Poison Ink (21 page)

“Holy shit,” she whispered.

She turned to stare at the black window eyes of the tattoo shop. Adrenaline raced through her, her heart pounding. The moment the distant roar of the motorcycle vanished completely, she hurried across the street. Every instinct told her to run, to go as fast as she could before Dante had a chance to return. But if she ran, that would look suspicious, and anyone who’d noticed the girl in the baggy sweatshirt or the leather jacket hanging around the neighborhood might pay too much attention.

Dante had locked the door. That was good. Otherwise Sammi would have had to try the front entrance first to see if anyone was working there. But he wouldn’t have locked the door with someone else inside, and she hadn’t seen any customers enter since a heavyset bald guy had walked out just after seven.

Sammi walked around behind the building. A small alley ran behind that whole block, where blue trash Dumpsters overflowed with junk awaiting pickup. A single light burned in the dark alley, all the way down at the other end of the block. She found the back door of the tattoo shop easily. It was metal, and painted a dark color that might have been burgundy or brown; she couldn’t tell without more light.

“You’re not really doing this,” she whispered to herself, flexing her good hand and taking a deep breath. But that was just fear talking. Sammi had not spent all this time waiting for Dante to leave to then ignore the opportunity.

Her world had been destroyed, her friends twisted, her life shattered. She wasn’t walking away now.

Sammi set her backpack on the pavement just behind the door and glanced around to make sure she was unobserved. She listened a moment for the sound of a Harley-Davidson roar but heard only car engines going by on the street out front.

Unzipping the backpack, she took out a black leather glove and slipped it onto her right hand. Then she grabbed the tire iron. Its weight felt good in her hand. One end was tapered flat, intended to pry off hubcaps.

Her left hand would be useless except to help guide the tire iron into place. There were two locks on the door—one in the knob, and the other above it—but the keyhole in the knob looked rusted and ancient, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time.

Sammi slipped the tire iron’s flat end between the door and the frame. The door itself might have been metal, but the frame was wood. Carefully, she began to pry the bar into the space, wedging it in, trying to use it to pop the lock open, but with no luck. Sliding it beneath the lock, she pushed it deeper and rocked it back and forth, putting her weight behind it. When she had inserted it as far as it would go, she glanced around again. Then she pressed her cast against the bar, gripped it with her right hand, and shoved.

Something splintered in the frame.

Panic surged through her, and for a second she nearly bolted. The conscience she’d always had, the voice of the good girl she had always been happy to remain, urged her to stop. To run.

Screw that
. She had to know.

Sammi shoved against the tire iron again and again. The door frame splintered, the lock tearing right through the old, damp wood. With a loud pop it gave way and the door swung open.

Breathing hard, her mostly healed ribs and face throbbing, she stopped to listen for Dante’s motorcycle. Then she slid the tire iron back into her backpack, picked it up, and stepped into the darkness. Reaching out, she searched for a light switch on the wall just inside the door. When her gloved hand found it, she pulled the door closed behind her and turned the light on.

The illumination came from a single, dirty, overhead fixture and cast a yellow gloom on that room. A single glance made Sammi realize that she had broken into the area of Dante’s shop that had been off limits when she and the girls had visited before. From inside the shop, the room was padlocked.

Now Sammi understood why.

A thin futon mattress lay in one corner with a tangle of sheets and blankets and a pile of pillows on top. A refrigerator hummed against the wall. Another narrow door hung open to show a dingy bathroom. Dante actually lived here after all. A shelf stocked with food and a microwave oven completed the picture.

But that was hardly all. Dante’s living area comprised only about a quarter of the space in what had once surely been a storage room. A huge desk with a high-backed wooden chair had been set up in the middle of the room, not far from the door that led into the area where the tattooist did his work. Shelves lined the walls. There were a couple of floor lamps, but she didn’t need the additional light to see the bizarre collection of items Dante kept in the confines of his sanctuary. Two tall shelves were full of books, mostly old, faded, leather volumes.

