Shock Totem 6: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted Read online

  I’m someone he chose.

  • • •

  I dream.

  I dream of mother’s face after the men beat her to death, blood bubbling through her cracked teeth. I dream of Dante dangling from the noose that Sherry holds.

  And I dream of the girl. The slick slide of a knife into skin, so much more personal than the whip-crash of a gun. I dream of curved blades and lighting quick movements. Dream of a girl who made herself into a weapon. A girl who likes watching people bleed.

  Mostly, I dream of hate.

  • • •

  You’ll find them someday, mother whispers, stroking my hair. I might not, but I promise you, you will.

  • • •

  When I wake up again, the girl is at my bedside, trailing a knife against the fabric of her jeans. Her hair is pulled into a loose ponytail. She has wide blue eyes and a scar that slices through her left eyebrow and onto her cheekbone.

  “I should kill you,” she says. “I’ve never tried to make it painless, but I think I probably could.”

  The ache in my side dulls as she trails the knife down my cheek.

  “But then I wouldn’t get a chance to see what makes you tick. And I’m surprised someone like you exists.” The words sound crass, but there’s genuine wonder filtering into my mind. She’s been out there for years, just like me, walking alone in a world of pairs.

  “The police are coming. I told them what you look like.”

  “No.” She tilts her head as if listening. “You didn’t.”

  • • •

  When I sleep, there’s blood on my hands, something that is not quite anger coursing through my veins. The man in front of me struggles to stand. My knife slides against the sharpening block. Without looking I raise my heel to meet his forehead and push him back in place.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” he sputters. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.”

  “You know why.”

  “No, please.”

  I check the sharpness of the knife against a finger. An ounce more pressure would draw blood. “You never stopped to think, did you? You just did the tests and moved on.”

  “Please. I have a family.”

  “So did I.”

  I wake up drenched in sweat.

  Ten hours later, I see the body on the news. The fifth with the same M.O.

  I spend the day trying to wash off blood that isn’t there.

  • • •

  “You’re calling me Dante again,” Watson says. He’s wearing blue scrubs. Another week and he could be the one undoing my sutures. “No one’s called me Dante in years.”

  It’s true. Even Dante’s mother calls him Watson.

  “I dunno. I’ve been thinking a lot. I mean, if I ever find that person, what happens to me? Am I rewritten? Do I just become something different?” I look my friend in the eyes. “I just want to know. What happened to Dante?”

  “Just because I found Sherry doesn’t mean I stopped being me.”

  “What would you do if she died?”

  Watson takes a sip of his coffee and answers as if this isn’t even a question. “I’d follow.”

  • • •

  She’s in my house when I get back, standing behind the door, holding a knife. I stop at the entryway and look sideways. Behind me, Watson wavers. “Are you sure you’re all right, Lee? You can always stay with us another week.”

  “I’m fine. Just feels weird to be back home.”

  The girl mouths, Get rid of him.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be back at the hospital anyway?”

  “Not for another—” Watson looks down at his watch and curses. “Five minutes ago. You sure you’re okay, buddy?”

  “I’ll be all right. Promise.”

  Watson bolts for his car and when I shut the door, the girl reaches over to lock it.

  “I never did get a name from you.” I raise my hands over my head and move away from the door. “Mine’s Lee.”

  “I know. I saw your chart.”

  A smile curls, unbidden onto my lips.

  “You can call me Red,” she offers.

  “That’s not a name.”

  The knife is still in her hands. I don’t think I’ve seen her without it. There’s a shadow of a whisper in the back of my head that says the knife means safety. Hope.

  I try to ignore it.

  “It’s the name I call myself,” she says. “I don’t have another anymore.”

  “Your hair’s brown.”

  Her teeth seem very sharp when she smiles.

  • • •

  I was twelve years old when mother was beaten to death. I found the body. I sat through the police interviews. I saw the cops’ faces shut down when they found out what she was.

  Alone.

  Mother died alone, discovered by her bastard son. If it had been different, maybe there could have been justice. Instead, they looked into her past and found out about the men she fucked in dingy alleys. The ones she dragged home from dive bars to see if they could have been the one. She stepped between soulmates more than once, had a bastard son, and died for it.

  I could see the disgust in the cops’ faces. They thought I was an abomination, a product of her sin. But mother’s only sin was that she never stopped looking. The cops wanted to know what was wrong with her, like maybe she’d stepped between her murderer and his soulmate and that made it okay.

  Ten years later, the murder is still unsolved and it’s not because of lack of evidence.

  It’s because nobody bothered to look.

  • • •

  Justifiable homicide is Red’s anthem. Her morals don’t mesh with the rest of the world. When she was sixteen, Red decided some people needed killing.

  Once she started, she only found more.

  • • •

  Watson wasn’t actually Watson until he was nine years old. He was Dante Rike right up until the moment he laid eyes on Sherry Locke and everything changed.

  Sherry had parents who were sadists, or literature fanatics or some horrible combination of the two and spent the better part of her first decade calling herself Sherlock. The first thing she did upon meeting Dante’s eye was declare, “You can be my Watson!”

