The Tattooed Heart (5 page)

As always there was food in the kitchen: fresh fruit, cereal, and milk, Flake bars—a habit I'd picked up during a childhood visit to the UK—and even a frozen pizza. All things I would ordinarily eat.

I made myself a dinner-breakfast of egg, cheese, and English muffin sandwich and wished this place had come with internet, or at least TV. But this place existed outside of normal space and time so the cable company did not exactly have its lines here.

There were books, however. Some were the sorts of books I normally read for pleasure, but there were some heavy, leather-bound tomes as well, that could not have been placed there by accident. There was a shelf of these just to the side of the fireplace.

Someone or something had arranged kindling, logs, and matches, and I took that as an invitation.
Before there was computer-plus-internet to shine a light on our faces there was fire. I built a decent little blaze that crackled impressively and threw off the odd spark. I pulled cushions off the sofa and sat there within range of the comforting heat with a small pile of obscure books.

“
Thesis and Antithesis: The Search for Balance
,” I read aloud. “Wow, that sounds like the dullest book ever written.” As did a book simply titled
Justice
that weighed about as much as one might expect so portentously titled a book to weigh.

In the end I opened a large but not terribly thick book with a magnificently embossed blue leather cover.

“Isthil,” I read aloud.

Messenger had taken me to Shamanvold, that awe-inspiring pit where the names of all Messengers are inscribed alongside bas-reliefs of the Heptarchy, the Seven Gods, of which Isthil was one.

I opened the book and read.

In the beginning was the void.

Into the void came existence.

But existence was precarious,

Suspended above the void,

Surrounded by the void.

A guppy at the shark's mouth.

A feather floating before the waterfall.

A pebble wobbling at the lip of a bottomless pit.

Ours is not the first existence.

Existence has occurred before.

And existence has failed.

It has fallen into the shark's teeth.

It has been swept down into the rushing water.

It has tipped and fallen into the pit.

Existence blinks into being,

And in a blink is gone.

“Well, that's cheerful,” I muttered to the fireplace.

Into existence came the Seven.

Summoned by the will of existence itself.

Summoned to serve existence.

Summoned to ensure that this time,

Existence should not fail.

Summoned to maintain the balance,

Of the guppy, the feather, and the pebble.

Summoned to extend the length of that blink.

And thus was Isthil born . . .

I read on, skimming past the long origin story, looking for the passage Messenger had quoted. And there, at last, amid a series of homilies and parables, I found it, though Messenger had slightly misquoted.

“The fool says, ‘I never intended to kill, I meant only to wound.' But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that to hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet will love triumph.”

The message came from a strange god, not my God, but it was no different than the lesson of my own faith, and perhaps many other faiths as well. Whatever Isthil really was, divine or mortal, god or pretender, I thought her words wise.

I decided I must read further, but the warmth of the fire and the lingering horror of seeing children shot down as I watched helplessly took their toll.

I did not dream of Isthil or of the balance of the world. I dreamed of places I had known, and people: a mother. A father now lying in his honored grave. Teachers. Friends. All of them in my dream seem to be on the other side of a pane of thick glass. I could hear their voices only as unintelligible murmurs. I saw their faces, but distorted by distance and the eternal yellow mist that in some way separated me from ordinary life.

And then, yes, I dreamed of Messenger. I saw him in my mind without his long black coat. Without the symbols of his office, the ring of horror and the ring of Isthil.

To my unfettered subconscious imagination he was the boy he was before becoming the Messenger of Fear, or at least how I imagined he must have been. Tall and beautiful as he was still, but sitting on a rock at the edge of the ocean, laughing as waves sent cold, salt spray to dampen his chest and shoulders, and the rope-gathered linen pants I had dressed him in.

Yes, I looked with more than casual interest at his
chest and shoulders, at his long black hair as it blew behind him, at his compassionate eyes. Yes, Oriax, I confess.

But even in my dream I knew it was false, for I knew that Messenger's body was covered in the tattoo-vivant marks of the horrors he had seen and made to happen.

I did not, in my dream, look at the single such terrible decoration that now marked my own body. I never looked at that, not in dreams, and only reluctantly in reality.

