by Chelsea Cain
The girl turned her head. Not much, but enough that she pulled away from Archie’s hand. He looked at it there in midair and then closed his fist and dropped it to his side. She was just a kid.
He turned to Shark Boy and the others.
“There’s a pretty big vein in the tongue that apparently bleeds a lot,” he said. He paused. Susan’s face was still impenetrable, but she’d crossed her arms tightly across her chest. A black sludge dripped from the rusty joint of a sewer pipe overhead.
“It took him sixteen hours to die. He lost five quarts of blood. But in the end, he died of suffocation. His tongue swelled up, and
he choked on it.” He looked back at the girl. Uncle Archie. Scaring them straight. “Still having fun?” he asked.
The girl took another small step back. She had goose bumps on her arms, but it might have just been because the basement was chilly.
“We found him four days later,” Archie continued. “Sitting in here in the dark, taped to the chair, his eggplant of a tongue engorged, drool, blood everywhere. Strange to see someone’s tongue coming out of the wrong orifice like that, blue lips, mouth open above it.”
“What about his eyes?” the masked man asked. Archie thought he detected a smile behind the mask, but the man’s features were so flattened by the nylon, he couldn’t be sure.
The details about the eyes had not been made public. “She’d pushed a needle through each of his pupils,” Archie said.
“Jesus Christ,” Susan said softly.
“Such is our reward for those in sin,” the masked man said.
One of the young men behind him smirked.
Archie lowered the timbre of his voice. It was time to get serious. “This ends now,” he said. “Whatever this is. Go home to your parents,” he said to the girl. “Your halfway houses,” he added to Shark Boy. “I don’t give a shit where you go. Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. She is not some sort of antihero. This is real life.” He addressed them all. “This man, his name was Can Giang. He came here from Vietnam with his wife. They ran a convenience store downtown. After he died, his teenaged son dropped out of high school to keep the place afloat. He was a human being.”
The girl pulled at the white fringe of her cutoffs. “He wanted to,” she said.
“Shut up,” the masked man snapped.
“Fintan wanted us to do it,” the girl said. “He begged us. We didn’t know he’d die.”
“Shut up, Pearl,” the masked man said again.
The girl was wavering. Archie had reached her. It had worked. “Where’s Jeremy?” Archie asked her.
“Jeremy’s part of our family,” Shark Boy said.
“Jeremy is the only person besides you who survived Gretchen Lowell,” the masked man said, walking toward Archie. “Jeremy is special.” He tapped Archie on the center of his chest. “Like you.”
“Jeremy was a kid,” Archie said. “He doesn’t remember.”
“Yes he does,” the masked man said. He motioned to Shark Boy. “Show him.”
Shark Boy lifted his shirt and bared his shark teeth in a frightening smile. Archie felt a shiver run down his back. Gretchen didn’t have an MO. She did whatever crazy shit she felt like in the moment. But it usually involved, at some point, carving into the person’s torso. Archie had come to know the marks and abrasions on her victims’ chests like a curator would know a collection of paintings. Every stroke was exact. Each victim was painted differently.
He remembered Isabel Reynolds’s wounds. Sixteen vertical slices stacked up on the left rib cage, a latticework of tiny hash marks on her belly, and below her left clavicle, carved with a scalpel, a thinly rendered heart. Even more unique, Gretchen had carved a pattern of triangles across her right rib cage, something she had done to no other victims.
Shark Boy’s chest bore the same marks.
“Jeremy did it for me,” he said. “How does it look?”
The shiver turned into a cold chill. The morgue photos were sealed. If Jeremy had carved those marks into Shark Boy’s chest, it meant that he did remember. He knew what had happened. He was a witness. With his testimony they might be able to close the case. Archie cleared his throat. “I need to talk to him,” he said.
The man in the mask put his nylon face right in front of
Archie’s. Archie could make out short brown hair beneath the stocking. “Starting to take us seriously?” the masked man asked.
Archie had heard of scarification, of cutting, but this? He pulled Shark Boy’s shirt back down. “You think this would amuse her?” Archie said. “That she’d take it as some sort of deranged compliment?”
“I know why she’s here,” the man in the mask said, jabbing a thumb at Susan. “She wants a story. But why are you here?” He turned to Susan, addressing her for the first time. “You wonder that, too?”
“I’m wondering why you’re the only one wearing a mask,” Susan said.
There was a slight adjustment in the masked man’s stance, like a boxer inhaling before a blow. Archie, still over by the bloodstain, was too far away. He took a step closer to Susan, and tried to refocus the masked man’s attention. “I came for Jeremy,” Archie said.
But things had already been set in motion.