  And just like that he was Watson. Nine years of Dante erased to nothing.

  • • •

  “Who’s Jill?”

  “Jill’s a figment.” Red’s mind has slammed shut, starbursts of anger ballooning out through the air. “The faded memory of a dead girl.”

  I can hear her breathing. Her fingers clench compulsively against her knife and I reach up to brush back her hair. She leans into the touch, starving for it. It’s been years since someone touched her at all. I can feel that truth in every inch of skin.

  When I push her to the bed, she drops the knife.

  • • •

  People say a soulmate is your perfect balance. A window into everything you are.

  Red is a serial killer.

  What does that say about me?

  • • •

  “Your mother died,” Red says. I have no idea if she pulled it from the back of my mind or if she found it on the Internet. “Did they ever find the one who did it?”

  The television is on in my drab apartment. Red sits on the side of the couch opposite me, back ramrod straight. Her latest victim is on display. Red looks away. They will find that every cut was made before death, that he’d been gagged but conscious.

  She’s close enough to touch, but I won’t touch her while the news plays. “They don’t have anything to pin this on you. Christ, they don’t even have the right gender.”

  “Are you asking me to stop?”

  Most people find their soulmates early, grow up together, plan the direction of their lives together. They don’t get a chance to be an individual. I won’t take that from her. Not even if I should. “I’m just telling you that you can.”

  • • •

  “You really don’t remember anything ab
out the person who attacked you?” Sherry pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, but they slide right back down. I wish Watson were here instead.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you have any idea how lucky you were? It’s a serial killer, you know. Police have seven murders in the past five years.”

  “Maybe they deserved it.”

  “You really believe that? You think there are people out there who deserve to die?”

  (Mother died with her mouth open, displaying eight cracked teeth as the blood dribbled down her chin.)

  “Yes.”

  • • •

  “I’ve got a present for you.”

  Red’s in my bed, her face just inches away from mine. Her knife is on the nightstand, gleaming in the moonlight. I should be startled, but I’m not. “I was just dreaming about you.”

  She captures my mouth in a kiss. She always tastes vaguely of copper. I push back against her, wondering when the hell that became a turn-on. When she pulls away, the smile stretches wide and she looks like the child she never got to be. She stands and picks up the knife, twirling it loosely in her hands like a teddy bear. Her hair swings across her neck and as she looks back at me, I don’t even notice the scar. “Follow me,” she says.

  In my living room, there is a man tied to a chair. A bloody gag is shoved in his mouth. He’s conscious but the vast black bruise spanning his face seems to suggest he’s concussed. Red stands on her tiptoes to whisper in my ear. “It’s the man who killed your mother.”

  • • •

  Red won’t tell me her story so I pull pieces of it out of her mind.

  When she was four years old, her mother enlisted her in a scientific study on the nature of soulmates. More specific, the study of how to sever that bond connecting them.

  Anything deeper in her mind brings up mental walls, huge insurmountable things cast in iron. But every once in a while, I catch a glimpse around them. I see an operating table, a scalpel, and a man in a lab coat.

  This I know: Red spent almost a decade in the hands of men with no morals.

  This I know: The first person Red killed was her mother for leaving her alone.

  • • •

  The man who killed my mother could be any one of the million faceless people passing by on the street. He has neatly cut brown hair and brown eyes. Under the massive bruise, his face is unremarkable. His eyes are deep set, his face wide and flabby. He’s twenty pounds overweight and has the physicality of an athlete gone to seed.

  Red yanks his head back by the hair. The man moans. “Tell him,” she orders, snatching the gag from his mouth. “Tell him what you told me.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Not even a flinch as Red continues, “The night outside the bar. There was a woman. Her name was...”

  “Alyssa James,” I say. “She took you all the way back to her apartment before you hit her.” Time hasn’t dulled the images. “When she fell, you didn’t stop.”

  The man has a flicker of recognition in his eyes. Red traces the blade over his exposed throat.

  “Her son found her.” I give my best imitation of Red’s feral smile. “Hello.”

  Red presses the blade into my hands.

  • • •

  Morality is a moving target. Watson tries to tell me it’s not, but he’s got the Hippocratic Oath and Sherry Locke standing behind him. I’ve got a past stained with blood and a girl called Red. I can say one thing for sure: Killers aren’t born.

  They’re made.

  • • •

  The blade shakes inches above his skin. “Go ahead,” Red says. “Some people deserve to die.”

  I press the blade down and draw a vivid red line against the man’s neck. I think of Watson, who wants to be a surgeon; and Sherry, peering at my sutures. I think of mother’s face and the little girl Red used to be.

  “I always suspected you’d be weak,” hisses the man tied to the chair. “The bitch’s abomination. You should have never been born.”

  “Shut up,” I say.

  Press harder, I tell myself.

  The man is laughing.

  Red steps in front of me and takes the knife. “I’ll do it if you don’t want to.”

