The Year's Best Horror Stories 15

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

“What should it be, it’s a business,” he said. “Just then he seemed like the old Nathan I remembered. He had an impish face, a mobile face capable of great expression.

  “Not what I’d expect, though,” I said. I could see that his arms and neck were scarred; tiny whitish welts crisscrossed his shaved skin. Perhaps he had some sort of a skin rash, I told myself, but that didn’t seem right to me. I was certain that Nathan had deliberately made those hairline scars. But why ...? “Nate, what the hell happened to you?” I asked. “You just disappeared off the face of the earth. And Ruth too. How is Ruth?”

  Nathan looked away from me, as if I had opened a recent wound. The stout, older woman who was standing a few feet away from us tried to get Nathan’s attention. “Excuse me, but could I please talk to you?” she asked, a trace of foreign accent in her voice. “It’s very important.” She looked agitated and tired, and I noticed dark shadows under her eyes. But Nathan didn’t seem to hear her. “It’s a long story,” he said to me, “and I don’t think you’d want to hear it.” He seemed suddenly cold and distant.

  “Of course I would,” I insisted.

  “Excuse me, please,” interrupted the older woman. “I’ve come a long way to see you,” she said to Nathan, “and you’ve been talking to everyone else but me. And I’ve been waiting ...”

  Nathan tried to ignore her, but she stepped right up to him and took his arm. He jerked away, as if he’d been shocked. I saw the faded, tattooed numbers just above her wrist. “Please ...” she asked.

  “Are you here for a cover-up?” Nathan asked her, glancing down at her arm.

  “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Nathan said gently. “You should be home.”

  “I know you can help me.”

  Nathan nodded, as if accepting the inevitable. “I’ll talk to you for a moment, but that’s all,” he said to her. “That’s all.” Then he looked up at me, smiled wanly, and led the woman into his trailer.

  You thinkin’ about getting a tattoo?” Dad asked, catching me staring at the trailer. Ben was looking around at the punkers, sizing them up. He had persuaded his mother to let him have a ‘rat-tail’ when he went for his last haircut. It was just a small clump of hair that hung down in the back, but it gave him the appearance of rebelliousness; the real thing would be here soon enough. He turned his back to the punkers with their orange hair and long bleach-white rat-tails, probably to exhibit his own.

  “Nah, just waiting for you,” I said, lying, trying to ignore my feelings of loss and depression. Seeing Nathan had unnerved me. I felt old, as if Nathan’s wasting had become my own.

  We spent the rest of the day at the fair, had dinner at Mom and Dad’s, watched television, and left at about eleven o’clock. We were all exhausted. I hadn’t said anything to Laura about seeing Nathan. I knew she would want to see him, and I didn’t want her upset, at least that’s what I told myself.

  Ben fell asleep in the back seat. Laura watched out for deer while I drove, as my night-vision is poor. She should be the one to drive, but it hurts her legs to sit—she has arthritis. Most of the time her legs are stretched out as far as possible in the foot well or she’ll prop her feet against the dashboard. I fought the numbing hypnosis of the road. Every mile felt like ten. I kept thinking about Nathan, how he looked, what he had become.

  “David, what’s the matter?” Laura asked when we were about halfway home. “You’re so quiet tonight. Is anything wrong? Did we do anything to upset you?”

  “No, I’m just tired,” I said, lying. Seeing Nathan had shocked and depressed me. But there was a selfish edge to my feelings. It was as though I had looked in one of the distorting mirrors in the fun-house; I had seen something of myself in Nathan.

  Ben yelped, lurching out of a particularly bad nightmare. He leaned forward, hugging the back of the front seat, and asked us if we were home yet.

  We’ve got a way to go,” I said. “Sit back, you’ll fall asleep.”

  “I’m cold back here.”

  I turned up the heat; the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees since the afternoon. “The freak show probably gave you nightmares; it always did me.”

  “That’s not it,” Ben insisted.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with your grandfather,” Laura said. “He had no business taking you in there. He should have his head examined.”

  “I told you,” Ben said, “it had nothing to do with that.”