But in my dream Messenger did not look at me as I looked at him. Instead he whispered a single word. The crashing waves tore that word from his lips, but I knew in my heart that what he had said was, “Ariadne.”

Ariadne, not Mara. Nor could it ever be Mara.

I think I cried in my sleep then, though I remember no dream, for my pillow was damp upon waking.

“It's time,” Messenger said, but he was no longer the laughing boy by the ocean. He was back, looming above me, the real Messenger of Fear, grim and relentless.

5

“ARE WE GOING AFTER TRENT AND PETE?” I asked.

“Yes. But not yet. Later. For now we have a very different matter to address.”

I was on the point of asking him where we were about to suddenly appear next, but by the time I could form the question, we had already stood in a wrecked, abandoned room.

It took me a while to establish just where we were. Messenger, of course, did not volunteer to help, preferring I suppose, that I use my own powers of
observation. I don't think I'd ever been particularly observant before, but I had changed and grown since becoming what Oriax liked to call “mini-Messenger” and I now paid a great deal more attention to my environment.

In this case the environment was an abandoned business of some sort. That it was abandoned was evident from the filth, the dust, the cobwebs and spiderwebs, the lack of any light aside from the ghostly greenish-gray of streetlights filtering in through a grimy window and grimier glass door.

There was a waist-high counter that surely once held a cash register. Behind the counter was a twisted mess of wire racks, a torn cardboard poster for Camel cigarettes. Strewn across the linoleum tile floor of the room were random bits of shelving, an upended round cooler splashed with the Pepsi logo, and a liberal scattering of trash—candy wrappers, empty chips bags, plastic cups, paper hot dog holders, empty water bottles, cigarette butts, and dried feces.

Against the back wall were empty spaces that would once have held refrigerated cases.

“It was a convenience store,” I announced proudly,
as though I really was playing Watson to Messenger's Sherlock.

Messenger was not wildly impressed by my powers of deduction.

The place stank of human and animal waste, of rotting garbage and dust. The room appeared empty. I heard a slight scratching sound, assumed it was a rat and carefully scanned the floor around me while wondering if there was a weapon at hand should the rat come my way.

Messenger moved to the back of the room, to the empty rectangles where the cold cases had once dispensed beer and soda and packs of salami and cheese. The glow of streetlights did not reach this far, but to my surprise the space was not entirely dark. There seemed to be a candle within, judging from the buttery light that flickered and at times disappeared entirely.

The scratching sound came again and something about it contradicted my assumption that it was an animal. It was too slow to be a rat. Too random.

I leaned into the void and saw the candle first, and the person lying near the candle second. I saw that it was a girl, a girl hard to place age-wise, though I
guessed she might be seventeen or so. She had dark hair that looked as if she had made an effort to gather it all together with a scrunchie, but wisps and entire hanks of hair had escaped. Her face might be pretty. I wasn't entirely sure, as it was both dirty and marked with too much makeup.

She was dressed like a bargain basement Oriax, but the net effect spoke not of supernatural allure but rather of vulnerability and despair.

I don't know why it took me so long to notice the syringe in the crook of her elbow. Maybe I just didn't want to see it.

It lay there, the needle still in the vein. A trickle of blood had started to dry. A leather belt lay loosened around her bicep. A tablespoon with a blackened bottom was on the floor beside the guttering candle.

“Her name is Graciella Jayne, though she has taken to calling herself Candy. She is seventeen.”

“Is?” I asked sharply, for I had leaped to the sad conclusion that she was dead.

“She lives still,” Messenger said. He cocked his head, as did I upon hearing a sound of footsteps and low conversation. From the direction of what must have
been the store's back door came a boy and a girl, both much the same age as Graciella.

Both looked to be in the same . . . business . . . as Graciella, the boy dressed in a skintight T-shirt that bared his lean midriff, while the girl wore the shortest of shorts and a top that would have doubled for a bathing suit.

“Candy!” the boy cried. They rushed to Graciella and knelt beside her. The rush of bodies extinguished the flame and for a moment they were in near pitch-darkness. Then a lighter flared in the boy's hand and the candle was relit.

