Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  “Romeo,” he said aloud and tried to laugh, but the noise he made sounded too much like a sob. “Yeah, that's what I am to you, baby. I'm your fuckin' Romeo, so don't you make me do it. What do you say, huh? Don't you make me do…”

  Christ, but he hated sad endings. He was always the poor sap sitting way in the back, in the dark, holding out hope until the bitter end that Juliet would wake up before Romeo swallowed the poison and died.

  When the idea had first come to Romeo—to sacrifice a utile of his own blood in the pursuit of his true love's salvation—he had tried pricking himself with a pocketknife and writing to her with his bleeding fingertip. The letters came out all smudgy and smeared, though, and he'd snatched up the paper, crumpling it in his fist, and thrown it against the wall.

  The walls were plastered with her face: glossy publicity stills and pages torn from fan magazines. Grainy tabloid shots and candid ones he'd taken himself. He'd surrounded himself with her image because she was beautiful and she was his, but the special keepsake, the one that mattered, he'd put into a silver frame next to their bed. In it her head is tilted back and her wide, scornful mouth is laughing, and she is pushing her fingers through her dark, shingled hair. The whole world had seen her do that a thousand times, but only he knew what it meant.

  “Hey, never mind, baby,” he had said to her that day, kissing her, and the glass that covered her face was cool against his lips. “We don't want to rush into this anyway, ‘cause when we do it, we want it to be right.”

  What he needed, he had told her, was a set of bleeding knives.

  You couldn't just walk on down to the drugstore, though, and ask the guy behind the counter for such a thing, and maybe the truth was he hadn't even been looking so hard. Then this morning he'd been strolling along Rampart Street and not even thinking about her for a change, when his eye had been caught by something in the window of a curiosity shop. It had a thick tortoiseshell handle and its three knives were spread out in a fan for display, and he recognized it instantly as the instrument that the doctor had used on the Russian peasant girl.

  The shop owner was wrinkled like a dried seed pod and had eyeglasses the size of thumbprints perched on the end of his nose. He peered at Romeo through those funny little glasses as if he knew all and he approved. “These are lovely knives,” he said, as he polished the blades with an oily rag. “Lovely, lovely. In our modem day we think of bloodletting as barbaric, but in truth it often did more good than harm. Lowering the patient's temperature and inducing a calm state of mind. And in some ancient societies bloodletting was a rite of purification.”

  “No kidding?” Romeo smiled. He didn't give a shit about ancient societies, but the love he felt for her was so rare and beautiful and pure that surely it deserved its own ritual.

  He walked home slowly with the knives in his pocket. He relished their weight, anticipating what he would do with them. He rounded the corner onto Canal Street and walked into the back of a crowd that had gathered to watch a couple of paper hangers glue sheets to, an enormous billboard on the roof of the new Saenger Theatre. He stopped to watch the men at work, as first her eyes appeared and her mouth and then her neck. Eventually all of her was spread out on the board, and he saw that she was lying crossways on a bed like a spent lover—her head hanging down over the side, her arms flung out wide—to advertise her latest flick, Lost Souls. It was a wildly innovative and truly scary movie about a dead woman whose haunted, restless soul leaves her grave at night and takes the form of a vampire bat to suck the blood out of the living, and only a star like her could ever have pulled it off.

  Romeo laughed out loud so that a few in the crowd left off staring at her to stare at him. He didn't care; they were fools, especially the women. They'd all be wearing bloodred lips and bat-wing capes by the end of the week. They tried so hard to look like her: bobbing their hair like hers, trying to paint her exotic face on top of their own, even trying to copy that smooth and languorous way she had of moving. Believing that their flattery and worship gave them ownership over her, when she would never belong to anyone but him.

  He'd shot enough junk into himself to know how to apply a tourniquet and pump up a vein, but the oddity of the bleeding knives had him nervous. Each of the set's three knives had two blades, a long one on the bottom that ended in a hooked point and a smaller, triangular-shaped blade on top. He had no idea which to use and that worried him. He didn't want to butcher himself and end up bleeding to death. Christ, he thought, but wouldn't that be just too fucking much, if he ended up leaving this vale of tears without her.

