Owen lay facedown on the bed.
Gasping.
Weeping.
His throat was raw from screaming.
There were bloodstains on the sheets. A lot of it. From where he had tried to claw the tattoo off his chest. There was piss and shit on the bed, too. The bedroom stank like an outhouse, pummeling him with shame.
He could heard his mother’s voice, screeching at him for having soiled the bed again. It didn’t matter that she was bones in a box in a cemetery whose name he’d totally forgotten. Her screams, her icy voice, and her knuckly fists, and the swish of the flyswatter with which she enforced her ever-increasing set of house rules—those things were as real as if she were still alive, still with him. Still filling the room, the house, the world, with the force of her glacial, implacable disapproval.
Owen lay tangled in the soiled sheets, unable to move. Unable to do anything.
Then he thought of the things he had down in the cellar. The knives. The scalpels. The acid. Surely they would save him.
On his chest the little girl’s face screamed and screamed and screamed. And, as if somehow standing behind her, was the face of the man from whom he’d stolen that tattoo. The big, ugly man with the muscular shoulders and the air of ragged violence. The face of that man leaned toward him, emerging from the shadow of the tattoo-inspired dream, but also seeming to lean into his bedroom. Owen turned away, not wanting to see it, but it was there in every corner, smiling at him in such an ugly way. A dark smile filled with the wrong kind of magic.
“Mine!” cried Owen, clapping his hand over the tattoo. But then he instantly snatched it away, hissing at the pain. He stared at his fingers and palm, watching as his skin puffed and then swelled with blisters. There was blood on his fingers, too, from where—in the heat of madness—he’d tried to claw it off his skin.
The flies buzzed around, agitated, angry. Frightened, too.
You’re a perverted little piece of shit, snarled his mother’s ghost.
Mommy, don’t forget me, wept the little dead girl.
“Mine,” said Owen weakly.
In his mind he could see the knives, the acid, and the scalpel down in his workroom so clearly. So very clearly.