Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  His face screwed up quizzically. He was silent.

  “Okay.” Velvet had suspected a snappy comeback. When it didn’t happen, she turned and stomped away. Nick chased after her, stumbling on the pavers with loud clops. About halfway to the dry fountain in the center of the square, she swiveled to look back at him.

  He showed her open palms and said, “Sorry. I don’t mean to be a dick.”

  “You’ve just got to let me lead,” she said. “You’ve got to.”

  He nodded and followed her the rest of the way to the funicular platform in silence. Velvet forced her hands into her pockets and felt the little box from Mr. Fassbinder, just as sturdy and pristine as when he’d given it to her. Just having the paper bird, a gift from a man who’d never been anything but kind to her, somehow gave her comfort from the sadness.

  Velvet and Nick sat with their hands inches apart, resting against the wooden bench seats of the railcar as it rattled and lurched up the mountain to the station. The minute Velvet was certain she’d have to break the silence, Nick cleared his throat.

  “I scared you when I said ‘love,’ didn’t I?” he asked. He chewed at his nails but didn’t wait for her to answer. “I don’t love you in a romantic way. I mean, I think you’re hot and all, and I love making out with you, but that’s different. I love you because you saved me, because you make me feel less alone.”

  Velvet mulled over the words. She guessed they made a sort of bizarre boy-sense, but it didn’t change the fact that he was still talking to her like they could continue any sort of physical stuff.

  She bit the inside of her cheek. Maybe Nick would never get it. How horrible would it be to have to fend off his attentions and work side by side with him for weeks, or months? Years?

  Finally she decided to take a cue from his tack. Hers, she thought, clearly wasn’t working.

  “Yeah. I totally get what you mean. The kissing and stuff is sexy, and it takes our minds off of all the bad shit. But in the end”—she shrugged pleasantly—“I don’t really know you and you don’t really know me. So we should probably work on being friends and coworkers.”

  “Oh, I know you,” he said, smiling broadly.

  She gave him a sideways glance. So much for reverse psychology.

  He caught on to her edginess and huffed. “Jesus. I’m flirting again, aren’t I?”

  “That’s kind of your fallback position. Why don’t we just change the subject? Okay?”

  The railcar jogged forward as they crossed into the station proper, and they both bounced in their seats. Their fingers touched, and neither of them moved. They just sat there like that, pinkies creating arcs of heat.

  Velvet held her breath and closed her eyes. They were much better like this, she thought. Still. Not talking. It was perfect.

  Finally Nick pulled away.

  She decided to pretend it hadn’t happened and continued. “So, the tests!”

  Nick nodded and crossed his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits. “Maybe we could call them something else,” he said. “ ‘Tests’ sounds like something involving needles.”

  Velvet thought about the second part of the test and the nursing home where Nick would have to try to possess a body. “Well, there might actually be needles,” she said, trying to remember.

  “Oh, good.”

  The platform came up on the left, and they scooted out onto the smooth cobblestone along with the few other passengers. There weren’t nearly as many travelers in the station as the last time she’d been there, and so they breezed quickly up to the Shattered Hall.

  “The tests are actually kind of fun,” she told him as the coiled lock on the gate spiraled open. “Plus, we’ll get a chance to know each other.”

  He straightened, developing a swarthy look befitting a lusty pirate in those old Sunday afternoon movies.

  Velvet almost giggled. “Not like that.”

  He slumped over dramatically.

  Velvet laughed. She couldn’t keep up the tough love. It was just getting exhausting, and she did, despite her better judgment, like the guy. It wasn’t in her nature to develop an easy rapport with anyone, let alone a boy. And this guy actually liked her back … or at least wanted to make out, which was something.

  “Or maybe …”

  “What?” Nick lit up.

  Velvet started to remove her pants, unbuckling her leather belt with delicate movements. She knew Nick was watching and, God help her, she wanted him to. She glanced at him and found him quietly chewing at his lips.

  Velvet looked up at him and shook her head. “This isn’t a seduction, you loser. Get your clothes off. We’re going through that crack there and doing a job.”