Shark Boy stepped behind Susan and wrapped his arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Her mouth opened, more out of surprise than fear, and she struggled for something in her purse, but Shark Boy pulled the purse off her arm and threw it across the room.
Archie could see it happening, see the man in the mask lift something sharp and silver to Susan’s face—a piercing needle. Shark Boy tightened his grip. Susan struggled but the masked man held the sharp needle against the smooth flushed flesh of her cheek, and she froze.
The masked man’s featureless face was pointed at Archie. “I think you came for something else,” he said.
Nobody moved. The needle was nearly touching Susan’s face, so close that if Susan flinched, it would pierce the skin. Susan’s eyes widened.
“The major vessels of the lingual artery go through the tongue,” the masked man continued. “That’s that big vein you were talking about. Ever had Manchego cheese? That’s what pushing a needle through a tongue feels like. Like slicing a knife through Manchego cheese. Cartilage makes a popping, squashy sound, like poking through the skin of a baked acorn squash.”
“Let me guess,” Susan said. “You work in food service?”
Shark Boy put a hand on Susan’s forehead and snapped her head back, securing the back of her skull against his shoulder.
She didn’t know what was happening yet, but Archie did. He couldn’t stop it. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.
The masked man slid one end of the needle into Susan’s cheek. It went in effortlessly, like a thumbtack into corkboard. The skin tented on the other side for a moment and then the tip of the needle popped through, just under her eye. It happened in an instant. Susan barely had time to cry out. Then it was over. The two-inch needle was threaded through her cheek.
The gun pressed insistently into Archie’s back. He could recover it, but it was under his shirt, and he would have to fumble for it. It would take seconds. So would they hurt her more in the panic of those few seconds, or if Archie did nothing?
Susan’s eyes were wild with anger and disbelief. She fought to lift her hands up, but Shark Boy held her tight.
“Jesus fuck!” Susan screamed. “You pierced my fucking face!” She looked at Archie, her eyes pleading with him to do something. She knew he had a gun. It was not unthinkable that she would wonder why the hell he wasn’t using it.
“Flesh,” the man in the mask said, producing another needle, “is more like a frozen grape.” He moved the needle down just below Susan’s bottom lip. “Is this about where Gretchen cut your noble immigrant?”
Susan stopped struggling and squeezed her eyes shut. A tiny rivulet of blood made a trail down her chin and neck, and under the collar of her white shirt.
Archie summon
ed all the calm in his body and focused on Susan. “Susan,” he said. “Look at me.”
He half expected her to ignore him. He’d brought her down here, into this. No backup. No badge. And a masked madman had just put a needle through her face. Trust was probably not high on her emotional agenda right now.
But she opened her eyes.
Archie tried to exude confidence, to project mettle into her gaze. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her.
She nodded. It was a tiny movement. Archie might have imagined it.
Without taking his eyes off Susan, he asked the masked man, “What do you want?”
Archie needed to get Susan out of this.
“I want you to do me a favor,” the man in the mask said.
“I’m not going to help you move,” Archie said.
“I want you to cut me.”
His words floated in the air like dust. Everyone waited. Archie could hear Susan breathing.
Shark Boy started rummaging around in a pocket and then they heard the snap of a case opening. Archie refused to unlock his eyes from Susan’s. He refused to look away. He could do that, at least, for her. He could keep her calm.
Susan caught sight of what Shark Boy had in his hands a split second before Archie did. He saw the fear register in her eyes. But Archie already knew what it was. He knew it from the word “cut.” So when Shark Boy lifted the tempered steel blade to Susan’s throat, Archie did not react at all.
Resolve.
Susan’s breathing now came in short little bursts. Archie worried she was going to hyperventilate. He needed her thinking straight.
He reached forward with his left hand, took her right hand, and squeezed it. Her hand was cold to the touch. He could feel her pulse through his palm.
But she looked at him. And she squeezed his hand back.
Archie had a plan.
He held his right hand out for the scalpel. Shark Boy set it in his palm. It was larger than the scalpel that Gretchen had used to carve into Archie’s chest, but not as pretty. This one was disposable, plastic and steel. Gretchen’s was top-of-the-line.
Archie folded his hand around the plastic handle.
“Where?” he asked the masked man.
He could smell the sour stink of the masked man’s breath; hear Shark Boy’s teeth clicking; feel Susan’s pulse beat against his fingers.
If someone had walked in, they would have thought that the four of them were having an intimate discussion—the masked man pressed next to Susan, Shark Boy behind her, Archie facing Susan, gripping her hand.
“Lift up my shirt,” the masked man said.
Archie gave Susan’s hand a firm squeeze and then released it.