  “You want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “No,” Ben said, but he didn’t sit back in his seat; he kept his face just behind us.

  “You should sit back,” Laura said. “If we got into an accident—”

  “Okay,” Ben said. There was silence for a minute, and then he said, “You know who I dreamed about?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Uncle Nathan.”

  I straightened up, automatically looking into the rearview mirror to see Ben, but it was too dark. I felt a chill and turned up the heat another notch.

  “We haven’t seen him in about four years,” Laura said. “Whatever made you dream about him?”

  “I dunno,” Ben said. “But I dreamed he was all different colors, all painted, like a monster.”

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

  “You were dreaming about the freak show,” Laura told him. “Sometimes old memories of people we know get mixed up with new memories.”

  “It wasn’t just Uncle Nathan looking like that scared me.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  He pulled himself toward us again. But he spoke to Laura. “He was doing something to Dad,” Ben said, meaning me.

  “What was he doing?” Laura asked.

  “I dunno,” Ben said, “but it was horrible, like he was pulling out Dad’s heart or something.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Laura said. “Look, honey, it was only a dream,” she said to him. “Forget about it and try to go back to sleep.”

  I tried to visualize the lines on Nathan’s arms and neck and keep the car on the road.

  I knew that I had to go back and see him.

  Monday morning I finished an overdue fund-raising report for the Binghamton Symphony with the help of my secretary. The three o’clock meeting with the board of directors went well; I was congratulated for a job well done, and my future seemed secure for another six months. I called Laura, told her I had another meeting, and that I would be home later than usual. Laura had a deadline of her own—she was writing an article for a travel magazine—and was happy for the stretch of work-time. She was only going to send out for a pizza anyway.

  The drive to the fairgrounds seemed to take longer than usual, but that was probably because I was impatient and tense about seeing Nathan. Ben’s crazy dream had spooked me; I also felt guilty about lying to Laura. We had a thing about not lying to each other, although there were some things we didn’t talk about, radioactive spots from the past which still burned, but which we pretended were dead.

  There weren’t as many people on the fairgrounds as last night, but that was to be expected, and I was glad for it.

  I parked close to the arcades, walked through the huckster’s alley and came to Nathan Rivlin’s trailer. It was dusk, and there was a chill in the air—a harbinger of the hard winter that was to come. A few kids wearing army jackets were loitering, looking at the designs of tattoos on paper, called flash, which were displayed under plexiglas on a table secured to the trailer. The designs were nicely executed, but ordinary stuff to attract the passers-by: anchors, hearts, butterflies, stylized women in profile, eagles, dragons, stars, various military insignia, cartoon characters, death-heads, flags, black panthers and lions, snakes, spiders; nothing to indicate the kind of fine work that had been sported by the people hanging around the trailer yesterday.

  I knocked on the door. Nathan didn’t seem surprised to see me; he welcomed me inside. It was warm inside the trailer, close, and Nathan w
as wearing a sixties hippy-style white gauze shirt; the sleeves were long and the cuffs buttoned, hiding the scars I had seen on his arms yesterday. Once again I felt a shock at seeing him so gaunt, at seeing the webbed scars on his neck. Was I returning to my friend’s out of just a morbid fascination to see what he had become? I felt guilty and ashamed. Why hadn’t I sought out Nathan before this? If I had been a better friend, I probably would have.

  Walking into his studio was like stepping into his paintings, which covered most of the available wall space. Nathan was known for working on large canvases, and some of his best work was in here—paintings I had seen in process years ago. On the wall opposite the door was a painting of a nude man weaving a cat’s cradle. The light was directed from behind, highlighting shoulders and arms and the large, peasant hands. The features of the face were blurred, but unmistakably Nathan’s. Beside it was a huge painting of three circus people, two jugglers standing beside a woman. Behind them, in large red letters was the word CIRCUS. The faces were ordinary, and disturbing, perhaps because of that. There was another painting on the wall where Nathan had set up his tattoo studio. A self-portrait. Nathan wearing a blue worker’s hat, red shirt, and apron, and standing beside a laboratory skeleton. And there were many paintings I had never seen, a whole series of tattoo paintings, which at first glance looked to be nonrepresentational, until the designs of figures on flesh came into focus. There were several paintings of gypsies. One, in particular, seemed to be staring directly at me over tarot cards, which were laid out on a table strewn with glasses. There was another painting of an old man being carried from his death-bed by a sad-faced demon. Nathan had a luminous technique, an execution like that of the old masters. Between the paintings, and covering every available space, was flash; not the flash that I had seen outside, but detailed colored designs and drawings of men and animals and mythical beasts, as grotesque as anything by Goya. I was staring into my own nightmares.

