Nightmare Ink

by Marcella Burnard

  Daniel walked out.

  Pain rolled through her shivering body. She wasn’t cold. On the contrary. Fine beads of sweat broke on her skin, reeking of fear. Stress response. “Needle nerves” she’d learned to call it during training. What should she call this?

  When he walked back through the door, it might have been hours or days later. She had no means of knowing. Daniel’s gaze locked not upon Isa but upon the tattoo he’d begun. Without a word, without any more regard for her than he might show a wood and linen canvas, he dragged her from the bed by the chains.

  The pressure on her wrists stabbed fiery pain up her arms, surprising a cry from her.

  He didn’t pause. He hauled the chain over her head and looped the links over the hook in the ceiling, leaving her hanging while he cast his circle and readied his tattoo machine.

  Anguish exploded in her shoulders, arms, and throbbing wrists. She bit back a shriek but couldn’t stop the hot tears tracking her cheeks.

  When he set the tattoo machine to her skin, Isa’s magic rose in automatic defense.

  He broke more fingers, then started on the bones in her left hand.

  It became clear. Daniel meant to break her. Mentally. Emotionally. Maybe spiritually.

  Her sense of time slid away in the windowless room. The light never dimmed. Food and water appeared at irregular intervals while she withered.

  It was as if she’d ceased to exist. Maybe she had.

  As the tattoo progressed, the stain of magic Ink spread on her spirit. As Daniel destroyed first her left hand and then her right, her ability to marshal her will bled away. Her stained and brittle skin stretched too tight, straining to contain too much; her and whatever thing Daniel forced into the confines of her skin and bones one prick of the tattoo needles at a time.

  Sometimes, the buzz of the tattoo machine triggered a wave of loss and homesickness so intense she thought she’d drown. When and how had this ocean and rain beleaguered city become home? How had the tiny apartment above her unfashionable tattoo shop found its way into her heart? Or had it? Was it simply that Gus and Ikylla owned her heart and they represented home?

  She missed them. For them, she’d fight to live. She wouldn’t abandon them. Not like that. She prayed that Nathalie and Troy were taking care of them.

  For a few minutes, she imagined she heard them. No. She heard music. And not with her ears. It was a complicated riff on an electric guitar stringing up a glittering, come-hither melody before her otherworldly eyes.

  Nathalie.

  The piercing artist played lead guitar for her band, Rage of the Raptors. Despite any number of invitations, Isa had never heard them play. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might be missing out.

  “She’s out there somewhere,” she heard Troy growl above the guitar strains. He sounded so far away. “You feel it. I feel it. We’ll do what it takes to bring her home.”

  The auditory illusion popped.

  Isa slammed into her physical body and couldn’t recall having left it. Something was different. A sheet covered her skin, and at first she couldn’t compel her brain to catalog what felt so odd. It took effort to command her eyes open.

  She wasn’t chained.

  Pain permeated her as if it were a brine she’d been pickled in. She felt wrinkled and wizened, as if parts of her had shrunken toward her core. Places with newer Ink, and at least one spot she suspected was infected, stretched tight and hot. Some of the hurt came from within, and she couldn’t localize it. Not that it mattered. She recognized the flutter of her pulse in her ears. Her heart flopped like a dying fish.

  She was dying. Blood poisoning? Malnutrition? Dehydration? She didn’t care. She cared only that Ikylla and Gus would never know what had happened. They’d mourn, thinking she’d abandoned them. Acid tears burned her eyes.

  They tipped her into the otherworld. It was the world that lived cozied up to the regular one—the two paired up like socks in a drawer. Touching, entwined, but rarely accessible one to the other, unless you’d purposefully opened the doors and stepped through.

  She’d learned how. She’d had to. In order to control magic, she’d been taught to handle the ceremonial drugs that had initially shown her the path between the worlds. That sorrow opened the door surprised her.