  He tested the edge of one of the hooked blades and he smiled. Sharp enough to cut through skin and flesh and bleeding veins.

  He hummed to himself as he brought his shooter's kit from out of its hiding place and took a soup bowl from out of the kitchen cupboard. He was flying high; but it was a pure high, coming from the moment. He wrapped a length of thin rubber tubing around his arm and tied it tight with one hand and his teeth. He made a fist. The veins in the crook of his elbow bulged blue against his skin.

  He stared at the knife and his high trembled a little as it slid toward the edge of fear, then he thought, Fuck it, and he picked up the knife and pressed the point of the top blade into the pulsing vein.

  He let out a little yelp of pain, and dropped the knife as blood spurted bright red jets into the air. His blood. The thought frightened and exhilarated him, and he stared at it, red and thick and pulsating out of his flesh in an arc, until he remembered to hold his arm over the bowl.

  The blood was so beautiful. He almost left it until too late to release the tourniquet.

  He pressed the heel of his hand into the cut he'd made. He blinked, swaying on his feet. His head felt thick, his body heavy, as if he was just coming down off a nod. He looked around, bemused, at the splatters of blood on the primrose yellow wallpaper, the pools of it on the brown linoleum floor, but his imagination was already leaping ahead to the moment when she would read his words and understand how she had to wise up and save herself, had to save them before it was too late. No more other men, no more other loves. Just Juliet and her Romeo.

  He wouldn't make the mistake of sending the letter through the mail. She got twenty thousand letters a week from her fans, each one carefully answered by studio secretaries who typed out the same reply over and over and rubber-stamped her signature. He wanted her, and only her, to see these words, written in his blood, and so he would have to deliver it himself to a place where only she would find it.

  He picked up the fountain pen that he'd bought for just this moment—an automatic shading pen used, the young woman in the stationery store had told him, for fancy lettering and show card writing. He'd already spent hours planning what he would write: the single, perfect sentence that would make her understand how desperate the situation was, how she had to change things before it was too late.

  He filled the pen's pearl barrel with his blood. He held the fat gold nib poised for a moment over the pristine sheet of paper, and then he wrote.

  Are you scared yet, Remy?

  Chapter Two

  CARLOS KELLY STOOD AT THE PIER'S END, with the muzzle of a big ol' revolver pressing into the bone behind his left ear. River water, black and oily, slopped against the wooden pilings beneath his feet, and the wind stank of dead fish, sour mud, and fermenting boiled potatoes from the stills in the gin mills along the wharf. It was still a sweet, sweet world, though, and he didn't want to die.

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “Don't do this.”

  The goon with the hog's leg only laughed and ground the bore deeper into Carlos Kelly's head.

  Carlos Kelly drew in a sobbing breath and closed his eyes. “Just give me a day, okay? One day, and I'll make things square with Tony.”

  “Yeah, sure you will.” The goon had a laugh raspy as a dull saw ripping through green wood. “Man, you've had all the days you're gonna get.”

  “Please. I got a mother, a sister.” He was crying now, his face
slimed with tears, snot dripping out his nose. “Aw, Jesus, aw, Jesus, you can't do this. You can't.”

  Carlos Kelly was only seventeen and up until this moment he'd held the conviction that he would live forever. He still couldn't get his mind around the idea of dying, but he sure enough had a firm grasp that he was now in the worst trouble of his life.

  It was all the fault of the cards, but a guy couldn't play without paying and who would've ever thought a losing streak could last a fucking month. So he'd borrowed a little off the bag money he'd been carrying for Tony the Rat, and somehow the man had found out and now he was playing hardball. Only Tony the Rat didn't mess with brass knuckles or blackjacks, breaking jaws and kneecaps being too subtle for a guy like him. When he sent his goon to see you, you ended up waltzing through eternity with the catfish.

  The wind died. Carlos Kelly heard the click of a hammer cocking.

  Aw, Jesus.

  The crack of a gunshot smacked off the water and Carlos Kelly fell to his hands and knees. His palms burned and his nostrils filled with the acrid odor of urine and in the next instant he realized that if he was pissing all over himself, then he wasn't dead.

  The goon realized it, too. He had whirled at the firing of a gun and the screaming going on behind them, but already he was spinning back around and pointing the big-bore revolver at Carlos Kelly's face.

