the demon that had once punished him. But now that he had gone public, the demon was nothing more than a slave.

  One of the mouths lunged forward. Its tongue wrapped around his lap, the sharp silver warm, comforting, and very real.

  Kilpatrick cuddled into the slurping mouth, his legs shuddering in the jagged throes of orgasm.

  It was a time of new beginnings, he knew. The demon of his mind no longer cruelly punishing him, but administering pleasure. It loved him now. Going public had made it happy—made him happy, as well. But his mission was far from complete: now that he was truly free from the gallery of painful memories that once controlled him, now that he was public, he was ready to create true art, the art that was his calling—art all his own.

  “I must go now,” he said sadly to the many-faced creature, and frowned as he opened the closet door.

  Stepping out of the dark threshold, into the light of the bedroom, Kilpatrick sighed.

  “You’re one sick motherfucker,” Corky said, his entire body clenched like one big muscle. “Think I don’t know what you have in that closet there? Think I don’t know what you’re doing in that sick room, you psycho fuck?”

  Kilpatrick looked over at his landlord, strapped with cracked black leather belts to the frame of the bed. “Shut up. You’re too stupid to understand true art…” He picked up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slipped them on over his wet body.

  Corky blinked a bead of sweat out of his eyes. “The only thing I understand is that I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you once I get loose.”
Corky grunted, pulling against the binds, trying to yank his arms free. The struggle made his arms turn puffy and red, like a junkie’s tied-off bicep.

  “No,” Kilpatrick said, moving over in front of his wall of snapshots and newspaper clippings and looking at them pensively. “No, you’ll never understand…that is why I’m going to teach you.”

  Corky allowed his muscles to loosen, his body to relax. The smell of the room was getting to him—too disgusting to inhale so deeply; he could feel its stench branching inside his veins, feeding his fatigued muscles. When he had first awakened in the room, he thought he had passed out in a men’s room or something…until he realized that he was in Kilpatrick’s bedroom, a room that was a mirror image of his own in structure, a part of his very own quad. The room had been changed, altered…and it stank like hell, of urine and shit, of blood and rotten meat….

  “Yes, I will teach you well. All along, these studies have served me,” Kilpatrick said, petting the photographs of tattooed bodies on his wall. “And now that I am free, I will serve them. The public. You.” Kilpatrick closed his eyes. “I will serve and I will teach.”

  “Fuck you, Killer.” Corky didn’t know what the hell Kilpatrick was talking about, but it didn’t matter—“fuck you” summed up his feelings about the whole situation.

  “You see, we’re all in hell, all of us. You are lucky; you will be the first to be shown the light—to see the hell that you’ve been blind to all along.”

  Corky smiled—he wasn’t about to give Kilpatrick any sign of how scared he was becoming, how frightened he already was. “Show me? Like you showed that girl over there?” He nodded his head in the direction of the opposite corner of the room, eyes closed because he did not want to look at it again.

  Kilpatrick glanced over at Cheri Carvers, her tapestry of eyeballs still alive and glowering on her pale, lifeless flesh. The pane of glass that gave entrance to her viscera was smashed, shattered in sharp jags that almost hid the green and dried black colors inside. “Yes,” Kilpatrick replied. “Perhaps you do understand. She did not see…at first. I have opened her eyes.” Kilpatrick walked over to the bedside table, and began to prepare a needle for the tattoo machine that was there—a professional one, not his makeshift portable. “And I will open your eyes, too. So you can see what is really inside you—all around you…”

  Corky suddenly began to feel itchy, everywhere. As if his own tattoos had come to life—knowing that they were in trouble, trying to peel their way off his skin.

  Kilpatrick sighed. “Oh, you’re so lucky, my friend. So lucky.” He set down a vial of ink. “I’m taking my time with you.”

  Corky tensed up again, thrashing against the belts till his hands and feet became dead numb.

  Kilpatrick walked around to the end of the bed, tattoo needle in hand, and climbed on top, crouching between Corky’s naked legs. “We’ll begin on the groin, where all creation begins,” he said, moving to Corky’s exposed crotch.

  The tattoo machine hummed to life with electricity. To Corky, it was much louder than the panic that surged inside him, bursting out into a scream that had no sound.

  IV.

  Back in his own bedroom, Roberts was trying to simultaneously catch his breath and light a cigarette that shook between his fingers. After seeing Lockerman so terribly violated and unconscious on the kitchen floor, the numbing shock of it all threw Roberts’ mind into an instinctual overdrive that acted on its own accord. From a distance—from where the real Roy Roberts had fled to, cowering, curling up inside—he watched as his body bent forward, checked Lockerman’s pulse. Finding one, he grabbed what looked like the museum register from a puddle of beer on the kitchen table. His body had run out of the house, shaking and pale, and he’d dropped the book several times on his way back to here, his bedroom, where he couldn’t even light a goddamned cigarette.