Conscious of the time, not knowing when Dante would return, Sammi hurried into the room. On other shelves she saw bottles and plastic jars of paints and dyes, as well as metal and bamboo spines that could only be the tools for the kind of slow, agonizing tattooing that some cultures thought of as an art and Dante claimed he did not do. One shelf had shoe boxes full of Polaroid pictures. She did not take off her gloves, but fished around in the top box. What she could see of the photographs made her stomach turn. The images were of grotesque body modifications, ritual scarring, strips of skin being torn off a woman’s back and then painted, the ochre color mixing with her blood. There were piercings that made her feel sick to her stomach.

But the pictures revealed something even more unsettling. In many of the photographs, black and white and red candles burned in the background. Strange symbols were painted on the floor beneath a woman splayed out while her breasts were being linked together by a heavy chain connected to hooks that pierced her nipples.

In disgust, Sammi stepped away from the box. She turned to find herself face to face with a shelf covered with dried herbs unfamiliar to her, jars of strange-colored powders, and bottles full of cloudy liquid in which small objects floated. She couldn’t tell what they were with the debris that drifted in that liquid, and did not want to know.

“What the hell is all this?” she asked the quiet of the room.

Hurrying now, her heart beating faster and a terrible dread twisting in her gut, she went to the bookshelves. Fumbling for the switch, she clicked on the floor lamp between them, illuminating that corner of the room. Most of the books were so old that their titles were obscured or totally faded. She could make out
Sons of Arkham
and
Mysteries of the Wurm
written in antique script. Others were in languages that might have been German and Latin, and one she recognized as French.

On more than one, she saw the word “grimoire.”

She pulled one of those off the shelf and flipped it open. Inside were nonsense words and gibberish she didn’t understand at all. There were inscriptions and pages of freaky symbols, and she shuddered. Her upper lip curling in disgust, she slid the book back into place and backed away.

Sammi looked around at the other shelves again. Some of it was just extreme tattoo and body modification stuff, but the rest…

“Magic.” The word felt ridiculous on her lips. But hadn’t she suspected as much all along? What other explanation could there have been? Evidence of a depraved mind filled the room, and the occult artifacts and grimoires were just a part of that. Dante was sick.

He’ll know I’ve been here,
she thought, and a fear unlike anything she’d ever felt went through her. In that moment, Sammi thought she understood what real fear was, the terror of the unknown lurking in the dark that had plagued her ancestors in a time before civilization.

“Oh my God,” she said. “He’ll know.”

No way could she fix the lock. Her only hope was that he would assume some thief had broken in.

Glancing around for something to steal, she saw nothing of any value. No TV, no DVD player, no computer. Frantic, she hurried to his desk. On it were stacks of papers, a ragged leather book, and another shoe box full of Polaroids. Ignoring them, she started opening drawers but found only more papers. No cell phone. Nothing of value. To take anything worth real money, she’d have to get into the shop itself, and that would require breaking the padlock.

No way.

Just go,
she told herself.
He can’t know it’s you.

Unconvinced, she started to turn anyway, and the box of pictures caught her eye. On top was a Polaroid of a naked woman with long, red hair. An insidious certainty sent a chill down her spine even as her face flushed with the heat of embarrassment. Unable to stop herself, she picked up the box in her gloved hand.

T.Q. lay on a concrete floor in the midst of some kind of occult symbol drawn in chalk. Her body had been smeared with something that might be blood. She held a serpentine blade between her splayed legs in an obscene pose. Sammi refused to wonder where the blood had come from, if blood it truly was.

She dug through the box. There were other pictures, some playful, others far more obscene. Some had been taken on that same concrete floor, but many had been taken elsewhere, at Covington High or around town. All the girls were there—Caryn, Letty, and Katsuko—and none was spared. In one Polaroid, Letty was plunging a hypodermic needle into a vein between Caryn’s toes. Caryn’s eyes had rolled back to white and her mouth half opened in almost erotic pleasure.

