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

by Rachel Caine

  Lola grew paler, weaker, sicker. And the rose rambled over her back and began to wrap its thorns around her sides, sneaking up toward the curves of her breasts, its color now definitely a rich wine red.

  She squinted at the overcast and drizzling sky out her bedroom window. The walk down to the post office seemed a long way and a lot of effort, but she needed a stamp to mail Aunt Nancy’s birthday card, and anyway she was flat out of bourbon, not to mention anything much edible. Hello, credit card. She avoided thinking about the growing mountain of debt.

  At least it’s not sunny out. She’d Googled sun allergy and solar urticaria and polymorphic light eruption, and thought of going to the clinic, but she figured they’d commit her to the psych ward if it came out that she thought her tattoo was growing and changing color. Easier just to stay in and sleep on sunny days. It’s not like I have anywhere to be.

  On the doorstep, she nearly turned back. Steeled herself against overwhelming weakness and the lure of going back to bed. I’ll just go as far as the Coffee Cave, treat myself to a latte. Then we’ll see.

  Lola saw him there as she approached: the mop-man, lounging against the brickwork outside the Coffee Cave, partially sheltered from the rain by the overhanging roof. Awkward, much? She’d avoided him since that day when she’d spoken too loudly about charity cases, even resorting to convenience store coffee instead of going in if she saw him there through the window.

  But this time he was outside, his eyes already on her, and in any case she felt too ill to do anything but move forward, with an uncomfortable nod for him as she turned in at the doorway.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, his voice the same soft rasp she remembered, his face stiff with reluctance. She looked about, but he could only mean her. “May I ask where you got your tattoo?”

  Could there be no greater shame? “I—well, uh, I was drunk. So I don’t know. I… woke up with it,” she choked out, feeling her face flame with embarrassment.

  He bit off a frustrated expletive. “Can’t be helped, I suppose. Sorry to have troubled you.” And he turned away, her cue to go on into the coffeehouse. But why did he want to know? Why would he care where I got it done?

  Lola tried to put it from her mind, but couldn’t. At the counter, she found herself asking Chad if he knew what the mop-man liked to drink. “Ian? He’s the herbal tea kind. Lemon-ginger, usually. Puts honey in it.”

  Damn, going to have to do this. “Okay, I’ll get one of those as well. To-go cups for both.”

  “Hey,” Lola said. When the mop-man—Ian—turned, tense and wary, she held out the steaming cup to him. “Here.”

  “Kind of you, ma’am, but I don’t drink coffee.”

  “And you don’t take charity. I know. But it’s the lemon tea Chad says you like, and it’s not charity. It’s… I owe you an apology. Consider the tea an apology.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t like to be judged over being a dancer; I had no business judging you.”

  He nodded, a gracious inclination of the head, and took the cup. “Thank you, ma’am.” Was that a trace of a Southern accent? He sipped his tea, observing her, waiting. Not making it easy.

  “You… you asked about my tattoo.” She paused, hoping that he’d volunteer something, but only the merest lift of his eyebrow encouraged her to continue. “There’s something… I mean, God, you’ll think I’m insane, but—”

  “But you aren’t,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, it’s growing. Yes, it’s getting redder. Yes, it will probably kill you if you do nothing.”

  “How—”

  “I have one too.” With an almost angry jerk, he stretched the neckline of his T-shirt down just far enough to show the head of a dragon on his shoulder, and skin horribly scarred by fire. “You, ah, don’t want to try to burn it off or cut it out. It’s rooted too deep; you’ll only mess yourself up.”

  “Christ!” Lola took a steadying gulp of her latte, tried not to visibly shudder at the burn scars or gasp with relief when he covered them again. Tried not to think about what he must have done.

  “Ma’am, I’ve got to go inside about now. Earn my supper.” He grinned, half rueful and half challenging. “But you need to know some things. Would you meet me after? That is, if you don’t mind being seen with a dude who lives in his car.”

  He looked shabby and poor, maybe even a little bit dangerous, and every learned prejudice came rushing up inside her. But then she thought of all the times she’d been called a slut and a tramp, the sneers and condescension given, the assumption that all dancers were whores.

