The Scribbled Victims

by Robert Tomoguchi

  “I don’t want to talk about Marcel any longer.”

  “Okay. We don’t have to. What would you like to talk about?”

  “I guess I’ve been thinking about that little girl. The one from the hospital. Do you remember?”

  “I remember. What have you been thinking?”

  “How frightened she must be. She’s all alone in the world and stuck in that hospital and I think she really knows she’s not going to live.”

  “What makes you think she won’t? The recovery rate for leukemia isn’t as it was twenty years ago. Her chances are likely good.”

  Yelena shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t explain openly to her therapist that she could smell my blood eating my life away that night we spent together in the cafeteria.

  “There are other kinds of love than the kind I dwell so much on. Love for a lover is not the same as love for a friend, love for a parent, or love for a child, right?”

  “I would agree with that.”

  “Do you also agree that, in general, people need love?”

  “Yes. I believe it is an important element in leading a fulfilled life. Why are you—“

  Yelena cut him short. “The need to love or need to be loved?”

  “Both are important.”

  “But can one kind of love replace the need for another kind?”

  “That’s a good question. What do you believe?”

  Yelena sighed. It was typical answer for a therapist to give, but she answered the question to her question anyway. “I doubt it. Maybe it would for a while, but never permanently.”

  Dr. Sloane nodded his head in assent but it wasn’t clear to Yelena if he agreed. “Whom are we talking about here?” he asked. “The girl?”

  “I think I could love her if I tried.”

  *

  It was really late. I felt weakened from the chemo that day, so I didn’t sneak down to the cafeteria that night. I stayed in bed and tried to sleep. My room was decorated for Christmas. Paper reindeer, linked together, were taped to my room’s door. There wasn’t enough room for Santa Claus on the door, so they weren’t pulling a sleigh of gifts or anything. I did have a stocking hanging from the table beside my bed where they keep my personal belongings, which are usually just pads of paper and black crayons. The stocking had my name written on the top white fuzzy part in glittery green puffy paint. Inside there was a miniature teddy bear, a candy cane and lots of chocolate Hershey’s Kisses, the kind that are in red and green foil, just for Christmas, in addition to the usual silver ones.

  Even though I was facing the window, staring out at the lit rooms of the east wing of the hospital, I could tell someone was standing in my doorway. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a nurse, because they always just walk in to check vital signs and stuff like that. I didn’t have family, not even fosters anymore, and it was nighttime, so I suspected it was Yelena.

  She stood in the doorway carrying a large wrapped Christmas present. She was disappointed I was pretending to be asleep. Still not stepping inside my room, because she didn’t want to invade my space in the tomb I was destined to die in, she set the present on the floor and pushed it into my room with her left foot.

  “Merry Christmas, little one,” she said and then turned to leave.

  “You…” I stopped. I coughed to clear my throat. “You don’t have to go,” I said. “I’m not really sleeping.”

  Yelena turned back around as I struggled to sit up in bed.

  “But you already knew I wasn’t really sleeping, didn’t you?” I asked. Maybe I kind of accused her.

  “Yes. I knew. But I thought maybe you just didn’t want to talk.”

  “Why would you visit someone you know is scared shitless of you?”

  Yelena still stood in the doorway. “I’m sorry. I guess I hoped that maybe after some time…”

  “You’re right. I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Uh-uh. You’re the one who bought all the stuff in the gallery, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “That you’ve never drank blood from a little kid. Or have you?”

  “No, I haven’t. I wouldn’t.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “So you know what I am then.”

  “Yeah, you’re a vampire. That’s why you can’t visit during visiting hours. How did you get past the nurses?”

  “It’s in the way you look back at them. They no longer register you’re there.”

  “You can come in. I give you permission or whatever,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she replied, and Yelena took her first step into room 442, but even though there was a chair meant for visitors, Yelena didn’t take a seat.

  “It was nice of you to make all the dead kids happy. One of them lives on my hall. She was super excited. She has cancer too.”

  Yelena just nodded her head slightly. For a lot of people there isn’t much to say when you tell them about someone they don’t know having cancer.

  “So can I open my Christmas present now?”

  Yelena lifted the gift box onto my bed and rested it on my legs, which were under the blankets. The box was pretty big, heavy, wrapped in shiny silver wrapping paper, and had a big, fancy, dark blue bow tied around it. I untied the bow, and then stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” Yelena asked.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “The hospital gives us stockings on Christmas. That’s pretty cool of them, but like I never have anything I actually get to unwrap, so I love this one already.”

  That was the first time I ever saw Yelena smile, if you could call it a smile. Her lips moved up, but her teeth didn’t show. Even though I had a gift to open, I still wasn’t feeling too great and had to take a couple of deep breaths before opening it. I finished removing the bow, ripped off the wrapping paper, and lifted the lid off of the box. Inside was a portable drawing easel, a folio large enough to hold my scribbles so they wouldn’t get wrinkled, and sheets of professional drawing paper and crayons in a bunch of different colors, all far better than the stuff I’d gotten used to using.