  Nick scowled and tugged his shirt from his pants.

  Velvet briefed the boy to the best of her ability, gave him the same three details for the pull-focus that they always used. Yellow plastic mop buckets full of moldy rags, a Girls of Glassware calendar perpetually on the June photo depicting a busty redhead leaning over two vases, and a barely used doorknob, covered in dust.

  “You need to get a move on the second we arrive at the factory,” she directed.

  And he nodded.

  Velvet thought she’d been very specific. Succinct, even.

  So why was it that when she followed Nick through the crack, Velvet wound up collapsed directly on top of the boy, right between his legs?

  “Jesus, Nick. You’ve got to keep moving.” She disentangled herself and passed through the door of the small closet where the crack had led them, and into a vast warehouse. After a moment, she huffed in the direction of the door. No Nick. She crammed her hand back through it and pulled Nick out.

  “Thanks.” Nick found his footing and inspected their surroundings.

  A grooved metal ceiling towered above them. The glass transoms were cranked fully open, and birds fluttered between the steel rods, chirping like a bunch of girls gossiping at a coffee shop. Row upon row of racks stretched the length of the building, and perched on each rack were crystal vases, wineglasses, and ashtrays.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s the Caruthers Family Crystal warehouse.” Velvet began to walk between the rows. “Well, one of them. This one is full of factory seconds, and they rarely move any of these pieces anywhere but into the garbage.”

  “What do you mean ‘seconds’?”

  Velvet crossed in front of him and drew his attention to a candlestick that looked like a column on a really old building—only glass and small, obviously. Nick leaned over and examined it closely. The carved edges sparkled in the sunlight beaming in from above. Pretty, if you liked that kind of thing, but Velvet thought it would look much better smashed into little glittery bits on the floor.

  “Do you see all those little bubbles?” She pointed at the candlestick’s base, where, like a pile of frog eggs in a pond, there were dozens of little bubbles settled inside the thick glass. “That means they’re no good. They can’t sell ’em for top dollar.”

  Nick nodded, his normally expressive face gone dull with boredom.

  “So where’s the test?” he whined.

  Velvet grinned and swept her arms toward the city-bus-sized towers of factory second crystal as though she and Nick had just arrived in some defective fantasy wonderland. “This is it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘This is it’? You want me to blow glass or something?”

  “When you’re done blowing yourself,” Velvet joked.

  The boy chuckled. “Funny.”

  She reached out with her amorphous hand and picked up a candlestick from the metal shelf. She handed it to Nick. “Take it.”

  Nick lifted his hand to circle the piece of glass. His brow scrunched with concentration. When Velvet released it, the crystal toppled from the boy’s nonexistent grasp and shattered on the concrete floor between their feet, glass shards dancing like a hard rain.

  “Oh, crap!” he shouted, and instinctively crouched, as though the workers or guards would come runn
ing. “We better get out of here.”

  “Not until you’ve completed the test. All you’ve proven is your lack of natural ability in poltergeisting, but you still have to learn it to get by in the daylight. It’s unacceptable to simply be able to do one job and not others. Where would you be if you got separated out there on the streets? You’d be nothing. A lost soul. Useless.”

  “What do you mean ‘daylight’?”

  “ ‘The daylight’ just means ‘the world of the living.’ ”

  “Then, why don’t we call purgatory ‘the nighttime’ or something?”

  Velvet scowled and stabbed a thumb toward the shelf. “Just shut up and try again. This time focus your energy on the candlestick or whatever. Don’t think of anything else but moving it. Really want it.”

  Velvet would have been amazed if Nick had taken to moving objects right out of the gate. It took a natural poltergeist to achieve that kind of dexterity. The thought reminded her of her problem with the knotted ropes and fishing lines circling Bonesaw’s girls. If she’d only been a natural, things would be so much easier.

  If only. If only.

  She brushed the thoughts aside before they infected her mind with the darkness of the situation, before the image of herself in Bonesaw’s mind became her only focus.

