Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  “Holy shit, Ron! Another one?” The alarm was gone in an instant, replaced with comfortable fury. Velvet started to run the numbers.

  Bonesaw never kept a girl longer than a week.

  Misha Kohl. Sandra Barry. Hanna Johannsen.

  Velveteen Monroe.

  One week. Every time.

  As dependable as a monthly period.

  Velvet circled the girl, scanning her exposed skin for bruising, for marks. The only thing she could find was a milky crust dried at the corners of the girl’s lips like a cold sore—the residue of whatever it was he drugged them with.

  This one was new.

  Brand-new. Fresh. Velvet was sure that was how Bonesaw saw her, just like the packs of hamburger floating in Lake Kitchen, complete with an expiration date. Just like the others Velvet had happened upon since her death. Over the next week there’d be no food, only a little water, and zero bathroom breaks. The abrading would start soon—Ron loved his cruel nutmeg grater.

  Then the cutting.

  Dammit!

  Velvet paced the room, stabbing the killer with furious glares. If she’d only been able to haunt Simanski the day before, given him something to tweak out about other than his psychotic urges, maybe she could have stopped this one. She was sure she’d managed to derail a few of his abductions simply by providing him with vandalism to clean up. He certainly wouldn’t have found the time to stalk and abduct the poor girl if he’d been busy bailing out his house like a sinking rowboat.

  But that didn’t matter now. She was on deadline.

  Velvet crouched beside the girl and ran her fingers carefully over her hair, making sure not to displace any and freak her out or draw the attention of Bonesaw’s obsessive gaze. “I’ll take care of you, whoever you are,” she whispered. “I’m going to get you out of here and away from this son of a bitch. Don’t worry.”

  Those last words were ridiculous, she knew. How could the girl do anything but worry? Even now, as subdued as his victim was, her jaw was clenched, her knuckles white in their death grip on the edges of the old wooden school desk. Tensing up for the battle.

  “That’s good,” she whispered into the girl’s ear. “You’re smart to prepare yourself for the worst.”

  And then, even though she was certain the girl couldn’t hear her, Velvet murmured to herself, “Especially if I screw this up.”

  She turned and glowered into Ron’s eyes. Madness floated there like stray lashes. The same evil she’d witnessed for one hellish week, all those months ago, still lingered there, fevered, septic. “And you!” she spat, her voice escalating to a scream. “I’ll have you know I don’t have time for this bullshit. I’ll sort you out, Bonesaw. This is the last girl you get to bring to this pit, and I guarantee you, you won’t get any satisfaction from her! None!”

  Velvet’s fingers curled into claws. She wanted to tear into him, dig his eyes out, make him feel every ounce of pain he’d meted out on Hanna and Sandra and Misha Kohl. Make him hurt.

  Make him know he hadn’t won.

  She knew it would be a battle. She’d tried to put an end to it all before, to end Bonesaw. To kill him. Make him kill himself. Those attempts had been a mixed bag of successes and failures. She’d saved his last one, the redheaded girl—Alexa, she believed her name was—and the blond with the broken glasses, and the one who hummed constantly. But the closest Velvet had come to offing the monster himself had been a small fire she’d managed to set outside Ron Simanski’s bedroom door. The man’s overly efficient smoke detectors had alerted him to the danger almost immediately, leaving her sour and screaming obscenities.

  Velvet gave one last glance toward this new girl and was satisfied that she had a little time left before the bad stuff happened. With the flood in his house, she’d done enough to keep the maniac busy for a while, enough to keep him off his victim.

  It was time to go back.

  “It might take a while,” she said, turning back to the slumped figure. “Just a little bit. But I promise you. I promise …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  In Velvet’s mind, there was no question she’d be able to save the girl’s life. Help her escape, at the very least. She’d saved three now. If there was one thing she was better at than vandalism, it was extraction. Of course, living people were more difficult to deal with than their spirits. Trickier.

  Things had gotten messy. But that wasn’t the point. Bonesaw didn’t get to play his games. Not while she was around.

