Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  Nick leaned over and whispered, “Have you ever had gas at a séance?”

  He was such a dork. But despite Velvet’s decidedly highbrow sense of humor, she couldn’t contain a giggle, and elbowed him in the ribs. “Stop it. You’re going to get us in trouble.”

  He shook in silent laughter next to her, his leg quivering against hers. The sensation rippled through her, and she couldn’t help but leave her leg right where it was.

  “Well, it was long believed that this medium was, in fact, legitimately gifted and that no one before him, nor since, had such an ability,” Miss Antonia continued. “That was not the case, however. In the summer of 1952, I was called to a Salvage operation in the small coastal town of Newport, Oregon. Shadowquakes weren’t nearly as violent in those days, and this one barely registered as an inky smudge obscuring the passing sparkle of souls above us. The station agent warned us, however, that there was something different about this disturbance, some undercurrent of evil that seemed to link directly between the lands of the living and the dead. Our team’s body thief’s name was Aloysius Clay.”

  There was a familiar darkness in Miss Antonia’s eyes as she spoke the name, a tension to her jaw that Velvet suspected only she’d picked up on.

  “He was a bright young man in the prime of his experience. He led us through the cracks to a string of beachside cabins called the Oasis Motel. It was rainy and clearly the off-season, as the streets were predominantly empty, except for several cars scattered around this one particular cabin, a gray clapboard box with a single window obscured by thick curtains. I remained ethereal on this particular mission, as the nearest dead were several miles inland and Clay reassured us he’d be able to handle the situation with little trouble. The motel clerk was his target, and he made short work of securing the use of the elderly man’s body. If only he’d found someone with more strength.”

  Her words were ominous; her tone suggested that this story was not going to end well. Velvet scooted in closer to Nick, drawing Isadora’s foul gaze. She reveled in it, making a point to rest her head on the boy’s shoulder in a pointedly affable, totally non-girlfriendy kind of way. The other girl scowled and whipped her head back toward the stage.

  “Clay rapped on the door to the cabin, but there was no response. Using the clerk’s keys, we entered and found the twin beds disassembled and propped against the wall. The lone table from the room had been moved to its center and was surrounded by several stunned men and women. Farthest from our vantage, a young woman, twenty-five years old perhaps, tossed her head back and belched a clammy fog from her mouth. It curled and glugged into the air, syrupy and sickening. One of the women in attendance fainted, falling forward onto the table with a bang.”

  Velvet noticed that Logan was on the edge of his seat, mouth wide open, probably still hungover. Luisa grimaced as the Salvage mother continued her tale.

  “Jerry, one of our poltergeists, sprang across the space and attempted to tackle the girl. She did appear to be possessed, after all, and the cloud of pearlescent gas was still issuing from inside her. What happened next marked the end of my tenure as an official undertaker, stripped down to the bone my will to protect purgatory. Jerry did not tumble out of the back of this girl but rather howled in pain from inside her and churned out of her mouth, transformed into what we now understand to be authentic ectoplasm. His cries of pain were excruciating.”

  Logan clamped his hands to his mouth.

  “Clay rushed forward, gathering all the strength he could muster from the withered man’s frame, and struck the girl. She rose from her seat, hands still clasped to the men at her right and left.

  “She bellowed, ‘Die in this mortal coil, unclean spirit.’

  “And the cloud dissipated, her eyes cleared up, and she sat there looking around, bewildered and confused. Later, Clay questioned the girl, and she told him that she didn’t remember a thing, that she didn’t even live in Newport but in Salem. How she got to be in the Oasis Motel surrounded by these people, with the death of our poltergeist Jerry on her hands, remains a mystery.”

  Miss Antonia leaned forward and held up one excruciatingly long finger as a warning. “But there are theories that this girl was an instrument of some unidentified spirit acting from purgatory through her slight frame to disrupt our Salvage team. And disrupt our team, it did. Jerry was gone, Clay disappeared shortly thereafter and was never seen again near the dormitories, and our second poltergeist transferred to another quarter. As you can see, I stayed, but in a different capacity entirely.”