  The bluish light that comes just before dark suffused the trailer, and the shadows seemed to become more concrete than the walls or paintings.

  The older woman I had seen on Sunday was back. She was sitting in Nathan’s studio, in what looked like a variation of a dentist chair. Beside the chair was a cabinet and a sink with a high, elongated faucet, the kind usually seen in examination rooms. Pigments, dyes, paper towels, napkins, bandages, charcoal for stencils, needle tubes and bottles of soap and alcohol were neatly displayed beside an autoclave. I was surprised to see this woman in the chair, even though I knew she had been desperate to see Nathan. But she just didn’t seem the sort to be getting a tattoo, although that probably didn’t mean a thing: anyone could have hidden tattoos: old ladies, senators, presidents. Didn’t Barry Goldwater brag that he had two dots tattooed on his hand to represent the bite of a snake? Who the hell knew why.

  “I’ll be done in a few minutes,” Nathan said to me. “Sit down. Would you like a drink? I’ve got some beer, I think. If you’re hungry, I’ve got soup on the stove.” Nathan was a vegetarian; he always used to make the same miso soup, which he’d start when he got up in the morning, every morning.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit,” I said, and I sat down on an old green art deco couch. The living room was made up of the couch, two slat back chairs, and a television set on a battered oak desk. The kitchenette behind Nathan’s work area had a stove, a small refrigerator, and a table attached to the wall. And, indeed, I could smell the familiar aroma of Nathan’s soup.

  “Steve, this is Mrs. Stramm,” Nathan said, and he seemed to be drawn toward me, away from Mrs. Stramm, who looked nervous. I wanted to talk with him ... connect with him ... find the man I used to know.

  “Mister Tarot,” the woman said, “I’m ready now, you can go ahead.”

  Nathan sat down in the chair beside her and switched on a gooseneck adjustable lamp, which produced a strong, intense white light. The flash and paintings in the room lost their fire and brilliance, as the darkness in the trailer seemed to gain substance.

  “Do you think you can help me?” she asked. “Do you think it will work?”

  “If you wish to believe in it,” Nathan said. He picked up his electrical tattoo machine, examined it, and then examined her wrist, where the concentration camp tattoo had faded into seven smudgy blue marks.

  “You know, when I got these numbers at the camp, it was a doctor who put them on. He was a prisoner, like I was. He didn’t have a machine like yours. He worked for Dr. Mengele.” She looked away from Nathan while she spoke, just as many people look away from a nurse about to stick a needle in their vein. But she seemed to have a need to talk. Perhaps it was just nerves.

  Nathan turned on his instrument, which made a staticky, electric noise, and began tattooing her wrist. I watched him work; he didn’t seem to have heard a word she said. He looked tense and bit his lip, as if it was his own wrist that was being tattooed. “I knew Mengele,” the woman continued. “Do you know who he was?” she asked Nathan. Nathan didn’t answer. “Of course you do,” she said. “He was such a nice looking man. Kept his hair very neat, clipped his mustache, and he had blue eyes. Like the sky. Everything else in the camp was gray, and the sky would get black from the furnaces, like the world was turned upside down.” She continued to talk while Nathan worked. She grimaced from the pain of the tattoo needle.

  I tried to imagine what she might have looked like when she was young, when she was in the camp. It would have been Auschwitz, I surmised, if Mengele was there.

  But why was a Jew getting a tattoo?