  Nick chose a crystal ashtray from a stack of the things and stretched his hand toward it. He touched the edge of the glass and pressed straight through.

  “You don’t feel anything, right?” She stepped up close to him. “It’s a matter of perspective. To you, it’s like the glass doesn’t exist, rather than the other way around. You have to focus.”

  And so did she.

  “Focus!” Velvet demanded.

  Nick glanced in her direction, his face filled with a steely determination in the gauzy light. On his second attempt, his finger caught hold for a moment before giving way to nothingness.

  “Dammit!” he shouted.

  “Just concentrate,” Velvet said. “It’ll come. Imagine your hand is solid.”

  This time, when the boy reached out, the ashtray’s edge nestled into his palm. He slipped his thumb underneath and lifted it off the shelf, drawing it toward them. It scraped and hopped against the open grid in the metal. He held it out for Velvet.

  “Holy crap.” She grinned proudly and gave him a great big theater clap.

  Then.

  The ashtray fell, slapping against the floor, bouncing once and then breaking into a million pieces, scattering across the floor like a crowd dispersing.

  “Shit!” Nick yelled.

  “That was really good. Until you lost your focus and screwed the pooch.”

  He straightened, and puffed his chest out proudly. “Heck, yeah. It was awesome, is what it was. Damn fine ashtray lifting.”

  “Uh.” Velvet shook her head. “I wouldn’t go that far. But it was a start!”

  Nick agreed, nodding. “A start. So what now?”

  She shrugged. “The next test.”

  Velvet waited for Nick to bounce from the crack. She sat on a cushy couch, her legs were crossed elegantly, her ankle popping in her boots.

  Nick slipped from the crack in the ballroom wall and tumbled across the freshly oiled floor.

  “Took you long enough,” Velvet chided, giving him a sheepish smile.

  She hopped up and sauntered across the room, feeling his gaze lower to her hips. Velvet couldn’t deny that she took some degree of pleasure in him watching her, and if she were being honest, she’d have to cop to swiveling her butt around a little more for the boy’s benefit.

  She couldn’t help but think of their night together. She could pretend she didn’t remember, but she’d been all over him. And their kiss.

  Holy crap.

  When she turned back to look at him, his eyes were dark with something completely unwholesome and his tongue played in the corner of his lips. Her heart pounded a haunting rhythm in her chest, and for a second, she was sure that he’d seen something in her expression. Something she had not meant to show him.

  Desire.

  Velvet turned away quickly. What was wrong with her? What was it with the boy? He was like a hormone magnet. And she was stuck in a perpetual loop of teenage lust and poor impulse control. But this wasn’t the place.

  But what if it was? she mused. What if it could be?

  “Welcome to the Friendly Acres Retirement Community and Skilled Nursing Facility,” she said, sweeping her arms out toward the space around them.

  “Lovely.” He scanned the lavishly decorated walls dutifully, but mostly he just watched Velvet. “I guess.”

  “Oh, it is. It’s also sad, and you’ll see that.” She glanced off to her right. “Or feel it, in a minute.”

  They passed through a narrow wood-paneled hall that opened into a grand lobby, richly appointed with plush chairs, Oriental carpets, and a massive fireplace that was blazing and crackling. A group of elderly residents sat in front of it warming themselves and gossiping. The sound of the fire joined the squeaking of aluminum walkers and wheelchairs and the soft shurring of crepe-soled nurse’s shoes. At the opposite end of the hall was a front desk of dark mahogany the size of a Mini Cooper. From behind it a man in a maroon cardigan and glasses with beads hanging from the arms glanced in their direction.

  “Did that guy just wink at me?” Nick asked Velvet, pointing in the deskman’s direction.

  “Barney is legally blind, so I seriously doubt it.” She pursed her lips and shook her head in judgment. “You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you?”

  Nick took a defensive posture. “Absolutely not. I just thought he could see us, is all. He definitely seemed to notice us passing through.”

  “Well, some people can, but they don’t really know what they’re seeing. I’ve heard that we kind of look like when you catch something in your eyelashes and the light hits it just right so you can see it in your periphery. Glowing orb things.”

