by David Wood
However, William knew the naked truth and it horrified him. A Chinese demon roamed the streets of Portland. Worse yet was the great lengths the secret society of monks would go to in order to practice their magic. Allowing demons to inhabit their bodies just to draw blood seemed way beyond the call of duty. William flinched, remembering how the Yaoguai had thrashed and tormented Klahan.
As he walked back to Inkenstein, he started second guessing his passion for black magic tattoos. Having a better understanding of the mighty and potentially deadly forces behind the scene had been a real eye opener.
He passed beneath the Chinatown gates, another reminder of Portland’s ties to mysticism. The city brimmed with strange energy and supernatural activity.
He wondered what forces would greet Kelly should she succeed in piercing through. He shuddered at the thought. Even more frightening; the idea of coming to her aid armed with black magic tats that showed no signs of life.
He needed to talk her out of it. He knew it would take all the luck in the world for that.
Chapter 11: Liberation
Kelly enjoyed her liberation. It put a bounce in her step, some pep in her stride. She roamed the streets of Beaverton knowing her Gothic Lolita outfit attracted a lot of attention. She didn’t care. She only cared about the freedom it granted her.
Though it stank of self-absorption, she couldn’t help but compare her newly found freedom to some of the country’s biggest liberation movements. She related to the jubilation of African-Americans when the chains of slavery had been shattered. She understood the joys that followed women’s right to vote. She felt the coming rapture the gay community would experience once equality in sexual orientation finally set down roots.
Liberation; such a remarkable and strength imparting concept. She relished the energy coursing through her veins.
So free! So alive!
The decision to wear the Gothic Lolita outfit in public was her coming out moment, much in the way a Queen might come out of the closet by dressing Drag at a family wedding. She no longer wished to wallow in the prison created by her dark secrets. Her Gothic look displayed her inner misery for everyone to see.
Projecting a tough girl aura, she sauntered down the sidewalk, swinging her black Hello Kitty duffle bag with passion. The click of her high heeled Goth boots on the concrete empowered her every step. She pitied the soul who crossed her the wrong way.
So free! So alive!
She paused outside the school entrance. She watched the students ambling up the outdoor stairs and through the double doors; little zombies preparing to sit in their chairs while being subjected to the indoctrination of algebra, chemistry and social science.
God save their souls.
Kelly had other plans and she wanted Trish Kendrick to be her accomplice. She had tried to reach her suburban friend on her cell, but it had been turned off. She hoped to intercept Trish before class started.
Trish’s high school differed from Kelly’s. Kelly’s fellow students emitted an inner city edge that went missing in the preppy dressed kids flocking past her. These students showed their intolerance in the contemptuous and disdainful sneers they directed her way.
She supposed her ghoulish white foundation, black mascara and corpse blue lipstick would stand out in this lovely suburban utopia. For that matter, it would probably stand out at her school. She didn’t care. Condescension from a group of Stepford children would not dampen her strength. Nothing could taint her liberation.
She grew fidgety as the crowd thinned and she saw no sign of Trish. She reached up to fiddle with her lip ring, forgetting it wasn’t there. The wound in its place still looked raw, but covered in her lipstick it resembled nothing worse than a huge blue spider bite.
The starting bell rang. A few stragglers remained outside, Trish not among them.
Two pimply adolescents sucked in a few last puffs from a cigarette.
“Hey, sweet cheeks,” one of them said. “Thought Halloween is a couple weeks from now.”
The boy’s sidekick snickered, blowing a plume of smoke from his mouth like a human chimney.
“A friend of mine reads that Jap manga all the time.” The first boy took a drag and looked Kelly up and down. His eyebrows rose. “You a character from one of those books? I have to say it’s pretty hot sweet cheeks.”
The sidekick snickered again, scratching one of the larger zits on his face.
Finding the boy’s derision an affront to her newly found liberation, Kelly gave up on finding Trish and turned to leave.