  Perhaps she wasn’t Jewish.

  And then I noticed that Nathan’s wrist was bleeding. Tiny beads of blood soaked through his shirt, which was like a blotter.

  “Nathan—” I said, as I reflexively stood up.

  But Nathan looked at me sharply and shook his head, indicating that I should stay where I was. “It’s all right, David. We’ll talk about it later.”

  I sat back down and watched them, mesmerized.

  Mrs. Stramm stopped talking; she seemed calmer now. There was only the sound of the machine, and the background noise of the fair. The air seemed heavier in the darkness, almost smothering. “Yesterday you told me that you came here to see me to find out about your husband,” Nathan said to her. “You lied to me, didn’t you.”

  “I had to know if he was alive,” she said. “He was a strong man, he could have survived. I left messages through the agencies for him when I was in Italy. I couldn’t stand to go back to Germany. I thought to go to South America, I had friends in Sao Paulo.”

  “You came to America to cut yourself off from the past,” Nathan said in a low voice. “You knew your husband had died. I can feel that you buried him ... in your heart. But you couldn’t bury everything. The tattoo is changing. Do you want me to stop? I have covered the numbers.”

  I couldn’t see what design he had made. Her wrist was bleeding, though ... as was his.

  Then she began to cry, and suddenly seemed angry. But she was directing her pain and anger at herself. Nathan stopped working, but made no move to comfort her. When Mrs. Stramm’s crying subsided and she regained control of her breathing, she said, “I murdered my infant. I had help from another, who thought she was saving my life.” She seemed surprised at her own words.

  “Do you want me to stop,” Nathan asked again, but his voice was gentle.

  “You do what you think, you’re the tattooist.”

  Nathan began again. The noise of his machine was teeth-jarring. Mrs. Stramm continued talking to him, even though she still looked away from the machine. But she talked in a low voice now. I had to lean forward and strain to hear her. My eyes were fixed on Nathan’s wrist; the dots of blood had connected into a large bright stain on his shirt cuff.

  “I was only seventeen,” Mrs. Stramm continued. “Just married and pregnant. I had my baby in the camp and Dr. Mengele delivered it himself. It wasn’t so bad in the hospital. I was taken care of as if I were in a hospital in Berlin. Everyt
hing was nice, clean. I even pretended that what was going on outside the hospital in the camp, in the ovens, wasn’t true. When I had the baby—his name was Stefan—everything was perfect. Dr. Mengele was very careful when he cut the cord; and another doctor assisted him, a Jewish doctor from the camp. Ach!” she said, flinching; she looked down at her wrist, where Nathan was working, but she didn’t say a word about the blood soaking through his shirtsleeve. She seemed to accept it as part of the process. Nathan must have told her what to expect. He stopped, and refilled his instrument with another ink pigment.

  “But then I was sent to a barracks, which was filthy, but not terribly crowded,” she continued. “There were other children in there, mutilated. One set of twins had been sewn together, back to back, arm to arm, and they smelled terrible. They were an experiment, of course. I knew that my baby and I were going to be an experiment. There was a woman in the barracks looking after us. She couldn’t do much, but watch the children die. She felt sorry for me. She told me that nothing could be done for my baby. And after they had finished their experiment and killed my son, then I would be killed also; it was the way it was done. Dr. Mengele killed all surviving parents and healthy siblings for comparison. My only hope, she said, was to kill my baby myself. If my baby died ‘naturally’ before Mengele began his experiment, then he might let me live. I remember thinking to myself that it was the only way I could save my baby the agony of a terrible death at the hands of Mengele.

  “So I suffocated my baby. I pinched his nose and held his mouth shut while my friend held us both and cried for us. I remember that very well. Dr. Mengele learned of my baby’s death and came to the barracks himself. He said he was very sorry, and, you know, I believed him. I took comfort from the man who had made me kill my child. I should have begged him to kill me. But I said nothing.”

  “What could you have done?” Nathan asked, as he was working. “Your child would have died no matter what. You saved yourself, that’s all you could do under the circumstances.”