Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  She glanced around the workbench, scanning for something suitable.

  “I’ll need a knife. Something big enough, where I can really whack at those ropes and stuff. Sawing is not really in my repertoire.”

  It was hard enough to manage throwing stuff with precision, let alone gripping a handle and cutting through something using all those intricate little movements. Ghosts just weren’t built for that, and the one time she’d commandeered a body for the purpose, things had not gone well for the body.

  Not. At. All.

  Velvet didn’t want to think about that. Though, to be clear, he’d been completely closed off from his pain receptors—she always made sure of that, whenever she possessed—and she had helped secure a very cushy job and residence for the man’s dearly departed soul. So. There was that.

  The times she had tried to untie the girls with her fingers, they’d always struggled and made the knots tighter as soon as they’d realized that something invisible was touching them and creating little indents in their loosening skin. Screaming, fainting, that kind of thing was usually what came next.

  Hacking was the only viable solution.

  “Oh, Ron. Where do you keep your cleavers?”

  Drawn onto the black Peg-Board that formed the wall behind the workbench were chalk outlines of various cutlery—butcher knives, paring knives, deboning knives, et cetera. And usually, inside of each one was its shiny metallic match. But today, the outlines were as vacant and empty as an old crime scene. There were none on the table or floor.

  Nowhere.

  “Seriously, Ron?” she shouted. “What kind of serial killer doesn’t have any knives?”

  Her eyes wandered over the outlines, and she remembered that he took all the sharps, as he called them, inside at night so they wouldn’t get damp. His victims could grow mossy and mildewed, but not his precious knives. It did bring a smile to her face that he must’ve been so busy with the kitchen flooding that he’d forgotten to bring them back out and arrange them with crazed meticulousness.

  Velvet remembered something else, too. She couldn’t help it. Staring at the workbench for too long always triggered the memories.

  She hadn’t been nearly as late for the bus as she could have been, but when she’d arrived at the stop, Velvet could just see the tail of the big silver metro bus taking the corner.

  “Dammit!” she’d yelled, and tossed her book bag onto the bench in the little bus carrel. If she hadn’t been on texting restriction, she never would have gone into the Round Up Grocery asking to use the phone.

  That was where she met Bonesaw, and she’d suspected nothing. How could she have? He was a pleasant guy with a big broad smile and a goofy expression on his face that had actually been kind of endearing to a girl like Velvet, who’d been used to people judging her about the way she kept her hair or the fact that she wore all black and listened to mopey music and stuff.

  “You wanna use the employee phone?” he’d asked.

  “Sure, sir. Thanks.”

  He’d taken her behind the meat counter and shown her the black phone hanging on the wall—one of those older ones with a coil of cord connecting the receiver to a big plastic box. If her mother had answered the phone, it probably would have ended there.

  If. If. If. Woulda. Shoulda. Didn’t.

  “You need a ride home or something?” Bonesaw had asked.

  And despite everything she’d ever learned about strangers, despite her natural instinct to be suspicious of just about everyone around her—due to the fact that she’d found most people were assholes—and particularly people who were nice to her, Velvet had nodded.

  “Well, lucky for you, I’m just about ready to clock out.” He’d taken off his blood-smudged white coat and hung it on a hook next to a puffy winter jacket, which he’d thrown over his shoulder. “You ready, then?”

  Velvet had nodded again.

  Moments later they’d been in his van.

  Moments after that, she’d been unconscious.

  Velvet didn’t want to think about it anymore; she had serious haunting business to take care of. She marched out of the shed and across the lawn to the back door of the farmhouse. She would have gone inside eventually anyway. The pull of the kitchen’s devastation was just too strong.

  A Shop-Vac sat in the middle of the dry linoleum like a sentinel. The kitchen door was propped open with a box fan that whirred and clanked intermittently, pointed at a wet patch of carpet that she was certain was almost dry. Even the molding around the floor seemed fine.

