© 2011 asotir.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
6
AMBER’S HAND scrubbed a sponge over the black mark on her shoulder. The streams of water from the shower rained across it, dissolving the suds. The tattoo wasn’t going away. She had had a wild hope that it was only the temporary tattoo, the one she had washed off before. The hope was dead now. She scratched at the mark, hard. Her nails left bloody marks in her skin around the mark, but the skin under the mark stayed unbroken.
She got out of the shower and slapped the wrapper over her still-wet skin.
The kitchen was a mess: cans and broken bottles littered the counters and the floor. She managed to shove the door partway open. She reached in past the door and opened a cabinet above the floor and fished out a bottle.
She turned the bottle over in her hand. The label was that of an expensive brandy and the bottle was unopened.
She crossed the living room and collapsed onto the floor in front of the television. She propped herself against a cushion and opened the bottle. The living room also was a mess. She stretched her leg and turned the television on with her toes. The screen filled with blue-white snow. She poured brandy into a plastic juice cup and drank it. She poured some more. The television screen grew huge, its white and blue and black bits dancing…
A sound came from the outer hall. Locks unlocking. A door opening. Light streamed into the apartment from the hall. A shadow crossed the light. Heavy, worn work shoes walked into the living room, between the television and the sofa. The legs and body cast a shadow on Amber where she lay curled up drunk and passed out on the sofa.
The shadow stood still for a long time as the ants crawled in the ant farm and the snow chased itself over the television screen. Then it turned and left. The outer door swung to and shut off the light from the outer hall. The locks clicked shut again.
The brandy bottle lay on its side on the floor. The juice cup, still with a bit of brandy, was clutched in her hand. She was draped across the cushion, sleeping. Her hair was dry now.
The ants crawled in the tracks of the ant farm. Below them the television screen danced with snow. In front of the television she stirred and sat up. She staggered to her feet.
It was night again. She opened the balcony door and stepped out.
She leaned on the rail and looked down. The wind moved through her hair and blew open the wrapper, exposing her to the squalid city but she didn’t care.
Far below, the lights of cars crawled through the tracks of the streets.
She stared down at them. Tears dropped out of her eyes.
Back in the bedroom, she stepped squarely before the long mirror. She held the wrapper tight around her throat. She turned her back to the mirror.
She could see her shoulder and her face in the mirror and her back down almost to her knees. She dropped the wrapper to the floor. Her naked back and buttocks and thighs were pale and unmarked.
She stared over her shoulder.
Her shoulder was unmarked. The tattoo was gone.
Hope and confusion filled her eyes. Was it only a bad dream? She began to smile—
—and she turned to the mirror and she was smiling and the smile went away and a look of horror replaced it: there was a mark on her chest. Her hand pulled away the key on the cord. Between her breasts was the beetle tattoo.
She stared down at it. She couldn’t believe it.
The beetle moved its legs a little and adjusted its position. It itched when it did that – she could feel in in her flesh. An itch is like the smallest tickle of pain. She wondered if the thing wanted to move fast and hard how much it would hurt. And yet it had crawled from her shoulder to her front and she hadn’t noticed. Now it settled and grew still again, as if falling asleep. It looked like a tattoo again.
She slapped at it and raked her fingernails across it and the beetle woke up and scuttled over her chest, clambered across her collarbones, dug into her throat…
She gasped. She couldn’t breathe. She clutched at her throat and collapsed at the foot of the bed.
The beetle moved down from her throat. It moved down her arm and settled on the inside of her wrist. It was the same place the mark had been on Aunt Amber’s dead body.
She gasped and coughed and sat up.
In the bathroom she switched on the light. She pulled down a box from the shelf. She set it on the sink.
Her hands opened the box. Inside were the strop and the straight razor. She took out the razor and held it in front of her face in front of the mirror. She opened the razor. She had wiped the broken blade clean but it was useless. She snapped the razor shut again.
§
INSIDE TRAXX, a hand dragged a pen across a card, leaving a bright, black trail.
Herr Doktor bent over the card in the tattooing chair as he drew the design.
