The Scribbled Victims

by Robert Tomoguchi

  “I’m sure you’re a very smart girl.”

  “Thanks for saying that.”

  “It’s treatable, isn’t it? Your acute lymphoblastic leukemia?”

  “Yeah. They make you do lots of chemo which sucks but at least I’ll be better soon.” That was the first lie I told Yelena.

  Yelena didn’t say anything.

  “You see that guy?” I asked, and motioned to Howard who was still mopping the floor, slowly, probably just so he could stare at Yelena longer.

  Yelena didn’t turn to look, but she said, “Yes. What about him?”

  I whispered, “He jacks off to his daughters.”

  It was bad timing. Yelena was just taking a sip of her coffee and almost choked.

  “What?” she asked.

  “He’s never touched them or anything like that. He just thinks about them and plays with his ding dong. But that’s still super gross, don’t you think?”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No. I’ve just drawn him before.” I looked through the sheets of sketch paper scattered on my table until I found his scribble and showed it to Yelena.

  “His name is Howard, but when he’s pretending to get with his daughters he calls himself…”

  And that’s when I freaked out. I caught a glimpse of the bottom left corner of Yelena’s scribble and quickly began to gather up my black crayons and papers. I had never drawn someone like her who sat so close to me.

  “He calls himself what?” Yelena asked.

  “Nothing. I have to go,” I said. And I got up and ran out of the cafeteria. I could feel Veronica and Howard staring as I fled. I learned later that they looked to Yelena once I was gone for an explanation, but she didn’t give them one.

  Call it fate, call it accidental, or call it my subconscious acting out, but I left the drawing of Yelena behind on the cafeteria table. Yelena hadn’t yet finished her coffee, but she stood up, grabbed the scribble and came after me.

  I kept pressing the up button for the elevator. The door finally opened and I jumped in and pressed number four just as Yelena caught up to me.

  “Wait. Orly, you forgot your…”

  I freaked out. “Please don’t kill me!” I screamed at her.

  Yelena stopped and stood stock-still. She didn’t know what to say. But she knew she was found out. She knew I knew what she was. The elevator doors closed and I thought I was safe for a moment, until I realized she would see what floor the elevator stopped on. I pressed more buttons, but I had already passed the third floor, so my first stop would still be the fourth floor. I wasn’t sure if I should get off when the elevator doors opened, but I did and ran and hid in my room, hearing one of the nurses yell at me to get back in bed.

  Yelena watched the numbers on the digital display above the elevator doors ascend. She saw that the first stop was the fourth floor, my floor, and then watched as it stopped on the fifth floor, seventh floor, eighth floor, and ninth floor, before descending to the third floor. She waited until it reached the first floor again, and when it did the doors opened to an empty elevator car. Yelena didn’t step inside. She didn’t come after me. Instead, she looked at her diamond-encrusted watch and saw sunrise was approaching. She left the hospital, taking with her the scribble that she knew, but couldn’t see, was her.

  Yelena sped home faster than she technically needed to, but she was always cautious about the sunlight. She arrived well in time—it was still dark out and the birds who sung their night songs had still not yielded to the chirpers who announced the morning.

  Yelena entered her house still holding the scribble and went straight to her bedroom. She glanced at the spot on the hardwood floor where she had killed and fed off of Andre. The floor was spotless, without any evidence of the murder. As throughout the rest of the house, excessively thick black coverings had already been lowered over her bedroom windows a half hour earlier as they were on a timer to fall, but never timed to rise. That Yelena would have to do manually, by pressing a sequence of buttons known only to her, on a remote control that commanded the window coverings for the entire house, and that she kept beside her bed on a nightstand.

  She undressed, slipped into a black silk robe, and stood studying the scribble. She looked at herself in the mirror holding the scribble up beside her face. Nothing. Not nothing because she couldn’t see herself in the mirror. She could. That, like crosses, I learned was a myth. But even still, she saw no trace of herself in her scribble. Yelena could not see herself the way I saw her, and she certainly couldn’t see the way in which I saw through her. She placed the scribble on her bed, which had been made. She would not be sleeping there tonight. She was too weary.