  “Bastard!” she screamed, kicking over the fan. It fell with a loud clunk and sputtered to a stop. She slouched over and picked up the empty vacuum and tossed it at the bistro set. The cheap plastic tub bounced ineffectually off the wrought-iron table, crashed back down onto its wheels, and rolled quietly to a stop by the fridge.

  Velvet stared at the lack of damage with a combination of shock and mild appreciation. Ron Simanski clearly had an angel looking after him. A dark demented angel with a boner for cutlery and pasty white jackasses who loved condiments. And likewise, someone or something—God, whoever—wanted her to fail.

  “Dammit!” she yelled, stomping to the sink.

  She suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there.

  Bonesaw’s knives lay lined up in the bottom, steel against porcelain, both gleaming like a showroom. She picked up the cleaver and managed to tote it almost to the door before it slipped through her hands and impaled the plastic flooring, quivering. She snatched it up and threw it at the window in the back door. Unbelievably, the cleaver clinked against the window sharply and cracked it rather than breaking through, and then it dropped to the floor with a bonk.

  “Come on!”

  She knelt to try again, the fury of the situation blistering through her. Velvet snatched at the cleaver’s handle, and her fingers barely moved it an inch across the slick sheen of the linoleum. Her next try was even more infuriating. She was on her knees at that point, but at least she was able to send the damn thing skittering.

  “What the crap?”

  She had to calm down; in her anger, she’d forgotten to focus. And that did the trick. But when she stood, the cleaver held tightly in her phantom fist, the first thing she saw was Ron Simanski’s face framed in the cracked pane of glass in the door.

  He wore a fresh scowl, and his eyes were intent and focused on the cleaver. To him, it must have appeared to be floating.

  To Velvet, the cleaver needed to find a new spot to dwell.

  She aimed for Bonesaw’s forehead and flung it with every ounce of energy she had.

  It banked off the opening door and clattered loudly as it sailed across the counter and fell back into the sink. By the time Simanski had crossed the threshold, nearly everything was back in its place, except the fan. The killer’s mouth crept open, a question dangling there, before he shook his head, crossed to the refrigerator, and withdrew a paper lunch sack. He peered down into the sink, his lips moving soundlessly as though counting. Satisfied, he shrugged, gave the room a final odd look, and walked back out. He hadn’t even noticed the fan lying on its side.

  Velvet shook her head. The whole trip had been a complete waste of time. She hadn’t freed the girl, and she’d missed her chance to bludgeon a psycho. What good was she?

  Then she heard the minivan engine spark to life.

  Velvet didn’t stop to think about it; she sprinted through the door and across the grass toward the moving vehicle, and then leapt at the driver’s side door, already focusing on a takeover.

  Darkness surrounded her, and a low hum—the muffled sound of the van engine—vibrated the space inside him. Velvet set off to corral Ron Simanski’s mind, but his thoughts were so vulgar, so hateful, she couldn’t help but look, to witness his madness. He imagined himself as red as a cartoon devil, fresh blood painting his skin a dark crimson. His tongue darted for the corners of his lips, blotting them back to pink. Fire danced about him like an aura. He was the god of his world.
/>
  And batshit crazy.

  Velvet reined in her terror and refocused on forcing the blazing image of Bonesaw into the little box she conjured for it. The act took a little more meditation than another body. Images, like postcards of the man’s insanity, fluttered around her: Meat extruding from grinders. Girls walking on sidewalks. Bonesaw’s desire. She heard a low, steady moan. Letting her anger build the box’s wall helped to distract her from the horrors. But once it was formed and Velvet looked inside, she gasped.

  The box, her carefully designed jail for Bonesaw’s mind, was already full.

  A body lay curled up inside, tight and fetal and so red.

  A girl. Her hands covered her face protectively. Wounds stabbed clean through her palms into her cheeks.

  Velvet didn’t want to know who the girl was. It wasn’t her intention to explore the freak’s psyche, just kill him quickly. But the girl’s hands were already falling. It was too late to look away.