Only the light over the chair was on; Herr Doktor was bright; the shop beyond was dark. There was the sound of the door opening and closing.
Herr Doktor said, ‘Ja, ja, ja … are you back so soon?’
The newcomer approached the chair. The light fell on his dark, worn trousers and heavy work shoes.
Herr Doktor looked up. He smiled.
‘Ah! Is it Brother Garrety? I have been wondering where you were hiding. Please to be seated. Please.’
The newcomer sat at the table across from Herr Doktor. His hands were thick and hard and they lay across the tabletop like marble slabs.
Herr Doktor said, ‘I have been toying with possibilities for future designs. What do you think?’
He turned the drawing around. It showed an ant. It was just like the ants in Aunt Amber’s final drawings.
Garrety said, ‘It’s not the same.’
‘Not the same as our own little friends, you mean? Oh, I agree. I quite agree. But after all, variety is next to godliness. Yes?’
Herr Doktor stroked his hand on the table.
‘I knew, when that woman came around prying, learning our secrets but refusing to make the mark upon herself, that we must make use of her,’ he said, ‘in every way we could. Is that not right, my pet? Come out, come out, see what your future playmate might be!’
The beetle tattoo emerged from under his sleeve, crawled over his wrist and settled on the back of his hand. Herr Doktor stroked it with one finger.
‘Ja, ja, sehr gut… Don’t tell me, Brother Garrety, that you are among those ignorant brothers who believe the design is everything?’
Garrety pulled an instrument form his belt and tapped the table with it. The instrument had a wooden handle and a steel round shaft like an ice pick.
Garrety said, ‘Why repeat it, then?’
‘As a sign of identity, perhaps, and comradeship. To inculcate a sense of belonging among the less sophisticated brothers. What is this toy you play with, please?’
‘It’s just an awl. We use it on voyages to repair rope – moorings, hawsers, cables, towlines, lifelines…’
Garrety jabbed the point of the awl between his fingers in the dance. His own beetle flashed on his wrist.
Herr Doktor said, ‘Ah. – Of course, I do not say the shape of the particular design is entirely without importance. On the contrary. In Jakarta, brothers have found some shapes that proved next to useless in controlling. Far too savage… Wayward elements of the flesh. The mark that you and I share is the most ancient. The most powerful. The monarch of marks, if you will. The Egyptians knew it as the divine scarabeus.’
‘And this one?’
‘Ah, this will be only a pawn, a foot-soldier among marks. Quite good enough for the herd, mind you. Not enough, perhaps, for a strong-willed fellow such as yourself. This reminds me. Brother Garrety, I am still waiting to hear of your sojourn in the desert.’
Garrety said, ‘You still haven’t told me. If it isn’t the mark – what is it?’
‘Ah, but you know it as well as I! It is the ink, Brother Garrety! The ink!’
His hand tapped the jar beside the drawing.
‘This is only common drawing ink, of course. But even here, what a miracle is captured in this bottle! A liquid that, when arranged properly, forever alters the identity of the surface it touches. There is in this bottle the basis of all civilization. For after all, what is property without the marks of ownership?’
Garrety said, ‘You mark men.’
‘We do. Men mark things and the beasts of the field. Gods mark men. But consider the ink. What is it? What is ink?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Ink is a liquid in which are suspended particles of dye. When the ink is spread upon a surface the particles of dye attach themselves to that surface. A mark is left. We all see the mark and what has become of the particles. But what has happened to the liquid? The dye particles are only flakes; the molecules of the liquid move – they breathe – they have life. They enter into the underlying fabric of the surface. Where the surface has its own liquid – as, for example, the skin of humans – the molecules of the liquid of the ink may enter into the currents within. They move – they dance – they flow. Like a colony. A colony of insects, if you will.’
‘Inside a man.’
Herr Doktor shrugged. ‘Or woman. What is a human, after all, Brother Garrety? We are only colonies of cells ourselves! The marks are colonies of ink. The shape may benefit or hinder, it depends on your purpose, but the ink is the life. The ink can join with us, if we welcome it. It can protect us. It can enable and empower and extend our lives.’