  Why is she telling this particular story now? Velvet wondered. Did she suspect that the revolution and Aloysius Clay had access to the kind of horrific power that had killed Jerry?

  Velvet raised her hand.

  Miss Antonia scanned the crowd with tortured eyes. Storytelling might be sustenance for some, but it certainly didn’t work that way for this storyteller. Her eyes brightened slightly when she lit on Velvet waving madly. “Yes, child?”

  “Is there any indication that the events of that night might be happening again?”

  Miss Antonia shook her head. “No one knows for certain. There’ve been instances of Salvage teams arriving late at the locus of a disturbance and finding nothing but bewildered humans with no memory of anything happening at all.”

  “Yes,” Velvet said, “but couldn’t those have been …” She hesitated to say it aloud.

  The crowd around her gawked, wide-eyed and clearly disturbed by the Salvage mother’s story.

  “Go on,” she said. “In light of the revolutionaries popping up everywhere, it’s important that we discuss these things openly.”

  “Couldn’t those people have simply been the targets of rogue body thieves, who dispossessed them prior to the team’s arrival?”

  The audience turned in unison toward Miss Antonia. The woman had no response. But Velvet could think only of that horrible creature lounging in the bowels of the Cellar, of its struggle to keep Madame Despot in its grasp and Nick in his crystal cell. And for what purpose? For nothing more than to create shadowquakes? To disrupt the fabric of purgatory? None of it made sense. And what about this ectoplasm stuff? Surely that wasn’t real. Some parlor trick to hide Jerry’s escape into the world, perhaps. The alternative—that Jerry had been processed as though the medium’s body were no more than a ghost blender—was too horrible. Velvet shuddered at the thought. But if it was real, then what had torn apart Miss Antonia’s team?

  What had happened to Jerry?

  What had made Clay run away and get involved with the revolution?

  Velvet looked around the room and noticed Isadora glaring at her intently, not with her regular pious judgment but with something else. Fear lurked in the soft glow of her eyes.

  They sat and listened to one of the singers accompanying a new record that had been swiped on a recent Collection run. It reminded Velvet of the disco her mother used to sing and dance to while doing the dishes. Velvet even used to join in—when she was younger, of course—her mother twirling her around and bumping her with her hip. Those were good times, but she rarely called upon the memories for comfort. It was better not to. Sadness could take hold of you in purgatory like nowhere else. She saw it all the time, people sobbing on the railcar, on benches, even within the dorms. She’d been awakened by the tortured cries of someone who couldn’t leave the memories well enough alone. It’s as though souls forget that there is an afterlife and they’re living it, which means that those who have been left behind will eventually be in purgatory themselves, or, hopefully, somewhere less gritty and crowded.

  Nick stood up beside her and wandered into the crowd. Her eyes followed him as he slipped up the stairs and out of sight.

  With Nick gone, her focus returned to Isadora.

  Isadora reached across and patted Velvet’s hand. Her touch sent shivers up Velvet’s spine, shivers that threatened to spike through her head. She slapped the girl’s hand away.

  “Oh, so infantile,” Isadora
hissed. “Clearly you’re intimidated by my looks and ability to snatch your man right out from under you. Because, really, what do you have to offer? That sour expression? Terrible hair? You could benefit from an actual personality, Velv. It’d counteract all this.” She swept her hand around Velvet’s general vicinity.

  Velvet tried to calm herself, but the girl leaned in farther and really put her foot in it.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a revolutionary, like everyone’s been saying,” she hissed into Velvet’s ear. “Creeping around like you do.”

  Without thinking how it’d look to the gathered crowd, Velvet clenched her fist and drove it straight into Isadora’s jaw.

  There wasn’t a crack, as there would have been had living flesh and bone connected, but all the same, Isadora dropped off her stool and thudded against the stone pavers like a burlap bag full of flour. The powder coating her skin puffed away from her in tiny mushroom clouds, and she even coughed up a wad of sparks that bounced around on the bodice of her far-too-dressy dress.