  “Call me Lola,” she said. “Where and when?”

  They sat on the hood of his beat-up Volvo station wagon, eating orange Creamsicles in the last rays of the sun. No booze to take the edge off the awkwardness. He’d shaken his head at the suggestion, so she’d bought the frozen treats from the gas station instead, unable to face the conversation with nothing in her hands for distraction.

  Lola’s T-shirt was knotted up under her breasts, and Ian had taken his off altogether, apologizing and turning his scarred side away from her. “You want to get as much sun on it as possible,” he’d said. The sunlight on her back stung and itched, but he told her not to mind it, that it would get better as the tattoo lost its strength.

  “So what is this… thing?” she asked.

  “I, ah, think it’s somehow vampiric in nature,” he said, watching her with wary eyes, waiting for her to doubt, to laugh. “You got weak, didn’t you, like you were losing blood?”

  “True.” Like I’d just given blood, only worse, all the time now. Drained.

  “And the only food that sounds anywhere close to good is rare steak?”

  She stared. “Yes. Though even that… when I actually go to eat it…”

  “And you’ve been avoiding sunlight, and sleeping all day, haven’t you?”

  She shuddered. “You said… it would probably kill me if I did nothing. Can it turn me into… I mean…”

  “That, I don’t know.” He sucked the last bite of his Creamsicle off the stick. “But you’ll be fine. I’ve had mine four years, and I’ve kept it from growing more’n a quarter-inch. You just have to live a little carefully, fight its grip. Lots of sun. No alcohol or caffeine.”

  “Shit,” said Lola.

  “Yep.” An oddly companionable silence settled between them; for the first time in ages she felt herself free to just be—neither judged and found wanting, nor up on a pedestal of lust. The sun slipped below the horizon. “I’ve been tracking the bastard tattoo artist who did this for four years,” he said as the dusk drew in. “Living out of my car. Taking odd jobs, busking, kindness of strangers and all that. Out west for a long time, up and down the coast. Started moving eastward ‘bout a year ago. And then I followed him here, and lost him.”

  “Well, it might not be much help, but whoever did this has got my corset.” She laughed, caught between indignation and the absurdity of it. “He took my best fucking corset!”

  With the sun gone, the air had cooled. Ian picked up his shirt and pulled it over his head, but when Lola made to unknot hers, he held up a hand. “Wait a moment, sugar, there’s one more thing—” He boosted his long body off the hood and popped open the car door, reached under the driver’s seat to pull out a small plastic deli tub.

  Crushed garlic. Lola gagged.

  “Whoops—sorry! Should’ve warned you. Breathe through your mouth; I’ll be quick.” He scooped out a handful and mashed it against her lower back.

  She came around to a lemon-disinfectant smell as something wet slid over her lower back.

  No garlic?

  Lola opened her eyes to find herself inside Ian’s station wagon. The rear seats were folded down to make a flat bed, and she lay face down on a neatly spread sleeping bag, with Ian kneeling over her, antiseptic wipe in hand.

  “Damn, sugar, you gave me a bit of a fright there.” He gave her back a final swipe, and disposed of the towelette in a small lidded garbage
pail. Even in the fading light, it struck her how clean and orderly the car was—not at all the rat’s nest of clothes and trash she’d expected—and the sleeping bag had the dryer-sheet scent of a recent washing.

  “What happened?” she asked, rolling onto her side.

  He grimaced. “You blacked out. The first dose of garlic sends the tattoo-thing into some kind of shock, I guess, but it never knocked me out. Yours must have gotten an awful strong grip on you. I, ah, I’m sorry I waited so long to—”

  Lola waved his words away. “Not your fault. I didn’t exactly give you a chance…”

  And then she noticed how dark it had become, grew acutely aware of his hand where it rested on her hip. And I’m lying on his bed.

  His indrawn breath and a sharpening intensity in his gaze warned her that he felt it, too.

  I should be scared. He’s still a stranger. He lives in his car, for fuck’s sake!

  But she tingled all over with anticipation, and she realized that she found him attractive.

  One corner of Ian’s mouth curved upward in a slow smile. “Am I right in thinking you might be giving me a chance now?” he asked, his voice deep and thick with sensuality. Waiting for permission.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” she gasped, reaching up to draw him down.

