(Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.)Some of these children have been tied to him for almost twenty years, others only since the month before.
(Twelve. One boy, two boys, three, four, five.)He smiles now, this smiling man. It is how he sets his bait, how he entices. And his smile this time is for the boy with the tattoos.
I could take him take take him take him now. I could take his smiling, putrid little head and crush it crush it crush in my mouth. I could make him suffer. I could make him scream scream scream scream SCREAM SCREAM for me. Daylight holds no power over spirits such as me.
But I prefer the thrill of night. I prefer the same enclosed spaces in which these people do their work, where they feel themselves at their most powerful. It is a greater pleasure to kill in darker pastures, that much I know. It is not much of a vanity, but that is all that remains with me.
The Smiling Man take him crush him starts his car. The dead children watch me as I watch him drive away, and I know I will see him again. I quell the hungers, the quiet places, and they retreat, for now.
The boy, too, intrigues me—for the first time in as long as I can remember—and that is a long, long time. His strange tattoos intrigue me. What lies moving underneath them intrigues me. There is something inside the boy that calls and repulses. There is something strange and malevolent hiding inside him, though I know not what, or why.
There is something inside him that reminds me of home. I want to know the language of his strange tattoos. And time is one of the few things I have left to spend.
And when the Smiling Man take him makes his move—as I know he will—I will be there. Waiting for him.
Until then, I can keep my own vigil. For in this new house, there also is an attic.
Few things of note pass during the nights at this new house, despite what finds residence in the empty room upstairs.
The lethargy finds me again, and by the time I become aware, several days in the tattooed boy’s lifetime must have passed. The furniture has been unwrapped and assembled, and the rooms no longer look abandoned. The man inspects the attic only once but quickly leaves again, unsure why he is repelled by its strange emptiness.
It is morning. The tattooed boy is sitting at a table, and his father is cooking, smoke lifting from various metal pots and pans. The boy does not look happy. He is wearing dark pants and a longsleeved shirt he keeps pulling down over his arms. The tattoos that so fascinate me only seem to anger him. He does his best to cover them up so no one else sees, though there is nobody present but his father, who has seen them many times.
“School blows,” he says by way of greeting. I count the plates in the kitchen. Eleven.
The father sighs like he has heard this all before. “I know it’s
going to take some time for you to get used to a new city and a new school, Tark, but you have got to meet me halfway on this one. Applegate has a lot of friendly people. Even my boss is nice, which is about as rare a thing as you can imagine.” He is attempting to be funny, but nobody laughs.
“Not really.” The boy bites into his bread with admirable ferocity, tearing a good chunk of it out with his teeth. I count glasses. Six.
“I’m sure things will be better today,” his father says encouragingly. The boy looks unconvinced and shrugs again. It appears to be his favorite habit. I count the condiments hanging from racks that line the walls. Eight.
In the time it takes them to finish, I have counted the flower patterns on their wallpaper, the lights overhead, the knots in the ceiling, the kitchen tiles. I follow them into the car, where there is very little conversation. The tattooed boy fidgets uneasily on occasion and often glances over at his right, like something out of the corner of his eye puzzles him. But when he looks my way, all he sees is the window where other cars pass them by, swift glimpses of pedestrians, and other ordinary sights.
The car stops before a large building that says Perry Hills High. Beside it is another with a sign proclaiming it is Perry Hills Elementary. A series of corridors and walkways connect one to the other. A blonde girl stands outside the main doors of the elementary school, a troubled look on her face. At eighteen, she is younger than she looks, though her manner and actions are those of an
adult. Children stream past her to enter, but she ignores them, waving at both the boy and his father.
“Uncle Doug! Tark!” She is smiling, but the worry in her brown eyes does not match the curve of her mouth. “Tark, you’re going to be late for class!”
The boy groans but accepts her hug willingly enough. “I’m not one of your fourth-graders, Callie.”
“Sorry,” the young woman says, not sounding sorry at all, “but that doesn’t change the fact it’s already two minutes to eight.”
“Ah, crap. I’m out of here. See you later, Dad, Callie.” He hitches his backpack, and a tattoo briefly slips out again from underneath his shirt as he turns to leave. The young woman sees it but is unsurprised, though the worry on her face grows.
“How’s my favorite niece?” the man asks with a grin. “I must say—I expected the teachers here to be older. Why didn’t you tell us you were working for the faculty?”
The young woman blushes. “I’m a teacher’s assistant—not a full-fledged teacher yet. For now, I mostly get by with tutoring and babysitting, but Mom insisted on paying the rent ’til I leave for college next year.”
“Good to hear. And speaking of Linda, how is she?”“Mom’s still with Doctors without Borders. Still fighting malnutrition in Africa—and winning, if you believe the last email she sent me. She’ll be back just in time for Christmas.”
The young woman pauses, glancing behind her to ensure her cousin is out of earshot. “I’m worried about Tark,” she says,
lowering her voice as if fearful others might hear. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of him. I had a feeling he was a little touchy on the subject. But it’s those…those strange tattoos on his arms.”
“I did my best to explain them to Mr. Kelsey, if that’s what you mean,” the man begins, but the young woman shakes her head adamantly, nervously tucking wisps of wheat-yellow hair behind her ear. “All the principal told the other teachers—and all Mom told me, for that matter—was that Aunt Yoko, Tarquin’s mother, gave him those when he was only five years old. I never really knew Aunt Yoko, and I don’t want to hurt Tark any further and pry, but—something about those tattoos scares me. A couple of times I’ve looked over at him, and I could have sworn…” “Could have sworn what?”
That his tattoos were moving is what she wants to tell her uncle, but she does not. She does not tell him that the boy feels wrong. She does not tell him that she cannot shake off the feeling that there is someone else in the room, watching, when he is there. She does not tell her uncle because she believes it to be a figment of her imagination, a mockery of her senses. It is the permanent ink staining her cousin’s skin, she tells herself, spreading across the canvas of her imagination. All these thoughts she keeps to herself and does not say aloud. What she says instead is this:
“I just want to know if I can do anything to help. He doesn’t seem to want any friends, and he always keeps to himself. Nobody’s been going out of their way to bully him or anything like that, but few people go out of their way to befriend him, either.”