  She picked up her cell phone and used the touchscreen to press the name at the top of her favorites and was answered with loud music and the chatter of a lively and drunk crowd through the other end of the connection. Hisato, her best friend, was having another one of his after parties. Hisato was thin, not short, but not tall either. He had black Japanese hair cut stylishly and he dressed fashionably. He was an ideal metrosexual. Unlike Yelena, Hisato had a loud voice and liked to use it.

  “Vatican Holiday Inn,” Hisato answered into the phone.

  “It’s me.”

  “Bitch, when are you coming over?”

  “It’s almost sunrise.”

  “Sure, spoil my party. Missed you at the club tonight. They said you already left. What’s up with that?”

  “I met someone.”

  “Did you fuck him yet?”

  “No. He was an asshole.”

  “And your beloved Andre? Did he suddenly become polyamorously liberal?”

  “He left me.”

  There was a pause before Hisato spoke again.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  “Hisato, get off the phone! I wanna fuck you!” a female voice screeched in the background. Hisato ignored her.

  “How are you handling it?” he asked Yelena.

  “I said, get over here and finger me, now!” the guest squealed, but again he ignored her.

  “You still there?”

  “Go back to your party. I was just calling to see if you’d call to wake me.”

  “Of course, sweets. I’m pretty coked up. I’ll be up for days. What time do you want me to wake you up?”

  “Friday.”

  “Today is Friday.”

  “Next Friday.”

  “Bitch, don’t you dare sleep the whole week away. Now’s when you should come out and play since you’re all Energizer Bunny.”

  “Good night,” was all Yelena said. She heard her best friend blow her a kiss before she hung up.

  Yelena went straight for her walk-in closet. Inside, she parted a row of black dresses and pushed on the wall behind it. The wall opened smoothly and silently, revealing a narrow secret passage, in which she stepped inside, turned and slid the dresses back in place and shut the secret door behind them. The walls of the passage were made of dark stone and quickly descended via a tall spiral staircase into a larger chamber below. There were no lights in this room, making navigation difficult, except for those immortally dead like Yelena who didn’t need light for darkness to be illuminated.

  The contracting company that built this passageway and the chamber that existed below the foundation of the house thought it an unusual request, but not unheard of with other wealthy clientele purchasing custom homes. Yelena once told me that the richer you are the more eccentric you’re allowed to be.

  In the center of the room were two coffins, one longer than the other. That had been Marcel’s. His coffin was the only thing she still possessed that had belonged to him. Barefoot on the cold stone floor, she went straight to her coffin, raised the lid, laid herself down within it, and pulled the lid shut over her. Yelena’s added weight was enough to depress a sensor below her coffin, activating a hidden audio system that softly played the recorded sounds of the Malibu ocean shore. The sound technician Yelena had hired to make the recording at dawn assu
med he was producing a relaxation track, but what it really did for Yelena was compel her to cry herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was dark out. Yelena sat in her usual spot on the thyme colored sofa opposite Dr. Sloane who sat in his high backed chair looking at her. Yelena was dressed more casually than she ordinarily was, wearing a black Cinema Strange t-shirt, black leggings, and a pair of black Mary Jane platforms, but as always she wore her diamonds and the necklace with its empty setting.

  A week had passed before she came out of her coffin, fully rested, but inside she still felt a blood starved weariness that Dr. Sloane labeled depression and inquired as to whether Yelena was still taking the four hundred and fifty milligrams of Wellbutrin XL and sixty milligrams of Cymbalta he prescribed her to take daily. She said yes, even though she had skipped both during the week she slept in her coffin. Antidepressants made no difference in her life while she lay in her coffin, but she took it otherwise so her psychiatrist didn’t need to know any better. They talked about me for the first time during that session.

  “It’s like she knew exactly what a bad person I am. She screamed her lungs out at me and ran off.”

  “What did she scream?”