  “Thank you,” I told her.

  “I didn’t know what else interested you.”

  “It’s perfect. I never gotten a present like this. Thank you, Yelena.”

  “You’re welcome, Orly.”

  “Will you stay here with me for a while?”

  She paused. “It’ll be dawn soon.”

  “It won’t take that long.

  “What won’t?”

  “I want you to be the first person I draw,” I said.

  I half-thought she would drop her smile when I decided to say that, but she didn’t. “You can sit down,” I said.

  Yelena sat in the unused visitor chair and I started to rip open one of the big pads of paper and the box of crayons.

  “And you said I don’t have to stay still, right?” Yelena asked.

  “Nope. Makes no difference at all.” Of all the colors, I grabbed the one black crayon.

  “Do you only draw in black?” Yelena asked.

  “The scribbles don’t work in colors. I’ve tried.”

  “I’m sorry. I wondered about that since all the drawings in the Clover Gallery were black.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can give the color ones to Margaret, if you don’t mind. She’s the girl on my hall with cancer I was telling you about.”

  Yelena sat there staring at me as I stared at her and then my pad and then back at her, scribbling her in black onto the gifted sheet of paper.

  “Are you going to rip all their heads off?” I asked her shortly after I had begun.

  “You know about that?

  “Yup. I see it in this scribble.”

  “That’s quite a gift you have, Orly. Does it upset you that he’s dead?”

  “I want it to bug
me since it’s supposed to and stuff, but it doesn’t feel like it does. I didn’t know him, just the bad stuff he did to people, and I don’t think any of that bad stuff bothered him one bit.”

  “Why do you feel it’s supposed to bother you?”

  “Because he’s dead. I think you’re always supposed to feel bad for dead people. Won’t people feel bad when I die?”

  “Your death will be viewed differently than his.”

  “I didn’t see anything about it in the news,” I said, and then told Yelena about how people leave newspapers around the cafeteria and that I look at them when there’s nobody around to draw.

  “I have someone who cleans things up for me,” she answered. That made sense.

  I drew some more and then stopped, put the crayon down, and looked at her.

  “You’re done already?” Yelena asked.

  “You’re hiding something in your purse.”

  “You see everything.”

  “Uh-uh. I don’t. What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s just something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “It’s bad, if I can see it in the scribble.”

  Yelena opened her purse and pulled out a business card. She handed it to me and I looked at it. Sigrid Paz, Licensed Clinical Social Worker. My social worker.

  “How did you get this?”

  “My lawyer procured it.”

  “She’s really nice. Did you talk to her?”

  “No.”

  I looked at the card again and then looked up at Yelena. I understood.

  “You want to be my foster parent?”

  “Is that something you think is bad?”

  “No. It must be, but I don’t.”

  “Where will you go after you finish your last round of chemo?”

  “Back to the youth home.” I didn’t actually think that was true though. Even then I didn’t expect to ever leave the hospital again.

  “What if you could come with me and live at my house? I’ve never been a foster parent before, but I’m willing to give it a try if you are. It could be nice. I’d get you all new clothes. You’d have your own bedroom with lots of pretty things. It would be a whole new life.”

  “I see it now,” I said, looking at the sheet of paper before me.

  “What do you see?”

  “The evil in your scribble. You want me to draw for you, don’t you?”

  Yelena paused and then asked, “Is that something you’d be willing to do?”

  “I don’t know. What would that make my own scribble look like?”

  “It would only be bad people.”

  I paused, I believe for a long time. “I have to think about it,” I finally said.

  “I understand. Think about it. My phone number is inside the Christmas card you didn’t look at.”

  “Sorry. Cards matter more to grownups. When kids open them, they’re just being polite.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “The sick kid’s exhibit thing closes in a little bit. You’ll get three more then.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kill Simon first.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “The one I called Con Man.”

  “Why him, especially when there’s a serial killer hanging on the wall above him?”

  “His specialty is conning old people.”

  “Old as in the elderly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This bothers you a lot?”

  “Of everyone, old people are usually the nicest to me.”

  “Okay. He’s next then.”

  I wanted to say thank you, but it didn’t seem right since I was talking about killing someone, so I didn’t say anything.

  “And you’ll think about what we discussed, right?”

  I nodded my head and Yelena rose from the chair.

  “Wait. I didn’t finish drawing you yet.”

  Yelena sat back down. I picked the crayon back up and continued scribbling her. Again, she stared at me and I stared at her. When I was finally finished, I dropped the crayon and showed her the scribble.

  “It looks different from the first one you did of me,” Yelena said.

  “You’ve done things since I drew you the first time. Like ripping Donald’s head off.”

  There was a moment of silence then, until I finally broke it. “It’s almost going to be morning,” I said.

  Yelena nodded and stood again. “Merry Christmas, Orly,” she said and started to leave. Right when she was in the doorway, I asked her to wait. There was something else I wanted to ask her. She stood there looking at me.