  Velvet saw the girl’s face and it was her own. A glassy-eyed version of Velvet stared back at her, dead lips parted, tongue as gray and dry as cigarette ash. Then the rest of Bonesaw’s victims spilled into the box, dropping in dull thuds. His dark proclivities were so strong that she couldn’t keep his twisted obsessions out of her construction. The box bowed and bulged, then collapsed.

  She lost her grip and fell from Bonesaw’s body, through the undercarriage of the moving minivan, and landed painlessly on the dirt farm road. The van disappeared in a cloud of dust that trailed it until the cloud disappeared around the forest bend.

  “Oh, my God,” Velvet said, shaking and hugging her knees to her chest.

  She rocked like that, trying to forget what she’d seen. She blamed her curiosity. If only she hadn’t wondered about his thoughts. If she could only take the last few minutes back, she’d still be able to hang on to the idea that Bonesaw could be forced to kill himself. That she could kill him.

  If only the girl’s face hadn’t been her own.

  Pull yourself together. You’re projecting. There was nothing in that box but your fear.

  After uncoiling herself slowly, Velvet made her shambling way back to the copse with the oak tree. It wouldn’t do any good to let the moment destroy her plans. They just needed revising, she told herself. Tightening up. Streamlining.

  “Focus on that,” she muttered. “You just need to focus.”

  Getting back to work would help.

  Chapter 16

  A vine of little paper bells, shellacked and clacking, shook from the doorknob as Velvet pushed into the Paper Aviary. It was quiet inside, the monk parakeets perfectly still and no sound of Mr. Fassbinder’s busy, sometimes frantic, humming. Tempted to change that, Velvet approached the globe of spikes, eager to hear the funny chirping sound from the tiny bellows.

  She reached out to touch one of the sharp spines, but stopped.

  Pitch-black eyes glowered back from inside the hollows, each parakeet cold and utterly, completely alone.

  Velvet’s dream pushed its way back into her mind. In a moment, she was like the parakeet again, trapped. The feeling of imprisonment knotted in her stomach, chilled her to the very core of her being.

  “Velvet!” Mr. Fassbinder’s voice tore her attention from the cage of papery needles as he rushed from behind the storeroom curtain, thankfully interrupting her creepy state. Pull yourself together, girl, she thought.

  Velvet returned the origamist’s greeting. “Hey, Mr. Fassbinder.”

  “Velvet!” he scolded. “Look at your eyes. They’re so dim. It’s like you’re carrying the weight of the world in that pretty head.”

  He rushed over and put his arm around her shoulders, herding her toward a pair of chairs standing guard over his desk and a dusty abacus in a mahogany frame. “Why don’t you sit down and we’ll talk. I’ll just run in the back and get the special bird I promised.”

  Velvet sank into the chair, managing as polite a smile as she could, and Mr. Fassbinder disappeared behind the dark plum curtain. She could hear him rummaging in the storeroom and wondered what kind of epic projects he carried out in private, if the monk parakeet world was suitable for display in the store.

  What is he working on next? she wondered.

  She shook off her exhaustion and tried to focus on why she’d stopped by at all. The nerve reading; the banshee’s memories of effigies and Chinese printing presses and all that paper. Velvet didn’t think Mr. Fassbinder would know anything about the rows of crystal balls, but he was sure to know all about the paper.

  “Here it is!” he called out.

  When he returned, he held a small black cube in his hand, a sleek matte origami box with a hinge of tightly woven paper. Velvet forced a smile as she took it and opened it slowly, wary of tearing the precise folds.

  Inside sat a miniature black dove.

  It was never enough for Mr. Fassbinder to merely create lifelike copies; he was all about capturing a moment. The dove was cleaning itself, and one shiny black eye was all that peered from underneath its ruffled outstretched wing.

  “I love it.” Velvet smiled up at the man and she said, “It’s genius. Just like you.”

  And it was true, though her mind was far too focused on the task at hand to really enjoy the present fully.

  Mr. Fassbinder clapped his bandaged hands together and slipped into the other chair. “I’m so glad, dear. It’s not much. Just a little dove to carry away the gloom of this dark existence.”