‘At a cost.’
‘What is the cost, Brother Garrety? One’s will? One’s soul? We merely exchange that shopworn article for a higher Will, a greater Soul. A Corporate identity in which we all belong. You must have felt its loss when you ran away. How lonely, how isolated, how lost you must have been, away out there in the desert!’
Garrety said, ‘It was the desert… I wandered the tracks. One train after another. The next station, and the next. I had to keep moving…’
‘And all the while,’ Herr Doktor said, ‘your little friend – it was calling out for its brothers, its kinfolk. It was longing for its home. Did it torment you very much? And how did you endure it for so long?’
Garrety repeated, ‘It was the desert… It lasted a long time … I couldn’t kill it and it couldn’t kill me. In the end, we came to an arrangement.’
He stabbed the awl down through Herr Doktor’s hand, pinning it to the table.
Herr Doktor screamed and Garrety seized his wrist in both hands and stood over the table and pulled the awl away.
Herr Doktor staggered back. He backed into the lamp and it swung up and spread its light across their faces.
Herr Doktor’s face was pale and filled with rage.
Garrety’s face was calm and determined.
Herr Doktor said, ‘What have you done? Are you insane?’
‘Yes. I think maybe I am. I’ve got a lot to make up for.’
Garrety held up his hand. On it now were two scarab marks. One had a red dot on it.
Herr Doktor cried out and lifted his hand into the light. The blood dripped from it – there was no mark.
‘Fool! It will destroy you!’
‘Maybe. But it can’t protect you now.’
He stepped forward. Herr Doktor was backed against the tattooing chair.
Garrety’s arm flashed up and down against the light.
The awl struck Herr Doktor in the chest, drew back and struck again. Herr Doktor crumpled to the floor.
Garrety stood over the tattooing chair. He took the tattooing cloth and wiped the blood off the awl.
On his wrist, Herr Doktor’s scarab was going mad, pinching and biting.
Garrety endured the pain. He pulled a piece of paper out of Herr Doktor’s pocket and lurched for the door.
§
IN THE BACK of the closet, she found the garment bag that the buyer had delivered on the first day she came here. It bore the dallio’s label. The sales slip was still attached to the bag:
For Miss Amber Wertham
For a moment she stared at the slip, confused; had Aunt Amber bought this for her? Then she remembered that her aunt shared the same last name, and yet the sense of dislocation lingered, and slowly, as if in a trance, and very gently, she took the garment bag down off the rod and laid it on the bed and unwrapped it.
The dress she found inside the garment bag was the worst and wickedest dress in her aunt’s collection ever. It made her blush just to look at it.
And yet, with the same sense of not being quite there, or quite connected to what she was doing, she took off all her clothes, even her underthings – because a dress like this wasn’t made for anything to go on under it – and wormed her way into that dress.
Amber stood in front of the mirror in the bedroom. She gawked at herself. Maybe it would be better to say that she gawked at what she saw in the mirror, because it didn’t look like herself at all. She was a beautiful, worldly, even wild, woman. She continued to prepare herself for the night. She did up her hair the way Aunt Amber did hers. She put on her aunt’s earrings and touched up her makeup. The makeup wasn’t the way she remembered her aunt, but it seemed to her as though there was only one way to make herself up when she looked like that, in that dress. And still she went on about everything as if half asleep and dreamy-eyed. She tried on the antique spectacles, but they made everything blurry so she took them off. Other than that, she looked exactly like Aunt Amber.
She dropped the lipstick into Aunt Amber’s purse on the dresser. She added the keys. She added the strop and the straight razor. She snapped the purse shut and moved toward the door, when the telephone rang.
She turned and looked at it.
§
GARRETY paced in the gateway to the platform at the station. It seemed he’d been waiting for awhile. He looked up.
The station clock said: 12:00 am. Below it, there were only a few people on the concourse. One of them, a woman, was walking straight for the gateway.
Garrety stared at her. For a moment, he looked startled, puzzled.