  He had knocked out all of mother’s front teeth. Jagged flecks of enamel sliding through the red of her blood. She died in agony.

  “Make sure it hurts,” I say.

  • • •

  For Jack, the body reads when the police discover it, and they don’t know if it’s the same person responsible or someone completely different. The Jack and Jill Killer, the press says. I wonder if Red likes her new title.

  Wonder if she’ll ever stop.

  If I even want her to.

  P.K. Gardner is a graduate student who occasionally scribbles stories in the margins of her chemistry notes. A DC area native, she spends most of her free time on a bike, a basketball court, or a soccer field. This is her first print sale.

  ORION

  by Michael Wehunt

  Miki whispers “Daddy” into the dark, as she has on the cusps of the last seven midnights. The dark breathes back onto her.

  Her hand reaches up to the shelf beside the bed and presses the large pebbled button on her alarm clock. A thin voice says, “It is eleven fifty-six p.m.” Each word’s tail is clipped by scissors.

  Anticipation prickles her back. The noises of the house gather around her. They widen through the rooms, arc up over the staircase. They slip through the gap in her door to swell in the cups of her ears.

  Jackson calls out a cooing syllable from his crib down the hall. Miki lies very still and very straight. Her lips draw back from her teeth.

  The music is low but she can hear every blemish in it. It is a rather poor performance of Chopin’s Nocturnes. She could play them more richly than this. Chopin is beautiful but easy. The broken chords of the left hand, the yearning song spilling from the right. It is playing because she is there, ensconced in her dark, but still she hears everything.

  “No, no, Lynn,” Aunt Sarah says to Mama. “Hoshu didn’t mean it like that.” The two voices drift up from the vaulted expanse of the living room, closest to the stairs. Miki could listen to Aunt Sarah’s sugary voice forever. She hopes her face is half as pretty. “He only wants to help Miki see reality.”

  Mama utters a caged bird of a noise.

  On the other side of the staircase, snippets of talk flap to her like freer birds folded out of living paper. Daddy is speaking of her—“She is eight years old now, but still she believes in these things she’s dreamed up”—with a tone that tastes like bad air. Miki hears how he says the word things differently, the extra tongue against his teeth. “She thinks a miracle is going to happen,” he says. “Her mother can’t take it. That is why we canceled the babysitter tonight.”

  Uncle Easton says something too far away for her to hear.

  “Perhaps the bigger problem,” Daddy continues, “is that Miki still has not warmed up to Jackson. We have to make her hold him. We have an appointment with someone her therapist referred us to next week.”

  “I did not dream them, Daddy.” She pushes his voice away. Her arms lock rigid against her sides.

  Dishes click together in the kitchen sink. Boot heels clump on hardwood. There is a flush beneath Miki and the water surges and groans distantly through the veins of the house. The noises are a blanket woolen and stitched and stretched over the bed of the too-thin piano. The baby has settled back into quiet. Outside is the occasional drone of a car at the other end of the long, winding driveway. There are no insects, no wind, and the oak that once scratched at her window has had its fingers shortened by Daddy’s shears. She misses it, sometimes.

  She reaches over and taps the clock’s button again. “It is eleven fifty-eight p.m.” The moments crawl on her skin.

  Beyond the bedside shelf, to the left, is the suggestion of the nightlight’s smear. A paler daub of dark with a faint electric thrum just above sound. The nightlight is a model of the
Orion constellation. The Hunter. Mama said she chose it because nothing is prettier and because its lights are so bright that Miki can see them. It is only the smear, yes, but still Mama was right. Mama has taken Miki’s fingers in hers and used them to describe Orion. Thickly bearded. Pulling back the bow, raising the club to strike, or holding a mighty lion’s pelt aloft.

  At first she longed too deeply to see the stars, and so loathed them; but as the years collect in a spreading ink pool, the smudge of light on the wall has come to be an unseen comfort. The proof of warmth and color and sun beyond the horizon, just over this hill she will soon crest.

  Daddy said to her not long ago, “Mono no aware,” in his Japanese voice, softer yet more grunting than his practiced American one. The palms of his hands were so smooth. “Where half of you is from, Miki, we say this. It means ‘the sadness of things,’ but it is up to you to be happy.”

  And Mama told her once—in her impatient voice with the words running together—that many stars are dead a thousand years before their light reaches people’s eyes. Then Mama stood up, quickly, and left Miki’s blanket bunched at her waist. Moments later Miki heard her voice, soft and snug now, lulling the baby.

  Even if it is true and Mama was not just being mean, she still wishes upon the stars. When Daddy points her finger at Orion. One wish, always. The notes of her piano are always deep and rich to her ears. Her fingers can read the riotous feel of tree bark, alive and harsh and sweet. But to see the tree that used to tap at her window, to see Daddy’s eyes shine when she performs flawlessly...

  The stars, cold or no, have never lost their wonder. And it is up to her. Miki looks toward Orion on the wall and listens to the underneath-hum. Her fingers reach toward the clock.