  She stood naked on the desert sand beneath a sky the color of old bones. Her long black hair brushed her back as a breeze stirred sagebrush that cast no shadow in the knife-sharp light and heat. Glistening black scorpions scuttled all around, one across the top of her bare feet. Beneath the bushes, rattlesnakes buzzed.

  Fear wrapped tight around her laboring heart. If she moved, the scorpions would sting. The snakes would strike. She’d die, envenomed. And dying here meant dying in fact.

  A sound like thunder drew her attention southeast. Isa gasped.

  Spider Woman strode toward her on long, articulated legs. Her every step shook the world like the skin of a drum, raising puffs of soil where her feet touched down. The serpents and scorpions parted before her.

  When Ruth had adopted Isa, she’d given her a blanket depicting Spider Woman’s creation of the world. Ruth had woven it with her own hands. It was the first of many gifts Isa had received from her new mother, but she’d always had a fondness for Spider Woman. Maybe because she created reality with everything she wove, or maybe because in that first present given by her new family, Isa had finally thought she’d achieved the acceptance she craved.

  Her heart soared. The sight of the spirit who’d taught the Navajo to weave filled her chest with joy and awe. There wasn’t enough room for breath.

  She had nothing with which to honor her, not a pinch of cornmeal, not a single offering. Nothing. She’d come into the spirit world with nothing to connect her to the physical world.

  So be it.

  If this was dying, she was touched that, at the end of her life, it was her adopted family’s spirit that came for her soul.

  “Daughter.” The word resounded in her head, overpowering.

  Isa dropped to her knees, eyes watering.

  The rattlesnakes and scorpions had fled. On her knees, Isa could see the faint tracks of their passage in the soil, s-lines from the snakes and the line of the scorpions dragging their tails, paralleled by the divots of their footprints on either side.

  “You do not have permission to die,” Spider Woman said in a voice like the end of the world. Or maybe its beginning. “Rise,” Spider Woman went on, her tone softening to the sound of rain in the cornfields.

  She stepped to one side. Beside her, a dull gray path rose from the sand. It looked like concrete, even though it shifted and glimmered. One moment it looked solid. The next it was ghostly and ephemeral. “Your path is before you. Seek freedom. My messenger will greet you.”

  “The scorpions will sting me,” Isa quavered. “And the snakes will bite.”

  “They are your fears, daughter, and they will destroy you if you do not conquer yourself and them. Seek freedom.”

  Freedom. The word echoed in her head. It wasn’t her voice or Spider Woman’s, though the longing embedded in it could have belonged to Isa.

  Her physical eyes snapped open on the cinder block room. She smelled sage, still saw the shadow of Spider Woman.

  Conquer herself and her fears. Could she?

  Trembling, weak, she forced herself to sitting. Her head spun. When the roar of dizziness subsided, she wrapped the sheet around her. Her broken, swollen hands couldn’t tuck in the edges. She could only clench the hem beneath one arm to secure the makeshift dress in place.

  She wavered to her feet. Gasping, sweating, she used the wall as a support. Stabs from the soles of her feet suggested that Daniel had tattooed even those.

  “Door.” Was that Spider Woman’s voice in her ears? Or her own?

  She’d heard it said that the spirits rarely asked thos
e who crossed into their realm to walk an easy path.

  Determination bubbled up within her. She hadn’t called it.

  Freedom. The word whispered through her brain, pleading.

  She forced her feet to carry her three shuffling steps. The wall against her shoulder gave way to cool metal.

  She found a door handle. Bone shifted against bone when she touched her right hand to the lever doorknob. Isa yelped. Panting at the fiery stabs in the hand, she set her forearm to the lever and leaned into it.

  The handle turned. The click of the latch opening resounded in her ears, echoing through her body. It sounded like a trap snapping shut.

  The door swung outward, dumping her into a narrow, white hall. Stumbling, she hit the far wall with one shoulder but kept her feet. The tiny triumph buoyed her.