‘Miss Wertham?’ he said.
The woman came closer. It was the woman he murdered. She walked right up and confronted him.
Then his eyes widened. ‘You’re – the niece. Not the aunt?’
‘That’s right.’
He shook his head. ‘If you’d been wearing the glasses, instead…’
She cut him short.
‘You wanted to see me.’
Still shaking his head, Garrety pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. She looked at it.
‘My ticket. Where did you get it?’
‘From somebody it didn’t belong to. You can go home now. You’re free.’
She stared at the ticket.
‘Thanks.’
Garrety said, ‘There’s a train heading east in ten minutes. That’s it there. Forget about all this. It’s finished now. Soon it’ll all be dead.’
He walked away. He left her in the middle of the gateway and walked back across the concourse.
She looked at the ticket.
The hand that held the ticket was steady. Below the wrist on the inside of the arm was a small mark, round in black lines, like a beetle.
She said in a little voice, ‘Too late…’
She stuffed the ticket in the purse and looked back down the concourse.
At the foot of the stairs Garrety staggered and leaned against the rail.
There was a mark on his neck, a beetle with a red dot. Even at the distance she could see it clearly. Her own mark twitched on her wrist in recognition. Garrety clutched his throat and tried to breathe.
Another mark emerged from under his collar, and attached itself to the beetle with the red dot.
Garrety began to breathe again. He stood up, still in great pain but he managed it and he took hold of the rail and started up the stairs.
She made up her mind. There really wasn’t any other choice.
She crossed the concourse to the foot of the stairs. She looked up.
Garrety reached the top of the stairs and turned right.
Amber started up after him.
§
THE SIGN on the lamppost said: Sandspray Road. Garrety walked beneath it. He continued into darkness. Amber appeared. She lingered in the light. Then she went on.
Garrety walked down the street through the pools of light. Behind him Amber followed. She paused at the edge of a pool of light and she watched him.
Garrety continued down the street and climbed the steps to the club Elysium. He went inside.
Amber watched him. She stepped forward in front of the window to dallio’s. Everything was the same there in the window and the mannequin was still missing.
Amber went to the door of the shop and she opened the door and went in. The door shut behind her.
§
IN ELYSIUM, Garrety moved through the darkness and splashes of multicolored lights, up to the bar.
The bartender was fixing a drink and his back was to Garrety. Garrety tapped on the bar.
Behind him was the club – pulsing with recorded music, many tables, very full, some couples dancing on the dance floor almost naked. The hostess noticed Garrety. She smiled and approached him.
‘The return of the Prodigal Son! – Or are you the Fatted Calf?’
Garrety said, ‘I’m tired.’
She said, ‘Got a light?’
He lit her cigarette and she sucked it in. She flipped the pack of cigarettes onto the bar.
Garrety said, ‘Are you thirsty too, or is it only me?’
‘Forgive him, he’s new at the job. And very dense. You there! Get the gentleman a drink!’
The bartender turned round. He was the morgue attendant. He stood and moved stiffly.
‘Yes, sir?’
Garrety said, ‘Brandy. That’s what Amber drinks. Alone in her apartment.’
The hostess said, ‘Are you watching over her now? We were wondering where you’d got to. Always disappearing, Brother Garrety. The shame of it. The great abiding pity of you, you sorry excuse for a man.’
Garrety said, ‘Leave the bottle.’
He drank. The morgue attendant refilled it.
The hostess said, ‘Did you know there is a new design for a mark?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s a very clever, very long-lived, very vicious design.’
She pulled the card out and placed it on the bar.
‘We found it in the tattoo parlor. Isn’t it beautiful? I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it. I want it. I want to feel it under my skin, inside me. There is a problem, though.’
Garrety said, ‘What’s that?’
‘You can see for yourself. It isn’t finished. It’s incomplete. It’s crippled, poor darling.’
‘So finish it.’
‘That’s the problem, you see. The artist is missing.’
Garrety said, ‘Can’t you finish it?’