  In the morning she suggested he come back to her place for a shower.

  Her roommates blinked at him and giggled and offered breakfast, shooting curious and significant looks at her—she’d never been one for mornings-after. Or maybe his untrimmed hair and threadbare clothes made them nervous. Somehow Ian makes it easy to forget about those things, once you know him.

  She saw in the mirror that her tattoo was darker, less red.

  “I’m no one’s girlfriend,” she told him. “I do my own thing.” Refusing the urge to ask when she’d see him again.

  “S’all right,” he said. “I don’t like labels and boxes either.” But his hand stroked hers with affection.

  Garlic capsules from the Vitamin Shoppe had no smell, and seemed to work—at least, Lola found herself wanting to eat again. Her energy picked up. The sun bothered her less. Her tattoo didn’t shrink—perhaps the inky spread could not be reversed—but nor did it grow.

  Ian conceded that taking garlic internally was a good idea, though he still argued that it should be applied to the surface as well. A couple of times a week, she’d let him mash the nasty stuff on her, and it no longer knocked her out.

  Chad at the Coffee Cave started calling Lola “Barbie Doll” again.

  “Oh, go pleasure yourself, hipster boy,” she snapped back in high good humor, having run into Morgan outside the Club. “I’ll have a cherry Danish with my latte, please.” She’d be dancing again in less than two weeks—on probation at first, but she wasn’t concerned.

  Her days now felt like vacation, not desperation.

  Ian hunted for the tattoo artist methodically, single-mindedly, with maps and notes, and hours spent online at the library. Lists of tattoo parlors, artists’ websites, some sort of data analysis program he carried on a memory stick. He scoured reviews for hints of oddity. Compared names for similarity to those used in previous cities. Measured distances from the Club, as the last known point of contact.

  Lola just walked. On every sunny day, in the skimpiest possible tops and tiny shorts—so the tattoo would have nowhere to hide—she walked miles of sidewalk, showing off her re-emerging fine self and flipping the bird at disapproving stares. Always looking, searching. Following her impulses. He has my damn corset, and I swear I’ll find it.

  And yet, when she saw it on a mannequin in the window of the Devil’s Ink Tattoo Emporium, she could hardly believe she’d found it. Probably just looks a bit like mine. Couldn’t really be… But the sequined hearts were the same, and the beaded fringe that had cost a goddamn fortune.

  She called the Coffee Cave. “Hi Chad, this is Barbie Doll. Is Ian there?…Yes, it is a fucking emergency, or I wouldn’t bother. Please?”

  After an agonizing pause—so long that Lola began to wonder if Chad had forgotten altogether about her being on the phone—Ian’s voice came on the line, rough with concern, asking, “What’s wrong, sugar?”

  “I, erm…” With the moment at hand, she wasn’t sure how to say it, especially when he would have Chad and customers around him, listening. “I found my corset.”

  “Ah, I thought Chad said you—never mind. So it wasn’t taken that night, then? You’d just misplaced it?” His matter-of-fact tone didn’t quite hide the disappointment that their one clue had fizzled.

  “No. Ian, I found my corset. In the display window of a tattoo place.”

  Silence. Shock? Then, “Where are you? I’m coming.”

  “Kensington Market. I’m in that coffee place on St. Andrew. But… you’re working, aren’t you?”

  She heard him chuckle over the phone—maybe the word “working” wasn’t the right choice, exactly. “Doesn’t matter. If we’ve found him, for real, I can—oh, Lord, I can go back to… I…” He cleared his throat. “Stay where you are. Please. I’m coming.”

  Efforts to peer through the windows came to nothing—the Devil’s Ink attracted passersby with tattoo-painted mannequins, posed in front of atmospheric velvet curtains that looked like theatrical window dressing but effectively concealed the shop’s interior. A sign on the door indicated that it wouldn’t be open for another hour.

  “D’you suppose the artist really is… something satanic?” Lola blurted out before she could censor herself. “Not that there’s such thing as a devil, but…” But if tattoos can grow and drain our blood, what else might exist? Broad daylight on a busy public street mocked her.

