Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

  Mr. Talag was suddenly beside her. He bent as if to kiss her, but she drew back weakly with a despairing moan.

  “I simply wish to give you a gift in return for the gift you’ve given me,” he explained.

  “I don’t want it!”

  “You may regret refusing it.”

  “Please, no…”

  “I won’t force you.” Ignoring her now, he shrugged out of his robe and stepped up to the mirror as if to kiss the face she had sketched there. His body was as white and perfect as a Greek statue. Wisps of fog began to fill the outline of her sketch upon the glass. Fay tried to move, to get away, but her limbs were heavy as stone.

  The fog thickened, seemed almost to harden. It spilled down from the neck where she had stopped drawing, overspilling the lines like milky blood, then coalescing into the shape of a man. The body was blurry and unfocused, but the features of that face were preternaturally sharp. It was not Mr. Talag’s portrait but instead his reflection that was captured there. Or even more than that somehow, for it seemed realer to her than his own face did. She saw that he was weeping again. Pink tears furrowed his cheeks. He leaned forward with a strange, choking cry that did not seem a perfect imitation of anything.

  There was an explosion of light as his lips touched the glass. Then only darkness.

  When Fay awoke, she got to her feet and staggered to the mirror, afraid of what she wouldn’t see. But there she was, her features superimposed on the sketch of Mr. Talag. It took her a moment to realize that the sketch was no longer a bare outline; the image of Mr. Talag filled it now, like a photograph. She touched it with trembling fingers, disbelieving her eyes. Her reflection gave back a twitchy smile over his pale face, the mouth open in an endless scream, whether of pain or triumph she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Pausing only to gather her drawing materials, Fay fled the house.

  Outside, it was daylight. Fay wished she had some shades, but it wasn’t long before the brightness stopped hurting and she felt more like herself again. When she got home, she slept until the next morning. Then, still exhausted, she dragged herself to a life-drawing class at the Art Students League.

  The charcoal felt clumsy in her hand. Try as she might, she couldn’t get the figures to come out right. It was as if the lines of communication from her eyes to her hand had been severed. Each flat and lifeless line she drew was like a razor drawn across her soul. Yet she couldn’t stop. The other students noticed that something was wrong, and put their own sketches aside to watch. Finally, the instructor asked if she was all right.

  Fay had forgotten where she was. Shaking her head, she stuffed her materials into her bag and ran from the room. On the street she hailed a cab and gave Mr. Talag’s address, drawn not by hope but by its utter absence.

  The townhouse was boarded up, as though no one had lived there for years. No one answered as Fay pounded and kicked at the door. After a while, she turned away. Cedar Street was busy and colorful, with trucks loading and unloading at the warehouses and noisy crowds of buyers jostling each other. She felt like she hadn’t seen it, really seen it, until now. There was an instant when the light fell in a certain way, and she reached for her bag, thinking automatically of how she would sketch it. But, again, her hand would not obey. She saw the finished drawing in her mind but could no longer understand how to translate it to paper. Weeping, Fay sank onto the steps.

  No one gave her a second look. In New York, every block has its weeping women. Finally, though, a boy crept up beside her and, with the delicacy and daring of an artist, snatched her bag and vanished into the crowd.

  FLIES IN THE INK

  By Megan Lee Beals

  Henry Nevins drained the bottle of whisky into his burning throat and slammed the empty vessel down onto the table with more force than his feelings should have allowed. In the weeks since his daughter never arrived in Virginia he’d used up all the sorrow he had for this life, and Detective Palmer’s news that the search had to be given up for more pressing matters hardly affected him. The kerosene lamp shuddered and he watched it closely through dirty glasses, daring it to fall and light him and the whole damn tattoo shop like a bonfire, but the flame settled before the oil could earnestly slosh. He blew over the top of it, grinning madly at the idea that the fumes of his breath could light those lacey white curtains on fire. They were the last touch remaining of his wife in the dim tattooist parlor, a scant bit of elegance rarely found among the rough Westernly types that sauntered bowlegged into the shop and asked for cowgirls on their forearms or rattlesnakes wrapped around their biceps. These young men knew as much of the Old West as Henry; their daddies worked the shipyard or the rails. A few that came in from the outskirts were loggers. All of them Tacoma boys, Northwesterners, but The War made all of them patriots, and ain’t nobody going to mistake a rattlesnake for a Limey’s mark. Let no one forget it was the doughboys had to pull those European asses out of the fire.