  She pushed back the memories of how quickly the cutting would start. The slow gouging that would leave tunnels in the girl’s flesh. She wouldn’t think about that.

  She couldn’t.

  “There’s a surprise waiting for you in the house, you sick fuck,” she finally said. “And one of these days—” She drew a make-believe blade up her wrist to her elbow. “Local butcher commits suicide. Too bad. So sad.”

  Velvet passed through the shed wall and into the twilight, mumbling, “He was such a quiet man. Polite. We never suspected a thing.”

  Chapter 2

  Velvet lingered in the burgeoning night long enough to watch Bonesaw complete his ritual padlocking of the shed. He pressed his body up against the metal door, as close as a lover. Listening—as if any abductee in their right mind would start maneuvering out of their bindings the second their abductor left the room. Then, glancing around suspiciously, he stomped back to the farmhouse. Once inside, he began to bellow. The sounds of plates clattered against walls, shattering, then splashing. All of it was muffled but oddly comforting.

  He’d found her mess.

  She wished she could manage a smile, but the weight of her duty to Ron’s new victim really messed with her vandalism high. So she trudged across the pasture, past wooden fences and cows that shivered as she passed through their hulking bodies—far enough that she could no longer hear the killer’s screams. Beyond the boundaries of Simanski’s property, a dying giant towered over the rest of the forest, an oak tree, bark gray and branches bare, ribboned in dense tentacles of ivy. Velvet stood before it and huffed, ankles deep in spiky ferns with fronds like crooked emerald fingers. She braced herself against the tree, trying to compose herself, trying to shake off the anger and horror she’d picked up in the shed.

  She needed to calm down.

  Way down.

  When Velvet passed from the daylight back into purgatory, there was more than a little finesse involved. She needed to concentrate and construct the image of the other side. The alley. From there, she’d need to move quickly, blend into the crowd before they noticed that she’d just appeared. She didn’t want anyone to ask questions about where she’d come from. People asked too many questions. In fact, most of them never shut up.

  Velvet had to play it cool.

  If anyone had reason to accuse her of haunting, they’d do it without hesitation. Petty, nosy souls, the lot of them. If the travel did not benefit purgatory, it would be seen as frivolous, dangerous, and, worst of all, traitorous in the eyes of the powers that be.

  Velvet couldn’t have that.

  A blackened crack ran up the length of the big oak, the scar of a lightning strike that had done more than kill the tree. In this case, it had torn straight through the veil between the world of the living and the dead. It had paved a road—a secret one, sure, but a road nonetheless—from the glen to a neighborhood in purgatory. A road, Velvet hoped, that would never be found by anyone else.

  She gave her arms and legs a little shake, trying to work out the kinks from the tension foisted upon her by Bonesaw’s addiction to awfulness. She needed to be calm, centered. Velvet sought out the imagery necessary to divine what was called a pull-focus—kind of like dropping a digital pin on a GPS—a triangulation of visuals from the other side. First, she imagined the tight gray walls of the alley. Then, the small box she kept there with its tattered sticker—the words worn to shadows, meaningless, yet for some reason intriguing—her wadded-up clothes blossoming from inside. The final ima
ge was distant but key: a thin sliver of the main street flickering in the gaslight.

  Stretching her fingers toward the thin black crevice, Velvet felt the City of the Dead reach toward her with its familiar pull. It was as though she’d pressed her palm to the bathtub drain and was being sucked close. Her diaphanous fingers began to elongate, deteriorating into curling wisps of smoky thread that streamed into the crack. Her arms were next, the opaque flesh unraveling like yarn from a sweater.

  Velvet clenched her eyes shut and ground her teeth.

  No matter how many times she made the journey, she never got used to being torn apart. Disassembled. Even the word reminded her of what happened to Bonesaw’s victims. Shaking off the thought, she fell forward, rushing through somewhere thin and windy. She pictured a vast pipeline, though she knew this was just her imagination. No one had any clue what lay between the daylight and purgatory … except maybe the flies. But it’s way too early to gross you out with their story. Suffice it to say, those nasty black bugs seem to know their way around a crack in the universe.