  “Would you still want to be my foster mom if I didn’t draw for you?”

  “I guess we both have things to think about,” she said, and left.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I hoped and expected Yelena would visit me on New Year’s Eve, so I stayed up until dawn, but never saw her, and so I spent the end of the year feeling lonely and forgotten.

  Yelena attended a party that night with Hisato and his girls. They danced and drank, and then fed just after midnight. Hisato preyed on a drunken couple and Yelena fed off the man after Hisato had sunk his teeth into him, draining him partially, before releasing him into the arms of his best friend.

  “Goodbye, 2016,” Yelena said before sinking her own teeth into him, drinking him dry, and reviving her strength. Yelena departed without her friends seeing her go. Her powers made her difficult to trace, even to the other vampires, who were, as you already know, younger and from a weaker bloodline. Hisato was disappointed when he realized she was gone, but he had grown accustomed to her vanishings over the seven decades in which he knew her.

  Yelena went home to nurse her guilt. The drunks they killed seemed like a nice couple. Although she knew that the man she fed off of would have died anyway in the hands of her best friend, killing him and watching his wife, or whoever she was, being bled to death by Hisato’s girlfriends made her feel wretched inside. As she slipped into her coffin, she decided she would not come out again until she could get the rest of my scribbles from the gallery, which meant she would lie still for four more nights.

  It turned out Doreen was wrong. The gallery didn’t reopen to the public until January third, but Yelena could have come by a night earlier, when the regular staff was back at work. In fact, the gallery owner told her they hoped to see her earlier as they needed to make room for the new exhibit.

  “We tried phoning, but there was no answer,” he said when Yelena came that evening to pick up the artwork that had filled the gallery in the old year. New art, all lowbrow, but stimulating nonetheless, already hung on the walls, replacing the art of all the dead kids, as I had called us. Our art was boxed up in the back storeroom, but not as carefully and neatly as they would have been for the pieces that were now on sale for much more than thirty-five dollars apiece.

  As she and the gallery owner made multiple trips to Yelena’s car, carrying the boxes of artwork, Yelena wondered which box contained my scribbles. She was only interested in the scribbles. She hadn’t yet decided where to put the rest of the pieces. She would probably leave them in the boxes and place them in a corner of one of her two garages, for even though she knew none were good enough to display alongside her collection, she also knew she would feel guilty if she disposed of them, since their creators were all dying as children.

  Yelena unloaded the boxes in the garage and began to open them. She found my scribbles in the fifth box she opened and left the remaining boxes untouched. She brought the three scribbles into the house and placed them neatly on her dining room table. She stared at them for a long moment, again trying and failing to see what I could see in them. The scribbles were all very different but Yelena did not have their designs or patterns memorized to remember which order they hung on the gallery wall, so she did not know who was who. She turned one over to read the back. It was the smack dealer. She r
ead everything and turned it back over and placed it back where it had been on the table, scribble-side up, like she was playing a game of memory.

  She turned another over and saw that it was the serial killer. So her next victim was the last one to be overturned. She took her time though, reading the description of the serial killer—he had killed men and women, sometimes couples. But one thing in particular that caught Yelena’s attention was that after he tortured his victims with small cuts and small puncture wounds, he would saw their heads off with a handheld ripsaw while they were still conscious. Their terror from this rudimentary method especially thrilled him. But this was of utmost importance to Yelena because she knew she could not allow him to act out on her as she had allowed Donald to, for she would be putting her own life in jeopardy. Besides the sunlight, Yelena told me there were two other known ways to kill a vampire and one of those was beheading. The belief was that the body could not repair itself with the head severed from the body if the body was too dead to pick up the head and replace it. She didn’t know what would happen if someone replaced the severed head on behalf of the vampire or how much time one would have to do so. The other method was a stake driven through the heart. But even the certainty of that wasn’t clear. For there was a belief, that was more like a legend, which said that the stake through the heart would have to be delivered during the daylight hours while the vampire slept, and because of that legend, it was also uncertain what would happen if a vampire received a stake in the heart at night. Would it heal on its own or would the vampire die? There were no written records of any vampire living after receiving a stake in the heart, day or night, just like there was no written record of any vampire having his head replaced on his shoulders. Yelena finished reading the back of the scribble and placed it back on the table, again scribble-side up.

  She picked up the third scribble. Simon’s name was written on the back of it. “Darling, your conning days are over,” Yelena thought as she read all about him before placing the scribble back on the table, text-side up, and then left the kitchen and headed to her bathroom to brush her teeth.

  *

  Simon Frazee lived in West LA, which was leagues closer than Donald had been and gave Hisato no reason to complain as he weaved his Porsche Cayenne through the Los Angeles traffic with his best friend sitting beside him. He was hoping to get this over with quickly, as he preferred to select his victims from across the packed room of a nightclub, where the delicacies were endless, unlike how it would be within a bachelor’s condominium off Santa Monica Boulevard.