“Hey, where you going? Dressed like that you must be used to putting out. Why don’t we cut class together? We can do the nasty all you like.”
Kelly turned and gave him the middle finger.
“Tough girl, huh?” He bellowed out a short devious laugh. “Do that to my face. I dare you.”
Kelly walked away, fuming. She imagined stabbing their pimple riddled faces with vicious jabs from the silver cross hanging around her neck.
The violent fantasy subsided by the time she reached the bus stop. She boarded the next bus heading downtown. On a whim she exited near the Nob Hill area of uptown Portland, one of the more desirable locations in the city. Its shaded streets boasted a number of quaint and memorable shopping establishments; a fun neighborhood to strut in her manga inspired fashion. She was sure to cultivate quite a few looks of disapproval.
Before she could get into full swing an old stone church distracted her. She couldn’t tell what denomination it represented. Could be Catholic, Presbyterian or Episcopal for all she knew. She had negligible knowledge in regards to theology.
Maybe she could burst in on a Holy Roller session and scare the bejesus out of the faithful. What fun. She was disappointed to find the church pews empty. Friday afternoon. Not an ideal time for worship.
Being in a holy establishment directed her thoughts to Justin Vandermeer. What if this church was owned by Adonai’s Attestants? She began examining the iconography, most of it etched into large arching stain glassed windows that ran up both sides of the narrow nave. The resplendent artwork depicted winged angels, various saints and several crucifixion scenes. Wouldn’t it be fun to discover hidden symbols? What did Justin call them? Subliminals?
Engrossed, she made her way to the front of the pews. The chancel prevented her from going farther. She looked beyond the plain altar to the ivory figure suspended above. The Madonna, clutching God’s infant to her bosom, gazed down at the altar.
Though the hanging statue was beautiful in form, it smacked of piety and sanctimony. The empathy and compassion radiating from the Virgin made Kelly snarl in disgust.
Now Kelly knew why she had never stepped foot inside a church since her mother’s death. Sickened, she left Mother Mary to suffer her sadness alone, exiting the building.
No longer wishing to waste time in Nob Hill, she hefted the Hello Kitty duffle bag over her shoulder and carried it like a sling. She had a matter that demanded urgent attending, her resolve somehow strengthened by her visit to the church.
As she walked, her mind teetered on the brink of rage. She thought back to the pimply teen who verbally accosted her at the high school. She prayed she didn’t encounter another jerk like him. She doubted she could duplicate the restraint she had shown earlier.
As she progressed down sloping Burnside Street, she started thinking about William. She couldn’t wait to share her news about Apostle Peter; not the church Peter, the trepanation Peter.
She came to the flat stretch of Burnside, across from the colorful gates of Chinatown. This close to the Mission, homeless druggies abounded. Two middle aged junkies, unwashed and smelling like a sanitary landfill, sandwiched her between them.
“Where you heading Lezzy?” the one on her front side said, his sour fish breath washing across her face like a fetid wind.
Lezzy? The man was clearly out of his mind.
“Get off me,” Kelly said. Liberation still coursed her veins, feeding her strength.
/> “Come on, me and Raccoon are on hard times, Lezzy. Literally, hard times.” He grinned at her with a crack addict’s gap-toothed smile.
She assumed Raccoon was the crackhead to her rear. He let out a guttural grunt and tried to lift her black ruffled miniskirt.
A few minutes prior, she had doubted her ability to exercise the same restraint she had shown towards the pimply adolescents at Trish’s high school. Her gut feeling had been right. Her mind snapped in an explosion of white hot rage.
She lifted her arms straight over her head and allowed her body to go limp. She dropped onto her knees and fell onto her right side, no longer trapped between the two loathsome junkies. As she rolled onto her back, she spotted Raccoon readying himself to pounce. She kicked out with her boot. The tip caught Raccoon right between the legs. He crumpled like an empty paper sack.
Not satisfied, she leaped to her feet and planted a kick to the side of the man’s oily head. He let out a hiss of breath that sounded like air escaping a tire and rolled onto his back, knocked unconscious.