  Velvet expected the girl to get up, return the punch, and turn the altercation into one huge brawl, but instead, Isadora just lay there, her expression wounded and pitiful. The girl sought out the help of the strangers around her, reaching for them to help her to her feet, playing the victim for all it was worth. Velvet turned to Luisa for support.

  “Jeez, Velvet. Harsh” was all the little girl had to offer.

  Velvet turned toward the staircase, but Nick hadn’t returned. Nor was Miss Antonia anywhere to be seen. The rest of the dorm tenants were glowering at her now, shaking their heads in disapproval. Velvet felt the nerves exploding in her cheeks, across her chest, the humiliation of being seen as the brute in the situation setting in and finding a home.

  When she peered over the table to see Isadora explaining the horror of the attack to a miraculously reappeared Miss Antonia, Velvet nearly exploded. She ran through the crowd to the breezeway and out into the streets.

  Chapter 21

  Velvet needed to hit something.

  To break. To destroy.

  To kill.

  When she broke out of the Retrieval dorm it was at a full run, boots pounding the cobblestone in blunt echoing clops. Scissoring through groups of people chattering and vendor carts rolling away for the night, Velvet rushed toward the only purpose that could effectively employ her anger.

  Moments later, she burst out into the forest glen. A crunch of leaves nearby heralded a deer stunned by her presence. She kept going, her pace quickening toward the desolate farmhouse, itself a dark smear against the pastoral scenery. She blew through fencing and livestock before stepping foot on the gravel approach to the Simanski farm. And pressing forward, Velvet sprinted past the house quickly, then the van, rushing headlong into the small shed stinking with hate.

  Bonesaw loomed over his victim from behind the chair. He’d set her chin and head in a horseshoe-shaped binding. A prong jutted downward from the device, ending in a loop attached to a belt strapped tightly about her chest. It looked like a tuning fork, and the girl’s cheeks were indented so painfully that Velvet could swear she felt the memory of the thing biting into her own flesh. The tool’s purpose was clear and sickening. The girl struggled to turn her head but couldn’t. The binding prevented all but the most minor movement. The girl’s eyes flinched and blinked painfully as she tried to see what her captor was doing.

  You don’t want to see, Velvet thought.

  It was bad enough that Velvet could see the man arching in, the grater nearly scraping against the girl’s ear, ready to abrade the cartilage down to hot bloody gristle. His doughy face was flushed. His eyes were mad with lust.

  Velvet rushed to the workbench and began slapping her palms against the table. Knives and cleavers jumped and clattered together, and when she peered over her shoulder, Bonesaw had dropped his grater. It lay tilted and askew atop his big bare foot.

  But it wasn’t the lack of a weapon in his hand that made Velvet smile. It was the fear written across his face in a trio of Os—his gaping mouth, his wide eyes. She grabbed a paring knife and tossed it toward the door with enough force that it grabbed a hold in the wood about a foot above the floor, right between a pair of bare legs.

  Velvet gasped as her eyes traveled quickly upward past the long satiny basketball shorts, the tank, to Nick’s beautiful face, turned ugly in a shocked grimace.

  “What the hell?” His eyes darted between Velvet, Bonesaw, and the man’s terrified victim. “What the hell is going on here?”

  She staggered backward, completely at a loss as to what to do … or to say. But when she shot a glance back at Simanski, just in time to see him recovering the grater from the floor and beginning to cross through the shed to check out the paring knife, she acted.

  “Nick! You’ve got to follow my directions really closely. This man is a maniac. If you can possess him, even for a second, try it. I haven’t been able to, and we’ve got to save this girl!”

  Nick nodded and watched the man as he approached, lumbering over in his black rubber apron, which was slick with God knew what. Velvet watched as the boy bit his lip, steeled himself by puffing a short burst of air from his mouth and hopping a bit, and then lunged into Bonesaw.