  He closed his eyes and held his breath, trying to calm down. His pulse was pounding at his temples, he felt dizzy, like on an overdose of sugar. He reminded himself that Lockerman was all right, that he was still alive, still breathing. He needed to get him some help, but he’d survive. He was not dead.

  Roberts stumbled over to his bedside table and picked up the phone. He called the police station, giving the woman on the other end Lockerman’s address and saying that “a cop was down” like he’d seen in the movies. He then hung up, without giving them his name—he would wait until he saw the flashing red and blues outside before leaving his own house, returning to the scene, and telling them everything he knew.

  But first, he wanted to check out a certain leatherbound book. If there was one thing he’d learned from Lockerman, it was that his rookies tended to screw up things, to glaze over important evidence like the museum register…and had Lockerman even told the rest of the department about the register? Was there anyone who was working on the Tattoo Killer’s case as intensely as Lockerman, someone in the know, someone who would be able to track the psycho down now that Lockerman had been victimized?

  Roberts doubted it. If anyone was Lockerman’s partner, if anyone was as close to catching the guy as Lockerman, it was himself.

  Roberts returned to his writing desk, and quickly riffled the pages of the large, beer-soaked book. Starting with the last entry, he scanned the pages, searching for the Killer’s latest message. Most of the entries were blurred from the urine-colored beer that blotted the pages—he prayed that the Killer’s message wasn’t.

  And then he found it, as if it were written for him alone, standing out from the others on the page in thick black ink: MY MASTERPIECE—THE KING, followed by the scribbled cursive scrawl Lockerman had described over the phone. He focused his eyes on the scrawl, seeing what Lockerman had seen—“KILLORSINK”—the sloppy letters strung together to form one word.

  Roberts forced himself to think like an editor again, even though he knew he was out of that job—a job he hated so much, but now had to rely on its basics. He searched for the hidden meaning in the words, trying to decipher what the Killer was really trying to say in the message. For that’s what it really was, wasn’t it? A message, an attempt to communicate something.

  His mind spit out the five W’s, those journalistic nuisances of who-what-where-when-why….

  Was “Kill or Sink” the Killer’s motto, like those signs that say “Denver or Bust”? What would that accomplish? Where was the psycho planning on going? Sink into what?

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, Roberts told himself, rubbing his eyes. Quit thinking, quit reading too much into it….

  He leaned back in his chair, propping his hands behind his head, looking at the book from a distance, seeing the letters blurred on the page.

  And then he saw it. He picked up the book, held it away from him like a farsighted old man, squinting to read the blurry message.

  Not ‘Kill Or Sink.’ Not three words…but two, combined in the rush of a speedy hand: Killer’s Ink.

  “No,” Roberts said, doubting himself, doubting that it could possibly be that simple. It couldn’t be that coincidental, could it? ‘Killer’ was a common nickname; even if it was Roberts’ own catchphrase for the psycho that didn’t make this signature and Corky’s tenant one in the same. Did it?

  He remembered what Corky had said about his looks, about his attitude…and how he hadn’t been at the convention, hadn’t been a successful tattoo artist….

  “Holy shit,” Roberts uttered, double-checking the register, trying to convince himself that it couldn’t be true. But he couldn’t see it any other way.

  He heard sirens in the distance.

  He grabbed the register and pocketed his car keys. True or not, he had to be sure. He had to ask Corky.

  And just maybe, he had to warn him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I.

  It was a race to get out of his neighborhood before the squad cars made it to Locke
rman’s house. He stepped hard on the gas pedal, careening around the corners of nearby side streets. The sirens were close-by, wailing like ghosts, and Roberts was seeing ghosts, specters that reflected and absorbed the white beams of his headlights as he rushed through the residential areas—all so pale white and shock-eyed that he couldn’t be sure if they were real people on the sidewalks or the afterimages of John Lockerman in his vision.

  He knew he could have stayed back, helped the cops arriving on the scene he had just left—but he knew they’d have plenty to go on without his help for now. He’d return later, after talking with Corky, to tell them all he knew—and maybe if his guess was correct about the Killer being Killer, he’d tell them where they could cuff him.

  And he wanted Lockerman to be conscious again, first. He wasn’t quite sure whether he could trust anyone else on the police force but his friend. It was their battle.

  The wailing, ghost-like shrieks of the police sirens were far behind him now, and he accessed the highway, I-25, to cut across town as fast as possible. He exited, ran a stop sign, and quickly found the motorcycle graveyard of Corky’s fourplex.

  Outside was a motorcycle he hadn’t seen before—and a car, a new-looking Ford with rental plates.

  Roberts parked beside the front curb, stepped out of his car, and ran on what felt like the tips of his toes across the front yard of gravel and weeds toward Corky’s sunken entrance. The entire quad reflected the dull, yellow light of the street lamp on the corner. Behind the drawn shades and plaid blankets, Roberts spied the familiar electronic glow of turned-on television sets in the upper apartments.