“Not cool,” Raccoon’s companion said. His eyes narrowed and he lunged.
Kelly lashed out with her boot a third time. The junkie saw it coming and had time to lift his hands in front of his crotch, a rudimentary effort to protect his family jewels. Maybe it was her imagination or wishful thinking, but she thought she heard the crunching of bones as the hard tip of her boot dug into the man’s fingers. He yelped and joined Raccoon on the concrete.
She knelt and tangled her fist in the man’s slimy hair. She gave it a good yank. “Give me your knife.” The man struggled, but she pinned him with a knee on his chest. “Give me your damn knife.”
“What the-I don’t-Christ,” he stammered. “What knife?”
Kelly yanked again, her hold brief as her fingers slipped on his unwashed hair. “Best not to lie to me.”
“I swear. I have no blade. Honest to god Lezzy.”
“Lucky for you. I guess you get to keep your balls today.” She dropped the man’s head and it thudded on the sidewalk. She smirked at the punk’s frightened face and walked away.
Liberation; so empowering.
She took long confident strides past Voodoo Doughnut. She felt she could do anything, even learn Swahili if need be.
However, she didn’t want to learn an African dialect. She indulged herself in a different fantasy, one inspired by the two aggressive druggies she had laid out. She pictured herself buying some sort of blade from a pawn shop, something on the order of a kukri from Nepal or a Scottish dirk, anything sharp enough to perform castrations.
First on her list of victims would be Raccoon. After removing his manhood she would proceed to emasculate every male in the city until Portland was no longer known as the city of roses, but the city of eunuchs.
Not William, however. He would be spared and what a gift that would be. The only male left intact to service the needs of Portland’s female population. She smiled. William had always treated her with the tenderness of a true friend. If Peter Halvorson was her apostle, then William was her savior. An apostle could only reveal the true path, could only show a disciple the way to walk. A savior, though, could implement that knowledge to save souls.
Though she hardly thought of herself as religious, over the past few days her mind had latched onto the theory of prophecy. Her conclusion was that prophecy was no more than simple prediction. Once the prediction is spoken or written it is up to someone to act upon it. If nobody acts it becomes yet another in a long line of failed prophecies.
She believed the strange paralysis and odd visions to be prophetic. She was determined to see the prophecy to its fruition. She knew a man with colorful arms and the instruments of prophecy rested at the bottom of her Hello Kitty duffel bag.
The heavy dark gray clouds above released their goods. The sudden rain shower did not dampen her enthusiasm.
“Ready or not, William, here I come,” she shouted into the gloomy air.
Swinging the duffle bag a little more emphatically, she headed straight for Inkenstein.
So free! So alive!
Chapter 12: The Last Secret
The droning buzz of the tattoo gun put William’s troubled mind at ease. The monotonous sound filled his head, leaving no room for anxious thoughts concerning Kelly.
He had seen the symbol he now tattooed onto the young boy’s arm on a burly biker dude years ago. However, he had never inked one himself.
He knew it as the logo for the classic rock band Blue Oyster Cult. patterned after the astrological sign for the Greek god Kronos combined with a sickle, the emblem had drawn heavy criticism from religious conservatives back in the band’s heyday. The Moral Majority Coalition had misinterpreted it as an upside down cross with a question mark.
In actuality, the symbol for the god of time (Kronos) with a sickle was intended to be a conceptualization of the Grim Reaper. After all, time cuts every one of us down in the end.
It seemed a strange choice for the conservative all-American boy seated in the reclining patient’s chair. With his short sleeved white dress shirt and pressed slacks, he looked more straight-laced than the Catholic choir boys William had been raised around.
At first, he had refused to ink the boy. Something didn’t feel right about tainting the kid’s reserved image. In fact, he had tried to talk him out of it by quoting Ozzy Osbourne who reportedly told his daughter, “If you want to be different don’t get a tattoo”. It hadn’t worked. The kid insisted and William gave in.