  He scoffed at the little soldier boy he imagined in the appropriated barber’s chair across the parlor. He couldn’t care for wars. Not since his daughter vanished from a train and no one would do him the decency of telling him how she died. Stories of the Railway Skinner ranked near as high on the front page of The Tribune as the invasion of Belgium, but the moniker was noticeably absent from all of Detective Palmer’s reports. So Henry tatted up the soldier boys and sent them off to fight a world away, and drank away the evenings until he could sleep again. Tonight’s bottle was empty. Sleep would come soon. But his waiting was interrupted by frantic fists pounding on the door.

  The shop had been closed for hours. It was far too dark for company, and he was too far in the cellar. But the fists kept pounding and a small girlish voice whimpered, “Please, sir, please let me in!”

  Henry’s feet found the ground. He drifted toward the door mumbling, “By the hairs of his chinny chin” and fumbled with the latch until the door opened as far as the chain would allow. His girl was there, holding a carpet bag. His little girl Jane with her straw-blond hair, and she was crying.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you, sir, but I saw a light on and my husband was meant to meet me at the train station and it’s so cold outside and I don’t know where to go…”

  No, this wasn’t Janey. Damned whisky had clouded his eyes again. This girl’s eyes were too wide and her teeth were long. She was still talking. Henry shook his head to clear the fumes.

  “Please, mister! I just need a place to wait until the tram comes by. It’s so cold outside. I won’t keep you long.” She smiled, pleading, and Henry stared again at those teeth. Teeth shouldn’t be that sharp. He peered around the door to get a closer squint-eyed view. The girl wasn’t wearing any shoes. No shoes! What kind of girl takes a train without shoes? The liquor took hold of his heart and he damn near cried looking at her poor little frozen feet. He was not so lost a lamb that he couldn’t see a girl in need. Henry nodded yes, yes and took the chain off the door and opened his heart to her. She stood there, toes touching the threshold.

  “I can come in?” she asked at the wide-flung door.

  “Yeah, you can come in. Come in. You need some socks, girl,” said Henry.

  She bull-rushed past him and ran for the other end of his parlor, far from the door and the outside.

  He closed the door and held up a hand. “You wait here, girl. I got extra socks in the back. No shoes that’ll fit you.” The shoes were in his daughter’s room under the stairs, all of it untouched since she left on the train. When he got news of her disappearance, he closed the door, denied anyone access, and kept it shrined to her.

  The girl cocked her head like a small dog and watched him stumble out of the room. Her snarling face was frozen, confused, and slowly her curled lip lowered over the fangs as she listened to him creak up the stairs into the kitchen. She was hungry, she was always hungry, but the man was a curiosity. The whole place smelled heavy and sharp with liquor. She sat in the large leather barber’s chair and waited for her meal to walk back in the
room. This prey was too drunk to fight, and just this once, her curiosity could stand to win against her stomach. She wrinkled her nose. There were different smells under the whisky: chemicals, iodine, and soap. She breathed in deeply just as Henry walked back into the room. Under all the smells, she found dried blood.

  “What is this place?” she asked harshly, the girlish lilt gone from her voice.

  “Tattoo shop,” said Henry from around an unlit cigarette. “Here, girly. They’ll be big, but they’re clean and warm.” He pressed a pair of good wool socks into her hands. “What’s your name?”