  “Yeah. Or maybe people are just crazy and want to see things.”

  “Well, there is that.” She smiled.

  She led him through a closed door into a hall lined with wheelchairs, gurneys, and chests of drawers. Nurses in paper hats crisscrossed the hall in front of them, darting from room to room, like some live-action video game.

  Velvet paid them no attention, and when they passed through her, she didn’t even flinch. The same couldn’t be said for Nick, who spasmed nearly every time one of the busy nurses clipped him.

  “In here!” Velvet yelled as she watched Nick recover from a particularly heinous body violation by a nurse nearly twice as big around as he was. She pointed toward an open door into a shadow-filled room.

  Nick stepped past her onto a floor as glossy as spun sugar. The sound of machines beeping echoed off the walls, and a gray curtain hung from the ceiling in a half-moon around a hospital bed. They peered around the corner to find an elderly woman harpooned by breathing tubes, the blankets on top of her stretched so tight that she seemed to be sunken into the bed, paper thin.

  “She’s a vegetable,” Velvet said without a hint of empathy in her voice.

  “You mean ‘comatose,’ ” Nick snipped.

  She shrugged. “Sure. Yeah, that works, too.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Velvet crouched to read the chart hanging from the foot of the woman’s bed. “Rita Renjette. It says here she has lung cancer.”

  Nick circled the bed, breezing across the woman’s exposed hand with the tips of his fingers. “Her face is so slack.”

  Her skin hung from her cheekbones like the clothes from the lines in the courtyard, limp and saggy.

  “It’s like there’s nothing underneath,” he whispered.

  Velvet studied the creases around the boy’s light eyes. His sympathy was so apparent, it made her sad. It came so easy for Nick.

  He cared.

  “But we know that’s not true.” Velvet sat down in an emerald-green wingback chair, the fleur-de-lis pattern of the fabric ob
scuring her figure as she did. “You need to get on in there.”

  “What?” He looked down at the old woman again, at her breathing tubes and wires and permanently sealed paper-thin eyelids. “She looks like a coffin,” he said finally. “Not ready for one, but like an actual coffin herself.” He glanced back at Velvet, beseeching her to excuse him from the task.

  “I don’t think I want anything to do with body thieving, Velvet. It scares me.” Nick’s voice quivered.

  Velvet nodded; it wasn’t for everyone. It took a certain degree of coarseness to pull it off, to commandeer someone else and strip away his or her humanity. It might not be for Nick. Poltergeisting certainly hadn’t been. But the test had to be done.

  “We’re not here sightseeing, Nick.” She tried to speak softly. “This is part of your test.”

  He shook his head and glanced at the prone figure. “Not this one. She reminds me of my own grandmother.”

  Velvet stood up and joined him next to the bed. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” He pointed at the thin skin on the woman’s wrists, bunched up like saggy panty hose. “I think it’s that.”

  “I know what you mean.” She turned and caught his gaze. “We used to visit my great-aunt in the nursing home up until she passed away. She was always so … like, alive. And then the old age just took her and she got like this. This woman is just waiting to move on. She might not know it, but we do, right?”

  He nodded his head, but his expression was grim.

  “You’re not going to hurt her. She’s beyond that now. Just lie down in her place and see what happens, okay?”

  He gulped. She’d never seen him look so horrified, and that was saying something, considering the panic she’d witnessed as he’d broken free from the bonds of the crystal ball. “You won’t hurt her. I promise.”

  Nick flinched, but climbed atop the bed, seemingly worried about putting any weight on the woman’s frail frame. He flipped and crab-walked over the woman, his hands and feet barely making dents in the hospital blankets, and then with a deep breath of nothing, he sank down into her.

  Velvet sat back down and waited. The clock above the door ticked away in time with the hushing shh of the breathing machine. She’d trained a boy named Gregory a few months ago—she wasn’t sure what district he’d ended up Salvaging for—much younger than Nick, but fearless. That boy had plopped down into one of these coma patients, and not a second later their eyes snapped open and he sat them right up and winked at her.