“Oh, my God, she OD'd,” the girl said.

“Is that the stuff she got off Jenks?”

“Same stuff we've got, Mouse. Jesus.”

The two of them looked at each other and slowly the boy named Mouse pulled a small, rectangular packet of white powder from his pocket. A logo had been stamped on it. A pink pony.

“We have to call 911,” Mouse said.

“I have to boot up first,” the girl said.

“Are you crazy? You want to end up like her? That stuff is cut with something bad.”

“Maybe not, maybe it's just real high-test, you know? Too pure will kill you. So I could just shoot half a spoon. Three-quarters, you know?”

Mouse stood up. “I'm calling 911.” He pulled out a cell phone and, shaking his head at the girl's plaintive look, called in an overdose.

The girl began slapping Graciella's face, saying, “Wake up, Candy, come on. Wake up.”

Graciella managed a low moan, but only one, and then she slid back into coma.

“Okay, come on Sue Lynn, we gotta get out of here before the EMTs show up,” Mouse said.

“This neighborhood, it'll take them twenty minutes,” the girl said. “And don't call me Sue Lynn. I'm Jessica now. And I have got to fix. It's nighttime, Mouse, I'm getting sick.”

All the while I watched Graciella. Her breathing was shallow. Her skin was gray and covered in sweat. Gray even by the gentle amber light of the candle. It was all I could do to stop myself asking Messenger the question: Can't we help her?

I knew the answer to that. The answer is always the same. We may not interfere. We are not there for the
victims. We are there for the people who create victims.

Yet first we must understand what has been done, that is the rule, that is the way of the Messengers of Fear.

The EMTs arrived, as Jessica had predicted, after about twenty minutes. By then Mouse and Jessica were gone. Did they go to shoot up? Almost certainly. Would their lives end in tragedy? Probably.

Would I find myself someday looking down at the dead body of one or the other or both, wondering what wickedness I was there to punish? That was a grim thought that would bring feelings of hopelessness in its wake. I pushed the thought away.

The arrival of the EMTs gave me my first inkling of where we were. The patch on their shoulders indicated Nashville, Tennessee.

The EMTs, a man and a woman, moved with practiced efficiency, barely speaking because they had seen OD'd junkies before, many times. They hung a transparent bag of fluid and pushed a needle into Graciella's arm. But the veins had been weakened to near collapse and the needle did not work. The EMT pulled it out, tried again. Again nothing. It took her six tries to find a vein that could handle the flow of fluids. The other EMT
took her pulse, blood pressure, checked her eyes, and said, “Pinpoint. BP is seventy over thirty-five. Breathing shallow and irregular.”

“Naloxone?”

“Yep.”

A shot into the muscle of her thigh this time. They radioed in to the emergency room at Vanderbilt University Hospital.

“BP's rising, ninety over forty.”

“She'll live,” I said, as though I were part of their conversation and not invisible and inaudible.

We watched as they brought in a gurney, kicking trash aside to allow them to roll it. A third EMT arrived and helped them lift Graciella onto it and pass a strap over her waist.

Then, without warning, Messenger and I were outside the red brick hospital. Ambulances pulled up but none were carrying Graciella; she was already inside. We walked through the doors, slid past nurses, technicians, doctors, and patients, and came upon Graciella in one of the beds. A young foreign doctor stood at the foot of her bed addressing half a dozen medical students.

“Heroin overdose. EMTs reported low BP, low pulse,
nonresponsive, breathing shallow. They administered fluids and Naloxone. The workup indicated what we already knew: OD. When results come in I expect we'll find she's positive for at least one STD, and almost certainly positive for hepatitis. Malnourished, of course.”

“She looks young,” one medical student offered.

“I'd say fifteen, sixteen, give or take, younger than she looks,” the doctor said wearily. “She's most likely a runaway turning tricks. She is still in a coma, but brain function appears normal.”

I turned away. She looked too vulnerable lying there being discussed by strangers as though she wasn't even present. Of course in a way she wasn't present.

“She's a junkie,” I said to Messenger, and perhaps my distaste was too obvious for he shot me a cold and disapproving look that I took as a rebuke.