  “Betty,” she said. The name was two years old. She had acquired it shortly after peeling herself out of a putrid black pool of violent death to find herself surrounded by the pieces of an older man and woman with torn out throats. Her first memory was the feel of her cold hand over her own smooth neck and the noticeable lack of a pulse. The name might once have been hers. The people, too, might have been important, but she had no memory of either. “Betty” belonged more to a letter pinned on the frame of a mirror in that death-soiled house written from “your beloved cousin” in Nashville. No one had ever asked her name.

  “Name’s Henry. Henry Nevins.” He pointed vaguely to the backwards letters on the window above the name of his shop. She wasn’t putting on the socks. He took them from her and unfolded them, then bent to help her put them on. The invasive effects of the liquor were waning now with someone to protect, but the whisky still toyed with his eyes. “Where’d your shadow get to, Betty?” He laughed as he said it under his breath.

  Betty pulled her feet up onto the chair and bristled. “You’re talking crazy, Mr. Nevins.”

  Henry tossed the socks onto her lap. “You can do it yourself, then.”

  Betty was staring at the board of tattoos on the wall. Most were the ones you could get anywhere. Eagles. Snakes. But her eyes were on the top left corner, where Henry kept his own designs sketched from the stories he and Jane used to read together. He read to her until she learned the letters, and for years after she’d follow him around the house and read her favorite passages and ask him to draw the characters. Henry held his forehead to avoid looking at the wall. He couldn’t remember the last time Jane read to him.

  “Why does this place smell like blood?” asked Betty.

  Henry sniffed at the room. His head was hurting, and this girl was odd.

  “Did you draw all those?” she asked, eyes trained on the wall.

  “Not all of them.”

  “That bat.” She pointed at the drawing of the woman, half-naked with a long red scarf wrapped tight around her throat. A large bat held her in its wings. It was a gruesome drawing, one his daughter insisted upon, and one he left on the wall in tribute to her. Henry had read Dracula to his daughter twice when she was little. She must have read it three times at least after that.

  Henry and Jane were alone with each other. His wife died in childbirth, the rest of the family lived in Virginia, and in secret defiance of his wife’s meddlesome family, he tattooed his daughter one week before she left. Janey begged him for the drawing of Dracula, and he obligingly depicted it between her shoulder blades, but he covered the woman in a modest negligee. “It’s beautiful, Mr. Nevins. But the wings are a little off. They don’t bend like that.”

  He looked up at the drawing, barely visible in the gloom. The girl was staring at it, unblinking, and her mouth was parted just enough to show the points of her fangs. The mirror he used for his clients hung over her shoulder and reflected an empty chair. His fingers buzzed, but the liquor was too long ago to be to blame.

  “This isn’t real. You’re a vampire.”

  She nodded slowly and settled into the barber’s chair. “Yes. I was going to drink your blood. Do you have a tattoo? On your skin? I love tattoos. I once met an illustrated man on the train going from Nebraska.”

  Henry looked around the room for a weapon, or a cross. His hand rested on a little vial of blue ink. “What do you mean ‘was’?”

  “I mean that I’m not going to drink your blood, Mr. Nevins. I’m an artist, too. Us artists have got to stick together, right? If I draw something for your wall can you put it on someone’s skin?”

  “Only if they’ll ask for it. I don’t choose for people.”

  She smiled brightly, showing the long fangs. “They’ll ask for it. I’m a great artist.”

  Henry chuckled, at her enthusiasm, at death, at the long impossible night he’d been having.

  “What are you laughing at,” asked Betty, her eyes narrowed to evil, reddened slits.

  “That’s real kind of you, Betty. Real lady-like. Thank you for not drinking my blood.” He laughed harder and bowed to the scruffy little barefoot girl in his barber’s chair. She straightened in it like a queen, then flung herself from the chair to thrust a long finger at Henry’s chest.

  “Don’t think you’re off the hook, mister. See, you’ve invited me into your house, and now I can come and go as I please. A girl’s got needs other than a full belly, and as I said, I’m new in town…”

  Henry shrunk under the vampire’s finger and held up his hands in protest. “Look, kid, you are way too young.”