‘Oh, no, not me. This requires a skillful hand. You wouldn’t know what happened to the artist, would you?’
‘Who was it?’
‘I thought you knew. It was Herr Doktor. Herr Doktor himself.’
‘I didn’t know he was so talented.’
‘Didn’t you? First the woman, then Brother Sammo, now… It’s becoming so difficult to find the right designer. You wouldn’t know what happened to Herr Doktor, would you, Brother Garrety?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? Are you sure you haven’t even a tiny idea?’
Garrety said, ‘The place is full tonight.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? We are becoming more and more chic. I take the credit for that, of course – after all, I was the one who thought of the entertainment in the back room. But as to Herr Doktor, Brother Garrety—’
Garrety said, ‘I want to see her.’
The hostess shook her head. ‘She’s not for you.’
Garrety drank another glass of brandy and took the hostess’ hand and twisted it at the wrist, very hard, and held it there. She gasped.
Garrety said, ‘I’m going to see her.’
‘You’re an idiot, didn’t you see enough of her before?’
Garrety said, ‘You’re going to take me.’
The morgue attendant watched from behind the bar. His eyes were dead. But there was a hint of a smile at his lips.
The hostess shook her head. She smoked and her eyes narrowed into a particularly vicious and unpleasant look at the seaman. ‘Yes,’ she said at last, and smiled brightly. ‘All right. If you really want her so much.’
Garrety released her. She rubbed her wrist. She looked off to one side.
Half in the shadows behind a pillar, the man in the fedora stood watching.
The hostess nodded. She looked back to Garrety.
‘This way.’
He put the bottle of brandy at the floor by the bar and followed her.
§
AMBER passed through dallio’s women’s department. The buyer was there. He was dressing one of the mannequins.
The buyer said, ‘We’re closed.’
She said, ‘This won’t take long.’
She moved on into the men’s department.
The buyer looked annoyed. He dropped what he was doing and followed her. He was another type she knew pretty well, the snooty store clerk who acted like he was boss and took sides with the owner, when all along he was just another hired hand, just a slave like any clerk.
She reached the counter. The glass case was filled with expensive toiletry items. The buyer moved into position behind the counter.
‘How may I help you?’
‘You have quite a collection. Is this everything?’
The buyer said, ‘More rarely requested items are in the cabinets. If you’re in the mood to browse, might I suggest returning during business hours—’
She unsnapped her purse and took something out and placed it on the counter with a click.
It was the straight razor.
The buyer stared at it.
Amber said, ‘Is this one of yours?’
He held it up and opened it.
‘It’s broken.’
‘I see that.’
‘If you’re here to return the razor, may I ask to see the sales receipt—’
‘I don’t want to return it,’ she said. ‘I just want it repaired.’
The buyer said, ‘Oh. It needs a new blade.’
‘Do you have any?’
The buyer glared at her, stooped and retrieved several boxes from the cabinets. He opened them. They contained blades for straight razors. They glittered in the light.
The buyer said, ‘Yes, I think this will do.’
‘Can you replace it now?’
‘Certainly.’
He unfastened the peg and removed the broken blade and replaced it.
‘Charge it,’ she told him, ‘to the usual account.’ At his look she added, ‘Miss Amber Wertham’s account.’ He went back to the work.
She said, ‘Are you Mr Dallio?’
He gave her a look that made her blush. ‘No, I’m not Mr Dallio,’ he said with a kind of a sneer.
‘I’ve been by the shop several times,’ she said, ‘since that night. I’m sorry if I was rude.’
The buyer said, ‘Of course.’
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen you before in my life.’
‘Didn’t this dress come from here?’ she asked. ‘It bears your label, after all. All the dresses in my closet bear your label.’
‘This is done now. If there’s nothing further—?’
He ushered her to the door.
‘Good night, Miss.’
He closed the door and locked it. The sign in the window stated: CLOSED.
She walked to a bench. She looked back at the shop. She put the razor in her purse and she sat at a bus stop and waited. She looked back at the shop.
The lights inside the shop went off, all but the lights in the display window. The door opened and the buyer emerged. He locked the door behind him and looked right and left and proceeded down the street.
