The Scribbled Victims

by Robert Tomoguchi

  Eventually she released him, after she drained him completely. His lifeless body fell forward, smashing the mirror. She didn’t plan on that and thought of Berthold having to clean it up.

  She rose from the bed and went to the door, but before turning the knob she reflected, wondering how Dianne would react to the news of her husband’s death or, worse, the sight of his dead body. She’d have to face it at any rate and opened the door. As she stepped out into the living room, she saw Hisato sitting on a couch with Dianne beside him, exceedingly pale. She was bloodless. She was dead. Her lifeblood drained by Yelena’s best friend.

  “What have you done?” Yelena asked, shocked.

  “She wouldn’t stop crying. You said she wanted to die. That she popped pills or whatever.”

  “We were here to help her, not kill her.”

  “Sweets, maybe that’s why you were here, but not me. What do you think you are? Some kind of vigilante superhero now? We’re killers, Yelena. This is what we do. I don’t care how old you are, you’re the one not playing by the rules.”

  Yelena sighed and looked down at her boots.

  “I can get Patrick to clean them up if it’ll make you feel better,” Hisato said.

  “You do that. Berthold is busy.”

  *

  Late that night, Yelena instructed Berthold to contact my social worker, which he did in the morning, setting up an appointment for Sigrid and Yelena to meet. In the evening, after Yelena awoke, Berthold was given instructions to refurnish what was to become my bedroom. As her lawyer, his work was never-ending.

  Berthold nodded to her instructions, assuring Yelena he would have the new furnishings within a few days. He bade Yelena good night and began to leave, but Yelena knew he wasn’t finished. And, true to her thoughts, before Berthold reached the front door, he turned to her anxiously and asked, “Do you really think fostering her is a good idea?”

  Yelena didn’t respond, and Berthold was used to that. He knew she never had to answer to him. But Berthold was a quick thinker and as he left, thoughts raced through his mind. He wasn’t sure how that would work—a vampire fostering a child—but the thought of it certainly stung him and he became concerned with losing Yelena’s favor to a child, and remaining mortal for the rest of his years.

  *

  Yelena came to visit me again the following night to tell me the meeting was set with my social worker. She checked the cafeteria first as that was easier and on the way, but when I wasn’t there, she took the elevator up to the fourth floor and walked by the nurses’ station unnoticed. When she arrived, she didn’t find me. Instead, she found my room occupied by an adolescent who was fast asleep. All of my things, including the gifts she had given me, were gone.

  A sharp pain pierced her heart and, despite her strength after having recently fed on the wife beater, she had to support herself by leaning her back against the wall out in the hallway. When she finally gathered herself together, she left my room and approached the nurses’ station, but she still didn’t allow herself to be seen. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone, not even Hisato. She should have called Berthold but Yelena was so accustomed to anguish that she often held on to it, and so she didn’t think of alleviating her pain by asking her lawyer to confirm the truth. The pain she felt shared qualities with the pain of her heartbreak when Marcel left her, and now she gripped it tightly. Her broken heart erroneously told her I had died.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Yelena left the hospital and drove home. Even though she had a couple of hours before dawn, she stepped through her closet, descended the staircase down to her private chamber and closed herself in her coffin. Lying within it, she wondered if she had made my life better in any way by agreeing to foster me before I died. But this thought was short-lived as she soon chastised herself for not uttering the word adopt instead of foster. Why hadn’t she offered to adopt? That would have shown real commitment. That would have shown permanent love. The prospect of motherhood had presented itself to her so quickly that she hadn’t had time enough to embrace it and conceptualize us in terms of cemented permanence. But now that I was gone, that was different. She was different. She mourned me.

  The night Yelena finally crawled out of her coffin, she went upstairs and found Berthold waiting for her. He had come to inform her that my new bedroom had been completed. Not only was it newly furnished, as she requested, but it was also newly painted and carpeted. He expected her to be satisfied, but she didn’t even acknowledge his efforts, as if she hadn’t heard him. To him she appeared distant and dour.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked her.

  “I believe she may have died,” Yelena said. “I need you to find out.”

  “Her social worker didn’t call.”

  “I wasn’t her mother yet so maybe she wouldn’t have called.”

  “Unlikely—you have your meeting with her tomorrow.”

  When Yelena was hurting, she was often single-minded. In this instance she gave no thought to tomorrow and no thought that she was scheduled to see Sigrid during the daytime. Tomorrow wasn’t only presently out of reach but also presently beyond comprehension. She looked at her feet and whispered, “I need to know what they did with her body and if she was in pain.”

  Berthold went to her and placed his hands on her upper arms and squeezed them gently. It was rare he ever touched her, but he felt for her, and she allowed it and put her head to his chest. He kissed the top of her head. He felt a dampness on his shirt. Her tears. He pushed back on her slightly so he could look into her eyes. “I’m sure everything is fine. We would have heard, Yelena. We would have heard.”

