Tattoo

by J G Alva

  “Oh Jesus Christ, men, fucking spare me,” she said, and then put the car in gear and drove away as fast as she could.

  *

  It was impossible to access the front door with Robin’s Ford Focus blocking most of it, so Sutton stumbled around the side of the building, toward the back.

  Robin had been right when she had said that he was angry, and she was probably right when she said he was being stupid. If he came across Alden King now, in his current condition…

  Well. It would be over quickly.

  It was dark and quiet behind the house, but Sutton could make out enough from the distant streetlights to avoid the rockery that followed the base of the building. He reached the edge of the house and poked his head around the corner.

  The back garden was huge. It was a surprise, because they were still very much in the centre of Bristol, but there might have been half an acre of land hidden behind Alden King’s abode. Along the far edge a wall of trees screened the rest of the world from what could quite easily have been a public park. It seemed deserted, but it was hard to tell; there was no light here, not even from the house, and anything could be hiding in the shadows at the foot of those trees.

  The tarmac continued around the back of the house to where it ended at the entrance to a two door garage. Sutton waited, crouched, listening; if Alden was going to make his getaway, he would be coming out of that garage any time now.

  Five minutes passed before Sutton straightened up and hobbled to the garage. He was feeling a little better; his muscles were uncoiling.

  There was a window on the side of the garage and he bent down to look in.

  No van.

  Cars, four of them, but no van.

  Which could very well mean that he was parked on a side street, and might already have escaped them.

  Sutton returned to the house, creeping as quietly as he could to the back door. It was open, and there was a dim light coming from inside. He pushed on the door and thankfully it was well oiled and made no sound. He took two steps inside and that’s when he smelled it: a very thin veil of decomposing meat, heavily overlaid with the artificial smell of a strong air freshener.

  At least, he thought it was meat.

  That was, of course, until he ventured further inside.

  *

  Downstairs, it hardly seemed like anybody lived there at all, and Sutton was reminded of Fin’s home, a derelict place he hardly ever used since his parents had passed away. The back door led directly in to the kitchen, a long impressive kitchen with a high ceiling. There was no light on in here but there was enough filtering in from the hall for Sutton to see that everything was very clean and tidy, spotless even, with nothing out of place, and little sign to indicate that it had been used or ever would be used.

  Except for something on the kitchen table.

  He moved closer, a fresh meat smell touching his nostrils.

  In the dimness of the kitchen, he could just make out blood stains on the dark wood surface.

  And in the middle of this, a lump of indefinable tissue.

  Jesus. It might just be an off cut…but knowing what he did about Alden King, Sutton wasn’t so sure.

  Cautiously he passed through the kitchen and in to the hall. It was a long hall, running most of the length of the house. At the end of it was Robin’s car, propped on an angle in the doorway, the headlights shining on the ceiling; there was dust and brick on the floor in the hall, as well as the splintered front door. As he came forward, it shifted slightly with a loud crunch before settling. The cooling engine gave off a monotonous ticking sound. But my God, she was a crazy woman, he thought…and thank God, otherwise he might not be standing here right now. On the right hand side of the hall was the staircase, and on the left hand side were doors to two rooms; he peeked in to both of them cautiously only to find one very large, very spacious Dining Room and one very large, very decorative Lounge, but nobody in them. The Dining Room was dominated by a stately table in a dark wood that could have sat twenty people easily; the lounge was dominated by an ornate fireplace, on either side of which row upon row of books lined big heavy shelving. Two big comfortable sofas were strategically placed in front of the fire, and it all looked very cosy, but the books did not have that used look, of having been loved, and the fireplace looked as if it had not been lit in years. It all spoke of money, but with nobody to enjoy it.

  Slowly, he began climbing the staircase.

  The smell of rotting food, which had at first only been a suggestion, became stronger with every step. Sutton stopped halfway up the stairs and listened but could hear nothing, no furtive cough, no heavy breathing, no shuffling of nervous feet, and so continued on up to the first floor.

  On the landing, the smell hit him like a wave, and he had to pause halfway across until he had adjusted to it, before he could go on. It was all around him, and he couldn’t see how Alden King lived with it. What was causing it? It seemed to be too powerful an odour to be anything but a vast collection of rotting waste. Sutton imagined finding a room full of rubbish, of half open black bags with chicken carcasses inside them, being gnawed over by rats. In his heart of hearts he already knew what was causing that smell, but it was something else altogether to be confronted so starkly with the reality of it. It stained a dark corner of his soul.

  There was a body in the bed.

  He stepped into the bedroom, quickly vouching that every corner did not have anybody or anything hiding in it, and then stepped through the doorway and put his back to the wall just inside the door. In the far left hand corner of the room was a walk-in wardrobe, and beside that an en suite bathroom. The wardrobe was closed and he regarded it nervously. The bathroom light was on and he could see all of it, and see that nobody was hiding in it. It was a small bathroom, with a tub and a toilet, and a sink with a medicine cabinet over it.