  Velvet looked up from the bird. “It’s not always this bad. Just sometimes, well, my work …”

  “That last shadowquake was a terror. I can’t imagine what you must go through. Don’t suppose you care to talk about the horrors that caused such a menace?” Mr. Fassbinder’s eyes were hopeful, and he leaned forward as though he expected Velvet to spill, as if Velvet were allowed to share specifics about any of her missions.

  “Nice try. But you know—”

  He broke into a fit of deep booming laughter. “Of course, but I have to try. You know how I miss being an insider. Getting all the information before it spreads among the souls. Now I never hear anything first, only through my customers, and by then I’m certain I’m the last.”

  That had to be true.

  As far as Velvet knew, Mr. Fassbinder rarely left the Paper Aviary. All his supplies were delivered. She’d invited him to attend the Retrieval dorm salons on a number of occasions, but he’d always declined. When he’d been alive, he’d been quite the society gentleman, to hear him tell it. Parties nearly every night of the week, expensive restaurant openings, art gallery galas.

  But something had happened to change all that—something Mr. Fassbinder had never shared with Velvet. Something more than just his death.

  “Well,” Velvet stretched the word out conspiratorially, a sinister smirk spreading across her lips.

  The man leaned forward and clasped his hands together eagerly. “Yes?”

  “I do have some questions for you. I can’t tell you why I need to know or answer anything about the shadowquakes other than to say that the answers to the questions I have could have a major impact on the case.”

  “Ooh,” he moaned saucily. “Now you definitely have my attention.”

  “You know about the departure, right?”

  His eyes narrowed, but he nodded slowly, intently.

  “Well, when we returned to the station, there was a demonstration of sorts.”

  He shook his head, his mouth crinkled up in disgust. “Nasty business. Yes. I’ve heard about it. Something was set ablaze. Neanderthals!”

  “Well, it’s exactly what was on fire that brings me to you.”

  “Oh?” Mr. Fassbinder reclined in the chair and crossed his legs, rubbing at the knot of his chin.

  “The effigy, if that’s the right word, was made of paper. Possibly origami.” Velvet studied the man’s face for his reaction. “It looked exactly like the station agent. A picture-perfect replica.”

  “Oh, my. That is disturbin
g.” He shook his head but didn’t seem surprised. “Now, why would the revolutionaries do something like that?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Have you heard rumblings? Has Manny been accused of something?”

  The words startled her.

  Accused of something? Velvet thought. Where did that come from? Manny had never done anything that wasn’t for the betterment of the Latin Quarter and purgatory.

  “Of course not,” she barked, irked.

  Mr. Fassbinder shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought so. What do the revolutionaries have against her, then?”

  Velvet shook her head and glanced at the monk parakeets in their cells. She wondered if perhaps that was how the revolutionaries felt. Trapped. Isolated. But even if that were the case, why take it out on Manny? And what kind of departure were they planning, anyway?

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, Mr. Fassbinder added, “Perhaps the revolutionaries believe that dimming is being kept from them by the Council of Station Agents. That it’s being lorded over them. That they’re being kept in this place against their will.”

  The idea startled her. “What? That’s ridiculous.” She paused, considering the notion in light of her dreams, of the demonstration at the station. “You’re suggesting that we could all dim at any second but somehow aren’t allowed to based on the whims of Manny and the others? Have you heard something to that effect?”

  “No. No. Not at all.” He shook his hands out in front of him. “Don’t get me wrong here. I’m just trying to help.”

  Velvet sighed. “And you have, Mr. Fassbinder. Those are definitely interesting ideas. But we kind of got sidetracked, because I meant to ask about who, besides yourself, is skilled enough at origami to create such lifelike paper effigies?”

  He stood up and skirted the desk. “Well. It’s a pretty rare profession, but there are quite a few, mostly in Vermillion.”

  “Oh?” she said, eyes widening at the possibility of a significant break in the case.

  The Chinese newspapers had certainly been in Vermillion. If there were an origamist who could be linked to the newspapers, then Velvet was on to something.