She rose from the bench and followed.
The buyer crossed the street to Elysium. The hostess greeted him at the door and he went in.
Amber paused on the sidewalk. She looked up at the club. She mounted the steps.
Someone stepped into her way.
It was the bald man.
‘Are you a member?’
She said, ‘I just want a drink.’
He looked her up and down in a way that brought the heat to her cheeks and made her intensely aware she wasn’t wearing a stitch underneath the wicked dress.
‘This is a private club,’ he said at last. ‘Members and their guests only.’
He went back in and shut the door.
She tried the knob. It was locked.
She walked down the steps and stood on the pavement. Distantly she could hear the little girl.
Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
She looked back up at the club. The sign glowed: Elysium. The Last Gasp.
§
INSIDE THE CLUB the music was pulsing as the buyer followed the hostess. People were dancing together almost naked, others sat at tables and watched and drank and talked. And on arms, on shoulders, on thighs, on ankles, the buyer saw the marks, the tattoos as he moved through them and the hostess led him on.
The hostess indicated a table near the back. The buyer sat.
‘Your server will be with you in a moment.’
The buyer said, ‘Excuse me, this isn’t – exactly—’
‘Yes, sir?’
The buyer said, ‘I had heard – that is to say, there have been rumors … I did provide her costumes, after all … and I heard…’
He pulled out a wallet and laid it on the table. It was fat with bills.
The hostess removed her cigarette from her lips. She smiled.
‘This way, sir.’
Across the crowded room the hostess led the buyer to a small, curtained door to one side. The passed through it.
The hallway was dark. The music faded behind them as the hostess and the buyer proceeded down the hall.
At the far end was a small door. The man in the fedora was waiting there. He opened the door.
The hostess led the buyer into the back room. The room was dark. But there was a little light beside the door and in the light stood the Mannequin in the Nightdress. There was something different about her.
On her cheek was a small design, round in black lines. It looked like a beetle.
The buyer seemed pleased to see her.
‘Oh, yes… my offering… You liked it, then?’
‘We appreciated it. We call her our newest member.’
The buyer said, ‘How amusing.’
‘This way.’
They passed through a fringed curtain. The room beyond was dark, lit only by strips of theater lighting in the floor. Starry spots of light shone off the walls and ceiling, but it was difficult to say where the lights came from. There were other patrons at the dozen or so small tables, but all that could be seen of them were their shoes, so outrageously expensive they looked almost commonplace. The buyer knew the other patrons were all ladies and gentlemen, by the elegance and luxury of the shoes. They were ladies and gentlemen of exquisite taste and the most refined courtesy. He could tell these things; dallio’s had a most civilized clientèle and the prices kept the riffraff out.
Along the way he stumbled on another patron’s foot. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he murmured.
‘Of course,’ the unseen man’s voice replied, equably.
The hostess led him to a table.
‘I trust this will be satisfactory.’
The buyer said, ‘Yes, an excellent table. But it’s rather hot in here, isn’t it?’
He handed her a generous bill. She took it.
‘Thank you, sir. Yes, there’s a reason for the heat… You’re just in time. I know you won’t regret the experience.’
She left.
Another strip of theater lighting rimmed the stage. After a moment, the curtains parted and the hostess emerged. She was dressed the same, still smoking the cigarette that hung from her whorish red lips. But she now wore a pair of hospital latex gloves on her hands. It struck the buyer as both puzzling and dangerous.
The hostess gave a slight, sardonic bow.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, Damen und Herren,’ she said in her husky voice. ‘Welcome to the Chamber of Mirrors. Some of you have come before, and are eagerly awaiting a repetition of your previous experience. Others have come for the first time, lured by the whispers of a novel and compelling, even extraordinary spectacle. To you I say, you will not be disappointed! For tonight you will witness a sight unlike any other you have witnessed in your lives. It may shock you, it may appall you; indeed I hope and pray it does, for these are among the rarest of emotions reserved for connoisseurs such as yourselves, the privileged few who are admitted into membership to the Elysium.’ She smiled, evidently relishing her little performance, enjoying the petty cruelty of making them wait. She sucked in a lungful of smoke and exhaled it.