  The big man staggered, reached out, and braced his palm against the door. Nick was doing it, she thought. Velvet turned to the girl, and her heart sank as she saw the craziness invading Simanski’s victim’s face. There was no getting around that, though. Insanity had been Velvet’s only escape from the shed.

  She didn’t waste another second. Velvet dove into the girl and quickly went to work shutting down her thoughts and ruminations—if nothing else, she could provide a little vacation from the horror. As traumatized as the girl was, Velvet was easily able to tuck her into the little mind-box.

  Velvet opened her eyes and looked out through a veil of tears.

  A big blurry version of Bonesaw shambled about recklessly, bumping into things. His knives fell to the floor around his ankles, clanging noisily. He stumbled toward her, tripping and very nearly falling. She braced the girl’s body as best she could as the man’s bulky frame barreled into the chair. It tipped and, try as she might, Velvet couldn’t shift the girl’s center of gravity enough to right it.

  She hovered there for the briefest of seconds. Dread filled her, and then a violent crash against the floor jarred her ghost loose from the body. Velvet hung half out of the girl. She twisted back to look at her and noticed the girl’s face turning blue. The brace about her neck had caught on a gap between the floorboards and forced her windpipe closed.

  The girl gagged. Spittle flew from her lips and drizzled down her cheek.

  Velvet wriggled away, flipped onto her butt, and focused on the legs of the chair. She kicked upward and out, over and over, until her foot caught against the wood and the whole thing jumped, chair, girl, ropes, and most important, the choking brace. The bar dislodged from the crack in the floor, and the girl fell over onto her side, gasping for air.

  “Have you got him?” Velvet screamed as she saw Bonesaw settle and still himself next to the worktable.

  But when Simanski turned around, he held a knife in his fist and his face was red with determination; his eyes were black and soulless. Where was Nick?

  Velvet scrambled to climb back into the girl before the knife started plunging into her. She’d take the girl’s pain. She owed her that much. But he was coming fast. So fast.

  By the time Velvet sank into the girl, working the possession as rapidly as she knew how, Velvet could feel the stainless steel blade pressing against her skin. Moving slowly, purposefully.

  Sawing.

  “You bastard!” she screamed.

  Bonesaw’s hands were on the girl then, hefting her upward until the chair was upright.

  Velvet closed her eyes. The man’s breath was hot on her face.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, and felt the slow hot trickle of blood drawing a line around the girl’s wris
t. He was cutting her now.

  But she didn’t feel it. The only pressure she could feel from the depths of the body were the slowly loosening bonds around her chest. The brace falling away.

  “Nick!” Her eyes snapped open, and the killer’s eyes crinkled pleasantly, a faint glow blistering around his pupils like a solar eclipse. “You did it!”

  He nodded and slipped the knife as carefully as he could between the fishing line and the girl’s right forearm. The thin plastic thread broke free, and she found that she was grinning, giddy for Nick’s success, for the girl’s impending freedom.

  For the first time, Velvet smiled broadly at her killer out of happiness rather than spite. But what she saw there made her heart skip a beat. Nick was slipping away. The man’s eyes were going from a safe glow to dead black and as dark as murder. He slashed the knife at her brutally, and Velvet held out the girl’s hand to defend her face.

  She didn’t realize Bonesaw had succeeded until a spurt of blood showered the dry floorboards. Velvet fell from the chair onto the girl’s knees, clutching the wounded hand to her chest, grasping the rapidly soaking shirt like a makeshift bandage. Her ankles were still connected to the chair by taut rubber tubing.

  The man growled and squatted down next to her, teeth bared and eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s going on, girl? You got somethin’ special in you?”

  Velvet’s eyes flew open wide. How can he know I’m inside the girl? she wondered. He couldn’t.

  Behind him, Nick was rushing forward, falling into a crouch and then straight into the killer’s back. For a second, Velvet thought she saw the struggle at play. Bonesaw’s eyes flashing with light, and then he was biting his lip in the same way Nick did when he was thinking. The knife in his hand turned back toward himself.