  “‘Please don’t love me,’” Yelena answered.

  “That’s a strange thing to say, let alone scream.”

  “I was stunned. It’s like she saw right through me. She knew right off I was a bad Valentine.”

  “Can you explain what you mean by that?”

  Yelena was referring to killing those she loves, but she didn’t answer Dr. Sloane that way. She changed the subject instead. “Here, what do you think of this?”

  Yelena turned over the scribble from where it lay on the sofa beside her. She leaned forward and handed it to Dr. Sloane who studied it.

  “Not exactly a Rorschach. Not that I put a lot of stock into inkblot tests. What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be me. I feel like I should give it back to her.”

  Dr. Sloane glanced at the scribble once more before returning it to Yelena. “I don’t know if that would be the best idea.”

  “I know. I guess I’ll just keep it. I’ll frame it and hang it. I’ve already titled it ‘Deplorable Yelena.’”

  “You’re placing a lot of power in the hands of a child. How old did you say she was?”

  “I didn’t say. She said she was twelve.”

  “You said she didn’t have a family. Perhaps what she yelled stemmed from a fear of intimacy. Something you would have in common.”

  “She has leukemia.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “That’s fucked up is what it is.”

  “It sounds like you care about this little girl.”

  Yelena thought about that for a moment and then shook her head.

  “No. She said she’s getting better and I’ll never see her again.”

  “How are things going with Andre?”

  “They’re not. We’re over. And I’m fine with it.”

  Dr. Sloane nodded his head. Not long after that, their session time was up. Yelena paid him in cash and left his office and headed to the parking garage.

  *

  Four chocolate covered strawberry magnets affixed the scribble I had done of Yelena to her otherwise vacant steel finished refrigerator door. She had bought the strawberries just for me as she had not yet decided on a frame and where to hang the scribble in her house. Her refrigerator was always stocked for appearance’s sake but even so, it was always filled with tastes Yelena preferred. Berthold was tasked to ensure that. He did the grocery shopping for Yelena weekly, visiting small mom and pop stores, as instructed, and always buying more than would fit in her refrigerator or pantry. The significant excesses of his purchases, upon Yelena’s orders, were donated anonymously to a local soup kitchen on skid row.

  These foods and beverages, with their pleasing tastes, would never satisfy the hunger of a vampire or provide the sustenance necessary to keep one alive, but with their heightened vampiric senses, selected tastes were a delightful pleasure that provided a much needed variance from the slight range of tastes amongst human blood.

  Yelena sat at her kitchen table, in near darkness, staring at the scribble from a distance with a nearly empty glass of red wine that had been poured from a bottle that was a century old and had just been uncorked. Like with her Scotch, Yelena preferred the numbing effect wine created in her brain.

  From elsewhere in her house, Yelena heard a dull thud and then another. She stopped staring at the scribble, got up, still holding her glass of wine, and walked toward her bedroom.

  Strewn across her bed and fully nude were three beautiful women. This was Corinne, Darcy, and Grace. They were her best friend’s lovers and he had made them all immortal. They were all fast asleep, in a postcoital slumber with blood still smeared across their lips. A mass of blood also stained the sheets and the floor leading to the master bathroom.

  The sound again. Yelena walked across the blood-covered floor toward the bathroom naturally as if its damp consistency was the result of a recent mopping.

  Hisato stood over the enormous oblong bathtub wearing a useless and ruined blood soaked apron, holding a cleaver with one hand and with the other he struggled to pry open a black plastic trash bag with the toes of an amputated foot. The tub was littered with limbs, male torsos, and faces with heads of hair that were gelled with blood to their lifeless expressions. Blood ran down the sides of the tub to the floor and mixed with the blood that had been smeared while dragging the bodies up and into the tub in order to make use of its drain. It was quite the mess.

  Hisato turned to her. He even had blood splatters across his usually pristine and perfect Japanese face.

  “Rub a dub dub. Three frat boys in a tub,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do that. You’re guests. Berthold will clean it up.”

  “I like doing it.”