I bristled at that. “It's what happens to junkies,” I said harshly.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“People shouldn't take drugs,” I said, coming off more self-righteous than I intended. “I mean, come on, who doesn't know that heroin is dangerous?”

“And you want to look no further?” he asked.

“I guess I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who screw up their lives in some obviously stupid way. There's people who have terrible things just happen to them. There are people being shot in the back in a school yard. That boy . . . those girls . . . and now this stupid girl, who nearly killed herself and may do so yet.”

“You spare no pity for the foolish.”

“I do have pity, it's just . . . I mean, you can't compare that brave boy standing up to gunmen and this girl here.”

He was silent, but it was a silence that carried the weight of disapproval.

The doctor and the medical students had moved on to another case. Graciella lay alone. All alone. A pretty but ragged girl with tubes in her arms and up her nose, scabs on her inner arms.

“Where are her parents, for God's sake?” I snapped. “That's who should be taking care of her.”

I should have known what would happen next—we stood outside a very nice, upscale suburban home in a location I could not guess at. There was a suggestion of impressive, pine-covered hills in the distance, the sky was threatening, and the air was chilly but not cold.

“Her home?”

“It was,” Messenger said. “And it is still, in this time.”

“You mean she's in there right now?” Did my reluctance show? For I was strangely resistant to seeing her in a time before she became a disease-ridden drug addict. But I couldn't fail in my duties. Messenger was deliberately waiting, patient as always, and I knew he was testing me.

I took a deep breath and walked straight up the sidewalk and through the front door into a tall entrance hall that revealed twin, curved staircases going up, with a formal dining room to the right and an equally formal living room, both furnished in a heavy, rather old-fashioned way, all dark wood and embroidered upholstery.

I heard laughter and the sound of running feet. A girl, no more than six years old, came running past, giggling, chased by an enthusiastic terrier.

It might be Graciella, I thought, but this child was a universe away from the scabbed junkie who lay in a Nashville hospital.

We walked on, heading back toward the kitchen
where a woman with a blond ponytail stood slicing vegetables for a salad. She worked awkwardly due to a cast on her left arm.

“Her mother,” I said, and at that a man entered. He was a strikingly handsome man of perhaps thirty-five but with prematurely silvered hair. He came up quietly behind his wife and made to put his arms around her waist but at his touch she flinched and cried out, “No, please!”

It was more than a startled sound, there was something brittle and high-strung in it, a panicky sound. Something was going on between the two parents. The man's face darkened in anger.

“I hate it when you do that,” he snapped.

“Do what?” the woman asked, trying to conceal her emotions. “You just startled me is all.”

“I haven't had a drink in two days and you still treat me like . . . like, I don't know. Like you hate me touching you.”

She turned and I saw naked fear on her face. It was so surprising that I took a step back.

“John, I didn't mean . . . I mean, I was just startled.”

“Have I ever laid a hand on you when I was sober?”
the man asked, his expression one of hurt and perhaps wounded pride. “I just want to give my beautiful wife a hug.”

“Of course,” she said, but it came out almost as a gasp.

He carefully, gently, raised her injured arm and seemed to be inspecting the cast.

She stood rigid.

“It was an accident,” he said firmly.

“I know, John, you didn't mean to . . . It's just that when you. . .” She looked into his eyes and looked away quickly.

“So, it's like that, is it?” He seemed almost pleased in a spiteful way. “Make a mistake, pay forever, right? Well, you ever hear the phrase, ‘might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb'?”

“I don't . . . I . . .”

“I'm sorry,” he said with savage mockery. “Is that a little over your head? Let me explain it in words of a single syllable. It means if you're going to blame me for what I haven't done, I might as well go ahead and do it for real.”

He opened the door of their expensive refrigerator,
drew out a bottle of beer, and rummaged in a drawer for a bottle opener.

“John, please.”

“Please, John. Please, John.” He popped the bottle top and drank half the bottle in a single long swig. “Please, John, please work like a dog to buy me this beautiful home, John. Please, John, buy me a nice new car. Please, John, pay for the country club and the private school.”

“Sweetheart, you know—”

“Shut the hell up. Just shut up.”