  “A place to stay, Mr. Nevins!” She huffed at him. “You’re lucky I’m an artist, too, or I’d never forgive your wicked temperament.”

  Henry blinked, hard, and shook his head to drive away the dream. When he looked up again, he saw Betty’s eyes staring into his own. Her face was softer, and her voice was light, so like his Jane when she was little, begging another hour to read before bedtime.

  “It’s late, Mr. Nevins. You’re going to go to sleep, and I’m going to take that room off the parlor.” She turned her head to indicate the closed door to Jane’s room, and Henry weakly shook his head, unable to protest any further than that. “The door will be locked in the morning, and you won’t open it up for anything. Goodnight, Mr. Nevins. Sweet dreams.” She kissed him on his forehead, and he slumped over, asleep in her waiting arms. She lifted him into the barber’s chair and pulled up his shirt sleeves to check the wrists. Betty clucked her tongue at the bare arms, then opened his shirt to check above the heart. Her first guess was wrist, but with those smudgy glasses he looked like he could be a heart man. There, fuzzy from fine blond chest hair was a bright blue swallow with a golden heart in its beak. She buttoned up his shirt and left him on the chair.

  Henry awoke to the bright winter sun streaming in through the window. He was on his barber’s chair, his watch was unwound, and a muffled voice yelled to him through the glass. Henry rubbed his face and got up, went to the door, and met Charlie Kane, his twelve-thirty appointment.

  “Should I reschedule?” Charlie glanced sideways at the tattooist’s red eyes, the stubble on his chin. Henry gulped down a glass of water and got reacquainted with sobriety.

  “No, no. Couldn’t do that to a fella just before he ships out. It was an eagle?”

  Charlie nodded and pointed up at the flash wall. He settled on an eagle gripping a knife in its talon. Henry grabbed the card off the wall, but his eye was caught by an askew card. It was his woman held by a bat, carefully redrawn and hung over the original drawing. She’d corrected the wing, and lowered the eyes of the woman, making her more demure and satisfied with the horror inflicted by his Dracula. Henry glanced to the door leading to the small room under the stairs. She was in there. The vampire. His cheeks flushed and he placed Betty’s card back on the wall, then started up the machine. Charlie flinched as Henry swabbed his back with alcohol, and Henry settled into a normal day.

  He tried, in between appointments, and after washing his face, and late in the day when he closed up shop and made a tasteless dinner of tinned sardines and old bread, to open the door to his daughter’s room. Each time he walked past, his hand would almost reach to press against the door, but a cold pit of dread would open up in his stomach and he’d go back to the kitchen and pace. A vampire was haunting his daughter’s room, violating her memory.

&nb
sp; Among the discarded daily contrivances littering the alley behind his shop, he found a broken chair, and spent his evening sharpening one leg to a wooden stake. He might have bought garlic, had he thought of it before the grocers closed for the evening.

  Henry stowed his weapon in the little end table next to his tattooist’s chair. He took everything out of it, cleaned his tools, and placed them back in around the stake, as if it were another instrument used to mark the skin. With the table organized, he moved to the rest of the parlor. His evening was consumed with cleaning and he was almost able to forget the reason he started until the whole shop gleamed deep orange and red from the sunset. When he heard a flutter behind the door to his daughter’s room, he set the rag down and stood at attention. The sun dipped behind the mountains. The Puget Sound turned black. Jane’s door opened, and Betty smiled winningly at him with her arms stretched over her head.

  “Did you see?” she asked. “I fixed your bat.” She yawned and clipped over to him in a pair of new brown shoes that Henry never could have afforded. He disliked them, they were flashy, but he was relieved she did not wear his daughter’s things.

  Betty took the card off the wall and handed it to him, leaning in too close to his arm. Her hair was glued to her head in grimy clumps, and her face was still sooty from the train.

  “You found some shoes?”

  She laughed. “That’s not all I found! Some high-society lady was cavorting outside the Rialto last night with a boy half her age. The boy got away, but that lady was a bleeder. More than enough to quiet my rumbly stomach.”