© 2011 asotir.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
8
IT WAS the last half-hour before dawn. The sky was ashen and violet but the earth and the buildings were dark, all but the burning club.
Amber staggered down the steps. The morgue attendant and the hostess followed her. The hostess looked back from the pavement.
‘Ruined … all of it … gone … my sweet little mark…’
Amber left them. She walked across the street.
The front of the tattoo parlor approached. Traxx. Amber moved in front of the window and her ghost crossed the cards with the designs and behind the ghost she could see the reflections of flames from the burning club. Somewhere in the distance sirens sounded and grew.
Amber turned from the tattoo parlor and moved along the street.
She walked for what seemed like a long time.
The next thing she knew, her bare feet were treading the planks of the pier.
She reached the next-to-last lantern. She leaned over the rail.
Thirty feet below, the waves surged against the pilings.
She took hold of the iron ladder and climbed down.
Out below the pier the sea was bright but under the boardwalk it was almost dark as night. It smelled of foul things, the ugliness that corroded the city of San Pedro like a cancer for which there will be no cure.
She walked between huge dark pilings. She walked into the light.
She emerged from under the pier and walked up the small beach. She didn’t feel troubled or peaceful. She’d seen and known things no sane person should ever experience. The horror of the past nights lingered in her, crawling about her soul like one of Sammo’s marks. The memories felt like pins and needles, like an itch about to turn painful.
She stopped and looked at the water. She walked down to the waves. The beach was empty and so was the sea; the sky was smudged with clouds and the red crescent moon sank to the horizon.
The wave broke over her feet.
She looked out into the waves. She waded faster.
A wave engulfed her in foam; the wave passed and her head bobbed up, and she was moving her arms, staying afloat. She splashed against the currents, learning for the first time in her life what it was to swim. She wasn’t afraid of it. Fear seemed like it had been burned out of her soul along with the mark that had grown in her flesh and then crawled down onto Garrety’s arm to join the thousand other obscene vile things that writhed there like living things. Compared to that, what was there to fear in some seawater?
She paddled out into the bay. It was cold and biting and it stank with oil and garbage and the waves slopped against her and made her bounce up and down and up and down. She was gasping and it was like laughter.
The waves were falling, and Amber emerged out of them and walked into the shallows.
Her feet splashed in the water. She tugged down the skirt and pulled up the top of the fetish dress. She was glad there wasn’t anybody else around to see. She looked up from her feet back to land. She frowned.
Out of the sand a twig of driftwood rose, and the wind blew the sand away from it, unburying something. Amber’s hand reached down and pulled the thing out of the sand.
She stood on the beach and examined it.
It was a black leather choker from which a silver crescent moon hung with a star. On the back of the moon was marked,
For Amber
Amber lifted the choker to her throat and strapped it on. She noticed for the first time that she didn’t have the cord with the key on it any more. Somewhere back there it had fallen out, on the street maybe, or under the pier, or in the bay.
She sat in the sand, trying not to show too much under the dress. She took out her train ticket and looked on it for a long time. She read the names on it, one San Pedro, the other the station nearest home.
She crumpled the ticket and let the wind carry it off with the rest of the garbage.
The sun rose higher in the sky. Some joggers passed by. It was broad day. A woman in a drying black fetish dress sat in the sand looking out to sea.