  “I have no idea what’s in there, natural or unnatural,” Ian said, a grim set to his face, “but I have no intention of waiting around for an hour to find out.” He fished a set of thin picks from his pocket. “Stand close in so no one can see my hands.”

  “You… you’re…” Discomfort washed over her. She hadn’t suspected he’d be criminally inclined. Still couldn’t quite believe it, despite the evidence in front of her.

  He shot her a wry grin. “Sugar, I’ve never taken anything that wasn’t freely given, but I’ve sure met a lot of, ah, interesting people on the road. Learned some useful tricks.” And the lock clicked open.

  No one waited in the front room—in the dim light filtering in from the front door, the place looked like any other tattoo parlor, with black vinyl benches to wait on, boards of designs on the walls and more in binders to flip through. A faintly medical-antiseptic scent drifted through a curtained archway to the back area, and Lola shuddered. Surely I’m only imagining the smell of blood?

  To Ian’s credit, he never asked her to wait outside or tried to keep her behind him, though she thought perhaps he might want to do just that. “Going in,” he murmured, nodding toward the archway. But there were no surprises behind the curtain, only empty cubicles, sterile equipment.

  And then they found stairs going down, of course. A basement.

  Red eyes glowed at them in the moment before Lola found the light switch. And she felt her tattoo prickle in recognition.

  Then the fluorescent strips blinked on overhead, and beside her Ian cursed, but it wasn’t in fear. Poor damn thing. An emaciated adolescent figure lay bound to a filthy cot, wrists and ankles blistered raw from silver chains. A handful of drained rat corpses had plainly been her only recent meals.

  “I… ah… think we can assume you’re not our ‘artist,’ ma’am?” said Ian.

  “No. He made the last one turn me. He takes my blood, to make his evil ink,” the girl whispered, her voice a broken scrape of wire on stone. “Please… let me go.”

  Lola gazed in horror at the soiled sheets, the festering sores under the shackles. “We have to let her go, help her get away,” she said to Ian. “Even if she is a…” No. Saying that word would make this too real. “Even if she’s… not like us… no one should be kept this way.”

  “I don�
��t think she means to escape, Lola,” Ian said. “It’s more a shuffling-off-this-mortal-coil kind of thing, I believe. Ma’am?”

  The girl nodded, an almost infinitesimal movement of a head too weak to hold itself up. “Please. I’m… too weak to run. I want to be… beyond his reach.”

  The scrape of a footstep echoed on the stairs beyond the door.

  Ian drew a switchblade from his pocket. “Silver blade,” he muttered, popping it open. “I’ll be quick.”

  “Bless you.” The words were barely audible, but the heartfelt gratitude unmistakable.

  Lola looked away, tried not to hear the wet puncture sound, the momentary thrashing of weak limbs. She felt an odd, vanishing prickle over the tattoo on her back, like a heartbeat winking out. And then there was nothing left of the birdlike girl but a double handful of ashes crumbled on the foul bed.

  Afterward, Lola had trouble piecing the next sequence of events together.

  She remembered surprise that the tattoo artist looked so ordinary: heavyset bodybuilder’s physique under a Devil’s Ink T-shirt, shaved head with a knotted bandana, neatly-trimmed soul patch on his chin. She remembered Ian circling him, wet-red blade in hand, and her own voice shrieking, “Don’t kill him, Ian! You don’t want to go to jail, or have to run from it!” Though what she’d thought would happen when they went after the tattoo artist in the first place, she wasn’t sure. She remembered jumping back against the wall as the two men lunged and dodged and grappled.

  She never could picture exactly how the tattoo artist ended up out cold on the floor with Ian’s knee on his neck, though Ian later told her—and gently demonstrated—the jujitsu moves that had brought the man down. What stuck in her mind was the moment of stillness afterward, and Ian breathing hard, saying, “Now what?”

  Unconscious dude. Basement room that had obviously held a hostage or victim of some sort. Somewhere on the premises, equipment to draw blood, and contaminated tattoo ink. “We call 911,” Lola said. “This nasty creep has obviously been putting blood and God knows what else into his tattoo ink, which is pretty much assault on unsuspecting customers, right? And I’d think this room points to kidnapping or worse.”