  “Such a sadist.”

  “Such a cunt.” Hisato winked at her. “I’ll let him carry the bags and clean the tub.”

  Yelena was lost in thought, looking at her best friend.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Yelena answered, but in truth she was staring at the apron Hisato had ruined. It was the same apron that had appeared in her house the last night Andre came over to cook dinner for her.

  “I opened some wine. Come sit with me.”

  Hisato dropped the cleaver, removed the apron and put it in the trash bag. “Sorry about the apron. Trust me, you didn’t want it. I don’t think any of those pricks ever heard of colonics.”

  “That’s foul.”

  “But it was full of wit and shit.” Hisato could be gross like that.

  He noticed the apron had not saved his silk shirt from the blood bath. He unbuttoned it and took it off and chucked it in the tub, leaving him shirtless, revealing his delicate frame.

  Back in the kitchen, Yelena resumed her seat and Hisato sat opposite her and poured them both a glass of wine.

  “It’ll be daybreak soon,” she said.

  “Sorry we stayed so late.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “The girls make fishing easy, don’t they?”

  “Who were they?”

  “Fuck if I know. The girls picked them up.”

  “You don’t know anything about them?”

  “If you’re gonna start that guilt trip again, I’ll just go to sleep.”

  “No, don’t,” Yelena said. She hoped Hisato would spill some details about the frat boys that could make her feel guilty for having fed on them and repress the binge she felt coming on. Hisato and his girls fed regularly but, unlike Yelena, they fed evenly.

  “Fucking Greeks at a goth club,” Hisato chuckled.

  Yelena snickered in her head too but she didn’t show it. Instead she took another sip of wine.

  Right then, Corinne entered the kitchen, still fully nude. She was tall and had long brown hair that w
as so dark that in the dimly lit kitchen it appeared black. She walked to the refrigerator.

  “Do you have anything to eat?”

  “Refrigerator,” Yelena answered.

  “I’ve got to get this taste out of my mouth. My guy’s stuff tasted weird.”

  Corinne opened the refrigerator door. “Oooh! Truffles!” she exclaimed and popped one in her mouth. She chewed it slowly, savoring it, her fierce green eyes rolling up into her head. After her moment of bliss had passed, she looked back inside the refrigerator, and from the top shelf she removed a bottle of peppermint infused mineral water, opened it, and drank straight from the bottle, and left it, still quite full, on the kitchen counter. As she shut the refrigerator door, her eyes landed on my scribble.

  “What’s this supposed to be?”

  Hisato didn’t turn to look to see what Corinne was referring to, but Yelena answered.

  “It’s actually supposed to be me.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t see it. You know, I’m telling you, I could live just fine without modern art.”

  That annoyed Yelena. Clearly Corinne wasn’t perceptive enough to notice her current surroundings, as Yelena’s walls were covered in modern and post-modern art. Yelena didn’t have a problem with any of Hisato’s girls, but she didn’t find any one of them to be exceptionally bright, though she didn’t make a remark because she couldn’t see herself in my scribble either.

  “This guy I used to date,” Corinne continued, “used to drag me to all these art shows where it just looked like someone pissed paint on a wall. And everyone just stood there staring at it. Total waste of time.”

  “But how did he taste?” Hisato asked, still not turning, still facing Yelena.

  “Yumsies, of course,” Corinne answered.

  “Cuddlebug, tell me again how it was a waste of time,” Hisato replied.

  “Whatever. Come to bed, lover,” she said before walking out of the kitchen and heading back to the bedroom where Darcy and Grace still slept.

  “She’s right you know,” Hisato said to Yelena. “You do like a lot of crap.”

  “Like you’d know what was good.”

  “Bitch, just because I don’t spend every other night at some stuck up art gallery, doesn’t mean I don’t recognize absolute shit when I see it. They call anything art these days, including that muck on your refrigerator you keep staring over my shoulder to get another look at. I got five bags of frat boy stew in your tub. If I hung a little card next to it that said mixed media, some rich fuck would buy it for his living room.”