  The boy rolled and lashed out with his legs just as the goon pulled the trigger, and for the first time in his young life Carlos Kelly got lucky. His heavy brogan clipped the goon in the back of the knee, knocking his right leg out from under him. The goon's arm had flailed as he fired, and the bullet went wide. Carlos Kelly kicked again.

  The goon staggered, catching his heel on a gap in the warped boards. He teetered a moment, then pancaked backward off the pier and into the river.

  Carlos Kelly didn't even hear the splash. He had already scrambled to his feet and was off and running, away from the open waterfront and toward the crosshatch of narrow, broken-down streets that was the Quarter.

  Even at past two o'clock in the morning the Quarter wasn't asleep, but all the action was happening behind the bolted doors and boarded-up windows of the speakeasies. Those working girls and boozers who still walked the streets were past helping anyone.

  Carlos Kelly ducked into the shadows of the wide arched stone portico to an abandoned macaroni factory. He strained his ears for the patter of following footsteps, but his breath sawed too loudly in his throat and his heart beat too hard for him to hear anything but his own fear. His legs trembled so badly he could barely hold himself up.

  The brick wall he sagged against was papered with peeling posters advertising a long ago boxing match. The broken glass panes in the fan light above his head rattled and moaned in the wind. The double barnlike doors of the factory were padlocked together, but he saw where the hasp had busted loose. The weathered wood had been scrawled with hobo graffiti: two parallel wavy lines slashed through with five hash marks. He didn't know what it meant and he didn't care. All he wanted was a place to hide.

  The wind gusted around the corner, and Carlos Kelly shuddered with the sudden chill of it on his damp skin. Jesus, he had been sweating scared. He was still scared but he was beginning to feel some shame now in the way he'd behaved, the begging noises and the tears. He stank of his own piss; his trousers were wet with it.

  A trash can clattered nearby, followed by glass smashing on cobblestone and a snarled curse, and Carlos Kelly nearly pissed himself again.

  His feet twitched, wanting to take off running, but the street was empty and harshly exposed in the white light of the incandescent lamps. He pressed deeper beneath the arched portico, his hands feeling the door behind him for the broken hasp.

  He pried it free of the rotting wood and then eased the door open carefully, praying that the hinges wouldn't squeak.

  It was dark inside, with the barest of light coming in through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. He heard a rustling noise and he looked up through the grated catwalk above his head, and nearly jumped out of his skin as he caught the flapping of dark wings out of the corner of his eye. A high-pitched squeal echoed in the rafters of the deep, pitched ceiling.

  Aw, Jesus, bats.

  His blood pounded in his ears and a scream clawed at his throat, but he wouldn't let it out. He hated bats, really hated them, but at the moment their company was preferable to another do-si-do on a river pier with Tony the Rat's goon.

  He stood unmoving for a long while, hardly daring to breathe as his eyes got used to the darkness. Slowly, he craned his head back and peered up through the latticed metal of the catwalk again. The bats, thank God, were gone.

  Where he was, on the floor of the macaroni factory, strange machinery cast hulking shadows on the walls: cement vats and long wooden troughs and huge wheels and pulleys connected together by thick fan belts, like giant slingshots. Then he saw, deep in the farthest corner, the flicker of a fire.

  Tramps, he thought, but unlike the bats they didn't scare him. Their company would be a good thing right now, and maybe he could join them in the morning when they hopped a train. What Carlos Kelly really needed to do was get his sorry ass out of town.

  Hobos who rode the rails didn't travel unarmed, though, and so he made some deliberate noise as he walked down the length of the cavernous factory. “Hey, there,” he called out, nice and friendly. He could smell meat cooking, but as he got closer he realized that it wasn't a fire he had seen. It was a cluster of burning votive candles, and above the burning candles something was hanging from the crossbeam of a large drying rack.

  Something that whimpered and then made a horrible noise as he came up to it. It was a noise he'd heard only once before, but once was enough for him never to have forgotten it—wet, popping gargle of a man strangling on his own blood.

  Then he got close enough to see it all, and for the second time that night Carlos Kelly fell to his knees, sobbing.

  “Aw, Jesus.”