  If he had any doubt that Alden King was the Head Hunter, then the body in the bed dispelled it: she had no head. He knew it was female because, passed the gold duvet pulled down to her waist, her ample rotting breasts were clearly visible. They were, however, not immediately recognisable as breasts; they were so distended and corrupted that they hung like misshapen grey-pink purses under each armpit, the nipples black. The rest of her was not so easy to make out; she had decomposed so much that her skin was a collage of multi-coloured blotches, brown, grey, purple, dark green, and a sickly dark orange, like sunburn. There were lumps where no lumps should have been, and hollows where there should have been no hollows. Around this unfortunate victim tea coloured stains had leaked out in to the sheets and the pillows where the body was rotting, and it must have been in the bed for some time for it to have contaminated the sheets so completely. What was perhaps even more shocking was the space next to her on the bed, the depression in the pillow where a head had lain next to the stump of her neck, and the duvet thrown back from the bed as if somebody had gotten out of it in a hurry. If Alden King had somehow been able in that moment to reveal himself as the Devil, then some equilibrium might have been restored to the universe. As it was, he was just a human being.

  He was, Sutton thought, quite simply the worst that any man could be.

  Sutton turned to the large walk-in wardrobe, afraid that Alden King might be hidden behind those big white wooden doors, peering out at Sutton through the thin slats. It didn’t feel like he was behind them, but you could never be too careful. Sutton edged closer, pulled his sleeve down over his hand – to prevent himself from leaving any fingerprints – and grasped the knob on one of the doors. He was ready for anything. He was positive that he was ready for anything.

  He opened the door.

  He stumbled back suddenly, his sleeve-covered hand covering his mouth in shock or fear, he was not sure which. It was like opening the door on to hell. He almost fell on to the body in the bed before he managed to steady myself.

  Toward the top of the walk-in wardrobe was a shelf; below the shelf was a small collection of clothes hanging dispiritedly f
rom an array of hangers. That was good. That was normal. On the shelf itself and placed in a neat orderly fashion were seven heads, arranged in degrees of corruption, from the totally rotted, almost skinless on the far left to the still-recognisable-as-human on the far right. The one on the far right was the most unnerving because it was still recognisable as once belonging to a human being. It was a twenty something woman with blonde hair, very much the type that Alden was attracted to, perhaps Susan Bell, perhaps Helen Allen, perhaps Victoria Jenkins. She might have been attractive in life. As it was, her skin was now a grey-green colour and hung like a badly fitting latex mask. Her eyes had sunk back in to her head. It was like she was half asleep, and could wake up at any moment...and start screaming.

  Sutton didn’t think he was going to be sick – and it might have been better to have been able to, to expel something that was sinking in to his soul – but he moved in to the bathroom anyway, just in case. He wanted to be out of that room for a little while, just to clear his head.

  There was something in the bath.

  It had probably been human once. Sutton saw the dull glimmer of bone here and there but, on the whole, it looked more like a stew than a human form, a yellow-green coloured stew with the occasional indistinguishable black and brown lump poking through the scum covered surface.

  Sutton got himself out of that room.

  On the landing he looked around. There were two other rooms on this floor, and in the corner stairs leading up to the next. One room was a very plain and orderly second bedroom, half the size of the main one, with one bed and another smaller walk-in wardrobe in the corner. Again, the door on it was closed. Sutton listened, but heard nothing from inside it.

  There was nothing else for it: he covered his hand with his sleeve and opened it.

  Nothing. No hidden Alden King, grinning maniacally and stroking a bowie knife, only some cardboard boxes stacked toward the back of the wardrobe, covered in dust.

  He went to the third and last bedroom, stood just outside the door, his back to the room. Breathing. Just breathing.

  But good God, that smell…

  It was a workroom, perhaps the same size as the master bedroom. There were three workbenches in the centre of the room covered with an array of tools, and a long work surface that went all the way around the edge of the room. Two fluorescent lights hanging quite low from the ceiling on chains illuminated what looked like complicated machinery in pieces on the floor and on the worktops. In the way of tools, Alden King seemed to have everything, from Black and Decker drills, to microscopes, to soldering irons. Sutton even saw two gas bottles – one maroon and another black – stashed in one corner with cables trailing from them and immediately recognised them as components for an Arc Welder. Across the walls design drawings for various machines had been pinned up, some only reprinted as part of magazine articles, others official looking blueprints, and others drawn free hand, presumably by Alden King himself.

  He looked at the other staircase.

  He didn’t want to go up it, but he knew he had no choice.

  Fear and disgust in equal measure clawing their way up the back of his throat, he began ascending.

  There were only two rooms on this last floor. One was a bathroom a little bigger than the en suite in the master bedroom. The other was another bedroom, long, thin, and as white and as sterile as an operating room. There was a small window with bars in it in the right hand wall that looked out on to the street. It was a small boy’s room; there was a blue duvet with sheep on it, toy cars on the floor, a stereo in one corner, a small desk with a computer on it, a drawing board with blank sheets of paper pinned to it, and another tall white wardrobe at the far end, its one door shut. Like the smaller of the two downstairs it was still big enough to hide a person, and Sutton approached it cautiously. He took a quick silent gulp of air before covering his hand with his sleeve again and opening the door.