  Yelena nodded her head and he released her. He looked down at his shirt; it was stained red with the blood of her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Berthold shook his head and very slightly, with his finger, wiped a lingering tear of blood from her right eye. He brought it to his lips.

  “Don’t do that,” Yelena said.

  Disappointed, Berthold wiped the tear on his sleeve instead. “Don’t stay here tonight,” he said. “You should feed. You’ll need your strength tomorrow.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I need to fix myself.”

  *

  Yelena went out alone that night in search of the smack dealer. He wasn’t difficult to find as the back of his scribble gave the address of the run-down apartment he dealt out of, his true name—Kelsey Stratton, his street name—Christian Cain, and a physical description—tall, tanned, a chipped front tooth, and dark hair. At the time I drew him, he knew of eleven junkies who had died from overdoses on his product.

  She passed a junkie nodding off in the hall who must not have been able to wait to leave the building before shooting up. She came to Christian’s door and knocked. There was no answer. She knocked again.

  “Who is it?” a gruff voice asked from within.

  “Chelsea,” Yelena said.

  “Fuck off.”

  Yelena didn’t fuck off. She knocked again and was unanswered.

  “I’ll knock until dawn,” she said, but there was still no answer, so she kept knocking without pause, until the man inside, presumably Christian, got so frustrated he opened the door. It was chain locked so it only opened a few inches. Yelena looked into his face. She believed he wasn’t expecting someone so well dressed.

  “What’d you want?” he asked. She saw his chipped tooth.

  “I need to score.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Yelena reached into her purse and pulled out a bundled stack of hundred dollar bills. “It’s your loss, then.”

  The door shut in her face, but Yelena waited as she heard the chain lock slide and the door reopened. “Come in,” he said, and stepped aside for her. Yelena stepped into the apartment. It was dark inside. The lights were soft and limited. The furniture was grimy. She wouldn’t want to sit on any of it. There wasn’t anyone else in the apartment. Yelena continued to step forward and heard the fr
ont door close behind her and the chain lock go back in place. When she was in the middle of the room, she turned around to face Christian, and saw that he had a nine-millimeter handgun pointed at her.

  “Drop the money on the table,” he said.

  “You get the money when you give me my shit.”

  “You think I’m fucking with you? I don’t know you. Drop the money on the motherfucking table.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  He raised the gun to the level of her face and pulled the hammer back.

  “I know you won’t shoot, because you never have. But if you want to make a deal, I’ll buy everything you’re holding.”

  “Crazy bitch,” he said, still pointing the gun at her face.

  She just stared him down. “Think long-term, Christian. There’s always more money over time.”

  He still didn’t lower his gun. She knew what he was thinking. In a firm voice that was said to convince him, she said, “I’m not the police,” and in that moment she made him have to believe her and he lowered his gun.

  “I only got an eighth of a kilo right now. But I can get three more keys by Friday.”

  “I’ll give you twelve for the eighth. If it’s good, I’ll come back for another key.”

  “Fifteen.”

  Yelena held the bundle of hundreds out to Christian. “That’s ten.” He uncocked the gun and slipped the gun into his waistband, down the front of his pants, and took the money. Yelena reached into her purse and pulled out another bundle and grabbed from it what appeared to be half. She handed it to him. “That’s five more or less. Your turn.”

  Christian took the money and walked into the bedroom and shut the door. She knew he was counting the money. A couple minutes later, he reappeared without the money, but holding a bag of white powder. He held it out to Yelena. She reached for it, but he withdrew it.

  “I want you to shoot it here.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Cuz I don’t know you.”

  “I didn’t bring a rig, and I don’t share needles.”

  Christian reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a perforated sheet of brand new syringes that were still sealed.

  Yelena motioned to the furniture. “I’m not going to nod off here on this junkie-crusted shit. Don’t be offended. I know you don’t live here.” She knew from the scribble he lived in a much nicer neighborhood.

  He pulled his gun from his waistband. “I knew you were a cop.” Yelena’s mind tricks weren’t permanent.

  “We’re gonna play this game again?”

  “Get on your knees.”

  This tested Yelena’s patience. She was weary of the conversation. Seemingly without any effort at all, she moved with a speed that made her movements indiscernible and took the gun away from him and tossed it on a ratty easy chair. It occurred so quickly that Christian wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it also appeared he didn’t care. He was under her charm again.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “You’re going to put the heroin and the needles in your pocket and you’re going to follow me out of here to my car.”

  “Where are we going?” Christian asked, again without the slightest resistance in his voice.

  “We’re going to party at my place.”