Some were worse. Much worse.

At last, unable to look anymore, Sammi pushed the box away. She glanced down at the book that lay open on the desk. Its yellowed pages showed a number of strange designs, but unlike the occult symbols she’d seen, these were almost artful. She flipped a page and saw illustrations showing the very same antique tattooing equipment that sat on Dante’s shelves, as well as what seemed to be directions for mixing different dyes and inks.

A photograph jutted from the top of the book like a bookmark.

Her mouth dry, feeling almost as though she were in a dream, Sammi opened the book to that page. The picture had been taken from a distance, its subject unaware.

The photograph was of Sammi. From the sweater she wore in the picture, one sleeve pulled down to cover most of her cast, she knew it had been taken the previous Tuesday in front of school, while she waited for her bus.

Her good hand came up to her mouth, and for a moment she thought she would throw up. But then she saw the illustration on the yellow page that the photograph had been marking. That thick, black circle with its hollow center, five waves sweeping up from its surface. The ocean, Dante had said. He had pretended to create the image on the spot, but here it was, in a book at least a century old.

The text seemed to be some kind of Nordic language. Whatever it was, she couldn’t read it, but knew what it meant. Numb, forcing herself to breathe, she turned the page. There were other, similar designs, some with two, three, or four prongs, and some with more, all representing the number of people to be bound together by a symbol, by a ritual scarring.

By poison ink.

The girls hadn’t been bound to each other by the tattoo. Somehow, they’d been bound to Dante. Like some kind of puppet master, he had to be manipulating their every move. And if the photograph of Sammi was any indication, he wouldn’t be happy until the ritual was complete, until the spell that had been intended for five girls claimed the fifth.

Confusion filled her. If Dante wanted her under his control, why not just come for her? Why would he let the girls—or make the girls—beat her so badly? Letty and the others hadn’t so much as spoken to Sammi since she had gone back to school.

An inkling of an answer came to her. They had all come here willingly, had offered themselves up to him. Sammi thought maybe that was the difference. Maybe whatever power Dante could put into that tattoo, it wouldn’t work on her unless she asked for the tattoo—unless she wanted it. And there was no way in hell that would happen.

So why did the psycho have her picture?

Her thoughts were so busy with that question that she didn’t notice the sound right away. But then the muffled growl of the motorcycle engine grew louder, and she cursed under her breath. Frantically she flipped pages to find the one the book had been open to. Hoping she’d remembered correctly, she crossed the room, snatched up her backpack, and eased the metal door open. Heart pounding in her ears, she reached out her cast and used it to switch off the dusty light fixture, casting the room into darkness.

The alley behind the shop remained mostly shadows, but none of them moved. There didn’t seem to be anyone watching and she slipped out, ears attuned to hear any sound of Dante coming back into the shop from the front.

A frown creased her forehead. The growl of the motorcycle engine had begun to diminish again. A wave of relief washed over her as she realized that, though it was as loud as Dante’s Harley, this bike belonged to someone else. The noise of the motorcycle moved away.

Still, she owed its rider a debt. It must be at least ten o’clock by now, perhaps later. There was no telling when Dante might come back, but she had already risked too much.

Slipping the leather glove into her backpack, Sammi zipped it, then slung it across her shoulder and started walking. This time she headed along the narrow maintenance alley behind the row of shops toward the single light at the end of the block. Once there, she turned left and walked into a neighborhood of barking dogs and rusty swings. At the first cross street, she turned left again, and slowly made her way back to Vespucci Square.

The last bus came by at ten-twenty-five, according to the schedule. She made it with seven minutes to spare and then waited with mounting panic for an additional ten beyond that. When the bus arrived, late, she quickly climbed aboard, thinking that she would feel safe once it rolled away.

But Sammi did not feel safe at all.