The buyer thought he heard in her exhalation a little moan of pleasure. He leaned forward and drummed his fingers on the table. Would the woman never get on with it?
The hostess dropped her cigarette on the stage and ground it under her stiletto heels.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Damen und Herren, it is my pleasure to give you … our Lady of 1,001 Marks!’
The curtains parted, and the bald man and the morgue attendant pushed a large, cylindrical glass tank to the front of the stage. Both men wore hospital latex gloves. They pushed the tank up to the front edge of the stage and withdrew behind the curtains.
Affixed to the glass tank were a dozen or so video cameras. Cables and power lines emerged from the back of the cameras and slithered to the floor behind the tank like so many parasitical snakes. The cylindrical tank was lighted from the inside of the blue steel containment lip at the bottom. The light filtered up through the sluggish, oily liquid, which had a faint tinge of a sickly greenish hue. The small room became suffused with an odor somewhat antiseptic, somewhat nauseating – an odor as of nursing home corridors or the back rooms of funeral parlors where the embalming takes place.
Within the liquid hung a nude human body.
A few gasps came from the audience, accompanied by hushed, excited murmurs.
The body suspended in the liquid was that of a woman. From the angle of the limbs and the lack of any bubbles in the liquid, or provision of any visible breathing apparatus, it was certain the woman was dead. Only her long hair, which was fair rather than dark, waved and floated up from her neck and skull in the liquid.
Lights flickered on about the cylinder. They were small focused lamps attached to the barrels of the cameras. The shafts of light pierced the greenish liquid, illuminating small spots on the dead woman’s flesh. At the same time, red activity lights shone on the camera controls.
A hiss sounded, of a rapid intake of breath, from a nearby table. The buyer wiped at his brow. The tension in the crowded chamber was unbearable.
Along both sides of the stage, double rows of monitors buzzed and glowed. The monitors were stacked from floor to ceiling. The monitors were apparently connected to the cameras through the cable snakes, for they all showed, in invasive detail, small areas of the dead woman’s body.
The glow of the monitors was picked up and reflected in hundreds of mirrors set in the ceiling and the walls of the oval chamber. Around, behind, and above the patrons, the mirrors shone with the close pictures of the skin as seen through the sluggish, greenish liquid.
The monitors and mirrors betrayed that the skin was neither pure nor unmarked.
Small shapes appeared upon the skin. The shapes were varied in size, shape, and color. The buyer had seen several of those shapes before, on the cards on white linen in the display window of the tattoo parlor, Traxx.
They were tattoos.
And before the eyes of the hushed, straining crowd, the tattoos in the monitors and mirrors began to twitch, and move, and dance.
A woman at a table across the room moaned; her body slumped in her chair and had to be supported by her companions. A man at one of the front tables swore a foul expletive in a rough, loud, rasping voice. A woman tittered; the sound was bitten off abruptly with a hiccup of fear or pleasure.
The buyer looked from the stage to the monitors to the mirrors nearest to his table, to the ceiling mirrors overhead. The entire Chamber of Mirrors had the look of a grotesque kaleidescope, that held them all captive in the gap between the lenticular views of the tattoos crawling and scuttling across the dead woman’s corpse within the greenish, sickly-smelling liquid.
The couple at the table directly in front of the buyer took hold of each other’s hands, leaned forward and kissed. Within moments they were caressing each other passionately, hands shamelessly groping beneath elegant gown and tuxedo trousers. No one paid attention to them for more than a moment, any more than the buyer, whose eyes quickly returned to the mirrors, the monitors, and the nude form in the cylindrical tank on stage.
Something had happened in the tank. Something was different. The buyer leaned forward; he glanced upwards to the mirrors in the ceiling but saw no difference in the mirrors or the monitors. Only in the tank … yes, that was it. And realizing what it was brought a shudder of fear and loathing up and down the buyer’s spine.