  The buzzing was maddening.

  There were times when Velvet thought she caught glimpses of vast caverns, as black as soot. But the images came so briefly and never lingered longer than the several seconds it took to travel.

  A moment later—or maybe it was an hour—Velvet was spat out into the dimly lit cobblestone alley. Where light filtered in from the street several yards away, she could barely make out shapes of souls rushing past, arms loaded with packages, chatting to their companions, moving on to somewhere very important, no doubt.

  And most likely, not just returning from a prohibited jaunt into the daylight.

  Velvet snatched her clothes from the wooden box she’d stashed in the darkest corner of the alley. She supposed there was a chance that one day she’d come back and find the box empty, as scarce as fashionable clothes were in the afterlife—stolen by some urchin scouring the alleys for castoffs or something. But so far it hadn’t happened, and she hoped it never would. Nothing would give away a secret haunting like showing up in public naked.

  One of the biggest sucks about going to purgatory instead of somewhere good like Hawaii or a college party was that most souls couldn’t manage to bring anything but themselves through the cracks. Clothes included. Which was lame, because when Velvet was alive, she had the most amazing pair of Fluevog boots—toes as pointy as a pair of switchblades. Passage through the cracks stripped a soul of everything but its essence. It’s like this: Souls are made up of memories, which don’t look like anything in the daylight, but in purgatory, the memories are burning white coils, firework fuses. They thread through a soul so tightly and brilliantly that when a person first pops through a crack, sometimes they’re so bright you have to look away. In purgatory, the ether of a soul is transformed into flesh. On that first day, they’re given clothes by the station guides and taught to apply a thick coat of ash to pretty much everywhere that clothes don’t touch.

  Souls look a whole lot like their human selves. Dirty, but human.

  Or human-ish.

  All you really need to know is this: If you ever have the misfortune to end up in purgatory, you’re going to arrive at the station naked. And yeah, it has the very real possibility of being embarrassing as hell.

  Velvet had learned to keep a box handy for storing her clothing. There were no guides at this crack. And hopefully, there never would be.

  She stabbed her feet and legs into her torn jeans, wrapped herself in the warm peacoat, and laced her feet into the combat boots. She grabbed a few handfuls of ash from the bottom of the box and rubbed it on her face and hands, and ran big clumps of it through her hair until she barely shone. She glanced at the thin sliver of black sky above her and watched as what looked like stars tore by with long trailing tails.

  Velvet sneered. “Show-offs.”

  Eyes narrowing to slits, she crept toward the opening of the alley, watching as the souls scuttled down the steep, almost suicidal slant of the street. She clung to the deepest shadows—no sense drawing attention where it wasn’t wanted. Two glowing eyes staring out of the darkness, while common in a city of dead people, can still be startling if you’re not expecting it. But as she reached the mouth of the alley, the other souls simply trudged on down the hill, wrapped up in their early evening business and blissfully unaware of the delinquent in their midst.

  The passage let out between two shops. On one side, an advisor’s office was shuttered up, a Closed sign hung in its tiny window. Velvet never gave advisors much thought. She knew souls were interested in learning about themselves, growing, resolving their remainders, and all that. But she figured those people were just looking for a way out. An early release from prison, if that’s what purgatory was.

  She had too much on her mind for any of that. It seemed frivolous, too. Why not just do your job and leave well enough alone? You move on when you’re meant to. At least, that’s what Velvet believed.

  She crouched and quickly backed into the crowd as though she’d been retrieving something from the ground. She nearly bumped into a very smartly dressed woman in a dark suit and pillbox hat. The woman’s face undulating in the flickering gaslight that hung nearby.

  “Excuse me. I was just—” Velvet stammered, figuring she’d need some excuse. But the woman merely rolled her glowing eyes and scuttled away on heels far too high for the uneven cobblestones of the Latin Quarter, her ankles popping.