  *

  Yelena lay on her bed in her loose-fitting black silk robe that came down to just above her knees. Her inhuman hearing told her her phone was vibrating inside her purse on the kitchen counter. With her head on the pillow, she ignored it and stared at the ceiling while Christian sat at the edge of the bed wearing nothing at all and cooking the heroin over a candle on the nightstand in a deep spoon that looked like a miniature measuring cup. She had just allowed him to fuck her and now he trusted her completely without her needing to determine his thoughts for him.

  “You’re a really cool chick,” he said over his shoulder.

  Yelena didn’t answer.

  “What’re you thinking about?”

  “A girl I knew.”

  “She a junkie?

  “No. She had leukemia.”

  “She dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry.”

  Her phone vibrated in the kitchen again.

  “Anyone ever die from shooting your shit?”

  “Hell no.”

  The rig was ready. Yelena used her teeth to pull the tourniquet tight on her upper arm and made a fist over and over again until her vein swelled. Christian was too busy staring at her perfect skin and didn’t notice her fangs.

  “You have clean arms,” he said and pushed the needle in.

  Yelena watched her blood register inside the syringe and swirl with the heroin. She thought about how much more potent her few red drops were than all the junk he pumped back into her vein. She released her bite on the tourniquet and pulled it off. She felt the effects of the heroin quickly but the full dose was not enough to make her lose consciousness. Christian pulled the needle out of her arm and though Yelena knew it was unlikely that any of her blood was still in it, she grabbed his wrist with her left hand and pulled the syringe away from him with her right. With her thumb and forefinger, she snapped the needle.

  Christian was surprised she was so active and quick. “What did you do that for?”

  “I told you, I don’t share needles.”

  “I don’t either,” he said, and he reached over on the nightstand and opened a new needle and began cooking again. He shot up and then lay back on the bed beside Yelena and began to nod off.

  They lay there for some time. Christian under the spell of the heroin he dealt and Yelena in a numbed agony thinking of my body lying dead in an ugly generic casket, being slid into the flames inside a crematorium. Over ninety minutes passed, Yelena watching the flames the whole time as they reduced my body and casket to ash. Yelena felt a drop of blood slip from her right eye and she wiped it away.

  Yelena sat up and slipped out of the bed and walked to the other side where Christian was lying. She pulled the needle out of his arm and placed it on the nightstand. She opened the stash and poured out into the measuring spoon more than three times the dose they had each taken, injected the water, and held the spoon over the candle.

  Christian opened his eyes slowly. “What are you doing?” he mumbled.

  “Just playing housewife, hun.”

  She stuck the needle into the piece of cotton at the bottom of the spoon and pulled the plunger, sucking up the dose into the syringe. Christian didn’t physically struggle when she put the needle to his neck, but Yelena presumed it was more that he was struggling inside himself to figure out what was going on. Yelena stabbed the needle below his skin into his artery and pressed the plunger. The effects were nearly immediate. The dose was too high. He was dying.

  Yelena crawled on the bed and straddled him and bit into his neck quickly before he could die. She drank, first feeling the increased strength she received from his human blood, and then second she felt a flood of anesthesia from his heroin overdose. Christian died but an autopsy would be needed to determine the cause. Yelena released his throat from her bite and rolled back to her side of the bed, this time lying on her stomach in the glow of the moonlight that poured through the open windows, and like that, under the heroin-induced haze, she tried to forget me.

  Promptly, as the grandfather clock in the living room chimed that it was three o’clock, the black window shades began to lower in anticipation of the morning. They were nearly silent in their descent, but Yelena opened her eyes sleepily and watched them fall. With the shades closed she could lay still in her bed, beside Christian’s corpse, until the following evening. The efficacy of her slumber would be less than it would be if she lay in her coffin, but she didn’t mind. It would make the effects of the heroin last longer. She closed her eyes again.

  The grandfather clock had already sounded the passing of the half hour, but had not yet reached the three-quarter hour when Yelena heard the front door open. She heard footsteps wandering throu
gh her house. She knew it was Berthold and kept her eyes closed. He entered and surveyed the bedroom, and from the candle, which was still burning, the discarded needles, bag of powder, and corpse lying beside Yelena, he quickly deduced the situation. He ignored Christian for the time being and went to the far side of the bed and went to his knees, putting his face close to Yelena’s.

  Berthold tapped her lightly on the cheek. She opened her eyes. She was awake, but the way her eyes were glazed told him that she wished to remain inattentive.

  “She’s alive,” he whispered.

  Yelena’s eyes blinked but she didn’t speak.

  “Orly. She’s alive. She’s in the ICU. Infection, but she’s recovering.”

  It was true. I hadn’t died anywhere other than within Yelena’s heart. The night before Yelena came to visit, I developed some kind of sepsis, which gave me a high fever, and I was brought to the ICU. I was put on a lot of antibiotics for the fever, which was terrible as antibiotics make me feel sick, just in a different way.