“Hanging in there?” he asked, dipping the needles in the ink cap.
“Not as painful as I thought,” the boy said, his innocent steel blue-gray eyes full of excitement. “Should have done this eons ago.”
William stretched the skin of the boy’s deltoid muscle, just below the collar bone and colored in the curve of the sickle with black ink.
The entrance bell clinked. William looked up. A young girl, dressed in some type of demented baby doll inspired fashion burst in. Rain dripped off her eggplant dyed hair, forming beads on her labret snake bites and lobret piercing. The cold followed her off Second Avenue and seemed to surround her as if finding solace in her stormy mood.
“Fine freaking day isn’t it?” she muttered, shaking water from her knee length black skirt and the pink lacy petticoat that protruded four inches beyond the skirt. The massive silver Judeo-Christian cross dangling between her breasts bounced with her frantic movements.
“Kelly?” he asked in disbelief. “What on earth...”
The girl took one look at the customer seated in the chair and dismissed William with a wave of her hand. She claimed a seat in the waiting area, picked up an issue of Tattoo Magazine and made sure it covered her face.
The girl in the Gothic clothes had to be Kelly. However, William had never seen her dressed so extreme. Her usual wardrobe consisted of tight straight-legged black jeans, an underground grindcore band T-shirt and her infamous faux leather spiked cuffs. He admitted the naughty baby-doll look appealed to his male sex drive. He found himself wrestling with racy thoughts.
The girl lowered the magazine just enough to reveal familiar jade eyes. “Nice shirt, dumbass.”
He smiled. He still wore the I’d Rather Be Waterboarding shirt from the other day, having spent another sleepless night at Inkenstein. Kelly would not pass on an opportunity to make a snide remark about it.
“Let me finish this up and I’ll be right with you.” He refrained from speaking her name. She seemed to be cloaking herself with anonymity as if she were in disguise. Though from what he could only guess.
It took less than ten minutes to complete the boy’s tat. He paid in cash, thanked William for a job well done and took a quick glance at the girl holding the magazine in front of her face as he exited onto the rain splattered sidewalk.
“Why are you hiding yourself and what’s up with that ridiculous getup?” William pushed down the magazine to look into Kelly’s eyes. What he saw disturbed him. He picked up on h
er usual distress signals, but her distraught manner appeared tempered by a calm resolve. He knew she was planning and scheming.
“I was hiding from that boy, Justin Vandermeer. I know him.” She tossed the magazine back on the coffee table. “I think he has a crush on me. He’s a super religious suppression case. I’m quite startled he even got a tat. What did he get?”
William described the Blue Oyster Cult symbol. “Funny thing is he didn’t want to believe it represents the Grim Reaper. He believes it’s an upside down cross with a question mark.”
“Cross with a question mark. What’s the big deal?”
“To him it questions whether Christ died on a cross or not. I guess his religion agrees with that sentiment. He kept saying they believe Christ died on a stake, not a cross. So apparently Blue Oyster Cult got it right without even knowing it. A little whacko if you ask me.”
“Nah. He’s all right. That reminds me I wanted to give you this. Got it from BOC boy. You might find the apocalypse art interesting.” She fished the rolled up AA tract from her waistband and handed it to him. She glanced up at the drawings above. After running out of room on his illustrated desk he had begun a row of newer images at the top of the east wall. “Who knows? It might even inspire some new flash designs.”
“I’ll look at it later,” he said, placing it amidst the pile of magazines littering the coffee table. “I’d rather talk about you. What’s up with this outfit? I kind of like it, but I have a funny feeling you’re not wearing it to turn me on.”
Kelly’s resolve deteriorated before his eyes. A torrent of tears washed away all vestiges of her earlier calm.
Although his heart ached at her sadness he felt a twinge of excitement. She seemed ready to reveal another secret. Perhaps they would reach the final layer, the bottom of the Chinese puzzle box. He sat next to her on the vinyl padded bench and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Hey. What’s wrong?”