  For a moment, she stared back through the door into her prison. It flickered. A twisted, alien landscape shimmered with red-tinged heat and malevolent intent. Hell. Or at least it looked so like the Christian description that she was comfortable labeling the vision. Not to mention how well it fit her feelings about that tiny room.

  The vision flickered out. Sagebrush, sand, and the silhouette of Spider Woman urging her to escape emerged.

  She blinked. The sight faded, leaving her with a confused impression of the otherworld superimposed on the prison.

  She wouldn’t accept, couldn’t accept, equating the spirit world with the cage Daniel had put her in so he could reduce her to—what? A compliant slave? An animal?

  Resolute, Isa turned. The hallway stretched away from her: uneven concrete floor, scarred white walls. Bare fluorescent bulbs in metal fixtures hung from a ceiling twice as high as the one in her room. Only every third light glowed.

  She drew a deep breath. Old dust. Oil and chemical smells she couldn’t identify scraped the back of her throat.

  Move. A male voice echoing through her head. Whose?

  She lurched down the hall.

  The hallway fuzzed. A sharp, rapid rattle beside her shot her heart into her throat. Rattler. She froze. The rattlesnake’s preparing-to-strike buzz slowed to a lazier don’t-mess-with-me rhythm.

  A diamondback made no sense. Not here. Was this a fear to be conquered? Or a warning of danger to be heeded?

  “Sometimes,” Isa heard Ruth say from within the confines of her memory, “fears are a handicap. Other times, fears are a warning.”

  “The trick,” she whispered, completing her mother’s thought out loud in the silent building, “is learning to know the difference.”

  Chapter Eight

  Isa sniffed. Beneath the stink of chemicals and oil, she caught a whiff of cold, clear air and the perfume of night. Was that possible? Could she smell a time of day?

  She sidled closer to that shadowed door.

  The rattle intensified.

  “You aren’t real,” she murmured. “You’re the spirit manifestation of my fear. You have no power here.”

  Clenching her fists was an automatic response meant to keep her from retreating. The muscles twitched in response, tightening around broken and partially healed bones. Razors slashed from her hands up, following the path of outraged nerves.

  She wavered, eyes watering.

  “I will not turn aside,” she gasped aloud. “This is my path. You will be happier beneath the sagebrush. Go.”

  A wave of dizziness surged over her. She staggered.

  The rattle spiked to double time.

  Gritting her teeth, she fought to stay upright. In the otherworld, she could destroy the thing. A knife of magic, a surge of golden flame, either would do the job. But killing a rattlesnake was bad luck. She wondered if that only held true in her world or if it was an ill omen in the spirit world as well.

  More to the point, she didn’t want to kill the snake, spirit or no. It was simply being what it was. Few people accepted venomous creatures for what they were. She knew that feeling. She wouldn’t kill it if she didn’t have to.

  On the other side of the door, a crow called. The raucous caw scolded through both worlds, reverberating around her, slamming her back into a dimly lit hallway.

  She still faced a door, though she couldn’t see whether the paint was flaking or the door rusting. Isa no longer heard the buzz of an angry snake.

  Crossing her arms and the sheet over her chest as if she could hold her heart in place that way, she went to the door. From outside, the cackle of a crow reached her. She fell against the door. Terrible desperation fired through her, stretching out her too tight skin and bones. So close.

  Freedom, the other voice whispered from inside her mind.

  She leaned on the lever door handle.

  The door didn’t budge.

  Her knees gave. She slid down the door. Chips and flakes of sharp-edged paint caught in her sheet, pulled her hair, and abraded her skin. The faint flame of hope she’d been nurturing winked out.

  A stygian, unsettling tendril of strength wormed through her muscles and bones. Not hers. She couldn’t say how she knew, but she did.

  Freedom.

  She jerked her head upright and opened her eyes.

  It took a moment to realize she was looking at the bolt keeping the door locked. From this side. A shallow breath rushed out of her. It kindled the ember of hope, which flared until she thought she tasted wood smoke on her tongue.