He took a step forward. He was so close to Susan now that his right shoulder touched her bare left shoulder just above where Shark Boy’s arm wrapped around her. He could feel the rise and fall of her chest against his shirt. Archie untucked the masked man’s T-shirt from the front of his pants and lifted it up. He waited a moment to look down. He knew what he’d see.
The masked man’s chest was a mass of scar tissue.
The scars were more healed than Shark Boy’s. There were dozens of them. They’d been done over time; the oldest ones looked to be at least a year old. The freshest were still red and raw.
“I did it myself,” the masked man said. “I want you to do it better. I want it to look like yours.”
“I see you’ve waxed,” Archie said.
Susan started to smile, but winced as the needle moved in her cheek.
The masked man lowered his chin at the scalpel in Archie’s hand. “Go ahead,” he said. “Cut me.”
Archie held up the scalpel and wiggled it. “Let her go,” he said.
No one moved.
Archie adjusted his grip on the scalpel. “This is the Palmar grip,” he said, holding the handle with his second through fourth fingers, the base of his thumb along the side of the handle securing it, his index finger extended along the top rear of the blade. “It’s also called ‘dinner knife’ grip.” He sawed at something imaginary in the air. “You can see why.” He looked at the scalpel. Even in the low light, it glittered. Even the sight of the blade made his stomach tighten, but he wouldn’t let them see it. “This grip is best for initial incisions and larger cuts,” he said.
He adjusted his grip again, this time holding the scalpel with the tips of his first and second fingers and the tip of his thumb, so that the plastic handle was resting on the crook between his index finger and thumb. He wrote something imaginary in the air. “The pencil grip,” Archie said. “You’ve got to be careful with this one not to let the handle rest too far along the index finger. Don’t want your hand cramping up.” Archie looked at the blade and frowned. “Better for smaller blades.
“Gretchen preferred the Palmar,” he said. “Most medical professionals do.” He leaned close to the masked man. So close he could see the color of his eyes through the nylon—blue. “Let her go,” Archie said. “And I’ll do what you want.”
The masked man lifted the second needle away from Susan’s chin and with the same hand grabbed hold of the end of the needle
piercing her cheek. With a smooth movement of his elbow, he snapped it out of her face.
“Fuck,” she yelled. This time Shark Boy let her lift her hands to her face and she cupped both to her bleeding cheek.
“Get out of here,” the masked man told her softly.
She drew her head back in rage. “No,” she said.
Archie lowered the scalpel and leaned in to Susan. He kissed the hand that covered her cheek. “Trust me,” he whispered.
She glared at all of them for a moment and then took a step toward her purse, which still lay on the floor by the wall.
“No,” the masked man said. “Leave it.”
She looked at Archie questioningly and he nodded, and then she turned and ran, her hand still on her face.
The man in the mask nodded at Archie. “Let me see yours,” he said.
Archie smiled. “Sure,” he said.
He reached up with his left hand and began unbuttoning his shirt. The girl appeared at the masked man’s shoulder and then the two other men from over by the boiler joined her. Shark Boy licked his lips. They all wanted to see Gretchen’s work in person.
When Archie had unbuttoned his shirt and opened it, he reached out and lifted the masked man’s shirt again. He compared the damage.
“It’s not so different,” he said.
The man in the mask wasn’t even looking at Archie’s face anymore. His entire focus was on Archie’s chest. Hands trembling, he reached out and brushed his fingertips across the topography of Archie’s scars.
As he did, Archie moved his right hand to his waist, dropped the scalpel, and pulled the gun from the back of his pants.
The scalpel made a metallic crack as it hit the concrete floor and the masked man and Shark Boy and the girl and the two other
men all looked down reflexively. When they looked back up, Archie had his gun trained at the masked man’s sternum.
“I’m arresting you for assault with a deadly weapon,” he said. “At least.” He paused. “Thank you. You’ve all made me feel very sane.”
Archie saw the flash of light an instant before the electrical jolt hit his body. The wave of pain blasted through every sensation. He had been Tasered once before, during academy training. It didn’t help. It wasn’t something you got used to. All of his muscles tightened, and he dropped to the floor unable to move. Information came in stuttering chunks. He’d lost the gun. It was the girl. She’d gotten him from behind, below his rib cage. She Tasered him again in the same spot. He curled on the floor, overcome by the pulsing charge, every cell vibrating. The girl. She was a kid. Like Jeremy.
How old? Sixteen?
She Tasered him again. His body jerked involuntarily, causing a tiny dust storm to rise off the cement floor. The yellow bulb on the ceiling got smaller, like it was getting farther away.
&
nbsp; They’d named the Taser after an old kids’ adventure book: Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. They’d added the a. It was the kind of useless trivia that Susan would want to know.
He felt bad he’d never told her.