The corpse in the tank was moving now.
Her arms were waving, slightly … her legs kicked like gentle butterflies … her torso undulated, softly, smoothly, languorously.
She swayed and danced, and gradually twirled about in the greenish liquid. Her left flank now faced the audience, and a few minutes later her backside was to them. Then her right flank came to the fore, and finally her front again, breasts and belly and smooth tattooed sex.
With a sickening wrench, the buyer realized that in fact the dead woman wasn’t moving at all. Gasps sounded from the tables around him, and from the back, the sounds of a slight, insistent retching. No, the dead woman wasn’t moving … it was the tattoos, the brilliant, multicolored, exotic, bizarre tattoos that twitched and writhed in the dead woman’s flesh, and tugged and pulled and animated the dead nerves and tissues in the lovely corpse.
And then, even as she undulated and swayed back around to face them all, the corpse opened her eyes, and looked at them.
The effect was instant, and extreme.
Two women on the far left of the room fainted dead away. Their companions, utterly engrossed in the spectacle in the tank, hardly noticed; the two women’s bodies slid unattended onto the floor. The couple directly in front of the buyer’s table engaged in the climax of their feverish caresses, stiffened, moaned, gasped, and achieved a compulsive, spasmodic orgasm.
The buyer scarcely saw. His gaze was locked on the dead woman’s face.
The light from the bottom of the tank was faintest above her breasts and shoulders. Her face and head were in shadow, a silhouette against the greenish, glowing liquid in which she drowned. From out of the depths of this shadowy silhouette, the eyes seemed to shine with their own inner light.
The eyes were the color of sea-green glass. They were clear and soft and held no expression of fear or yearning or loathing. They held no expression whatsoever. They were like the painted eyes of a doll, like the eyes of a fish, like the eyes of a mannequin. They were the most lifeless and deadly thing about her. Did they judge? Did they condemn? Did they despair? Did they detest? The flat, level, unblinking gaze continued, even as the tattoos scuttled and pinched about the dead embalmed flesh, and the limbs and naked torso swayed and danced, and the sluggish currents in the oily liquid swirled about, drawing the seaweed-like hair up and about the darkened face in which the two sea-green eyes glowed with no life whatsoever.
The buyer found them deliriously and deliciously desirable.
He glanced about him, suddenly ashamed of himself for the stabs of lust that wracked him. But he found no cause for worry. He was not alone in feeling what he did. From the eyes of every patron about his table, from gentlemen and ladies alike, an equal lust was shining.
It was her death they lusted for. It was her flesh, animated by the living tattoos. It was the tattoos themselves. It was her eyes and what lay behind them, in the dreadful, unnameable meaning that lay behind those dead, dead eyes.
It was all these things, and other things even uglier to contemplate.
And one thing more, one secret for himself alone; he knew with certainty not one of the other patrons could know it. For he knew who the nude dead woman was. He had dressed her many times, had measured her body with detailed exactitude, had designed special outfits for her, had … he had no doubt whatsoever that the nude corpse in the tank crawling with hundreds of obscene tattoos was or had once been Miss Amber Wertham, noted children’s book illustrator and author, recently raped and murdered in a dirty back alley in the butt end of the city, not far from the Elysium.
‘I must have her,’ the buyer whispered, licking his dry lips. ‘I must have that creature!’
The monitors faded out. The activity lights on the camera controls died. The spotlights on the lens mounts went out. The dead woman danced on, slowly, languorously, in the tank, but she was only a shadow now, except for the still-glowing, deadly eyes. Then the bald man and the morgue attendant emerged from the curtains and pulled the tank backstage again.
A sigh issued from the collective throat of the crowd. ‘No, please … not yet,’ one woman whimpered.
The buyer looked down, and noticed that he had been holding his fists so tightly that his fingernails had dug deep into his palms, drawing blood.
The hostess appeared.
‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, Damen und Herren,’ she said. She gave them another slight bow, her lips curling around the cigarette shaft with pleasurable disgust. ‘This concludes tonight’s exhibition.’