  Clothes on hangers were all that confronted him.

  The house, it seemed, was empty.

  Sutton went back over it again, quickly. He had an idea that Alden might have a secret room somewhere, a place where he tortured his victims, perhaps a basement, whose door would be concealed, but he could not find anything. Conscious that time was running out, that Robin had called the police and that they would soon be arriving, he rushed through the place, even checking the attic in the hopes that Alden might have been keeping Andrea up there; the place was empty however, but for old boxes and tired dusty pieces of forgotten furniture. If he was hiding her in this house somewhere then Sutton did not know where.

  He came back down and found himself once again by the door to the master bedroom. He did not want to go back in there, but something had been bothering him, something in the back of his head, a niggling, and he somehow had the impression that he had missed something, distracted perhaps by all the horror that there was to be had in there to take proper notice of it.

  He stood in the doorway and looked around the room carefully, and then he saw it.

  A book.

  On the bedside table.

  Holding his breath, he crossed the room and picked it up, quickly flicking through its pages.

  There was wall-to-wall writing, pages and pages of it, with no paragraph breaks, no breaks of any kind. The only thing that broke up all this text were small line drawings, not dissimilar to the ones he had seen on the workroom wall, but more basic, quick simple sketches done in a hurry.

  He paged back to the beginning of the book and read the first line, to determine, if he could, exactly what it was he was looking at. He read:

  This isn’t so much a diary as it is an attempt to understand myself, whatever curious twist of fate has delivered me to this place, this life, and where exactly I fit in.

  And to understand whatever it was I did to deserve such a fucked up, evil, cunt of a mother.

  A diary. Of sorts.

  Sutton closed the book, tucked it into the small of his back, under his belt, and quickly removed himself from that terrible place.

  *

  CHAPTER 16

  Steve Ashbury knew what it was to be charged with a difficult task, to apply himself to see it through to its completion.

  It had seemed as if, all his life, that when one trial was over, it would be time for a new one to begin.

  The only son of a toolmaker, he had grown up happy until his parents had split when he was nine. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, they just didn’t get on. One of those things. He could not remember any of the details of the arrangement, or if it was even discussed, but when his mother moved out it was with his father that he stayed. His father, always taciturn, started drinking. He wasn’t an unkind man, just immeasurably sad, and more often than not it was Steve who would have to go to the shop to get the milk and bread and other essentials that his father had forgotten to purchase, or could not be engaged to do so. So his first introduction to responsibility was to himself: to clean his own clothes, make lunch for himself, cook in the evenings, get himself to and from school.

  He saw his mother every other weekend, and this went on for a couple of years, until she married an accountant, and then moved to the Midlands. She had a new family now, and Steve didn’t see her much. Not that he would have much to say to her if he did. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, it was just that they were now strangers to each other.

  She had no stamina for difficult tasks, it seemed.

  His father never re-married, and had died six years ago. Bronchial Pneumonia. He had gone into the hospital with the flu and had come out in a box.

  Steve was not surprised. Life itself was a hard task, and it had long been apparent to him that his father was not capable of dealing with such a heavy load.

  Maybe that in itself was to blame for the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.

  He had every intention of following in his father’s footsteps by becoming a toolmaker himself, but found that there was a requirement for training – if not college, then at least
an apprenticeship, and with the Ashbury finances in the toilet (his father didn’t care, as long as he had money for alcohol) Steve was forced to find what he could as soon as he left school.

  He wasn’t stupid, but he was no academic either. One of this father’s friends was a Foreman in a local construction company, and hat in hand, Steve had asked him if there was any work for him, he’d do anything, make tea, brush floors, but he needed work, needed the money.

  Michael Owen employed him under the loose title of Site Labourer, and so he was set to work on the construction site in a housing development on the outskirts of Bristol. He swept floors, ran errands, helped move whatever needed moving, as long as he could manage the load. He started with buckets of water, until when he had filled out, he was able to move paving slabs, bags of dried cement, even the concrete mixers. He was shown how to construct scaffolding, and subsequently how to take it down. He learnt Bricklaying, how to plaster. He got dirtier, but the pay got better. Invariably, he’d come home covered in brick dust, his hands cut, grazed and bleeding from the tools, or from dropping slabs on his fingers, or just from the general wear and tear of working on a construction site.

  But none of this mattered to him.

  He was on his way.

  When he asked about the JCBs, Michael Owen somehow arranged for him to go on a training course so he could get his license.

  That had been almost eight years ago now, and it could startle you sometimes, the way time and circumstance had a way of sending you in a certain direction, certainly one you never thought you’d take. He had been a young man then, alone, getting on with things, maybe a little angry at the way his life was turning out, but still to the best of his ability taking responsibility for himself, for the tasks of each labored day.