  A quick scan of the other passing faces revealed none of Velvet’s acquaintances, thankfully, so she took a deep breath and turned the corner, only to have to fling herself back into the alley, falling onto her butt with an aching thud. That souls could still feel physical pain was a cruel joke.

  A rush of souls muscled past her, waving banners and brandishing torches like angry townspeople chasing the Frankenstein monster. Black smoke ribboned from the flames, blending into the inky forever night. Their expressions were uniform, lots of glowering and sneering and hate.

  “Down with the station agent!” they shouted venomously. “Depart! Depart!”

  Velvet shook her head as one of the fanatics stopped short and plastered a flyer on the stone wall, crimson ink glaring and glue dribbling from it like tree sap.

  “You ought to join us, you know.” He nodded casually, eyes blazing in his head with the kind of fire only someone completely brainwashed could muster. “Our way is freedom.”

  “Dude!” Velvet bristled, readying for an argument. “Do you know who I am? What I do?”

  The man shrugged and bolted back into the throng. Within a few seconds, their crazed numbers thinned and their shouts dwindled to distant whispers. The street’s regular inhabitants were left shaken. They gathered in small groups to discuss the Departurists’ intrusion—an otherwise pleasant purgatory evening ruined.

  Velvet changed her mind about the advisors next door. If the alternative was joining a crazy cult, more power to those poor souls who want to simply talk it out.

  She pushed herself off the ground and brushed the ash from her clothes before taking the corner again.

  The building that made up the opposite wall from the advisor’s office housed the Paper Aviary. Big picture windows clouded with age were crammed with the most amazing origami birds. Not mere cranes folded to resemble their counterparts in the daylight, the birds perching inside looked real—like for real, real. Velvet was particularly fascinated by the current display. Rows of crows lined up on thick black wire were glaring down at a lifelike diorama of a small schoolhouse and playground and a smartly dressed woman sitting on a bench. The folds were so tight in each of the little miracles, that they disappeared into the bodies, becoming feathers, beaks, even tiny talons; the creases hung perfectly from the schoolhouse like real clapboard; and she didn’t even know how it was possible to make such a lifelike person in miniature. It was simply amazing.

  She recognized the scene instantly.

  Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

  Velvet
’s mother was a movie freak—one of the few things they had in common. Almodóvar, Jarmusch, Kubrick, and, for sure, Hitchcock. While most of her friends had been out seeing the big Hollywood blowup piece-of-crap movie of the week, Regina Monroe had carted her grim little daughter off to the Orpheus for some “cultural enlightenment.” She was fond of the word “Philistine” and mismatched terms such as “mass-market under-education,” whatever those meant. And she often curled her lip as they’d drive straight past the multiplex to the tiny theater with busted seats and old popcorn. But she’d been right about the movies, and The Birds was one of Velvet’s favorites.

  When she looked past the scene and deep into the shop, Velvet jumped.

  A pair of glowing eyes pierced the darkness. Velvet very nearly turned to run, before Mr. Fassbinder stepped from the depths of the back room and into the lantern light. He grinned pleasantly and crossed the room toward the door. It opened with a scrape, a wave of ashes roiling at its base.

  “Good evening, Ms. Velvet. You like the new diorama?” A special glint glowed from under Werner Fassbinder’s felt hat. Today he wore a fedora; on other days when she visited, he’d tip a porkpie in a funky little way. Like a beatnik, she thought they were called, or a hipster, maybe. He wore his wavy black hair a little long, just brushing the wool shoulders of his peacoat. His old-fashioned style gave a hint as to his true age—though he looked to be only in his late twenties. Velvet wasn’t certain how old Mr. Fassbinder was, exactly, but she couldn’t bring herself to call him Werner, despite his many requests.

  Velvet grinned. “It’s fantastic. I love that part of the movie, too. So creepy.”

  “Hitchcock had a way with tension,” Mr. Fassbinder agreed.

  She nodded, remembering the flocks of birds gathering behind Melanie Daniels, the snotty-ass main character, who totally deserved to get pecked in the head. Each time the camera panned, there’d be more and more, until she turned to see that they were everywhere.