  Shaking, she reached up and, with one bloody, raw wrist, slid that bolt back. When she snagged her forearm on the handle and pushed, the door swung open.

  Cold, night air washed over her. The chill sliced through muscle straight to bone. She didn’t care. She’d rather freeze to death than live in Daniel’s cage.

  Agreement and a fierce roil of satisfaction made her breath tremble. She wasn’t alone inside her own skin anymore.

  She didn’t have time to contemplate that.

  Neither of them did.

  She bolted through the opening on knees and forearms. The sheet and her snarled hair tangled around her. She emerged into the black of night. A pool of yellow light illuminated a circle outside the door. For a moment, the glow pulled the otherworld out of the background. The buckled and pitted concrete faded into sun-splashed pale sand, spindly sagebrush, and the gray path that looked remarkably like the broken concrete under her knees.

  The flap of wings and a brush of icy wind against her left cheek drew her back into her body.

  A crow landed beside her and clacked its beak. The bird tilted its head back and forth as if studying her.

  “I’m not dead, yet,” she rasped, then had to suppress a hysterical giggle.

  The black bird hopped closer and leaned forward. In a lightning-fast strike, it grabbed a tendril of her hair. It turned and hopped away, pulling.

  “Hey,” Isa tried to say. An anemic grunt issued from her throat.

  It tugged again.

  “Ow!” No sound at all emerged that time.

  Were all crows that strong? Or that big?

  “My messenger will greet you,” Spider Woman had said.

  Not a crow then. Raven. In the city.

  Isa could hear the song of the city now, the constant sigh of traffic rushing past in the distance, the whine of an airplane overhead.

  She was outside, and she had a guide, whether real or imagined.

  She climbed to her feet so Daniel wouldn’t catch her on her knees on the damned doorstep.

  The bird let go and uttered a surprisingly tender caw.

  A breeze stirred, bringing a putrid, cloying odor of rot. Trash? Corpses?

  She disentangled her sheet. The thin fabric was streaked with dark smears of what she suspected was her blood, but it was the only protection she had. She refused to give it up. Ignoring pain, she tucked it under her arms once more.

  As if the effort to stand had broken her eyes on some level, she saw t
wo landscapes vying for her attention. Low, hulking buildings and darkness relieved by city lights bouncing orange off the belly of the low clouds in one; sun on desert and pale, bleached sky in the other.

  She saw the raven in both.

  It chattered, taking wing. It flew to a perch several feet away. It was either a sagging metal chain-link fence or the skeleton of a stunted, dead pinyon, but “follow me” was clear.

  Shivering, Isa lurched across what felt like an endless expanse of rocky concrete. Puddles of icy water numbed her feet until she couldn’t tell what surface she trod.

  When she reached the fence/pinyon skeleton, the raven clacked its beak and launched into the air. It landed on an enormous electrical box/sandstone boulder and urged her to follow with voice and beating wings.

  She lost track of how many times they played follow-the-raven-leader. Isa tripped, landing on the big, sharp-edged stones of a railroad grade, her foot still hooked on one rusty metal rail of the track.

  The pushes of strength from the other inside her skin had evaporated. So Isa crawled, her hair and sheet dragging through foul-smelling puddles.

  The raven hopped in front of her as if afraid to leave her sight. When she paused in a vain attempt to catch her breath, the bird took up a strand of her filthy hair again and pulled.

  Freedom, the male voice sighed into her head.

  Her strength failed, and she folded down to the ground. At least it was dry. Was she lying on sand? Or concrete?

  How far had she gotten?

  Far.

  Why couldn’t she remember?

  The raven shrieked.

  Why? the male voice in her head whispered. Why debilitate you?

  “To break my spirit,” Isa murmured. “To break my will.”

  So I could break you.

  “And break free of me, yes.”

  He intends for me to kill you.

  “Yes.”

  Release me.

  “No.”

  He didn’t break you. He couldn’t.

  “Not like that.”

  Black closed in, smothering them both.

  ***